What has gone before # 17
In the dungeons of Nostrilia

"Well?" asked Brogart, "which door?"

Legum shrugged. "We only covered a portion of the dungeon last time, Brogart. I guess any door we didn't hit before is as good as any other." He pulled the old maps from his backpack. They were hastily scrawled, but readable. He looked up, pointed at a door down the hall. "That one should do."

Brogart shook his head. "I think we need to explore the area around the elvish skeletons. We need to get to the bottom of Plellelan and the other elves' odd behavior."

Legum shrugged again. "Why? We've got plenty of time, and whatever is there will wait."

It looked like Brogart was about to argue when Tallow broke in. "You aren't feeling... odd, are you Brogart?" Everyone suddenly tensed. Perhaps Brogart was being affected by whatever it was.

Brogart, feeling the unease, gave in. "No. And I suppose you're right. We might as well do this methodically."

The party was much smaller now; the nine of them and Brogart, but it was still unwieldily for the ten foot corridors down here. They put Hammerhand and Rocky in front. There was no sound from the other side of the door. Rocky nodded to Hammerhand, who held his weapon at the ready. With a hard, swift kick, Rocky splintered the ancient wood of the door around the lock, and the door swung into the gloom of the new room. Out of the darkness sprung two dull, white shapes. Animated skeletons, armed with swords. Hammerhand swung, struck down the one jumping at him. Rocky was not so lucky, getting in a blow but being struck in turn. Suddenly, an icy feeling ran down the length of his body, and he felt his muscles spasm and then lock rigidly in place. He fell to the ground, paralyzed.

Jake and Hammerhand finished off the two undead, taking hits but somehow avoiding Rocky's fate. They clustered around his frozen body, trying to help. Guido just shook his head. 'There's nothing you can do. Either he'll recover on his own or he won't." Guido shivered, remembering his own brush with the undead. If it hadn't been for a string of remarkable coincidences... Veskavar, the Chen Kunda Lair, the preservation fluid... well, he didn't like to think about what might have happened otherwise. Death perhaps, but Guido felt like there could be something much worse than death waiting for Rocky.
They decided to hole up overnight in the room Fra Rentec had found the STAM crystal in on their first visit here. The next day, they gathered around Rocky hopefully, but he seemed even worse than before, with labored, heavy breathing. "Hammerhand and Jake will have to drag him around with us. It's either that or leaving him around for the rats to knaw on" pointed out Tallow.

They nodded agreement. "By the way, I claim dibs on the amulet" said Tallow, a gleam coming into his eye. "After the way you guys gave away that bogus gateway artifact to Hotherial for free, I think we need someone sensible to look after our other valuables."

They began to talk about where to go next. Brogart again suggested that they explore around the elf skeletons. This time, there was no disagreement.

The old jail with its rust streaked bars and corroded manacles still held the remains they remembered. Although there was nothing he could do to indicate it, Rocky was conscious. As they approached the skeletons, he felt an odd tingle run through him, a feeling of power. For some reason, the symbols on the cards that the guardians had shown him in his dream came back to him. He knew intuitively that he could focus this power, release it as a command to the elf skeletons, much like he did to animate dead bodies with the amulet. But this was much more powerful, and instead he contained it, not knowing what the effect would be and without the capability to warn anyone what he was doing.

The cells gave up no more secrets than last time, and they began to widen the search. Inside one room off the cell area was a human skeleton with scraps of rotten leather and metal armor hanging here and there on the body. Legum cast a D-mag, and there was something there, something high level and in the communication chain. Brogart tentatively poked at the skeleton with his sword. It shattered, and in the midst of the pile of bones something gleamed and sparkled a deep red. Brogart reached down, picking a large ruby out of the pile. Legum felt a sudden spark of fear. "Brogart, toss it here for a look-see, will you?"

Brogart looked at him coldly, and his hand clenched around the gem. "You know, Legum, I really think I should hang on to this. It is, after all, a serious threat to the elves."

Legum walked up to him, the spark turning into a full fledge bonfire. "Brogart, give the gem to me. Give it to me now."

Brogarf s smiled. "Well, if you insist..." As he spoke, his other hand slipped into his pocket. There was a flash, the pop of an implosion, and Brogart was gone.

"He teleported out" said Ziwa with some disbelief. "Is this deja-vue, or what? Next time we visit, I say we shake down any non-party members and strip them of any teleportation devices."

