(Following: Jarlmoot: Circle of Thrones)
(In parallel with down time for the party, and continued Dwarven Aspirations)
Prelude
It began in the days following the defeat of the creature at Revel's End, nightmares intruding on Sudon's mind to the point it became difficult to know which timeline was real. In the timeline experienced by the rest of the party, Sudon would wake from a disturbing dream. In trust he shared with Alyks Askaria the nature of the nightmare, hoping she might find the truth. In that reality, he had never escaped the Nautiloid craft - he was still under the control of the Illithid Mind Flayer and all the events of the escape, the prison, the return to Bryn Shander, Jarlmoot: Circle of Thrones, all were in fact dreamt between his moments remaining in the service of the Mind Flayer. (Rather than this reality where the captivity on the Nautiloid was the dream.)
Despite Alyks being busy with learning the news spells from the found spellbooks, she took time to assist her friend Sudon. Staying in his room one night as he entered the trance state of elves - she carefully raised her divination magics to sense any intrusions. She noted the Helm of the Slug, the device that Sudon had used to reach out to the mind of the Flayer took on an activated state. Sudon had already tried to sell the helm - was even offered a good deal of money for it - he found he was unable to part with it. Something manipulated the minds of others - and himself - preventing it from being sold, even given away, discarded or destroyed. It surely was some sort of cursed item - if not in fact still being used by the Flayer to control things from afar. Alyks had no solution to this herself, so Sudon began to appeal to his Warlock Patron, the Raven Queen of the Shadar-kai for some path to becoming free of these disturbing visions - blurring what is real and what is dream and threatening to drive him mad.
Winged Guides Into Darkness
One morning, waking suddenly and with a feeling of something being "off" - Alyks rushes to her window at the inn in Bryn Shander, to see Sudon following three ravens leading him down the early morning street and into an alleyway. Alyks sent her familiar Loki, a spotted raven himself to follow and be her eyes while she quickly dressed and gathered her things to pursue. Sudon and Alyks travel a twisting path through the streets to a location in a once-prosperous part of town, now somewhat abandoned - and a central building there: a shrine to the Harvest Goddess Chauntea. The everlasting winter had now seen two whole seasons of planting, growth, and harvest erased by the snow and ice of the Frostmaiden - so the shrine had fallen out of use and was now abandoned and dilapidated.
The trio of ravens led the hexblade and wizard within the shrine and to a rotting door to the cellar, buzzing with flies. The cellar served as a great storage room when grains were more plentiful in the growing times, but now the enormous room was mostly empty. Empty except for several zombies shuffling about on a floor slick with blood and maggots. Flies swarmed within and the stench of the air thick and foul. This place was beyond desecrated and the blood wet not of the underground moisture but the workings of some infernal presence. At the far end of the room, vein-like lines glowed a soft red through the darkness, hinting at a passageway. The ravens flew across this room, as the zombies slowly converged on the tiefling and shadow elf.
Alyks loosed the fiery explosion of a fireball to blast apart most of the poor souls-turned-undead in the path to the passage, as the pair evaded the others or cut them down in their path. Indeed the rotting clothing worn by the zombies appeared to confirm they once served the shrine in some duty.
Reaching the glowing opening and descending downward, Alyks took moments to carefully examine the peculiar tunnel itself.
- It had been carved through earth and stone alike, not avoiding more difficult work on harder stones - staying to a path.
- The soft glow ran through the passage in thin bands of chardalyn, the material repeatedly encountered and described as both magic-attuned and cursed.
- The markings of the mining tools more likely seemed tooth or claw than pickaxe or shovel.
- Most disturbingly, the tunnel had been dug up and into the temple, rather than downward from the cellar.
The passage leveled off in a tall cavern whose ceiling had been penetrated with metal pipes from the town's sewers, dropping waste of all sorts to the floor of the room. The glow had since vanished and torches were lit to see through the darkness. The ravens had flows some distance away, where a tunnel continued, but first the pair had to wade through the filth and stench of the waste from a century of townspeople. Beneath the soggy and wet surface, steps could feel sudden slopes into deeper pools - so the path had to be carefully chosen to keep knees above the sewage.
Almost to the passage, raven escort waiting, they spotted a tentacle-like stalk with eyes upon it just before a horrifying creature burst from the muck: ox-sized, mouth like a shark, with a pair of spiked tentacles on each side of the eye-tentacle - what Alyks' later research would classify as an "Unknown". Though adapted to this sort of environment, it seemed impaired by the slickness of the filth and the ferocity of its attacks greatly diminished by struggles to keep its footing. (GM note: four attack rolls were 1s or 2s!) A terrible blow from a tentacle, aimed at Sudon was deflected by the sacrifice of one of the three raven escorts. After Sudon's greatsword and Alyks' Fire Bolts diminished the creature's strength, the wizard was able to magically Sleep it back into the muck.
To remove the stain and stench, Alyks casts Presdigitation on herself and Sudon, cleaning themselves.
