Quest Start
Loose threads Serpentfolk cleaning out temple, ancient visions: Unknown, flumph jail for warped sanity-drainers, forest where nothing dies with mysterious inhabitant, Crucible 2
Participants Vhel, Guhdhag, Ishka'tar, Daggoth, Tamiko Sato of House Miyagawa
Locations Silent Forest, Desert of Rydess, Tomb of the Oracles, Temple of the Oracles
Summary: of a full report on interesting, potentially urgent information near the desert!
Vhel sought help on a potential archeology dig using her new sand diver, setting out to the Desert of Rydess once we convinced the Watchers of our goodwill and agreed to report our findings. Our first stop was the Tomb of the Oracles to consult with its sphinx keeper Khafre. (Along the way we saw signs of eventual regrowth in the Silent Forest, fought a great acidic worm, and generally had interesting experiences together.) He recognized Daggoth and told us of a temple the Saqqarans had once used, giving its direction once we helped him fight off hieracosphinxes.
By sheer luck, we uncovered and completed a slide puzzle leading to a room of Menkaure's, an Oracle whose orb showed us the ancient world (see full+loose threads). Khafre explained some things, including about the "void" said to have swallowed this world's gods and attempted to destroy the land, before being sealed away by great dragons (in prophesy). Though the flumph jail seemed pressing for its failure being foreseen, we would be unprepared for it and the forest; thus we visited the temple.
We found it being ransacked by a legion of serpentfolk, which we mostly avoided. At nightfall most of us snuck in from above (thank you Guhdhag and Ishka!), finding etchings of ourselves and a hidden book (in Common) with a message from the Head Scribe of their visions and hopes for us in the face of the void.
Full Report
Archaeology is a noble profession in so far that learning from the past is an important part in knowing what to do about the future.
After my findings I am increasingly worried about the future.
I was joined by four companions who responded to a request for aid in my excursion to the desert in the Northern half of Watcher’s Island to look for ancient ruins. Figuring that a sphinx would be both ancient, knowledgeable, and sociable enough to have such information, we went to consult Khafre who is the Sphinx guardian of the Tomb of the Oracles.
As previous excursions here failed to mention – allow me to explain the puzzle that locks the tomb off from the world outside for your benefit:
A sequence of symbols spans the door from top to base, forming a pyramid. These symbols are the Saqqaran symbols for the numbers ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘three’. A sun, a set of scales, and an hourglass respectively. The trick to the puzzle is that you start at ‘one’, and then say how many of each number you see if for the next in the sequence. So one is ‘one one’ – two suns. One one is ‘two ones’, or a set of scales and a sun. Two ones is ‘one two, two ones’ – sun, scales, sun, sun. This pattern continues. The solution when I was there (if it has not changed), was:
Hourglass, Sun, Sun, Hourglass, Sun, Scales, Sun, Sun, Sun, Hourglass, Sun, Scales, Scales, Sun.
I hope this explanation is sufficient.
The inside of the tomb had panels depicting five scenes. Since this was poorly explained I will elaborate on the five scenes. They each have a motif indicating they are an ordered sequence, from one to five.
(( Text in Blue is text that is more or less taken whole sale from GM text described in the quest. ))
1) - People worshipping what were ancient sorts of Gods – conceptual ones (nature, time, etc). They are caught in a ritual next with their hands to the sky. The Gods then flee something. There is a gap there that seems to depict a void of sorts, or it might simply be destruction.
2) - People with their hands up in reverence about a spherical winged object, the same void-like gap looms above them, as if lurking in a predatory manner. A mountain beneath it full of caves and passages have what seem to be dwarves depicted in various ways. There are some sort of artifact-like depictions surrounded by skeletons in the caves.
3) - Depictions that look like elves living in cities of glass and stone, holding spheres with a myriad of objects, as follows: An opened door, through which a creature is stepping out like a chick from an egg; - A glowing shield reflecting and breaking all manner of weapons; An opened eye, and little scenes of life surrounding it; A star-covered brain, worked on as if it was a mechanism; A wisp of fire, a droplet of water, a bolt of lightning, a gust of air, and a blob with a skull in it; A barren desert, and a smaller sphere; within it, a lush jungle, and a person surrounded by four faint outlines of that person; A procession of objects, like a line of evolution; person, bird, horned beast, statue, and so on. One orb bearer is larger, their orb split in half by an ankh with one half showing symbols of heal, the other rotting bodies and blood. At the bottom is skulls on the ground with robed figured lording over them – and this same void devouring their heads.
4) - Smaller people (Halflings? Gnomes?) warring against and with one another with white bannered ones facing off against black bannered ones. The former has a sun-faced winged being above, the latter a horned creature. They both start by fighting skeletons united, but soon turn against each other. The void-like depictions are on either side, but don’t seem directly involved.
5) - An apocalypse of sorts – the ground is shattered and winged orbs are rising upwards from the Earth. The two largest are hatched and revealing what look to be Dragons. People are fleeing through a myriad of doors and archways while the dragons fight against the void. The dragons appear to be victorious, and the void appears… fractured and imprisoned in great shields.
