They fought the stone bears, and Captain Blank nearly died. He only survived because he managed to dispatch the bear that grappled him with a well-placed blast of icefire, and then Sorern knocked the other into an acid pit with stone blast.
They rested, then explored the room from which the bears had come. It also had carvings on the walls, but they were newer and more stylized than the carvings in the earlier rooms; they showed scenes of war. The other major feature in the room was a light that ran, every few seconds, from beneath the largest dragon-thing carving to a temple of some sort, from the south-west to the north-east.
The temple turned out to hide a secret chamber, within which were a bastard sword and fifteen warm, sparking blue stones, that came in three different sizes, five of each size. All the objects were magical, and everyone was convinced they were somehow dangerous; they spent a long time deciding whether and how to handle them, and decided that Captain Blank should be the one to remove the stones.
Detect magic revealed that the stones were fairly minor objects, of the evocation school, and that the sword was some kind of artifact of the necromancy school. This sparked a long discussion of who should have the sword--Sigrid was the only one who could use it, but no one trusted her with it, because they were all convinced that it was probably evil and possibly mind-affecting.
Intertwined in the carvings were words, from a language no one recognized but that everyone still understood:
Keep these words,
Who finds them here,
Beneath a bitter moon,
Your path is found,
By dragon bound,
By ritual and rune.
They spent a long time trying to figure out what this meant. (Particularly the "bitter moon" part.) Eventually, Sigrid got fed up with it, and they decided to finish searching the rest of the place and come back to it later.
They went back to the main chamber and checked out the passage off to the right. They found a statue of some hero-type person, likely the right-hand man of Ozymandius, and a bunch of carvings depicting the same person. They also found a reliquary in the wall, with a longsword and a box with a lock of hair in it.
They then spent three days searching the place from top to bottom, because they still weren't satisfied. They moved the rubble off to the left of the chamber, found another room like the one to the right, except without anything in it. Sorern remembered something about the “Hora Quan,” and recognized the tomb as done in that style. He also destroyed part of the carvings in the room in the back, looking for secret passages, and dove down into the moat to investigate.
Eventually they decided that--combined with the carvings on the wall, and the light on the floor--it was directions to another ruin, that might have more neat stuff in it.
They sailed through a storm back to Ao-Manasa. On the way, Sorern used object loresight on the bastard sword and the fifteen stones. Thus they discovered that the bastard sword didn’t seem to have any particular powers, which was puzzling.
Back at Ao-Manasa, Captain Blank went back to Taevin, and traded the two scepter pieces, (which turned out to be from two different scepters) the crown, the box, and the sword for 1,000 queens each.
They did a bit of asking around, and discovered that, in their absence, the city had held a funeral for Sa-Follen, a new Captain of the Guard, Ea-Shamar, had been inaugurated, some vaguely important human rich-type person had been found dead with a yellow rose, and the illegal underground arena had announced they were holding a series of fights in Sa-Follen’s honor.
1 comment:
Also, the party made Sigrid cry.
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