Session XXVI: Death is not the End

Jacqualine and Del'Gado discuss the ghost sighting for some time. After coming to an agreement, Jacqualine approached the ghost whilst Del'Gado stayed behind. However, the ghostly officer was completely unresponsive towards her questions. She observed that he was looking at the leftmost part of a mountain, but the distant darkness made it impossible to ascertain exactly what. The two decided not to tell the next shift about the ghost, citing the possibility of one or more of them having an unfortunate response to the presence of a spooky apparition. At first light, Jacqualine ventured to the same spot and could now see that the leftmost part of the mountain housed a well-concealed cavern. Convincing the rest of the party to investigate, they headed towards it. Imaros wondered why this seemingly random cave was interesting. The answer: caves are beautiful. Nature is healing.   Del'Gado inspected the entry as Caerlin lit up the first room with a light-infused rock. Aside from being very easy to miss, nothing stood out from its exterior; except Baldur who could sense that the ground around this place had been desecrated for quite some time. The party wandered in and Imaros began formulating a theory as to the purpose of the cave. Before he could finish his thought, Del'Gado reminded him to put on the scholar's spectacles. Imaros no longer wished to present the theory. Inside, a caved-in tunnel led farther in. On one of the walls, an archaic dialect of Common informed its reader that sometime in 998, traitors had been caved in here. The group set up camp and decided to excavate the tunnel: Jacqualine used stoneshape to efficiently clear parts of it. As they cleared the rest of the tunnel, the crushed corpses of human Brass Pact soldiers were discovered; one of them wore armour that matched that of the ghost officer seen during the night. It took five hours to clear it, with Imaros and Baldur doing the majority of the heavy lifting. As the end drew close, Del'Gado perceived faint sounds coming from behind the last layers, and the party prepared for an unwelcome entry. Once the last debris was removed, they were greeted by the reanimated bodies of Brass Pact levies and some lesser noble knights: their eyesockets glowed bright green, and some of their shields had southron-made arrows stuck in them. At the centre of the room lay a dirty satchel with an unknown item near it which evoked green swirls of energy. As the party felled the first decaying soldier, they discovered that the body rose again in a very short time. Caerlin covered the area around the satchel (which contained numerous undead as well as what was likely the former commander) with black tentacles, inflicting damage and making the area difficult to traverse. Jacqualine successfully routed the undead levies back to the unknown artifact, which was by now surrounded by these rapidly reanimating undead soldiers. Imaros was the first to get a clear view of the artifact: it was a wand. The next stage of the battle was somewhat of textbook example of friendly fire. The sorcerer's tentacle field wounded several in the party as they headed towards the wand, even incapacitating Caerlin himself for a short duration; once Imaros had the wand in hand Caerlin used thunderstep to get them out, which caused damage towards Jacqualine. Once they were reunited with Baldur and Del'Gado, Jacqualine tried to restrain Caerlin with hold person, which he counterspelled. The undead knights, who had been unaffected by Jacqualine's turn undead, seized this opportunity to strike down Caerlin. In order to retreat back in full strength to the entry, Imaros ceased his battle rage and healed Caerlin with a bardic spell. Jacqualine brought down a layer of rocks which isolated most of the undead levies, but two of the knights had rushed up to them in the tunnel. It was now that the party tried activating the wand: it passed unsuccessfully from Imaros to Caerlin until Del'Gado, with his limited arcane expertise, managed to unleash a wave of unholy power which banished the green glow from the undead levies, ending their constant reanimation. They could hear the clanking of a dozen armoured people fall to the floor behind the stone. Only the commander and a single knight remained standing, albeit in a severely weakened state; and once they had been felled, they did not rise again.   Once this troublesome episode was over Imaros took a closer look at the wand. He identified it and found out that if the Wand of the Luminary was unattuned, it raised nearby corpses on its own in addition to desecrating its nearby environments. Still, it was an incredibly potent artifact in the hands of a person of ill intent, as it could raise constantly reanimating undead thralls. It also functioned as a compass of sorts, guiding its wielder in a set cardinal direction. In order to inhibit the Wand from doing ill deeds on its own, Caerlin attuned himself to it. Before moving on, the party made camp in the cavern to rest and recuperate. Baldur cleansed the area of its desecration with holy water and buried the bodies in ceremonies. He noticed that the shields worn by the levies encountered beyond the cave-in were marked by a small arrow-shaped symbol near the grip.   The following day the party were travelling as normal. Del'Gado noticed a faint scream descending from above, quickly approaching the ground. The whole party then heard the loud scream of a human dressed in the garb of an Arcanish who violently impacted several feet in front of them. For some reason, Jacqualine found this highly amusing. Nearly all things that an Arcanist should be equipped with, such as a spellbook and arcane focus, had likely been lost during the flight. The only thing of note remaining were two scrolls that Imaros identified. They were extremely ill-conceived scrolls of "flying." The journey continued.   Now close to the coast, the weather had drastically changed: strong winds accompanied by heavy thunderstorms overtook the calm cold. The party thought little of this except for Caerlin, who recalled esoteric lore that maintained that powerful creatures could warp their environments as a way to mark territory. He specifically named hydras and dragons as possible candidates. Even then, the others remained a bit skeptical until the thunderstorm briefly stopped, only to immediately start again, but this time red lightning decorated the skies. The adventurers set up shelter, and Caerlin dreamt of becoming legends by defeating a hydra.