Tomb of Annihilation - Session 37
General Summary
Before they enter the tomb, Ixtli spends a few minutes rearranging the foliage behind them, concealing the cave entrance again.
Ahead, a twenty-foot passage leads to another door, where a stone skull leers down from the lintel. An iron lever stands next to the stone door. Advancing cautiously down the corridor, they notice a conspicuous seam in the middle of the floor. Hoping to seal it shut, they start to hammer iron spikes into the seam, placing one every few feet—but once they move within ten feet of the door, the jaws of the stone skull open. A crystal hand holding a small hourglass pops out from between the jaws, then turns the timer over, the sand running out rapidly. Dunch runs to the lever and pulls it. The iron spikes in the floor hold for a moment, then give way with the sound of shearing metal, revealing a twenty-foot drop into a spiked pit. Dolan casts Fly on himself and Chibuzo, while Dunch hangs onto the lever and Ixtli and Yollotl leap back across the pit to safety. The hand with the hourglass retracts into the skull; when Chibuzo and Dolan grab hold of Dunch and he lets go of the lever, the door opens. The flyers drop Dunch in the corridor beyond and head back for Yollotl, while Ixtli crosses the pit by running along the wall.
The forty-foot corridor beyond is covered in moss, and smells of rot and damp. In a few places plant roots break through the stone ceiling. At the end of the passage they see an intersection, with corridors leading left and right. Facing the adventurers on the far wall is an eight-foot wide, moss-covered bas-relief carving of a devil's face, its gaping mouth filled with utter darkness.
Now carrying the Gem of Brightness, Ixtli spots that the corridor ahead is lined with small holes, and a close examination of the floor reveals three separate pressure plates. Avoiding them, the party makes it to the intersection without incident. To the left, a short corridor leads to an arched crystal window, six feet wide and ten feet high. Creepers and vines spread across the corridor's walls, while in the floor is a circular grate of rusty iron bars seven or eight feet across. To the right, another short corridor leads to a vast open space.
Even with the Gem of Brightness up close, the maw in the devil face remains pitch black, as if it were eating the light. Dolan throws a pebble inside it, but the stone vanishes into the darkness without a sound.
The adventurers head left. The grate looks down on another corridor, running perpendicular to the one they are in and filled with shallow running water that flows deeper into the interior of the tomb. As they gaze downwards, they see a skeleton walking against the current. Its most notable feature is its skull, which is flat-topped and shaped like a triangle. After a moment it disappears from view. The adventurers recall that Caprakan spoke to them of five "skeleton keys" in the tomb that locked the way to the "cradle of Ubtao"; could its skull be one of the keys? Chibuzo tries the grate with a crowbar, but it doesn't seem like it would open easily.
At the end of the hall, they look through the crystal window. The rectangular chamber beyond looks like a burial vault. A sarcophagus rests on a dais in the middle; standing beyond it are two large statues of bears holding a bronze disc five feet in diameter. The disc is engraved with dozens of eyes. Niches built into the walls of the vault hold six desiccated corpses, slumped in chairs and wearing masks that look like they are made of feathers and black papier-mâché.
They head back the way they came. The passage to the right of the devil face brings them to a large open chamber, where a five-foot-wide stone balcony surrounds a square central pit that plunges down into darkness. The balcony leads gradually downwards, descending periodic flights of stairs to the dimly seen levels below. Looking down into the abyss, the adventurers realize that they have seen this place before, in the vision Kurat shared with them.
On this level, two narrow passages lead off the balcony to the north, with another wider passage directly opposite them to the east. Ignoring them, the party descends some twenty-five feet to the next level, where more narrow corridors lead off the balcony to the north and east. Light glints off a bronze plaque on the eastern side of the balcony, and the party moves to examine it. It reads:
The dead abhor sunlight.
Only a jewel can tame the frog.
Bow as the dead god intoned.
Into darkness descend.