I will speculate on this meaning of this a little later in an aside.
After satisfying his appetite for riddles and home cooked food, and helping defend him from some of his more feral kin, he granted us some of the knowledge we sought and let us explore the Tomb. He explained that before the Oracles of Saqqara were banished for their visions in the future there was a temple they lived inside.
It is located here:
We found and entered the chamber of Menkaure after, who had a magical orb that – when focused upon – let the world melt into mists that granted a sort of divination into various locations (at the expensive of a splitting headache.)
The locations we scried are as follows:
A small church of sorts with a procession of humanoids wearing robes dragging a captured, struggling ungulate inside. It looks like a place of religious worship.
Location on the map
A prison of sorts well below the sands beneath a flying city. Former humanoids are screaming and singing and weeping in arcane cells that capture them. The mere sight of them could cause mania or insanity. Floating jellyfish like creatures – Flumphs, a good-natured sociable sort of aberration that dedicates themselves to defending the word from cosmic horrors – act as the prison’s guards or wardens. Khafre said he recalls this prison – that it was a prison for abominations that should never have been, and that the Oracles predicted it would one day fall. This place seems dangerous.
Location on the map
A forest in the corner of the island – it was especially hard to read, no details would resolve without intense focus on it. In this forest, a murder and betrayal occurred. The details would not come into focus, and who or what was killed was unknown, as was the reason and the culprits, but the event warped the world so hard that it changed the world about it. Lift springs eternal in that realm, animals roam about and die only for a young version of themselves to burst free from the corpse. Plants grow until they die before sprouting exactly the same somewhere else. This has occurred for a very long time. Walking among the nature was a strangely calm humanoid who looked to have green vines for hair and flowers or petals sprouting and falling off of her. This place seems extremely dangerous, and Khafre warned expressly against heading here without very strong protections from mental influences. He thinks something that the Oracles once struggled against was responsible for the difficulty in scrying here.
Location on the map
A mountain hollowed out to be a repository for secrets and knowledge. Humanoids which look like dwarves filled it with clockwork defenses and made deals with other humanoids to have their information kept safe here. It also serves as a factory that can replicate items stored inside of the archives it has.
Location on the map
While here I asked Khafre about the religious beliefs of the
oracles, which I will expound on in the end once a full context is provided, as
this all seems linked to a grander truth.
Seeing as many of these locations seemed dangerous without proper preparation – we went to the temple Khafre originally mentioned. We saw a huge procession of Unknown, more than we could possibly fight. There was a Zyss (a higher caste one) in the form of a Venom Caller leading them. The little I could glean from reading their lips was that they were looting the temple looking for magical relics to give an advantage to their people. They seemed to have only found things of no value.
We staked the area out and waited for nightfall, when a much more manageable guard was posted. Still, if some fled to their camp we could not engage them all, so we snuck in by rappelling up the truly massive structure in the back and scaling down into it through the open ceiling.
Inside we found a myriad of prophecies written on the wall, quite self-referential ones, depicting seemingly us (the party) investigating these self-same depictions. Given the eccentricity of our group’s ancestry they seemed beyond raw chance. After exploring we found various rooms, including a paper listing the leading members of the Oracles called the ‘High Scribes of Saqqara’. For the sake of a complete record, here was the list.
1. Pen-nub
2.Khons-af-ankh
3-15. Unreadable
16. Teti
17. Senedj
18. Hotepsekhemwy
19. Sneferu
20. Senusret
21. Set-ap
22. Maani
23-31. Unreadable
The Bottom Row seemed unreadable, if that was because the
Oracles fell before reaching it or because the paper was too damaged I couldn’t
tell.
Various deformed, warped corpses all pointed collectively to behind a statue whose head was blasted off. Behind there, another corpse pointing to the back of the statue’s leg – which had a small seam. I cracked open a secret compartment with a book. Due to the importance of the contents, I will transcribe the full text of the first page with text here. It was in Common.
"Greetings. Hello. Welcome. Howdy. I'm sorry to say that I don't know your name, but I saw you and your friends (at least I assume they are friends) quite a bit throughout my life, ever since I was a young initiate making their first etching on the wall. If you are wondering how I learned your language, just know that the visions are clearer and farther reaching for some than others. Even then, however, I could not see everything; If I could, I never would have let what is transpiring now come to pass. I can't say I know anything about you or your companions (a more accurate word, perhaps) Maybe you came here for power, like the snake man. Maybe you are simply lost and seeking refuge like the scarab crawling up your foot."
"Maybe you are a curious soul, searching for knowledge as we did. Once did, from your perspective. Regardless, you are here now and neither of us have much time. The serpents that you have been taking care to avoid will get drawn into the temple by a scorpion in about twenty minutes, assuming you don't do anything to alert them beforehand, so I'll try and make this quick. If you've spent any amount of time in this world, then I'm sure you've seen the proof of their presence. The void that swallowed the gods and hid in their skin to take all that is sacred. I don't know how many of them there are. Perhaps there is just one, playing a game that sets us against each other. All I know is that they are responsible for the horrors taking place on these grounds. What you saw coming in was the least of what they've enacted. Bodies transmuted into misshapen lumps of flesh, minds warped into madness, souls consumed for the experiences accumulated over their lives. I saw it all. I am not ashamed to admit it; it broke me, seeing all that."
