Tomb of Annihilation - Session 23
General Summary
The venomous troll claws and bites Akachi again, injuring her with its poison, as yet another troll lumbers into the cavern from a side passage. Electricity arcs across this new giant's frame. Reaching the guard imprisoned by Dunch's Iron Bands of Binding, the electric troll seizes the restraints in its meaty fists but cannot break them. Impatiently, it swats the Aldani aside, and the bound guard tumbles prone onto the sandy beach. Dunch advances to meet the new threat, slashing the troll twice, while Mokomoko, heavily injured, keeps a safe distance from the battle.
After dragging Chibuzo out of the reach of the venom troll, Elmar drops him, picks at random one of the two remaining potions he recovered from the temple workroom, and feeds it to Dolan. It fortuitously turns out to be another Potion of Superior Healing, and the sorcerer revives. He stands, backs away to a safe distance, then casts Guiding Bolt on the venom troll. The impact causes poison to spatter over Akachi again, but the troll collapses, momentarily incapacitated.
Nayarak utters some incomprehensible words, and Elmar is wracked with terrible pain. Then, his eyes aglow, the Aldani stares at Akachi, whose own eyes glaze over in turn. Stepping towards Dolan, she slashes him with her scimitar, then shakes her head, and her eyes go back to normal. Catching her second wind, she fires a cone of light from the Gem of Brightness at Nayarak and his remaining guard, blinding the witch doctor.
Chibuzo rises to his feet and invokes the power of the Circlet of Blasting on his brow. One ray of fire strikes the venom troll, preventing its regeneration, while the other bolts hit the guard and Nayarak. The witch doctor reacts with more dissonant words, at first incomprehensible, that inflict agonizing pain on Chibuzo. But through the pain, the ranger finds he is able to make sense of the whispers: I will not fail the Master of the Hidden Waters. The Soulmonger must be destroyed and Kurat's death is necessary to accomplish that.
While Dunch continues to battle the remaining troll, Elmar moves out of harm's way, hiding below the ledge of rock above the beach. Dolan repositions himself, then summons a bolt of lightning that flashes out to strike both Nayarak and his guard. The Aldani are blasted off their feet before falling dead, Nayarak's charred outline still visible on the cavern wall behind where he once stood.
The electricity arcing across the troll flares, and a spinning sphere of air, crackling with lightning, materializes around Dolan, Akachi, and Chibuzo, buffeting all of them with the force of the wind. A bolt of lightning strikes Chibuzo square in the chest, and he collapses again, unconscious and dying.
Having reached the shore, Ixtli advances towards the troll, firing two arrows into it, while Yollotl moves to aid Chibuzo, dragging the ranger's motionless form out of the whirling sphere of air. As he struggles to return to consciousness, Akachi escapes the wind under her own power. She fires another beam of light from the Gem of Brightness at the troll, but fails to blind it. The troll claws Dunch in turn, but to little effect as the barbarian is protected by his own rage as well as the inherent resistance of Nyemba's Might. Another bolt of lightning flashes out from the whirling sphere, striking Dolan, and the sorcerer too collapses, dying. But a mighty blow from Dunch causes the troll to lose its concentration on its spell, and the sphere of wind dissipates. Waiting for his moment to act, Elmar lights a torch and moves cautiously toward the fray.
Ixtli twice stabs the troll from beneath the ledge with the Blood Spear, then twice more, while Yollotl bludgeons it with two deft strikes. The troll collapses, but regenerates and rises again. Catching sight of the torch in Elmar's hand, its eyes show panic as it claws him viciously, then lunges to bite at his head. The archaeologist dodges its fangs and stabs the troll with his short sword, but his swing with the torch misses. Akachi joins the group encircling the troll, severing its leg with her scimitar, and it falls prone again, momentarily lifeless.
Up the beach, Mokomoko moves to aid Dolan, and succeeds in stabilizing the fallen sorcerer. Chibuzo also manages to stabilize himself.