Tallow looked surly. "I knew this was going to happen. More treasure down the tubes. Maybe you'll start listening to me now."

Legum was too busy pulling out the communication ring and activating it to listen. There was the usual short burst of static, then the short set of intermittent buzzing sounds. "Hotherial" came the voice in his head.

"Hotherial, we've got a problem." Legum ran down what had happened in the last few minutes.

"Brogart? Ghod no, not my son, not Brogart... it can't be." Hotherial sounded almost old.

"Your son?!? Brogart is... well, never mind that for now. Where did he teleport too? Or did he use a spell?"

"Brogart doesn't know teleport. And neither he nor Plellelan were carrying any teleportation devices that I know of."
"Can you track him? He's got all his stuff, plus whatever Plellelan was carrying."

"We should be able too. Ghod, I can't believe it."

"Why wasn't Brogart affected by the spell like the other elves?"

There was a pause. "There are reasons. I'd rather not talk about them. They have nothing to do with what has occurred."
"If you say so" thought Legum dubiously. "Give me a ring when you get more information on his location, will you?"
"Agreed" thought Hotherial tiredly. Then his presence was gone.

Legum summarized his conversation with Hotherial with the rest of the party. 'Til bet a gold to your silver Hoth comes up blank on Brogart" said Galrog. "Brogart dearly knows enough about Hotherial's set up that he wouldn't do it if he didn't know he could get away with it."
On that cheery thought, they began to explore again. Several empty rooms were carefully searched with nothing significant discovered. Then they burst into a room that held shelves covered with tattered, decaying manuscripts. They attempted to read a few, but the paper disintegrated into dust at the slightest touch. Legum cast a D-mag on the off chance that there was something hidden in the piles of worthless papers. In the corner of the room, something glowed, a middle-level spell of some variety he was not familiar with. After a short search, they carefully extracted three pages of well preserved paper from the area. It was a letter signed by a Councilmember Jorgy, addressed to Admiral Morgart. Most of the letter concerned various activities in the Nostrilia magic schools, and their relative priorities. Taken out of context, it did not provide any useful information. The last paragraph, however, was different. It read:

With regards to this new threat from the north, the Chen Kunda, I must reiterate that we cannot deviate from our current priorities. The Chen Kunda can and will be dealt with by conventional means. We cannot afford to be sidetracked from our real agenda when we are so close to it reaching fruition. The Greattrolls have been successfully nullified by the use of Greatshadowbeasts; this program, since it costs us so little, should be maintained, particularly since it helps to mask our real goals. Diversion of any further resources to them, the Chen Kunda, or the Urakai is unacceptable. We both know who the real enemy is; let us continue to act on that information.

Sincerely,

Councilmember Jorgy


It was not entirely dear what this passage meant, but Jake tucked it away for future study.

They left the room and began searching the next side corridor, checking each room off it in turn. Templar paused. "You know," he commented, "I think the backs of these rooms are quite distant from the rooms in the other hallway." He thunked the wall with his fist. "And yet, it sounds hollow behind here."

They returned to the main corridor, searching the wall between the two side corridors more carefully. "Here!" cried Ziwa excitedly, "there's some sort of seam between these stones." After a few minutes, they determined how to open the secret door. A rough hewn passageway extended as far as they could see. They followed it for about a hundred yards, well beyond the confines of the dungeon complex.

"I think this is some kind of escape route" said Galrog finally. "It must surface somewhere in the middle of town."

"I think he's right" said Templar. "Good to know, but we should finish searching the rest of the dungeon complex first. There seems to be a remarkable amount of useful information down there."

"But not much treasure" said Tallow morosely. Nonetheless, they decided to check the passageway later and returned to the dungeon. At the end of the last corridor they had been checking was a ninety degree turn and a fifty foot corridor leading to a door.

"This is different" said Guido with interest. They proceeded down the corridor, Hammerhand and Jake in the lead. As Hammerhand's foot came down on one section of the hallway, there was an audible snap and the floor opened up beneath him. Jake barely managed to avoid falling into the pit. Hammerhand wheeled on one foot, grasping for some invisible handhold to catch himself on, then toppled in with a yell. There was a splash, and the Troll's yell of surprise turned into a roar of pain. There was a horrible hissing sound, and a cloud of smoke that caught in the throat and made the eyes water rose out of the hole.

'If s acid! He's fallen into a vat of acid! Get a rope!" yelled Jake.

