Episode 24 - The Cryptic Crypt

General Summary

Sword of Air

Episode XXIV

The Cryptic Crypt

Our intrepid heroes creep through the shadows of the eerily dripping cavern, their steps silenced and their forms obscured by Lightstrike’s ring of pass without trace. Zimlok, with all the overacted stealth of an amateur thespian, makes some elaborate commando hand gestures which the rest studiously ignore. As they edge closer to the boulders where the four Grimlocks hide, one of the primitive creatures spots a one-legged frog flopping inelegantly across the cave floor, making a noble effort to reach the safety of the sump across the way. The Grimlock licks its lips and blindly sniffs the air. It nudges its companion and gestures towards the frog.
“Vron nach beglor,” it grunts, salivating, and makes to move towards its oblivious prey.
But the other Grimlock, which is slightly larger, holds it back with a heavy hand on its shoulder and shakes its heavy-browed head. “Nog, Dokrom. Nog beglor. Hlob Groznak icki mhezh dookit,” it whispers huskily, and the first Grimlock acquires what might pass for a forlorn expression and gives up.
As this exchange is occurring, the adventurers manoeuvre into position, quiet as ghosts. Lightstrike flattens himself against the rock and climbs up above his target. Viper the Quasit covers the exit, temporarily ditching his hula skirt in case he needs to scare any of the Grimlocks (although it’s debatable whether a Quasit in a hula skirt would be any less scary than a Quasit not in a hula skirt – DM).
Zimlok places his hand over his designated Grimlock’s mouth and unhesitatingly runs cold steel across its throat, as Lightstrike and Haji Baba do the same. A look of undisguised glee passes across the Druid’s face as the creature’s mortal blood runs hot across her fingers, and she quickly manifests an expression of disgust just in case anyone is watching her. As three of the Grimlocks slump motionless against the rocks, Mherren pops out from behind the boulder and bonks the last one squarely on the head with the blunt edge of his axe. The creature looks momentarily stupefied before collapsing in a heap to the ground.
As blood pools at their feet, the four assassins swiftly loot the corpses of their unknowing foes. Lightstrike finds thirteen gold pieces on the larger Grimlock, but otherwise there are only rusted knives, spiked clubs and… wait… what’s this? A small wooden idol that depicts a strange entity with a wide, frog-like mouth, sleep, heavy-lidded eyes and ears like a bat’s. It has a bloated belly and carved into its skin are queer symbols in a language that none of them recognises.
The companions examine it closely, Viper peering up at it suspiciously from between Mherren’s legs, but they can make little of it. Only…
An uncharacteristically thoughtful look appears on Mherren’s face. “I’ve heard tell of a god or demon of some kind whose description vaguely matches this figurine,” he says.
“I don’t recall its name, but I do remember Golak’s shaman telling us stories when we were youngsters. Something about some great evil that had been banished or locked away by mankind. The one act Orcs actually have reason to be grateful to Humans for, and the only reason why to this day the Orc tribes stick to raiding rather than waging outright war with mankind, to reclaim the lands that were once, and still are, rightfully theirs.”
As they study the unassuming little figure, a chill creeps upon each of them, and they are compelled to tuck the stunted-looking idol away and out of sight. Haji Baba in particular has some sense of an abomination against the natural order, something profoundly insulting to her Druidic sensibilities, and she hastily puts the thing into the bag of holding. “No bad juju can reach us from in here,” she says.

