Session 42: Lost in the Shadowfell
General Summary
In trying to free Sigvurd from the flycatcher's clutches, Lins flung spell after spell. When none of them worked, she bullrushed the two of them, but failed to knock Sigvurd loose. Sigvurd grabbed her arm, and together, the three of them phased out of the Material Plane.
The world blurred around them, desaturating and fading, until they landed in a strange new place. Sigvurd brought his axe down on the bloodied Flycatcher, dealing him a deadly welcome home.
Sigvurd wove a necklace out of the Flycatcher's multifaceted eyes while Lins scanned their surroundings for signs of her lost familiar. She reached out with her mind, but the spell backfired, and gave her only pain.
All around them was a thick fog. Dimly in the distance, they could make out a mountain with a concave peak, out of which black smoke was rolling down to mingle with the pervasive mist. Nearer and to the east was a tangled forest, or maybe a swamp, it was difficult to tell. On its border stood a dark tower with a pinpoint of light at its peak.
The whole place seemed grey and devoid of color. The vaulted sky overhead featured neither sun nor stars, and though the air was chill, no breeze stirred.
Sigvurd looked around for tracks, and found a few marks of passage leading west. They followed them, but after a while, Sigvurd began to notice the landscape shifting around them. It seemed like they were going in circles. His feet ached as if they'd been walking for hours, and he began to drag his feet, lost in his thoughts as they moved on.
Atop a rise, they could see a few more features. Ruins in the south, swarming with oily-looking creatures, and a hill that resembled a giant skull. Sigvurd found some tracks that seemed to indicate the skull-hill.
As they approached, a voice whispered to them through the fog. "Come with me," rasped the thin, hoarse voice, "I know the way, come with me"
The party whirled around, trying to pinpoint the source. Sigvurd caught sight of it at-last. A humanoid creature with five arms, each of them ending in a single long claw like a talon, and all of them outstretched as if seeking an embrace.
The creature grasped Sigvurd and ran into the fog, leaving Lins alone in the gloom. The silence fell around her, and she felt the deathly energy of the place sapping her will as isolation settled on her like a heavy stone. But she steeled her resolve and took off. With Sigvurd's muscles and Lins' magic, they managed to fight the creature until it faded, melding with the earth and merging with the plane itself.
Lins was badly wounded, and Sigvurd was not without injury either. But their magic didn't seem as effective as it had been. Barely pulling herself together, Lins' shoulders were heavier, and when she saw something moving in the fog to the south, she screamed and dragged Sigvurd toward the skull.
As they climbed, they realized it was not just an uncanny resemblance, but actual bone. They scraped their hands on the way up, and found themselves staring into the empty cranium - empty, except for the huge swaths of sticky webbing which attached from every wall, suspending a mass of thicker webbing in the centre of the space.
Using magic, Lins determined that Kaida was inside one of the smaller cocoons, and reached out with telepathy. Kaida had been despairing, certain that the party either could not or would not come for him, that he had failed both Lins and his former master, and that his new friends would leave him, curse his name, or both. When Sigurd made his way up to the cocoons and freed the pseudodragon, he made a beeline to his mistress.
But their quest was not over. Strange spiders with ghostly lights emanating from their bodies began converging at the disturbance in the webbing. One of them wrapped Sigvurd in its deadly webbing, and he disappeared. Another began assaulting Lins with bite attacks, which she barely held off with her shield, her wounded arm aching against the strain.
Kaida rescued, but restrained by vile webs, Sigvurd who-knows-where, Lins stood seemingly alone, the rest of the party still within the grimoire of hero-holding. Could help arrive in time, or were our heroes doomed to die in a world of death and despair?