Guido had another idea; he preped a spell, and suddenly a shower of water cascaded down into the pit. It did not neutralize the acid, but it did dilute it, giving the rest of the group enough time to throw a rope down to the rapidly weakening troll. He caught it, and several people pulled him up, out of the corrosive liquid. Hammerhand lay at the edge of the pit, moaning in pain, barely conscious. They gathered him up, washed off what acid they could, and cast the remaining curing spells for the day. It was time to retreat for another night, and they returned to the STAM room.

The next day they had pleasant surprise. Rocky, who had continued to deteriorate, suddenly recovered from his paralysis. He was still weak, but able to march with the party. It was decided to search the rest of the dungeon before returning to the acid trap. Several more rooms were investigated, one with two more undead skeletons. Fortunately, they were dispatched with little harm to the party. The last corridor to search ended in a door; they crashed through, finding a twenty foot wide corridor extending to the north. They explored this corridor more carefully, checking for traps along the way. They were not disappointed; a pit trap with a zombie at the bottom opened up at the tap of Hammerhands' pole. Rocky had the same sense of suddenly rising power that he had felt with the elf skeletons. Again, he contained it, and they dispatched the zombie with missile fire. A careful search of the walls revealed a hidden mechanism that was much like the one used for the pit trap that had killed Plellelan, and they left the small lever in the disarmed position, locking the flooring over the pit in place.
At the end of the corridor were double doors. Nothing could be heard beyond them, and they were not locked, so Jake cautiously opened them. Not a sound was made as they gazed into an unexpected paradise. It was a large room, perhaps sixty to a hundred feet to a side, and the forty foot high ceiling blazed with a white, warm light like that of the sun. It was welcome after the days spent in the gloom of the dungeon. Just inside the door grew trees, trees that seemed to extend into the interior like some kind of grove. The trees were the same type of vegetation that grew across the river in the Evael forest. The far walls could not be seen, hidden by the lush greenery.

"Wow" exclaimed Guido intelligently.

"I don't trust it, not for a second" said Ziwa, clutching Facinalethvree.

"Might be treasure in them thar woods" exclaimed Tallow.

A D-mag by Legum showed the ceiling to be a high level magic spell in the fire chain, but also revealed a faint essence of a illusion chain spell permeating the forest. After a short conversation, it was decided that Ziwa and Galrog would remain at the door, while the rest of them explored the room. They moved into the grove, quickly disappearing from Ziwa's and Galrog's sight. It was a warm, pleasant place, the light from above casting dappled shadows across the party. The quiet settled around them like a blanket, and almost unconsciously hands dropped away from weapons as people breathed deeply of the fresh, earthy smelling air. "Man," yawned Guido, "we should be crashing in here during the evenings instead of that dismal STAM place. In fact, I could use a little nap after all those nights on that hard floor." He flopped down, back nestled against a tree, yawned again.

A small alarm went off in Jake's mind. "Guido, it isn't nap time. Come on, get up."

"In just a second, OK?" replied Guido sleepily. Then his eyes dosed and a snore escaped his lips.

"This is wrong" said Jake. Several people were shaking their heads as if trying to ward off sleep. "Hammerhand! Grab Guido! We are leaving!!!.".

Hammerhand threw the hobbit over his shoulder effortlessly, and they turned around, backtracking. Jake stopped, confused. This couldn't have been the way they took in; that had been clear, easy travelling. Whereas the path before them was more overgrown, and had the look of brambles and thorns in the underbrush. They forged ahead anyway, until suddenly Jake and Hammerhand began moving in different directions. "Where are you going?" Jake asked the troll.

"You say we leave this place" replied the troll. "I think you mean we go back to door."

"The door is this way" Jake answered, pointing straight ahead.

"Door this way" replied the troll, pointing in the direction he was headed and obviously confused by Jake's statement.
"Don't be ridic..." Jake paused in mid sentence. He suddenly raised his head. "ZIWA! GALROG! WHERE ARE YOU!" He shouted.
"Over here" came the reply moments later.

"See!" cried Hammerhand and Jake simultaneously, pointing in different directions.

"This is bad" said Legum. There was no agreement between the group as too which direction the voices had come from. Legum cast his D-mag again. The illusion spell that had been a glimmer before was now a full fledged spell. "We may be in real trouble folks..." he said nervously.