The troll's eyes snap open. Still prone, it claws Akachi twice, but only the electricity in its talons injures her. Then Dunch smites it with a mighty blow, chopping its head clean off. When the severed head rolls to a stop, its eyes still follow Dunch with hatred until Elmar brings up his torch. The troll's corpse bursts into flame, and the severed head's eyes grow lifeless and dim.
Silence falls in the cavern, broken only by the sound of the falling water and the crackling flames of the lit braziers and the burning troll. The smell of its charred flesh fills the air, while the face-down corpse of the Aldani monk still bobs up and down in the lake.
The party regroups. Dunch checks down the side passage from which the electric troll emerged, but sees and hears nothing unusual. He also retrieves Nayarak's maul; it has an obsidian head, with a socket presumably intended to hold Kurat's horn. Ixtli uses his Hand of Healing on Dolan, who heals Chibuzo in turn, while Yollotl's shadowy form flows back within Ixtli. Elmar flops on his back on the beach. "Is this really worth it?" he asks rhetorically.
With Akachi translating as needed, the party questions the captured, clearly terrified guard. Haltingly, frequently mumbling, he eventually confirms that the number of trolls in the complex matched the number the party killed, and that he is the last remaining of the Aldani followers of Nayarak. When they ask about Balan, he doesn't recognize the name, but says that one of the former priests came back to the temple and they fought him on an upper level. A troll caused the ceiling to collapse during the battle, and they didn't see the priest after that.
Like Nayarak, the guard is from Tal'mayu. The witch doctor convinced him the sacrifice of Kurat was necessary. When Chibuzo asks him, "who is the Master of the Hidden Waters?", he says that Nayarak also called this being Taloc—a name Ixtli has heard for the Architect of the Crown of Teotenocht, Glyh'rul.
"What would you like us to do with you?" Dunch asks. He would like to return home, the Aldani answers, and receive the matriarch's judgment. Confident in the prisoner's compliance, Dunch removes the Iron Bands of Binding and ties the guard's hands instead, leading him by a rope.
The party goes out to the island at the centre of the lake to examine it more closely. They see now that a second walkway also connects the island to the shore. On the island itself, the ghostly outline of Kurat—twitching occasionally—can be seen within the circle of glowing red glyphs carved into the stone. Three of the glyphs are larger than the others. All were carved by Nayarak, their prisoner tells them. Examining the symbols more closely, Dolan concludes that they are binding and necromantic runes, intended to confine and harm Kurat if he were to materialize. Akachi relates what Balan told her: that the sound of the drum is used as a beacon to guide Kurat back to this world, while Nayarak's ritual was intended to force the dragon back into physical form.
Dolan closes his eyes to commune with Saja N'baza, asking for her guidance. When he opens them again, he surveys the scene with eyes like those of a snake. The glyphs contain much power, Saja N'baza tells her Voice, and they must be disrupted to ensure Kurat's safety. She suggests doing so from a distance—particularly for the larger glyphs.
The others move off the island, and Dolan stands on one of the walkways and casts Acid Splash. When the acid hits one of the larger glyphs, light flashes and a burst of energy explodes out to a distance of twenty feet. Part of the remaining chain of glyphs dims. The sorcerer applies acid to the other larger glyphs next, and continues until the red light has faded from all of the symbols.
Intending to resolve Balan's fate, the party climbs back up to the level above, moving through the flooded area and down the collapsed hallway. Chibuzo dons his Cap of Water Breathing and dives into the water. After swimming a short distance underwater, he finds the way forward blocked. He taps on the rock, hoping to hear a sign of life, but hears no response. After clearing away the obstructing rubble, he eventually reaches a chamber where he can stand: a collapsed room with a staircase up. Pinned under a massive stone block on the stairs is a dead lizardman dressed in red cloth, with gold bangles across his arm and chest. In the water nearby Chibuzo finds a wooden staff, with small animal skulls hanging off it and an obsidian stone wedge in the middle. Taking it with him, he rejoins the others, and Akachi confirms that the staff was Balan's.
The adventurers climb back up and emerge at the top of the temple to find that the sun is going down. Boarding their canoes, they paddle to a spot on the shoreline that Akachi indicates and find her campsite nearby. Exhausted from the long day's battles, they pitch their tents on the tiny spit of land and sleep. Thankfully the salve they received from Oklo back in Tal'mayu keeps the teeming insects mostly at bay.