On the southern side of the balcony at this level is a ten-foot wide closed door, from which they hear the guttural moans characteristic of zombies. Moving closer, they find three oval holes carved in the door at head height. Three zombies have stuck their heads through the holes, which are fitted with headgear that positions metal bits between the zombies' jaws. Chibuzo spears one of them, but it only thrashes briefly against the bit. The light of the Gem of Brightness doesn't seem to bother them, nor do they react when Ixtli briefly dismisses the light from the gem. Chibuzo dispatches the zombie, then shoves its head backwards out of the socket. Through the hole, he sees a corridor that opens into a huge room, at the centre of which is an ancient chariot bearing a sarcophagus. A chain attached to the now-inanimate zombie rises up to the ceiling, and he sees two more chains which must be attached to the others. In frustration, Chibuzo cuts down the other two zombies. Ixtli tries to cast Stone Shape using the Ring of Earth Elemental Command, but the tomb has been enchanted to prevent such transmutations.
They abandon the room. Seeking the shortest path to the Soulmonger, Dolan casts the Find the Path spell that the statue of Ubtao at the Tugela Falls granted him two months ago. He feels a pull downwards, and the party descends to the next level.
At the bottom of the stairs, they find lumpy patches of purple mould growing on the floor and walls of the balcony. Splotches of the mould spread throughout the level. Suddenly an eye appears in one of the blobs of mould looking at Dunch. Dolan casts a Fire Bolt at it; as it is incinerated, the fungus makes a tiny screeching noise and releases a puff of spores.
A ten-foot-wide corridor leads to the west. While Dunch heads down it, from another patch of mould an eye extends on a stalk, and fires a ray of light at Dolan. The sorcerer is instilled with fear; he turns to flee back up the stairs, but Chibuzo grabs him before he can go far, and forcibly hauls him past the eyestalk. Once they are past it, the stalk merges back into the mould, and Dolan's fear dissipates.
Down the corridor, Dunch shortly comes to a bizarre sight. Two humanoid figures stand in small alcoves on either side of the corridor. The figures wear bucket helms and spiked gauntlets, and have armour bolted to their frames. A spiked chain attached to collars around their necks stretches across the corridor, which continues to the west. Examining the figures more closely, Dunch sees that these are not statues, but living (or at least, animate) creatures. Between the gaps in their armour, what he can glimpse of their flesh reminds him of Hondo, the flesh golem that served Nanny Pu'pu. He turns back to rejoin the others.
Further along the balcony, they come to another of the bronze plaques. This one reads:
Walk through water with weapon in hand.
Slake your shadow at the font.
The vulture is the first step.
Right the traitors of Ubtao.
The walls of history tell all.
A narrow corridor leads north from the balcony. After twenty feet, it ends in a huge carving of a snarling jackal's head. Peering through the gap between its fangs, Dunch sees a rectangular torchlit chamber beyond. Stone sphinxes stand in the corners of the room, whose floor tiles are carved with large hieroglyphic symbols. Atop a three-foot-tall stone dais in the middle stands a funeral barge bearing a gold sarcophagus decorated with horned rabbits. As Dunch watches, a panel in the wall slides upward, and a dwarf wearing a yellow turban and chainmail enters the room. After he steps on one of the floor tiles, a swarm of locusts emerges from the mouths of the sphinxes. The dwarf is engulfed by the swarm; when it dissipates a few moments later, only his bones and gear remain.
They return to the balcony. On the opposite side of the central pit, they enter another corridor that leads south, ending after a short distance in a T intersection. To their right is a short dead-end corridor containing only a small, two-feet-by-three-feet crawlway on the north side that leads into darkness. In the other direction is a sixty- or seventy-foot-long passage that brings them to a long hall extending northwards. Another crawlway here leads further east.
The walls of the hall are decorated with murals of male and female animal-headed warriors, but the weapons they carry in their painted hands are real, held up by brackets in the wall. Advancing down the hall, the murals depict stork-headed warriors carrying hand axes, lizard-headed warriors with maces, panther-headed warriors with blowguns, unarmed hawk-headed warriors, goat-headed warriors with sickles, and frog-headed warriors bearing tridents. Past the frog-headed figures is a curtain of falling water. The space beyond the curtain is a mirror image of the side they are on, with murals on the walls, another crawlspace to the east, and an exit to the west. Another skeleton is visible behind the curtain, the top of its flat skull moulded into a pentagon. It walks away from them and through the far exit.