"Hang on!" cried Jake suddenly as he had a new thought. He cast the tracking spell he had learned from some of the Ibisi. There was a momentary dizziness as his spell-enhanced tracking sense and his intuitive feel collided, then things snapped into place. "Hammerhand is right! This is the way!" he cried, pushing ahead into the undergrowth. It became more and more tangled as they continued, and thorns and sharp branches began to scratch and poke the party. They seemed to run into a solid wall of branches suddenly, but Hammerhand crashed into it with a bellow and it tore open to reveal the doorway and Ziwa's and Galrog's concerned faces. They piled out into the corridor, where Legum began slapping Guide's face as Jake explained what had happened to the other two. Guido sputtered, then complained groggily about being woken up.
"What do you think it is?" asked Ziwa.

Jake shook his head. "Hard to say. I think we need more information."

Rocky spoke up. "I think I know a way we might get some." Everyone listened as he described the strange feelings he had felt with the undead and the elf skeletons, feelings he knew where part of the amulef s power.
Legum shrugged. "Might as well try it."

They returned to the jail area, and this time Rocky released the pent up power, a torrent of raw force he could almost physically feel and see. Suddenly, horribly, one of the piles of elvish bones began to move, ribs and joints knitting together, the skull jumping from its resting place a few feet away to land on top of the spine, arms and legs falling into place with a dry, hollow clacking. With a creaking, grating sound, the reassembled skeleton rose to its feet.

"Who disturbs the rest of Cerecil?" cried the dusty, ancient voice that carried overtones of horror from beyond the grave. "I am dead. Let me rest."

"I have called you" replied Rocky weakly. This was far beyond anything he had been able to do with the amulet before. "I... ahhh, I have called you... called you here too...". Rocky stopped, not sure what to say.

"You have a question? Ask, or let me rest in what peace I can. Let me rest with my comrades in the arms of darkness once again."

"Who are you?" asked Legum from the back. "Cerecil, Groupleader of the shaded hawks." "How did you come to be here?"

"Morgart, the black wolf, tricked me, curse his name. Hotherial warned me against the man, but I did not listen, hoping to gain some of the knowledge of gates that had been found here. But we found only madness and death."

"Hotherial?" squeaked Ziwa. "Ghod... that means he's at least five hundred years old!"

The empty sockets turned to her. "You have a question?" it asked.

Ziwa shook her head vigorously no as Legum resumed his line of questions. Unfortunately, little else of value was learned. There was a short pause while they considered what to ask next. Without warning, the skeleton raised its arms and cried out "Morgarf s death is the key to the passage" in its dry, rasping voice. Then the bones collapsed, scattering across the floor. Ziwa fastidiously avoided a rib bone that clattered to a halt near her feet and shuddered.

"That was a little too weird for me" was her only comment.

Rocky looked at her in irritation. "We learned a lot here. We will again in the future. There's nothing wrong with the undead, and we're pretty dependent on them now, so I suggest you get use to things like this."

Ziwa looked at Rocky in surprise. "Sorry. Just a comment." Legum spoke up again. "Enough bickering. What does this tell us?" Tallow answered "absolutely nothing that sounds profitable."

Templar answered more seriously. "Not much of use. We could have guessed that it was Morgarfs doing trapping the elves here, not Gorwell's. The last thing about the passage sounds interesting, but I can't think of anything we've run into that it could apply to. We just have to keep our eyes open, and use the clue when we find a puzzle it fits."

"Agreed. So what's our next move?"

"We check the room protected by the acid bath pit trap. It's the only thing we haven't looked at yet." There was no argument, and they headed for the corridor. They were better prepared this time, and found another disarming lever for the pit. At the end of the corridor, they came across the first locked door they had seen. Guido quickly pulled out his lockpicks and set to work. After a minute or so there was a muffled dick, and Guido, with a flourish and smile, pushed the door open. It swung into a room that had empty shelves of sturdy construction, possibly to hold coin for payrolls or something similar. They were about to leave, disappointed, when Templar spoke up.

"You know, once again it seems that there is some dead space behind this wall that is out of sorts with the architecture of the dungeon."

Guido shrugged and began knocking on the wall. Everyone else joined in quickly, and it was only seconds later that a hollow thump was heard when a sword pommel hit apparently solid stone. Guido looked it over. After a while, he shook his head. "This is a tricky one. The rest of you better hang back."