In the morning, Akachi digs up the ritual drum, though there is nothing obviously unusual about it. They take their canoes back to the temple and descend to the cavern. The braziers have gone dark; they relight them, and the roof of the cave glitters with reflected light once again.
Akachi relates that Balan told her there was a special place near the lake that amplified the sound of the drum. At the end of island's second walkway is a beach with a raised wooden platform, carved with draconic glyphs.
The drum is played like a heartbeat, Akachi tells them. After Dunch plays the drum for a few minutes, Kurat's form materializes on the island. Light pulses from the crystal horn embedded in his forehead, and all the crystals in the roof of the cave glow with a bright light like daylight.
The dragon looks about. "What has happened here? Where are my Dreamwatchers?" Swiftly the party explains to him the treachery of Nayarak. "Is that why you were calling for help in the spirit realm?" Dunch asks. "I was calling to my Dreamwatchers," the dragon answers, "but I also saw troubling things in the Dreamlands."
Dolan explains that he destroyed the circle of glyphs with Saja N'baza's guidance. Kurat examines the scaled symbol on his forehead. "You bear her mark. Why are you here?"
"Nyemba sent us to you for aid," Dunch responds.
"Saja N'baza told us to seek your guidance," Dolan replies.
Kurat eyes them coldly: "What, specifically, are you looking for?"
"How to stop the Death Curse," Dolan answers.
"You know of this? Good," says the dragon. "I am not too late."
"Saja N'baza told us that its source is in Omu," states Dolan. "What is it?
"I will show you," Kurat replies.
"Now," the ancient dragon proclaims as the crystalline horn on his head begins to glow with a pure white light. The adventurers are gently lifted into the air as Kurat continues to speak. "I will share with you both the sights I have personally witnessed and the vision granted to me by the black dragon god, Leviathan."
Their stomachs churn as their perception is wrenched from their physical forms and thrust upwards at break-neck speed. Just as they expect to strike the ceiling of Kurat's lair, they pass through the rock and stones of the upper temple. In another heartbeat they find themselves outside, hanging suspended and bodiless, above the sunken temple of Val'Kurat.
Again, the sensation of unnatural movement strikes, and they are propelled far to the south. They travel out of the Aldani basin, then over a hundred miles or more of thick jungle before they are again brought to an abrupt halt. Kurat's voice echoes around them. "Behold: Omu, the Forbidden City."
Far beneath them sprawls a massive, ruined city, settled into a misty valley in the jungle. Long, grand causeways segment the city, and a large circular wall surrounds what looks to be the remains of the royal palace. A wild river falls into the valley from the north, flooding many streets and buildings. It snakes southward, eventually emptying into a massive fissure in the earth, at the bottom of which is a lake of bubbling magma. Roiling clouds of steam issue forth as the river meets the molten rock, obscuring much of the surrounding area. "This is all that remains of Marakuru's once-greatest city. Nothing but a decaying, vine-choked monument to mortal hubris." The contempt in Kurat's voice is unmistakable.
In the northwestern quarter of the city, they perceive a great bird slowly circling. Occasionally, red lightning arcs across its feathers. "Before the humans came, this place was once a nexus for many loa. Though diminished, it calls to them still," Kurat says. "Nyemba, the Storm's Fury, has also journeyed to Omu. Separated by the boundaries of the planes, I was unable to speak with her. But I believe that she is desperately searching for others of her kind that may have been claimed by this dark place."
They begin to descend towards Omu as Kurat continues. "But this is only what lies on the surface… and in the realm of the living. Beyond the veil, things are much worse."
A disorienting sensation washes over them as two planes of existence rapidly alternate before their eyes. One moment they see lost Omu, the next they see a dark, twisted reflection of it. This other Omu is predominantly black, grey, and white as most other colour has been leached from everything. It is a place of darkness that shuns the light, where the heavens are a black vault with neither sun nor stars. They quickly realize that this alternate Omu is the one that exists in the Spirit World, and it is slowly being corrupted.