Recalling the words of the plaque, Dunch takes his Maul of Destruction in hand and tries to walk through the water. But the water erupts with massive bludgeoning force, injuring the entire party and sweeping them off their feet. Dunch tries again, this time bearing a hand axe he takes off the wall, but with the same result.
After this second bludgeoning, Chibuzo and Dolan decide to explore the tunnel instead. Dolan uses a scroll of Continual Flame to create a light source and they crawl into the narrow space, which curves to the south after thirty feet and opens into a ten-foot-square, apparently empty chamber with another crawlspace on the opposite side. Entering this second tunnel, they find that it curves westward, then opens into a larger space.
They emerge onto a balcony lit by a single torch, where a fifteen-foot-tall statue of a fiend with furled wings and clenched fists stands overlooking a long, narrow chamber containing a vast pit. At the far end of the room, some 120' distant, they see another torchlit balcony, with an exit leading further west. Lit by the distant torch is a lever built into the wall, while staggered along the length of the pit, several wooden platforms hover in space. The purple mould infests this room as well. After examining their surroundings, the adventurers retrace their path to rejoin the others.
Meanwhile, Dunch prepares to try again. As a precaution, Ixtli and Yollotl step out of the hallway, but this time the trident that Dunch pulls from the wall seems to do the trick, and he steps through the curtain of water without incident. Ixtli follows, passing the trident back to Yollotl so he can pass through in turn.
While they wait for Chibuzo and Dolan, Dunch takes the exit at the far end of the hall. The purple mould is still everywhere. After a short jog west, the corridor turns north for about fifty feet before turning west again at the far end. At about the halfway point, Dunch comes across another short corridor to the east ending in an iron-bound wooden door. Opening it, he finds a small room containing a stone font filled with steaming green liquid. Beyond it is another doorway, where a shadowy figure stands with its back turned to him.
As Dunch moves into the room, the shadow mirrors his steps. He backs up so that the shadow is positioned next to the font, then turns around and moves his hands in a drinking motion. The others having joined him by now, they see the shadow picking up and consuming the green liquid. After a few minutes, the font is empty, and the shadow vanishes. When Dunch re-enters the room, he sees at the bottom of the font an orange spherical crystal, an inch in diameter and carved like an eyeball. He tries to look through it, but it's too opaque to see through. Beyond the doorway where the shadow appeared is a dead end.
The party continues down the hall to the north. At the end, the corridor turns sharply left, then left again. Looking around the corner, they see that the corridor ends after this sharp bend. To the west of the corridor's end is a block of stone painted with the figure of a jackal wearing a circular gold medallion around its neck. The figure is surrounded by images of locusts. Another crawlway leads to the north.
Just before the bend in the corridor is a peephole with a glass lens. When Dolan looks through it, he sees the image of a horned devil with a gold piece in its mouth. Engraved on the gold is the picture of a vulture. They realize that the peephole magnifies the view of the medallion around the jackal figure's neck. Examining it more closely, it looks to them as if the vulture image is engraved on a disc that might rotate, but they are unable to move the disc.
One of the locust engravings is a button. When Ixtli pushes it, the stone block rises into the ceiling, revealing the rectangular room with the funeral barge and four sphinxes where Dunch saw the dwarf consumed by locusts. Past the portal, the first floor tile shows the image of a vulture; on the tile beyond it are the dwarf's bones and the remnants of its yellow turban. The bones look old, not recently stripped of their flesh, and the adventurers conclude that what Dunch saw earlier was an image or illusion of the dwarf's death. Other tiles on the floor are carved with other glyphs, such as a snake, an urn, and a scarab. Above the sarcophagus, a dark shaft opens in the ceiling. The pentagon-headed skeleton is here too, on the far side of the sarcophagus. It seems to be scraping a dagger along the wall for some reason.
