We finally emerged from the Library last night; the experience has shaken me a little, but I’m glad we committed ourselves to it.
Throughout our venture in there, I didn’t give much thought to the “why” – we finally had allies in this fight to break our world free from the seemingly constant back-and-forth between the Infernal and the Abyssal. That we were doing this to help them seemed appropriate, and I had no issues with it.
The dark aged corridors were in amazingly good shape – as were many of the traps left behind by the original custodians of the library. Right away we stumbled upon a room containing a golem that had been posing as a statue – we had no idea it was animate until it slugged Sered full in the face. As soon as the noise from that fight started getting out, a particularly large thimensis, your folk call them ‘rust monsters’, appeared with dozens of its verminous spawn. I almost lostRiftspar to it as it ran past me. I’d forgotten their talent, and as it chased after Karac I’d taken a swipe at it. I’ve only just cleaned off the last of the oxidation from the blade, the shine is just about restored.
We unfortunately missed a rather important clue during that fight – a dozen ancient corpses, dried and stale, were arranged around the statue in an apparently organized fashion. Most of them were destroyed in the fight, and we could have used that information.
One good thing came out of that battle, which I hold in my hand now – a faceted red stone, which seems to flicker with faint light within it. The ancient Jessil Kerith were devoted heavily to Ioun, and this seems to be a fragment of one of her boons – I’ve discovered that by releasing it in the air before me, it hovers about my head. While there, I can understand and seem able to speak freely with just about anything – it translates perfectly for me. Quite handy, this.
After dealing with that golem, we discovered a side passage containing several chests – which were obviously mimics. Once we established for them that we could roast or otherwise destroy them from outside of their reach, they became somewhat helpful, and one calling itself “Sweet-Sweet” gave us a little explanation of some of the area (including the bit that the arrangement of corpses in the previous room was important).
Also in that side room, a narrow crack in the stone wall provided an opportunity to do a little scouting – which I volunteered for. Not sure why, but the spirit took me. I backed out almost as soon as I entered, as a pair of infernal hounds chased me back into the crevice, singeing me slightly. We would soon find that I’d discovered a link between the avenue we’d chosen and a second straight off from the entrance – and that I’d also run into the advance phalanx of a Morvreyan expedition bent on the same goal we had embarked upon.
We met the main force of the Morvreyans shortly thereafter, upon taking the main route towards the section of the ruins they’d entered. Crossing through what appeared to be an illusory planetarium – complete with stone trees carved up from the floor, and a perfect night sky above us. We hugged one wall (suspecting the place to be trapped, correctly as it turns out – Sered took a hit from a falling star by stepping too far from the wall) and came to a set of stairs. The Morvreyans had used a trained or summoned chromosect (then Nentirian humans call them “umber hulks”) to burrow into the complex rather than take the front entrance as we had. We would later return to this place, to discover that the center of the room held a veiled image of daylight and a fountain inscribed with four hundred or more names – members of the Jessil Kerith who had performed some distinguished service, we supposed.
During our first engagement with the Morvreyans in this room, Sered was magically captivated by one of their mages, and separated from us. We were forced to retreat, even though we had fought strong and well – between the Morvreyan wizards hammering at us from the back, we also had to contend with four or five of the infernal hounds and a Death Knight. We gave the Knight a severe beating and quickly, but the combined bursts of flame and biting of the hounds quickly brought Karac and Morin close to falling. The loss of Sered, in spite of my personal feelings for him, was a troubling one for us all.
Far more so, as the Morvreyans impersonated him not once, but twice against us. The first time we re-encountered Sered, he was weaponless and disoriented – which should have clued me in right away. Without weapons, he was relegated to carrying light for the rest of us…which he inconveniently took with him when he vanished in the middle of combat. The second time, I had been on my guard and we hammered the creature that revealed itself while on watch. A summoned demon, a succubus, had intended to slay as many of us as it could while we slept, but fortunately I’d been suspicious the whole time, and caught it before it could land a stroke against anyone.
After retreating to the golem room and barring ourselves in to rest, we discovered the Morvreyans had departed. Whether they’d found what they came for or simply left after we discovered their presence, we were not to know at the time. We searched the area in which we’d encountered them with a hefty dose of caution, but came across little of consequence. We even spent a good bit of time around the fountain in the center of the planetarium, reading each name aloud – which elicited a gonging sound from somewhere in the air around us with every name. No other effect was produced, that we could see.