The clouds here circle ominously, and the sky is filled with a churning vortex of energy that begins above them and extends downward, penetrating the ground near the northern edge of the city. All around, they also hear the familiar—though now deafening—sound of roaring wind. However, here it seems to be more akin to screaming than the mere movement of air. As they contemplate the sight before them, the flashes stop as quickly as they began, their perception returning to the mundane world.
"It was here my own exploration ended and Leviathan showed me what lay below. Beneath the city lies something terrible. A place where the Dreamlands and the Mortal World are being forced together in a profane union. Come, it is time to show you the source of the Death Curse."
Once again they are thrust downward, towards where they saw the base of the vortex pierce the ground in the Spirit World. Their ethereal form passes through the earth, and the darkened halls of a large underground complex blur past at the edges of their vision. Due to their rapid descent, they are only able to make out a few recognizable features: a large, central chamber or shaft, ringed by a massive stone staircase connecting several different levels. Next, after passing through more stone, they plunge through what appears to be a dark lake echoing with the rhythmic sounds of steam and grinding stone.
Finally, their descent ends, and they find themselves faced with an unbelievable sight. Crumbling balconies overlook a pool of lava filling a triangular chamber, above which is suspended an enormous crystal cylinder held in place by three adamantine struts. Wraithlike forms swirl inside the cylinder, and otherworldly screams hang in the air. Four long, writhing tentacles sprout from the cylinder's cap. A shriveled, vaguely humanoid monstrosity the size of an elephant floats near the cylinder. Its body is wet and malformed, its arms and legs are atrophied, and its oversized head drips black goo. The creature is attached to the cylinder by a twisted umbilical cord. On one of the balconies stands a shrivelled husk of a man dressed in dark robes who watches as an unseen force deposits souls into the cylinder.
Gazing upon the crystal cylinder, they hear Kurat's deep voice say disgustedly: "This… machine… is the Soulmonger. An unholy apparatus that tears the souls of the dead from the Dreamlands and feeds them to that abomination. The man is Lar'lenek, the once-bara of Omu and most devout of Ubtao's followers. Deeply mourning the loss of his god, he bargained with an ancient creature from the Outside for a way to return his deity to life. The creature, the aboleth Glyh'rul, showed him how to construct the Soulmonger and use it to reconstruct Ubtao. But Lar'lenek has been blinded by his grief and has succumbed to madness. I suspect he does not understand the harm he is causing, nor that his abomination is nothing but an atropal—a stillborn godling."
With that, the vision fades and they find themselves back in the physical presence of Kurat, the Dreaming Guardian. The dragon slowly turns his head towards them. "The damage the Soulmonger is doing to the Cycle of Souls is immense, and if left functioning much longer, potentially irreversible. Lar'lenek must be stopped, and his machine destroyed."
Dunch shows Kurat the maul that they took from Nayarak, and the dragon examines it judiciously. "I understand what he was doing," Kurat states, "but the magical construction of such a weapon is intricate. It is not something Nayarak would come to on his own. If my horn were placed in the socket of this mallet, it would indeed create a powerful magical weapon. But that my death was necessary was only one of the Elsecaller's lies."
The Elsecaller claimed that he also sought to destroy the Soulmonger, Ixtli says. "I am curious why that would be," Kurat answers, "when he himself told Lar'lenek how to build it. There is more to this than I know. In any case, the Soulmonger must be destroyed. This weapon can do that."
At the dragon's request, Dunch offers him the maul. Telekinetically holding it suspended before him, Kurat takes flight and ascends to the roof of the cavern. After snapping a crystal off the ceiling, he descends again. His horn glows, and the crystal shimmers in response. He inserts the crystal into the maul's socket, and suddenly the crystal grows and expands, encompassing the maul until its original obsidian construction is entirely replaced with clearest crystal.
"This should work well against the device," Kurat declaims. "All of you must now go to Omu to destroy the Soulmonger. As for myself, I must rest for a time, but will then visit the people of Tal'mayu to help them recover from Nayarak's betrayal."
He turns to Dunch: "You will seek out Nyemba in Omu?"
