Session 49: Reunion With the Marquis
General Summary
As Lins fled the worm, she heard a war cry from Sigvurd and a thunderclap from Nemara, and was alarmed to find herself running alone as they were both swept into the book. This didn't last long however as Vin and Zeke came tumbling out, stumbling into a run to keep their feet.
The party fled, scooping up one of the corpses in the large cavern before Flying back up to where the Wind Warriors had made their last stand. Lins guided them down the unexplored corridor, and they found a flight of steps, with a familiar (to Lins) face at the top.
Moreto of the White City was pleased to meet them again, and asked Vin's help solving a riddle. The top of the stairs featured a landing in front of two fifty-foot-high doors, carved with Auran glyphs and shining as if the stone had only been cut yesterday.
Through some spellwork, they managed to translate the password, and together with the tablet bearing Isociol's glyph that Moreto handed over, they got the doors to open.
They beheld a room with no apparent floor, only stormy fog that flashed with thunder. The walls and ceiling also swirled with wind and crackling lightning. Along the middle of the 60-foot-long room were columns of various height, but the whole party, Moreto and his bodyguards as well, was focused on the doors facing them at the opposite end of the tomb.
Moreto cast Fly on himself and his companions immediately and set about circumventing the columns, but this brought the wrath of two elementals, who rose up from the mist to defend the room. They made short work of Moreto's second henchmen, generating hurricane-force windstorms that occupied half the chamber with their forceful vortexes.
After Moreto and his surviving friend retreated, and the party dropped fly, the elementals laid off, descending into the fog. The party set about handling the columns, and after some fumbles and successes, navigated their way to the other end of the room where they tried the doors - only to find the elementals at their backs!
They fought them off, and as Vin changed out of her pillar-hopping Giant Ape form to rejoin her companions on the small ledge, she noticed a square depression in the pillar she was on. Experimentally, she inserted the tablet, and the platform began to rise. Panicking, she removed it, and set about timing her ascent so that she could be on the ledge with Zeke and Lins when the column reached its height.
The party watched as the column with the tablet rose steadily, then stopped, ten feet from the ceiling. Suspecting this action had unlocked the doors, they tried them again, only to discover to their dismay that the doors were false.
Lins misty-stepped up to the risen pillar, and found herself gently lifted on a current of air into a beautiful room. The ceilings were sixty feet high if they were an inch, and a white marble sarcophagus floated about ten feet off the floor on the opposite end of the chamber. The walls were decorated with iconography of wind dukes, elementals, and djinni mourning the great general, and of his enemies - demons and foul creatures of all description - being trod beneath his feet as he ascended to a golden doorway.
As Lins surveyed the room, Vin kicked herself and used Fly to transport herself and - after a brief tousle following the reveal that she had another use of Fly prepped the entire time they were jumping the pillars - Zeke as well, up into the room.
No sooner had they landed than three necrotic attacks pierced them from behind. Turning, they saw a horrific creature, a gigantic demon, with batlike wings and long horns jutting backward from its skull. Its carapace, red like dried blood, was freckled with hundreds of eyes, embedded and glaring from its shoulders, arms, wings, even the palms of its hands and feet as it pushed off from the wall and hovered in the air, squishing with a sickening sound as it gripped its fanged longsword and prepared for battle.