Ep 102: "The Crappy Sequel aka Restless Lich Face"
Nightmares
The fifth night, of the Week of Nightmares, was filled with more terrifying dreams. This time, the nightmare were filled with visions of spiders. Finkoo’s involved him working, but things kept breaking no matter what he did. Eventually, the whole place was engulfed in both webs and spiders, with him being surrounded by breaking clocks. They echoed in his head, along with the sounds of spiders, as the web floor broke beneath him. Cyl dreamt of Dub again. Though this time it was an Eirshale spider going after Dub. Every step she took toward defending him caused the area around her to get darker and darker. Ultimately, she couldn’t see anything or reach Dub to help him. All she could do was listen to him scream in horror from somewhere in the dark around her, before finally waking up. Saxi’s dream started with her and everyone else caught in a giant web. She saw her friends cocooned around her. Trapped and drained within a giant web. Cyl and Mo lay crushed, in scatter pieces, below the web. Saxi watched as each of her friends gasped in pain while the spider worked its way through its victims. The spider was finishing with Oisin as it turned toward Saxi and she saw its face. The spider had the face of Donovan. It stalked over to Saxi and, as it bit into her side, she woke up. Lark’s nightmare started with him having a normal day, but with him not noticing all of the spider issues and webs following him. As he finally got home and saw Jastra, she looked like a spider, but he didn’t notice this properly either. Finally, he saw his own reflection, and he was also a spider. This scared him into waking. Primeheart’s nightmare took him back into the moment that they lost Kali to the Spider Drake. He watched the moment in slow-motion and heard the sound of her falling with disturbingly perfect clarity. Lark came back up the cliff as he had done in real life, but this time the bag of holding that held Kali’s body also had spiders pouring out of it. Lark smiled as the spiders flowed from the bag and revealed a mouth full of blood. The dream ended with the spiderdrake coming back up, though this time with Kali’s face. GB’s started with him waking up at home. As he tried to go about his day, he felt incredibly itchy. He scratched at himself and his paw caught in his fur and skin. His fur started sticking to the floor, and all the other surfaces, as he tried to untangle himself. As his fur was pulled from his body, he found himself covered in small spiders. His fur seemed to be their web as it stuck and caught on everything. As the small spiders overtook him, and started to bite, he woke up.Morning
Finkoo spent his morning trying to cast his new Find Familiar spell. It failed multiple times, before eventually summoning a Spider, though he had been trying to summon an Owl. This was very concerning to him, but he decided that he would remedy this later. Lark met a Tortle walking toward the city. It shambled, more than walked, toward him after he called out. It then fell apart on its way to him. Lark moved over to the remains and reached out his hand to their hand, getting a vision of himself as the Tortle being killed. As he embodied the dead tortle, he heard a voice say, “My name is Din, you killed me.” The vision then ended.Dub’s House
Everyone eventually made their way over to Dub’s house. Cyl was still looking over the puzzle intently. She had done a lot of the puzzle that morning and it was all that she could focus on. As Finkoo arrived, the Mawblade tried to tempt him and changed into a dagger form, as he picked it up. As dawn approached, Saxi checked on Dub again. This time he had the wound and stitching that Mawblade had told them would appear. Also at this time, Cyl seemed to become charmed by the puzzle and there was no hesitation in her as she placed all of the pieces down one after another. Finkoo was a little concerned and took one of the pieces away from the ground. As Cyl filled in the rest, she saw Finkoo attempting to hide it from her, and she came to take it from him. He decided to put it in place, after asking what everyone else thought, Saxi reminded him that it needed to happen anyway. As h placed the last piece, the picture gained depth, and started to look real. The creature in the picture appeared to be the torso of a twisted suit of armor. It looked as though it would fit perfectly into the empty space from the armor that had wielded the Mawblade. As the group took in the sight before them, the creature in the picture began to move. GB’s ritual spell, that he had started before the creature fully appeared in the painting, finished and allowed the group to talk telepathically. The creature eventually started coming into the room, reaching out of the papers toward the group. As it did so, the whole house cracked, all of the party falling into the creature’s realm.The Spider Realm