*

The friends continue down the passageway that gently slopes down and deeper into the sides of the ravine. Lightstrike notices that the tunnel, rather than being natural, is carved out by hand. There are even traces in the walls of ancient stonework, now crumbling. Mherren chips away at some of the stone, dislodging part of the wall and causing streams of dust and soil to pour rather unnervingly from cracks in the ceiling. A few bricks come free, some of which have initials carved into them. Zimlok recalls it is a Dwarfish practice for architects and builders to inscribe their initials on their edifices, and he dismisses the marks as unimportant. But then Mherren finds a large block which has an intricate rune carved into its reverse side. He blows away the dust and stuns the others as he fluently reads the Old Dwarfish script: “He is in his element– ” he reads proudly, and then immediately looks confused.
Elated by their finds, and perhaps a little unhinged psychologically by the cold-blooded murders they just committed, Lightstrike, Mherren, Viper and Zimlok set off skipping down the passageway, singing an old Tabaxi folk song at the top of their lungs, which echoes eerily and seems to distort and deepen oddly as it bounces off the cavern walls. “We’re off to see the Wizard…” they croon breezily, as Haji Baba scowls to herself and follows on with caution.
Eventually they reach an impressive-looking structure at the end of the passage. Two thick pillars, capped with the sculpted heads of helmed Dwarfs that seem to glare down with impassive and unreadable expressions, frame double doors, tantalisingly ajar.
Behind the doors the companions discern another passage lit by flickering torches in iron sconces.
“We should leave our immovable rod here, butted against the door so we can’t be shut in,” proclaims Zimlok with an expression of worldly wisdom.
“I’m not so sure about that,” says Lightstrike. “It’s a pretty valuable thing to just leave lying around.”
“Ach, what are you worried about?” scoffs Zimlok. “Nobody can take it. It’s immovable, except by you, of course (this is manifestly not true – DM). And it’ll give us a sure means of egress.”
Dazzled by Zimlok’s fancy verbiage, and against his better instincts, Lightstrike places the rod against the top of the open door and presses the button that holds it in place. As he lets go, the heavy metal rod remains in place, magically defying gravity.
“Onward!” says Zimlok, satisfied by his own cunning plan and inspired with an inexplicable selfconfidence. Mherren, young and impressionable as he is, picks up on Zimlok’s high spirits and mirrors them as he strides off down the passage, which seems better preserved than the tunnel behind them, with neatly-cut paving stones in the floor and decorative motifs and bas-reliefs in panels and friezes upon the walls.
“Erm, guys. Don’t you think we should proceed a little more caref– ” starts Haji Baba.
Too late.
Mherren treads upon a tile that depresses into the floor as he sinks his full weight upon it. There is a loud click, and Mherren looks round at the others with a wide-eyed expression of “Oops!” as the entire section of floor drops beneath them, and tips them into a chute that sends them sliding down to land in a heap in a lightless chamber below. Before they can gather their senses, the chute retracts and the ceiling above them slides back into place. They are trapped in the silent darkness. Looking around with the black-and-white indistinctness of their darkvision, the heroes make out that they are in a rectangular, doorless room with a large stone statue of a crowned Dwarf in robes at the midpoint of the longest wall. Before the statue are eight circular pedestals, which Haji Baba notices are strangely eroded as though eaten away. She also sees a network of cracks in the floor, so she turns into a beetle and scuttles down into one of the fissures to investigate.
Upon four of the pedestals are huge cauldrons, one of bronze, one of black marble, one of granite and one of ceramic. Lightstrike and Viper go to inspect them, finding ash at the bottom of the bronze one, a lump of stone in the granite one, a pool of still water in the marble one, and a circular hole at the bottom of the ceramic one, three feet in diameter, that curiously looks to lead to open sky, with vapours like clouds floating past.
Viper’s breath disturbs the ash at the bottom of the brazier, and suddenly a massive gout of flame erupts from the ash, singeing his eyebrows as he pulls his face away. At the same time, the waters of the pool begin to ripple and a tornado of swirling air spouts up from the sky-hole. A booming voice emanates from the statue: “A name is earned!” it pronounces in the Common Tongue, as Haji Baba is hit by an acrid stench that burns the back of her beetle’s throat.
“Uh-oh!” she thinks to herself as a surge of caustic green acid surges up from beneath and burns her segmented legs, and she scuttles madly out of the fissure, her carapace sizzling as she morphs back into Druid form. The heroes hastily clamber up the pedestals as stinking acid begins to fill the chamber all around them.