"Yes," Dunch answers, "Nyemba asked me to fight in her name."
"A residual curse clings to the armour you wear," the dragon states. "For your part in restoring me I will remove it." He reaches out a claw and traces a symbol over the chest plate of the armour. "Be at rest, good king," he intones, "there is another to take up your fight." The armour shines, and for a moment they see behind the armour the glowing outline of a pair of wings.
Kurat next turns his attention to Ixtli, demanding to know why Saja N'baza sent him to Kurat, and commanding the Anasazi to tell him what he knows of the Legacy of Gol. When Ixtli says the legacy manifests as a shadow, Kurat commands a demonstration. Within himself, Ixtli senses that Yollotl does not wish to emerge, and the monk hesitates.
Kurat's horn pulses, and Ixtli rises into the air, suspended helpless before the black dragon. "From where I stand, Saja N'baza has failed in her duty," he declares. He magically rips the shadowy form of Yollotl out of Ixtli, and examines the suspended shadow. "By the Five, what is this?" He commands them to justify why he should not destroy Yollotl immediately.
Yollotl helped to rescue Kurat himself just now, Ixtli says; Kurat might be captured or dead were it not for his aid. Chibuzo speaks in favour of judging Yollotl by his actions, while Dunch argues that they will need all the help they can get in the coming fight. But Kurat remains unmoved until Dolan speaks: Saja N'baza has revealed to him that Yollotl is also bound to Bahamut.
"Creatures from the outside such as this are alien," Kurat tells Ixtli, "poison to our very reality. The Soulmonger was crafted by such a creature." But he can test Bahamut's influence on Yollotl—if Ixtli is willing to accept the consequences.
Ixtli agrees. Kurat's horn glows, and glittering crystal begins to accumulate over Yollotl's body, while the shadow screams in pain. When he is encased completely, Kurat opens his jaws, and the suspended shadow is caught in a blast of the dragon's breath. Horrible noises are heard from Yollotl; acrid smoke rises, and fragments of crystal go flying as they are scourged from Yollotl's body. Finally the smoke dissipates. Where the shadowy form of Yollotl once hovered is now a lizardlike creature resembling Ixtli but covered in red scales. Within himself, Ixtli feels his connection to Yollotl severed.
Kurat lowers the new Yollotl to earth. "By the Five," he proclaims, "I hope you can help these people destroy the Soulmonger." He turns to Dolan. "As it turns out, Saja N'baza was correct. Bahamut's divine spark resided within Yollotl. Otherwise, he would have been destroyed."
In the aftermath, Dolan asks of Ras Nsi, whom Saja N'baza commanded them to destroy. Kurat smirks. "Her affection for you humans has clouded her judgment. Ras Nsi is not an insignificant threat, but he is as nothing compared to the Soulmonger."
"What of the Black Opal Crown?" Dunch asks. The adamantine struts that hold up the Soulmonger are nearly indestructible, Kurat explains. The Crown's powers of annihilation could destroy them. The purpose of the maul, though, is to attack the cylinder, and release the souls within. The adventurers now have a matter of weeks, perhaps a couple of months, to do so.
Dunch also tells him of the yuan-ti tracks they saw near Mbala, but this information elicits only indifference from Kurat. "They are a mere nuisance when compared to the Soulmonger and the Death Curse. Go back to the Oracle if you are worried about the snake-men. I would have thought her 'Kimbala' would have dealt with them long ago."
His concern now, the dragon tells them, is with the people of Tal'mayu. Perhaps the matriarch's son can lead the Dreamwatchers from now on. After the adventurers inform him that Caprakan has led a party of Tal'mayu's warriors to Omu, he tells them to send the Aldani home, if they should encounter him.
As for their prisoner, Kurat asks Ixtli what should be done with him. He was fooled by Nayarak, Ixtli answers, but so were many others. He should be returned to Tal'mayu to face the matriarch's judgment.
Before they depart, Kurat grants further boons to Chibuzo and Dolan, granting them the ability to invest themselves with the power of flame and wind, respectively. Then Dolan invokes the power of the Sceptre of the Honored Voice to return the party to Port Nyanzaru.