Session Twenty Seven
In the aftermath of the victory against the chimera, the Fated were in a benevolent mood. Ethlyn decided to try again with the nearby mountain giant, and brought him a tribute of a dozen mountain goats and a newly-composed song. These efforts were warmly received, and the mountain giant agreed to leave any humans in the area unmolested provided the party brought him a dozen sheep each month.
After dispatching a cave bear that was resident near Krak al-Shidda, the Fated decided they should return to their explorations of the Howling Emptiness. By the 27th of Esevelen, they had reached the now-familiar oasis a the north-eastern edge of the Emptiness. The strange, ululating oasis again plagued their sleep, but they were otherwise left alone.
In the morning, they set out following an old trail to the south. It was the height of summer, and the Fated suffered greatly from the scorching heat and withering dryness of the desert. By the time the trail led them to a small oasis, they were in no mood to trifle with a flock of giant desert birds interrupting their rest; they slew them unceremoniously.
On the 29th, they began to explore the area nearby. They were cautious about the heat and made sure to return safely to the oasis by nightfall. During the cool evening ours, they were set upon by a flight of seven ichor hawks, condor-sized raptors with blood-ripping talons. Six of these were slain, while one was charmed into servitude by Senef. Sayyid, Senef’s python totem, had a savage dislike of the hawk, but apart from hissing and venomous looks, he tolerated its feathery existence.
The next day, Senef used shamanic magic to speak with the hawk. He learned of a “stone nest where the sun rises” and “a home for night criers where the sun sets.” The Fated felt the stone nest sounded promising, and headed east. After a brief skirmish with a nomadic pack of gnolls, the party came upon a cairn of stones rising about a dozen feet from the rocky ground. Suad advised that such cairns often marked tombs below. While the rest of the party began a thorough search of the surrounding area for some secret entrance into the tomb, Ethlyn sunbathed and amused herself by toppling cairn-stones. This inadvertently opened up a hole into the very tomb the rest of the band was off searching for.
The tomb below dated to the Zaharan era, and was guarded by several deadly traps and a dozen berserker skeletons. After the traps and skeletons were defeated, Suad magically detected a secret door to the tomb’s inner sanctum. A terrifying poltergeist within paralyzed most of the group with fear, but Sapphira slew it with her magical spear.
The party carted the various treasures and grave goods within back to the surface on the 31st of Esevelen, then set out on the 32nd for the “home of the night criers,” which they had by now surmised to be some sort of bat caves. They soon came upon a limestone promontory rising from the waste, its weathered face dotted with cave openings. The caves were home to a vast swarm of bats, and thick with guano – except where smooth trails had been burned through the guano by some creature or spell.
It turned out to be a creature, or three creatures rather: enormous slugs, each spitting a vile acid that could melt stone and flesh. This hideous monsters put up a vicious fight, but were eventually slain. Mahmud and Sapphira distinguished themselves by heroically leaping from a cliff to cleave down into the slugs, while Rakh was bold enough to actually tear into them with tool and nail.
After dispatching the giant slugs, the party ventured deeper into the bat caves. They were stunned to discover a gaping pit that seemed bottomless. Zoya dropped a torch into the pit; its flame was gusted out by a draft, and she did not hear it strike bottom. An expedition downward by rope saw no bottom after 50’. The Fated decided to knot all of their available rope together to form a 350’ length. Rakh, trusting to Imran, volunteered to rappel downward. At 300’, no bottom was in sight, but he could see the faintest evidence of cave openings in the otherwise sheer surface, another 50’ or 60’ down.
Was this a pit to the Nether Darkness? Or merely an unusually long shaft? The Fated knew they had to explore further. Senef used his shamanic magic to grow a pair of wings, and began flying his comrades down one by one, depositing them each on the lip of the nearest of three visible cave mouths.
It was hair-raising work, for at any moment something might have soared up from the pit… but nothing did. Once everyone was deposited in the cave mouth, the Fated proceeded inward. The cave within held a great etched copper bowl, sealed with magical runes, 7’ in diameter. Translated, the runes read: “Sealed within the Child slumbers until the Time of the Awakening.” Suad recalled ancient myths, spoken only in darkness, that the children of the chthonic gods had been sealed in copper bowls in the deep places of the earth.
“We should flee,” said Rakh, his faith momentarily overcome by a flashback to that he’d endured the last time the Fated had awoken something dire. “Coward! No wonder your people are a slave race,” said Ethlyn. “Open it, Suad!” The mage obliged, his magic unsealing the ancient bowl.
The creature that emerged was a true Child of Nasga, its beautiful androgynous face attached to the sinuous body of a giant snake. Its sibilant whispers enthralled the party and might have doomed them all with its mesmerizing dance …Had Balen not webbed it and Ethlyn not beheaded it with her lightning sword.
Within the bowl were great treasures, including a large black sapphire, seven wrought gold bracelets, two maps, a brooch, and a grayish, smooth orb. Ethlyn recognized the orb for what it was: a crystal ball. She gazed within to see how her city, Cynidicea, fared. To her horror, she saw that Cynidicea’s surface had been turned to rubble, its soil salted, its irrigation shattered. An army of thousands of Imperial legionaries encircled its ziggurat, and was pounding it with siege weapons. A final assault could not be more than a day away. Sapphira responded to the loss of her city immediately: “Just as my people died in your service, so too will I die in your service!”
Still, Ethlyn was in despair and wanted no further part of the crystal ball. Balen claimed it and commanded it to show Kirkuk. He saw the once thriving town in ruins, its buildings torn down. The rubble of its wrecked structures had been collected and piled into the sacred Well, sealing up the underwater grotto against whatever lurked within. Next, Balen commanded it to show one of the Thrassian mummies the party had fought in the grotto.
The ball showed an image of a stepped pyramid in a wasteland. At its summit, a struggling human captive was shoved onto a stone altar, where Amur-Sin, the Thrassian mummy king, tore open his chest. Black energies seemed to radiate around the king, as if he was absorbing the life energies of the slain sacrifice. Next to Amur-Sin, the bandit chief Yasir al-Achmed looked on, his face passive and unreadable.
“Things just got intense,” said Ethlyn.