They did as he suggested, gathering down the hallway near the pit trap. With a loud bang, the first doorway slammed shut unexpectedly. Before anyone could react, however, Guido appeared gasping and wheezing before

them out of thin air. After a few minutes to clear his lungs, he described what had happened. He had set off the trap, which had caused the first door to slam shut and lock and released poison gas into the chamber. If it hadn't been for his D-door spell, he would have been killed by the noxious fumes.

"I have an idea" said Galrog. "This hidden room has to have a common wall with one of the storerooms we found earlier. Why don't we use a passwall spell and get in that way?"

It sounded sensible, and they decided to try it. The passwall spell was cast, and a doorway-shaped hole appeared in the wall. A few inches in, however, a solid wall of blinding white light burned intensely. A second passwall was cast, and a copper coin was tossed in. As it impacted the odd phenomena, there was a flare and the people in front were spattered with molten copper. There was no passage here.

"This must be the power source for the entire complex" said Legum excitedly. "If we could figure out how to tap into it..."
Tallow cocked his head. "Why couldn't it just be a protective force field to keep people from passwalling in?"

"Don't be silly Tallow" replied Legum, "this is clearly some huge ball of energy which, if we could tap into it, would make us the rulers of this world."

Further investigation revealed that the strange white light was indeed a protective force field to keep people from passwalling in. Legum turned red. "Well, you can't be right all the time" he muttered sullenly.

That left two avenues of approach; the shadow land, a path open only to Ziwa, or picking the lock. "Right. Picking the lock," said Guide, "would be trivial if I could only hold my breath for fifteen minutes. Hey!" he exclaimed in a startled voice, 1 can hold my breath for fifteen minutes!" Guido explained that he had a spell that allowed him to survive without breathing for a reasonably long period of time. Armed with this information, the party returned to the secret door. This time they spiked the first door open and Guido went after the lock again. This time, with the pressure off, he managed to pick it successfully. The door opened into a twenty by twenty storeroom. Inside was rack after rack of chain mail, fifty all told. To the sides were fifty crossbows and fifty quivers with twenty quarrels each. Legum cast his Detect Magic, and had to shield his eyes. Every piece of armour, every crossbow, and every quarrel glowed. The armor was some variety of the protection chain, like blur, but higher level. The crossbows and quarrels were a chain with which Legum was not familiar. He explained what he had found to everyone else.

"We're rich" said Tallow in stunned amazement. "I mean, WE ARE RICH! HAHAHAHAHAHA!" he continued.

"Hang loose, Tallow" said Legum, "this could all be cursed stuff."

"Fifty sets of cursed armor and weapons? This doesn't seem likely, Legum" spoke up Templar. "You usually find individual cursed items. Unless Morgart wanted to open a novelty store, I suspect there is something else to what we've found here. Perhaps this armor is a way to enter the forest room safely."

After a short discussion, several people tried on armor with no discernable negative results. Several people decided to replace their old, badly dinged armor with the newer stuff, and several party members loaded up on crossbows and quarrels. They returned to the large room with the grove of trees inside. This time, only Jake and Rocky went in, with ropes tied to them and played out by the group standing at the door.

One aspect of the new armor became apparent immediately. As soon as Jake and Rocky approached the forest, the armor changed color to provide effective camouflage, making them appear to blend into the forest. "Cool" cried Jake. They entered the grove and felt the same peaceful, soothing effect as last time. More prepared, however, they fought its enticing message of rest and quiet and forged ahead. The path was easy once again, but when Jake glanced back, the same thorny, thick undergrowth they had seen on the return path last time met his gaze. They did not fight it, willing for the moment to go where the forest would take them. After a short walk, they found themselves entering a small clearing that seemed like a slice of heaven... except for the half dozen elvish skeletons lying here and there, some propped up against the trunk of a tree, some curled up in the grass with the taller stems sticking up through the empty rib cages. It was a macabre scene, and Jake and Rocky were happy to quit the area and to return to the door. On the way out, the same increasingly dense underbrush attempted to thwart their efforts as last time, but in this case, they seemed to be protected from the branches and thorns. Near the edge of forest, it was as if the vegetation were wrapped around a bubble a couple of feet away from their bodies. They broke through the trees and rejoined the party.

A short round of discussion followed during which it was decided that the new information was not helpful in explaining the odd things they had found. It was time to try a new approach. And so, a short while later, the party ventured into the secret passage under the castle walls they had found earlier, marching cautiously down the rough hewn walls and cob webs of a path that had seen no visitors for five centuries...

to be continued in What has gone before #18