The tunnel then led to a region cloaked in magical Darkness, while the heat of the torches could be felt, they shed no light, blinding the pair. Reacting quickly, the wizard's Dispel Magic restored the torches' dim light for their darkvision just ahead of attacks from three Shadows. The beam weapon found by the necromancer Dex in the Nautiloid and collected by Sudon was known to the ancestral memory of the Shadar-kai, and so the shadow elf was able to use Elven Memory after each rest to tap into proficiency with the device. The beams proved devastating against the shadow creatures, vaporizing two of them, while Alyks defeated the third.
Continuing down the tunnel, a side-passage had crumbled in the construction, opening into a musty and ancient tomb that must have long-predated the Ten Towns. The two remaining raven guides glided in, tapping on a sarcophagus with markings lost to time, which the pair opened to reveal a skeleton with a humanoid physiology but not quite anything obvious to either wizard or warlock. Atop the long-dead skeleton lay a sword and shield cold-worked of material Sudon noted, in wonder, to be what was called "sky metal" - and by their mysterious origin, precisely the sorts of objects his patron sought to collect.
But this was not to be the end of the quest... the ravens continued on down the dark passage...
Plane Shift
Over the next half hour, traveling the passage slowly transitioned into an alien environment for the tiefling wizard - but one familiar to the Shadar-kai: the cool-but-not-cold and entirely colorlessness of the Shadowfell. But even with the familiarity of this greyed-world, it was not the true Shadowfell, a sense of dread and wickedness seeped into the soul from all around. This place also spanned into one of the Lower Planes - a realm of fiends. Opening a great bone gate with the wizard's Knock, the passage opened into a great canyon with a flowing river of grey-blue lava below, emanating the cold of death in place of what heat would have been expected from magma. A bridge lined with great ribs (or tusks?) arched over the flow and into a building carved into the rock face, styled in horn, fang, and pain motifs on the outward walls.
Within the structure, as the pair approached the open entrance on the far side of the bridge, an enormous pentacle had been carved into the floor lighting with a dull blue color as they neared. To enter the room, the outer circle would have to be crossed. The ravens, still leading ahead, landed on either side of the doorway, looking inward and caw-ing twice. Beyond the symbol-engraved floor at corners of the pentagonal room, stairways led to the point at the far corner, where a landing held a pillar of some sort.
As soon as Sudon crossed the edge of the blue-glow circle, the five-pointed star within stirred with dark smoke - rising to the ceiling to sharply form the star's shape in an utter darkness. A like darkness unfolded like a wave from the far corner, covering and concealing the stairways. Continuing toward one of these, Sudon suffered a great stabbing blow from a creature emerging from the dark star: armored in slick black armor, wielding a dark blade, horned and unmistakably demonic, it quickly vanished back into an arm of the symbol. Sudon attempted to counter-attack with the beam weapon, which stabbed through the dark, but effectively blind, found no target.
The dark star proved beyond Alyks' ability to Dispel Magic, unlike the prior Darkness, and soon the wizard, too, had been dealt a deadly wound by this shadow-demon. Just as it was retreating into its darkness, Alyks successfully struck the creature with a Mind Spike, gaining awareness of its location regardless of its abilities to conceal itself. Her health vulnerable (GM note: 6 HP remaining), she braved exposure to join Sudon against an outer wall aside the pentacle, a distance from the points of the dark star. Aiding Sudon's aim with the beam weapon (GM note: to counter disadvantage) guiding with her spell's tracking of the creature, Alyks then employed the Diviner's Portent (GM note: a previously 20 rolled on a die she could substitute for a roll) giving the attack a critical hit. Within the dark star, the shape of the shadow demon lit up with its fading scream as it was vaporized (GM note: very high damage rolled on the crit and vulnerability to radiant damage!)
The darkness faded like mist in dawn's light, the floor turning grey and colorless and the shrouds over the stairways draining up and back into the corner platform and pedestal. The pair climb the stairs to find this to be a podium on which a great book lay open. Alyks' Comprehend Languages noted the book to be a "Shadow Grimoire" of lost lore, perhaps even spells - but what Sudon immediately asserted belonged in the Fortress of Memory of the Raven Queen, his Hexblade Patron and deity of the Shadar-kai.
Upon Sudon speaking her name, the two ravens leap into the air, merging as shadow and splitting space, opening a window into another place erased of color, a vast library and rooms with wonders teased beyond. From an unseen source: a voice - soft but immensely powerful - in words only Sudon could understand. A tendril of shadow extended from the portal, pulling the dark book into that place. Another exchange of words and two more tendrils reach out. One grasps the offered sword of sky metal, then swirls about Sudon. The other takes the offered shield of sky metal, then swirls about Alyks. Each feel a THUMP as a raven's shape is placed on the warlock's chest and the wizard's arm. The opening into the Shadowfell seals itself silently.
In a niche of the pedestal, beneath where the book had been, Alyks finds a ring with the shape of a book carved on it.
The return to the surface through the tunnel is without incident, the earth filing itself behind the pair as they climb the rise back to the harvest shrine's cellar. The corpses of the room now lie motionless, the floor now flaked with dried blood and flies and maggots only around the bodies. Reaching his room at the inn, Sudon finds the Helm of the Slug to now be absent, a pair of large black feathers in its place. A perfect size for the hats of the Bregan D'aerthe, he keeps one and gives the other to his company leader, Zaknalimar.
With all these deeds complete, Sudon finds peaceful rest.
(Next: TBD)