Unfortunately, the next area we were to look was a challenge of mythic proportions. In the third and final section, we were confronted immediately with a wall of darkness at the end of the hallway – and yet another Sered, semi-conscious upon the floor in front of it. Karac rushed forward to rescue this one, and was struck through the darkness by a beam of greyish light that seemed to melt portions of him into dust. Though he recovered (with Morin’s help), the newly-found Sered – who I almost killed simply as a safety precaution – informed us that there was an Eye Tyrant in that direction which had utterly wiped out the Morvreyans.
We immediately attempted a scrying ritual, through which Deimos acquired a few seconds’ glimpse of the room beyond. The darkness we saw was not terribly deep, but the beast could apparently see through it to attack us. In that room, sure enough, floated a beholder – Sered referred to him as “The Mighty Thog.” Thog was easily nine feet in diameter, and was chained to the floor with mithril links, each inset with what appeared to be Ioun’s stones, and each link engraved with fantastically detailed inscriptions. Four gargoyle statues – which we were quite certain would animate – were spaced about the room’s corners.
After a lengthy consultation, we decided on a radical course of action – to break the chain binding the great Eye. We hoped that upon freeing it, we might earn a modicum of gratitude from the thing, and barring that we could at least run and hope that it would vacate the area before our return.
It was a terrible job, breaking that chain. Morin was strained to his limit, trying to keep us all conscious while we variously hammered at the chain with every power we possessed, and kept the great Eye busy or distracted from those focusing their efforts on the anchor link. In the end, the aberrant creature almost destroyed Deimos with one of its strange and powerful eye beams. But break the chain we did, and we freed Thog, for better or worse.
It bellowed like a dragon, and immediately demanded our surrender – which we promptly gave. The gratitude we’d hoped for did ensue, in that Thog did not attack us. He screamed bloody murder about the Jessil Kerith, who had apparently bargained with him to build this place and the trapped library behind him – and who then trapped him and bound him to the room as the first and foremost true trap. As he gathered himself up, he claimed he was off to find his way to “Gog’a’Gog”, a city where he had been enthroned as king deep beneath in the Underearth. He also gave us parting advice to “remember our names” and a combination of levers to pull in order to avoid the traps of the rooms ahead.
As it turns out, his comment about the names didn’t refer to us specifically, but to the names we’d read on the fountain inscription back in the planetarium room. Once Thog had gone, we moved on through a hidden doorway at the back of the room down a set of widening stairs, and into another, wider gallery beyond.
In this gallery, a waist-high pair of sarcophagi took up the center of the room, and three alcoves lined each the left and right sides. Another empty and wider alcove took up the opposite side of the room, and two statues braced our entry stairs. Each of the side alcoves had a body standing in it, seemingly made of paper – or perhaps wrapped up in it.
When we passed between the statues, the six corpses animated and rushed to attack us, while the occupants of the huge central coffins rose up. Needless to say, hostilities ensued. One of the two from the center shouted a query – “what are your names” I believe it said. While I and a couple others immediately responded with our own names, it was Morin who figured out right away that they wanted names of Jessil Kerith members that they might recognize. Deimos and others wracked their brains for memory of names – getting a surprising number correct – while Sered and I danced with the libram-encrusted mummies and their rotted, maggoty masters.
They did get some right, though – and with each one, a loud bell sounded through the room. After several correct names, one of the mummies stopped – just stopped, like a marionette whose strings are severed with a quick, sharp scythe. This added urgency to the attempts to remember, and I too joined in the effort. Urgency was needed, as well, because we were losing this fight.
Unfortunately the occupants of this room were almost too much for us – before long I found myself alone, the others fallen and bleeding around me. Happy circumstance prevailed, however, for I was successful in evading my attackers by having blurred my form early in this fight. It bought me just enough time to recall a name or two, which at some point must have tripped a critical threshold – twelve names. One for each of the rooms to come. On hitting the twelfth, the paper-wrapped mummies vanished, to reappear in their alcoves, still and silent. The two masters also vanished, presumably back in the coffins from which they’d oozed. The back wall’s alcove then slid open with the grating slickness of stonework performing its duty for the first time.