“What now?” hollers Zimlok with a note of poorly-disguised panic, his confident composure in tatters as the acid inexorably rises up the pillars. The companions grope for ideas, yelling out any names they can think of: “Halimhetazi!” tries Haji Baba; “Pelor!” shouts Mherren; “Arden!” yells Lightstrike. “Help!” screams Zimlok, for he doesn’t know any Dwarfish gods and in his blind panic is struggling to recall even his own name. In desperation, he plants his staff, vaults across to the nearest urn, performs a faultless triple pike and swan dives into the swirling waters even as he reads his scroll of water breathing, which turns to vapour just as he breaks the surface…
…To find himself in a still and seemingly endless ocean of water. Instead of the walls of the cauldron, there is only cool water that stretches for infinite miles in all directions. Before him, the shimmering outline of the turbulent disc he just dived through – but it is not a ‘surface’ as such, for all around it is water, nothing but water… except… there! Far below, if there is such a thing as ‘below’ in this bizarre watery world, fragments of floating ice. They seem to spell out a word:
FAR
Jubilant, he swims for the floating disc, and, his head bursting through, he squawks: “Far! Part of the name is Far! Look inside the cauldrons!” And, feeling smug and not just a little safe in his Pool of Infinity, he dives back under and proceeds to swim about like a weird-looking penguin, cruising and spinning and water-dancing, and generally luxuriating in the watery embrace of the Elemental Plane of Water.
Lightstrike deftly leaps from pillar to pillar and takes a final jump, only to fall short, his fingertips brushing the lip of the granite cauldron as he tumbles into the roiling acid. He sets his teeth and grimaces as it burns into his flesh, and his muscles ripple as he pulls himself out of the excruciating green death. A lump of stone crumbles away from the pedestal as he pulls himself up, and, as he rolls himself into the relative safety of the urn, he tries throwing it at the rock at its base… to no effect. He mutters arcane words and a fierce blue light appears at the tip of his wand. He hurls it forward, and it stretches out into a glowing arrow that sinks deep into the boulder. Then another. And another. And the boulder cracks open like an egg to spill forth a cascade of sand, and a pebble upon which is inscribed a Dwarfish rune. He summons his ethereal mage hand and sends it across to the burning brazier, out of which a distinctly singed and sooty Mherren is clambering. Against all his instincts, he had dived into the fire to find himself in a flaming, cracked world of seeping rivers of magma and smouldering, white-hot earth. Before him, a momentary cascade of ash. And for a split second it appeared to spell a word, before it fell to the sizzling ground and evaporated:
BLOOD
Mherren reaches out for the mage hand and grasps the pebble:
FIST
Just one more word… Mherren and Lightstrike turn expectantly to the ceramic urn into which Haji Baba had disappeared. They wait with baited breath. A moment passes. And another. Something is wrong!
Braving the acid gauntlet, Mherren leaps from pillar to pillar and bounds in one almighty leap on to the edge of the Cauldron of Air. He peers into the swirling mists at its base. Nothing. He unhooks his rope and, whispering a prayer to Demogorgon, hurls it into the portal.
“Remember to hold the other end!” shouts Lightstrike. Just in time, Mherren grabs hold of one end of the rope as the rest of it disappears from view.
“Well, obviously!” he yells back at Lightstrike, and turns back to the portal with a rueful, sheepish look of “Phew – that was close”.
Meanwhile, Haji Baba is falling. Endlessly falling through an endless sky. Clouds scud past, one of which seems to form for a second into a recognisable syllable, before drifting back into formlessness.
GRIM
She looks with horror as the hole above her recedes smaller and smaller and smaller as she plummets. But wait – what’s this? Something hurtling towards her. Instinctively she grasps for it, and misses. Again, she reaches out, and it slips from her grip. Desperately she thrusts her hand out one more time, and her fingers close around the frayed end of a thick hempen rope. She clutches on, her knuckles turning white as she feels herself being slowly heaved back towards the portal and out of the Plane of Air.
“Grim!” she shouts. “The last word is Grim!”
As the acid bubbles and spits at the bases of the cauldrons, they try all the combinations they can think of, until Mherren hits upon it: “Fargrim Bloodfist!” And, slowly, the green death begins to recede and drain away. Respectively burned, scorched, scalded, and almost lost forever, Mherren, Viper, Lightstrike and Haji Baba collapse exhausted against each other on the floor.
“Ah! Now that was refreshing!” declares Zimlok as he emerges dripping from his cauldron like he’s just returning from a spa weekend, his cloak of many pockets looking for all the world like a Terry towelling dressing gown. He clambers wetly out of the urn and turns to look at his comrades.
“What?” he asks innocently as he is met by four pairs of eyes like daggers.
“Never mind,” spits Haji Baba bitterly, her hair frizzed into a giant red afro, and she stalks past him with all the dignity she can muster towards a door that has suddenly materialised at the far end of the room, followed closely by Mherren, Lightstrike and Viper, all bearing studied expressions of haughty disgust. Zimlok watches them pass, utterly baffled.
As Lightstrike reaches for the door, the statue booms out once more: “A name is earned. The worthy may pass!” And the door swings open.

