GoCorral

This session was attended by everyone!

The group reformed at Dalleer with Hektor joining them via teleportation. Aldarian decided to take the day off as he was getting tired of almost dying. After preparing they popped off to the Lich Shade and teleported to the previous room they’d explored once inside. The day’s exploration was started with the corridor beyond the room that contained the flying multi-headed creepy beast. The short stone corridor ended in a simple stone door. Amalius detected magic, but found nothing. Torin and Amalius moved into the corridor while Tagenadi took point in the opening position. Hektor and Eathirilu waited outside the corridor’s edge.

Tagenadi swung the door open and saw only a solid stone wall beyond. The party then heard an ominous clicking sound as metal grinded on metal before the corridor floor dropped out from under them. Amalius quickly clung to the wall with his spider climb slippers. Tagenadi activated his celestial armor and flew in the air. Torin the dwarf plummeted like a rock. He hit the bottom, but unfazed, he quickly healed himself back to full. Tagenadi swooped down to pick him up. Amalius scanned the corridor’s end and found no magic. Tagenadi chipped at it a bit with his weapon, but the party soon decided it was a simple trapped dead-end.

Wanting to experiment with the altars to Apollo and Artemis more, Torin and Amalius attempted to sacrifice their blood by dripping it on the altars. This produced no amazing effect though. Presumably the altars were another dead end trap.

With time running down on the party’s buffs, only one completely unexplored section of the Lich Shade remained, going left at the fork before the wisps’ room. Going down that way the party reached another large square room filled with five foot thick columns. Tagenadi journeyed into the room first and found nothing unusual. Amalius went in next and activated the swarm of life-seeking undead. Roughly, two dozen incorporeal shadowy creatures appeared out of nowhere and encircled all the party members except Tagenadi. They flailed their appendages but quickly realized they could do nothing against a party fully protected by death wards. The party retaliated, killing about half before the ghosts retreated into the walls.

The room beyond contained no monsters, but an extremely low ceiling. Wary of collapses, the party huddled together with people ready to teleport across the room if anything dangerous occured. Nothing foul befell the party as they entered the next room.

This room dead-ended instead of containing another door or passageway. At the far end of the room was a stone throne on a raised dais. Sitting on the throne was a skeleton wearing the decayed clothes of nobility and thousands of gold pieces in fine jewelry. A detect magic revealed that the throne had a transmutation effect on it, but nothing on the skeleton or the jewelry. Amalius used his retrieve power on the skeleton’s necklace and put the fine piece into his portable hole.

Tagenadi braved up and went to shake the skeleton’s hand. As he did so a spell went off that tried to slow Tagenadi down to almost not move at all. Fortunately he resisted. The spell also turned all the jewelry still on the skeleton into dust. Amalius and Eathirilu identified the spell as temporal stasis which requires a hefty material component to go off. Amalius checked to ensure his necklace was still safe and happily found it still intact.

Now all the rooms in the tomb had been explored, but two remained unsearched. The room filled with corpse gatherer zombie piles that the party teleported past and the room with the giant staring at the fire just past the corpse gatherer room that had also been teleported past. Choosing the unknown evil, the party went to the giant room.

A few attempts were made to communicate with the giant through a cut open peephole in the iron doors to the room, but unfortunately, no common languages were shared. Amalius tried telepathy, but retreated instantly when he realized that the fire in the room was also intelligent! The party quickly surmised that the fire was somehow controlling the giant. Wishing to take care of the encounter quickly, Tagenadi busted in, Eathirilu summoned a water elemental on top of the fire, and Amalius dominated the giant.

The fire rose up through the elemental and entered the giant’s body. Amalius felt his influence over the giant pushed to a back corner of its mind as a new entity took control. The giant’s eyes glowed an eerie white and his body became reathed in flame. Amalius recognized the creature as an effigy, an incorporeal fire undead that possesses living creatures and consumes them. The creature was known to be resistant to magic but weak to the icy cold.

Tagenadi engaged the giant, but found it able to exchange blow for blow with him. Frightened, he took a more defensive posture. Torin kept Tagenadi healed up with a harm spell. Hektor prepared a maze for when the effigy remerged. Eathirilu changed into an ankylosaurus and moved to engage the giant. Tagenadi had hoped to keep the giant alive but unconscious, but the flow of battle directed his blade a different way. With a mighty critical blow, Tagenadi cut off the giant’s head. The effigy came out and was quickly removed from the world for a moment by Hektor. Everyone prepared attacks for when it came back.

Upon its return, Torin tried mass heal but failed. Hektor tried a true striked disintegrate but still missed as the effigy masterfully dodged. Eathirilu tried to bash it with his dino tail, but went through the ghost’s ethereal body. Amalius successfully blasted the beast with cold magic and Tagenadi also landed a mighty blow, but the monster still stood! It moved to possess Eathirilu and succeeded.

Hektor struck Eathirilu with a ray of enfeeblement. Torin also hit him with a dispel magic that removed most of Eathirilu’s beneficial enchantments. With the dino gimped, Tagenadi easily dispatched it with subdual damage. When the effigy came out again, Tagenadi and Amalius were able to destroy it using their cold and divine abilities once again.

With victory achieved the party mourned the dead giant. Hektor realized that this giant was probably a relative of Barakah, the sand giant the party rescued from the Lich Shade (Xorian Wars 35/Alliance 25). Tagenadi felt especially bad as he was the one who dealt the unnecessary killing blow. As they prayed for the giant’s soul, the decapitated head rolled over and spoke to Tagenadi in a chilling voice that could only be that of the god of the underworld, “Tunnel through the center for what you seek.”