After I staunched the bleeding of everyone, Morin gave what little he had left in the form of divine healing – we were all still exhausted after freeing Thog – and we all decided to try the first of our lever combinations before determining to rest or not. It did work, and we proceeded through a dizzying array of rooms…each one different and threatening in its own way. With the trip of a lever in each, the rooms themselves shifted relative to one another, giving us access to further ones as we proceeded deeper into this labyrinth. Without Thog’s codes, I could imagine we’d have either died quickly or been stuck in this maze of traps forever.
The last one, however, wasn’t quite the honest answer we’d grown to expect – I suppose Thog’s attempt at humor. We found ourselves facing a gemstone effigy of Thog himself, easily the size of a human head sitting on a pedestal in the center of an enormous octagonal room, and firing beams from its eyes similarly to Thog’s own. As well, the floor beneath us spun like a badly-balanced wagon wheel, throwing us to the ground at every opportunity.
While my first instinct was to simply destroy it with blasts of power, I was struck with an epiphany and raced to the base of the effigy, there to pry and peel at the connection between the crystalline head and the pedestal. With a few deft swipes – for I do recognize the mechanics of devices fairly easily – I popped the head free of its mooring, whereupon it fell to the floor and rolled to a stop some fifteen feet from its resting place. The radiating trap and the spinning floor ground to a swift halt, enabling us to retrieve and stow the head – for even though it was large and unwieldy, it appeared to be made from solid garnet.
After scratching our heads over the false combination Thog had given us, we finally determined a correct switch for this room’s lever, and the final door opened. We found ourselves in the Library of the Jessil Kerith. Books lay scattered all about, shelved and piled upon the floor. During the evacuation, I suppose there wasn’t time to organize them all.
In this room, an enormous vault, a great ceiling of some kind of glass looked up into the waters of Banner’s adjacent lake. Enormous fish cruised sedately overhead, as the greenish glow of daylight filtered down into the room about us.
Exhausted beyond relief, we immediately established camp in a clear space on the floor, and began perusing the enormous collection around us. We came across several magical tomes, and a rune of Ioun which we decided would best be borne by Morin. A bone-bound book caught our attention too, seemingly a history of a particular dragon. As well, we at last discovered the Gaulus prophecies. Tracking down the desired text, we found the completed scripting of our own:
Wrack & Game’s ruin
Lit by Hell’s spiral flame
Carved souls of petty Knights
Jousting the Ruby Rod’s game
Pinions of feathers spin on golden rings
Holding red eyes high aloft
Black Pawns & fell’s dark bane
& treason’s twice cost
A checked King’s lost hope
Set sail o’er a sea of poisoned bone
The Rook & the iron circle
Binding a wolf cub to an empty throne
A dead star’s timely breath
Blowing white on a coming cold
Is the horn for smoke & scales
Written in water on the flag’s fold
A black Crow & a grayed Troll
All carved by a skull’s jeweled glare
Make a quiver for a dreaming archer
Retrieved from ‘neath a red prison’s stair
Thus burn &blaze to light a Devil’s smile
With a Demon’s brand and stake
A desert wind blows rot and dead
While souls gleam as future’s fate
Two Queens, the dark Dream, on a bloodied Board
Warring for Rods of ruin & rule
Could kneel under a King’s hand-sewn cloth
Crowned only by pages & some lost Bishops’ jewels
A spark, a stone, a horn, & a bone
Led by a thousand lives before
Might Knight their Pawn in fell’s dark flame
Never knowing who this King rules for
Which leads to Boards & Games & Worlds made real
Carved on pages of mirror and glass
That will reflect old bindings in newly scribed chapters
Written with Man’s own hand at last…
After three days secreted away in this place, we took our leave of the place.
And found two people awaiting us in the entrance. One familiar, Bad Dray whom we’d met in the town of Dalvar, and an Eladrin not of our acquaintance. His eyes were entirely black – and he wore the collar of a Morvreyan! Before we could bring him to blows, Dray stayed us, explaining that this fellow (whose name was Dayereth Dust) was a Jessil Kerith spy who had been embedded in the ranks of the Morvreyans. Addawyr had apparently been driven into hiding, and had dispatched Dray and Dust to meet us and escort us to safety on our emergence from the Library, should we survive. They were here to get us out of Banner for a while, as Hesrith Andelyn had made some connections between the Jessil Kerith’s organization, the prophecies themselves, and our presence here.
They led us through old, unused sewers and other tunnels, eventually to emerge into daylight on the western edge of town, where we found ourselves refuge in an unremarkable inn that catered to traveling merchants, called the Red Rooster.
Finally, a hot meal after days of trail rations…