They decide they need to take action to obtain its skull. Invoking the Step of the Wind, Ixtli dashes into the room and makes a long jump onto the dais with the funeral barge, launching himself from the vulture tile. As soon as he steps on the tile, the stone block starts to sink, and the others, standing in the doorway, are forced to make a split-second decision which way to evade the oncoming stone. Chibuzo and Dolan dodge to the outside, while Dunch and Yollotl dodge inside the room, onto the vulture tile.
In an instant, locusts erupt from the mouths of the four sphinxes, swarming over the two of them and ravaging their flesh. Yollotl exhales his Breath of Fire, but it has no effect on the magical swarm. He starts to move towards the stone dais, but when he steps on the next tile, the locusts first vanish, then reappear, centred on his new location. In another moment only Yollotl's bones remain. Ixtli senses his death.
Outside, after hearing a clicking sound from the medallion worn by the painted jackal, Dolan rushes to look through the peephole. The disc in the devil's mouth has changed, and now shows a serpent. He finds that he can hear Dunch's thoughts; the half-orc curses mightily as the cloud of locusts continues to attack him. Believing Dunch can hear his thoughts in turn, Dolan thinks, "snake now!"
Chibuzo presses the button again, and the stone block rises. Then he reaches into the swarm to grab Dunch. The locusts tear at his flesh, but he manages to pull the half-orc out of the room. The swarm stays in place.
Inside the room, the skeleton turns to look behind it, seeming to do a double-take when it registers Ixtli's presence. Moving almost like a crab, it clings to the wall with all four limbs, scuttling up and then along the ceiling towards the shaft above the sarcophagus. Before it can escape, Ixtli smites it with the Circlet of Blasting he recently received from Chibuzo, and the skeleton's bones rain down onto the barge. Ixtli catches the pentagon-shaped skull before it can bounce onto the floor.
After a moment, the stone block sinks again, and the locust swarm dissipates. After checking the sarcophagus and finding it locked, Ixtli takes a moment to heal himself, also casting Stoneskin to protect himself somewhat from the locusts. Finding that he too can sense Dolan's thoughts while the sorcerer is at the peephole, Ixtli jumps to the nearest floor tile with the serpent symbol. Through the peephole, Dolan sees the symbol change to a new one. Guided by Dolan's thoughts, Ixtli jumps from one symbol to the next. When he lands on a tile with an urn symbol, the sarcophagus lid springs open, the symbol on the disc changes back to a vulture, the stone block rises, and the floor tiles throughout the room all make a clicking sound.
Judging that the trap has been disarmed, Ixtli walks over to look into the sarcophagus. Inside are the fragile bones of a horned rabbit. Light emanates from its horn; when he reaches out to take it, the spectral image of an almiraj appears to him in a flare of light. "Quick, quick," a female voice says, "let me in! We must stop Lar'lenek!" The monk tries to resist, but in a moment he finds himself inhabited by the spirit of I'jin.
The rabbit's voice chatters away at him internally, one moment asking questions about Ixtli and his companions, the next relating how she came to be imprisoned here. Lar'lenek killed her and her fellow loa, she says, then bound them to talismans he buried in this tomb. "He claimed that the people turned away from the worship of Ubtao to worship us instead. But that just isn't true!" The other gods buried here would also be willing to join them, she says, "except Obo'laka. He's no good." Ixtli briefly relates the presence of this new spirit to the rest of the party.
Searching the bones of the dwarf, they find a peridot among the cloth fragments of the turban, as well as a pouch containing a diamond and two crystal eyeballs very like the one Dunch found at the bottom of the font. One is dark blue in colour, the other a vibrant purple.
Before they leave this room, Ixtli mentally suppresses for the moment the sound of I'jin's voice, and kneels on the floor in the ashen residue left behind by Yollotl's last fiery breath. Memories come to him unbidden: meeting his shadow for the first time at Nkansu House; fighting side-by-side in Port Nyanzaru and the jungles of Marakuru; Kurat's acid breath, and Yollotl's transformation; their battles together against pirates and dinosaurs and yuan-ti. He picks up Yollotl's bones, and places them in a sack.