*

A narrow, square-cut passageway opens into another cavern, which is filled with the sound of fastflowing water. Chastened by his experience with the acid trap, Zimlok clicks together the heels of his slippers of spider climb and shins up the walls, as Haji Baba polymorphs into a mouse and Lightstrike skulks shadow-like around the edges of the cave. They find an ancient-looking stone bridge that spans a surging underground river. It spills into the cavern from a waterfall at one side and a dark and ominous-looking tunnel at the other, before disappearing on the other side of the bridge into a churning swallow hole. At the far end of the bridge Haji Baba finds another squaredoff passage that leads out of the cavern, and she proceeds to investigate, finding traces of footsteps – some fresh, others weeks old – of some kind of diminutive humanoids, smaller than a Halfling by the look of them.
Lightstrike and Zimlok find several stone statues similar to the one in the acid room, each depicting a regal-looking Dwarf. Lightstrike dares to cross the bridge, which proves sound enough to support his weight, as Zimlok scuttles spider-like across the perimeter wall.
Mherren and Viper, taking the other side of the cave, find some stepping-stones that lead across the torrential waters to another, larger statue, a wooden chest and some crates that stink of halfrotted fish. An uneven staircase of broken and subsided slabs leads up and out of the cave to the left of the statue.
This sculpture, about twenty feet tall, depicts a grimfaced and long-bearded Dwarf, helmed and leaning upon a massive warhammer. It appears to be wearing a kilt, bracers and huge shoulder pauldrons cut in angular planes out of solid rock.
Mherren’s acute Warlock’s senses detect a faint aura of abjuration magic about the statue, but the magic seems somehow stale, as though once powerful enchantments are now faded with the passing centuries.
Curious to see if his instinct is correct, he picks up a nearby stone and hurls it with all his might at the statue. The stone appears to hit not the statue but a protective field of energy that glows faintly at the impact, and the rock bounces back with force, rolls and plops into the water.
“That’s strange,” thinks Mherren quizzically as he looks at the spot where the rock went under.
“Those are some mighty big ripples…”
And a monstrous head emerges from the foaming waters, with six glowing eyes, a wide, toad-like grinning mouth and writhing tentacles that flail around its bloated torso. It emits a reverberating belch as it surfaces, and, turning its great head to regard Mherren, licks its jowls with a huge, pink tongue. It hoots a piercing cry, and lumbers menacingly towards the shocked Half-Orc.
With characteristic quick-thinking, Lightstrike summons an illusion of a Dwarf across the water, whose shimmering form grabs the attention of the beast. Zimlok tries Tasha’s hideous laughter, but the creature throws off the effect and lumbers on two elephantine legs towards the illusory Dwarf. It tries to swallow the Dwarf whole, but of course its maw closes around thin air and it turns with a look of surprise that quickly transforms to a renewed malevolence.
But Lightstrike has bought precious moments for Mherren to snap to his senses and decide not to chuck some rotten fish at it, as he was momentarily considering doing in his confusion, but rather to unleash an agonising blast of Eldritch magic. The beast shrieks with pain as a purple ray of dark energy sears and envelops it. But it does not fall.
“Haji Baba! We need you!” shouts Lightstrike down the tunnel. Her keen mouse hearing discerns the words from above the din of the river, and she drops her animal form and races back to the aid of her comrades. Seeing the foul creature slavering towards Mherren, she strikes the butt of her staff upon the floor and raises her arms heavenward, and a heavenly bolt of lightning courses down at the monster and explodes upon its slimy, wart-ridden flesh, as a clap of thunder resonates through the cavern and shakes streams of dust from the ceiling. These streams become torrents, and the companions dive for cover beneath the statues as great chunks of rock tumble down all around them.
The cacophony subsides and the dust settles, and Lightstrike peers cautiously out from his hiding place. The beast, half-buried beneath the rubble, still stirs. He rifles through his brain for all the cool stuff he can do, but somehow nothing seems quite right.