Lark and Finkoo, who had been on the opposite side of the room from the others, ended up separated from the rest of the group. The two of them only saw a large temple amid the desolate landscape and they headed towards it. They found a lock with 8 spider legs keeping it sealed. Finkoo picked the first 4 without issue, but had to cast identify on it to find out that the other 4 required a sacrifice to open them. The rest of the group arrived in the middle of fields, with Dub lying at their feet. He was still unconscious and seemed to be trapped inside himself. Saxi, Cyl, GB, and Primeheart decided to try removing the phylactery from Dub’s heart. Saxi carefully cut into Dub’s chest and began to pull out stuffing, like what would normally be found in a toy. Eventually, she found a small, stuffed heart and the group paused to discuss what to do next. Mawblade told the party that for the phylactery to be destroyed, it would cost either Dub’s soul, or the soul of someone who was close to him. Cyl went quiet, thinking hard about that decision and what it would mean. Saxi asked whether the soul would be destroyed, or if it could be brought back, and Mawblade said the soul would be destroyed. The group with Dub continued to think and try to figure out another option. Saxi even went so far as to suggest putting the phylactery inside of her and Primeheart's bags of holding to destroy it. After stalling on their choice, Mawblade began to become more insistent and told them that any of the party would do. Throughout all of this, the party members were communicating through the telepathic link that GB had magically created. Back at the temple, Finkoo was assessing the locks that required a sacrifice. Lark, wanting to meet-up with the others, tried to will himself over to the rest of the party. It succeeded, and know that a sacrifice appeared to be necessary, he whispered something to Primeheart. He asked Primeheart to kill him. Primeheart, wanting to honor Lark’s wishes, attempted to summon an arrow to shoot him, but it was countered by GB. Meanwhile, Finkoo was alone at the temple and gave up most of his new spells from his Spellbook in order to open the locks on the structure. Inside, was a statue of a Drow woman, which also featured a set of images showing their life, and their reincarnations as they happened through time. The weapon was always with them, becoming more and more similar to Mawblade. Along with this, the people who wielded the weapon began to change after the lich ritual was complete. The last image showed all of the party except him being dead, with Cyl sobbing over Dub’s body. Finkoo called out to the others over the telepathic link. He filled them in on the images within the temple as well as that he didn’t trust what the Mawblade was saying. He believed the weapon itself might be the phylactery. The group paused in their discussion of whether to let Lark sacrifice himself, and Saxi suggested that they should all to go to the temple to view the images before they decided. Right as Saxi suggested this, the temple started to crumble and Finkoo had to run from it. Eventually, he was able to get over to his friends the same way that Lark had. Both Saxi and GB found this coincidence incredibly suspsicious. With everything that the Mawblade had tried to convince them to do, they decided that they could not trust it. The group chose not to kill anyone, and instead used the two bags of holding. They decided to shove Mawblade into the two bags of holding, like they had discussed doing with the phylactery. All the while, Mawblade was cursing them and insulting their decision. The group found itself surrounded by an innumerable horde of cart-sized spiders that approached quickly from all sides. They fought with everything they had, even knowing they may not survive the battle. They struck out at as many of the creatures as they could, desperately trying to hold back the swarm that began to overtake them. Everyone sought to protect GB for as long as possible, as he used his mage hands to destroy both of the bags of holding, and the Mawblade with them. As the weapon was destroyed, GB felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Dub, who told him that he was a good boy. Dub reached out and sent beams of multi-colored light in every direction. The beams of light cut through the spiders, destroying them and bathing the gray landscape with color.Dub’s House
The group woke and found themselves on the floor in Dub’s room. Dub was alive, and smiling, with a small scar on his chest.Aftermath
The group would come to find out that Mawblade and Khalqua were one and the same. The drow woman that Khalqua had been was twisted and changed over time, as she sought to become an avatar of Rinth. Eventually, she took on the form of the Mawblade and used her new form to convince others to sacrifice sols to her phylactery. This fed her phylactery and kept her power as a lich growing. They would also come to learn that the Mawblade was a phylactery as well. Khalqua had merged with it to make the Mawblade both lich and phylactery, rendering it extremely hard to destroy. They had damaged one of its forms and likely weakened it, but it was unlikely that they had destroyed it.Thus ended the Week of Nightmares.
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