The handwriting gets shakier at this point.
"I retreated into solitude and wasted away. What was the point in fighting or even living in the face of such things? Better to lie down and accept fate, no matter how terrible that fate may be. No matter who came to see me or who tried to convince me, I stayed locked in the dark. Perhaps that was their plan all along, but I doubt it. Even after my coronation I was never so important to be dealt with in such a manner. The truth of the matter is, whether I am the High Scribe of Saqqara or just a simple initiate, deep in my soul I was a scared child. Scared that for all the life I lived and all the importance I ascribed to myself, that it could mean nothing and be taken from me in an instant."
"But, right as the black was about to take me, I had a vision. Great, winged creatures wielding magic I could barely comprehend; They fought back against the void and sealed it away. The invincible enemy I feared was not invincible after all. They could be hurt, tricked, beaten back, and in one case, killed. I knew what I had to do at once. I answered the pleas of my brethren to eat and set about seeing as much of the future as I could. I saw the rise and fall of civilizations, the birth of heroes and villains, the Portal through which you entered. But, before I could finish my work and find some sort of weakness, the servants of the void attacked. They are battling the initiates now and they are winning."
"I could hate the dark gods that are killing my brethren, bending their minds and reducing our civilization to ash, but what would be the point? I am the one who ran and hid like a coward when I had the chance to use my knowledge for the better. Perhaps I could have prevented this, saved people from the void and from themselves. Who can say? I am just rambling at this point. What matters is that I will no longer run."
Small splatters of what could either be blood or tears dot the page near the bottom. The handwriting begins to steady itself.
"Perhaps none of this means anything. Perhaps everything that we have worked for from the beginning was a lie for beings far greater than we could ever imagine. But still, I cannot shake that deepset feeling in my soul, that ever-present human desire to see things even a tiny bit better than they were before. The flame of my life is now a tiny, feeble ember about to go out, but at least I can throw it into the future. And if it goes out, if the void swallows it up without even a say, if this book is found and burned to ash shortly after my death, then so be it. At least I stared into the abyss with my eyes wide open. There is so much more I wish to tell you, of our culture, my friends, of the things we learned. I wish these things could be remembered for eternity and not lost to the wind. But the screams have finally stopped. They come."
Scrawled at the bottom of the page is one final note.
"P.S: (I hope I am using this right) tell your friend I am sorry about frightening them. I was young then and thought it would be funny. If you check the leftmost storage room, you all should find things that might be of interest."
As promised, items where were he described. We found them
and recalled before we were assailed. Now then.
I have found in my time on this island a much greater mystery. The Elemental Portal Shrine served as an ‘escape’ for a group of people who described a plight where ‘Twin Dragons’ aided them in escape from their ‘Pursuers’, using the portal to renounce the land. Escapee’s Tongue, which I have documented extensively, was a language used broadly by this group. They speak of “Tyrants bound in a prison” and that they had traitors among them who listened to “wordless voices” and stopped being mortals and became Aberrations. They had a sword designed primarily to detect aberrant creatures.
The The Watchers' Tribe of this island speak of ‘The The Taint’, a voice, oft without words, that speaks directly to the heart of people and corrupts them irrevocably. Warps them into something destructive that a Dragon seems to have given them a moral imperative to fight against.
The Oracles of Saqqara depicted various tragedies of a void-like thing that Dragons fought against and sealed away. There is a prison specifically full of aberrations that the Oracles knew of. Khafre described their religious beliefs as being areligious, for the “gods” they saw were not ones worth worshipping. These Gods presented themselves in disguise, to hide their true intentions from mortals and all spoke without a voice. He said they were depicted as a void because they will destroy everything given a chance.
I have heard accounts from many people about strange experiences where some dark entity contacted them and attempt to bind them into an agreement. Those who have agreed were all… physically warped in some way, I suspect if they were to go deep into it they would be warped even more, as the changes were gradual and ramped up. These experiences were often with those who spoke without voices, right to the afflicted hearts.
One of them expressly desired its victim to kill Rydess, the Dragon who cultivates a tribe of zealots to hunt down and kill anyone showing these changes or allegiances. They are associated greatly with plants and verdant-cy and life, seemingly, and indeed Rydess struggles according to other reports with an overgrowth of plant life that she keeps in check.
I have reason to believe all of this is connected. That there is an epidemic of strange, wordless voices touching the hearts of those around us, hoping to bind us into their wills and have us – if they were sealed and imprisoned as the Oracles imply – perhaps free them? Whatever it is, history shows us that these entities were deeply dangerous and destructive. We as a community should be strong against them.
That is all for the report. I ask that anyone who has similar experiences of this nature inform me about them so that I may gather more information on the subject.
- Vhel