“Aim for his brain with your shortbow!” cries Zimlok as he readies the trusty Jim.
Lightstrike sighs. “Okay, I’m gonna aim for its brain with a shortbow,” he says wearily, and lets an arrow fly. The creature groans at the impact, but still continues to rise, throwing off great boulders and rocks like they were mere pebbles and buttons.
Zimlok’s eyes narrow, he holds his breath and slowly squeezes the trigger of his crossbow. The quarrel shoots straight into one of the monster’s eerily glowing eyes, which immediately grow dull as it breathes its last and collapses back into the dirt. Zimlok nods to himself with assured selfcongratulation at single-handedly dispatching the beast. “Good one, Zimmo,” he mutters quietly.
Covered in dust, the others crawl out coughing from their hiding places to see the cavern halfcollapsed around them, the stairwell and tunnel to the acid room blocked by rubble, and the ceiling still spilling worrying spurts of soil and dust from jagged, slowly spreading cracks.
Mherren eyes the ceiling expertly. “It’ll hold. For now,” he says, and goes to examine the statues. Each has an Old Dwarfish inscription at its base. One reads:
Here lies Fargrim Bloodfist, Elementalist and Worthy King of Hvela.
And another:
Here sleeps eternal Branag Firebeard, Hero of Runor and Slayer of Dragons.
Another:
Here rests King Uden the Patient, Wise Reconciler of Hvel-Runor.
And behind the largest statue, the cave-in has dislodged some loose earth and revealed a secret chamber. Mherren crawls in and finds a large, smooth stone slab from which he brushes age-old layers of dust. Carved into the slab are the words:
Here lieth Duorik the Geomancer, Hero of Hvela, Wielder of Bouldir and Giantslayer of Runor. Let it be known that Duorik raised the Stoneheart Mountains with his Magicks, and confined the Great Hydra, Queen of Wyrms, the Last Dragon of the West, within their darkest bowels.
“Hmm,” ponders Zimlok to himself as Mherren relates the words to the others. “The Stoneheart Mountains lie far to the South and West of here. I have heard of no Dwarfs in that region, although I suppose I could be mistaken. If my memory serves me, the largest current settlement of Dwarfs lies even farther West, at the Ironcrags beyond the Giant Marches. … And Dragons? Dragons are long departed from the Western lands of Yore, so they say, although their lesser kin, the Drakes, and Wyverns, still terrorise the outlands, as we ourselves have experienced first-hand… and great Dragons still roam my homeland of Tian Xia far to the East, as well as the icy tundra of the far North beyond Bor Nyster. But my, what a thing that would be, if Dragons were to return to these lands, and I, Zimlok the Lightbringer, Legendary Hero of Yore, could slay one and be remembered through the ages as…”
Lightstrike, studying the starry-eyed and dumbly-smiling Zimlok curiously, nudges Haji Baba with a questioning look. She just rolls her eyes and shrugs.
Meanwhile, Mherren’s thick, stubby fingers have stumbled across what feels like a lever hidden around the back of the tombstone. He heaves and pulls with all his might, but the lever will not budge. He tries shoving the slab itself, almost popping a vein in his forehead, but the stone remains stubbornly unmoved.
“Let me try,” says Lightstrike, to the bemusement of the hulking Half-Orc. “Knock yerself out,” scoffs Mherren.
Lightstrike’s nimble fingers searchingly probe the mechanism, and he smiles. This is nothing for a master thief! A trifle! He pulls out his inlaid silver box of masterwork thieves’ tools and selects a few choice items, which he applies with deft skill to the seized lever. He listens to the mechanism with his stethoscope as he examines it with his long-handled mirror, and manipulates the internal springs with his pliers, levering his scissors and file against the tumbler until a hidden catch clicks free and the entire slab glides away with the merest touch of his finger. Mherren looks on, blinking and agape, as a cloud of dust that has laid undisturbed for centuries escapes out of the crypt in a puff and billows around him, coating him in yet another layer of dust.
Lightstrike looks up with a grin and, with a mocking bow, gestures to the steps leading down into the stale and musty darkness.
“After you…”

Report Date

03 Jan 2021