Episode VII: In Which the true tomb is discovered and the party make a new friend

General Summary

Godsday, 4th day of Fireseek, 592 cy

The party find themselves looking down into a dark corridor that disappears beyond their vision. Moving forward slowly, they notice a large carved face, and a way forward through the open mouth. As they move forward, they notice long scratch marks on the ground, as if someone had been trying to prevent from being dragged along by sticking a dagger into the worked stone. About halfway down the passage, they discover a pressure pad, that has been locked into place.  

Through the gaping mouth at the end of the hallway is a long, dark room with no floor. A three-foot-wide beam of petrified wood spans the chasm, leading straight ahead into darkness. About ten feet below the beam, countless iron spheres the size of large oranges form an irregular floor, but it's impossible to tell if they represent a wholly solid surface. The northwest and southeast walls are covered in a honeycomb of geometric patterns. The featureless stone ceiling extends about twenty feet from the beam.

  Virgil steps into the room and onto the beam. He just made out that he could see a door on the opposite side of the room, some 60 feet away then a small stone sphere shot out of the wall and struck him in the side of the head. He slumped down unconscious and fell to the floor below. Using healing magic, Bayleaf was able to restore him, and he was able to climb out, but not before two things happened. Firstly, there was something else alive down here and was moving through the balls towards Virgil and second a strange childlike laugh echoed throughout the room. As Virgil climbed out of the room, a Grick burst through the surface, angry that its prey had escaped. The party used ranged attacks to drive it back under the surface.   Further testing revealed that every time someone stepped into the room on the beam, they were targeted by the very iron balls that filled the room. Lazuli tried to engage the spirit that is laughing at the party's misfortune; however, she only angered it and it withdrew.   Lazuli, never one to sit back, ran across the beam and attempted to open the door at the other end. To her dismay the door was locked, but to he further dismay, she was knocked out by an iron ball to the head, and fell off the beam to the floor below, and the feeding ground of the Grick.   Seeing no other option, the three remaining party members entered the chamber and joined the fight, all the while getting ghostly commentary of the fight. The managed to kill the grick and that is when Alistair Land revealed himself.     He told the party of his story. How he ran away from home and died in this chamber. He is now cursed to stay on here as a ghost because he abandoned his family. In exchange for returning his bones to his family farmstead, he will open the locked door before he rests. The party agree, collect his bones and head back to town.   They head back to town to rest up, before heading south to the Land farmstead, in the knowledge that the family had been wiped out years ago.