Rama, the obsidiman Warrior I had the pleasure of travelling with and eating the cooking of a few month prior, sent a message asking to if would join him on the next step of his journey. Before I could get too worried about the macabre implications, he clarified that he'd found information about the location of his liferock and wanted to check on it.
We were joined by Sandrin, Zvilyn and a t'skrang Illusionist named Moe'uhaune who I had not met before. Yet again we went into the mountains, but at least the rains seem to have finally let up.
The others all seemed to know what was going on and Rama briefly explained that we were looking for the dried bed of a river that would move with the liferock and it was somehow tied to stopping horrors from entering reality through the caves of Koylos with only some kind of magician holding them back. I will be honest and admit I did not really grasp the entire situation.
After a couple of days of trekking we did indeed reach a dried riverbed which looked rather out of place. For one thing the water would have had to flow uphill, for another it did not follow any of the surrounding land features and it stopped abruptly from in the middle of a meadow. From then on we followed this displaced river towards its source.
The next day, Zivilyn, who was taking care of scouting, noticed a massive humanoid of some kind in the distance. It did not appear to move but after about a minute it had shifted position slightly. Some quick estimations by Sandrin told us that it was likely moving towards the same goal we were. Further observation also revealed it was some kind of crystal statue and it moved by dissolving into the ground and forming up a few yards ahead.
I pushed for us to try and intercept the entity before it could get close to the liferock and endanger it, this was easy since its movement was so slow. As we got closer and get a better look we realised it was shaped vaguely like an obsidiman but far, far larger and made of salt crystals whose surfaces shifted in impossible ways. The others mentioned something about a location called the "salt cellar" as a possible source of the entity. Moe wondered if it was some kind of illusion while Zivilyn took a look astrally finding it even more confusing and disturbing there. It was also leaving a trail of horror taint behind which revealed its true nature.
Unwilling to let this thing get closer to anything it wanted to approach, I stood near where it would emerge on its next move and struck it as it was reforming. The blow was a solid hit but failed to even mar the crystals. Master was right, I still had a long road ahead of me on the path of the Gauntlet.
Since we could not stop or redirect the horror construct, we decided that our next best option was to get to the liefrock as quickly as possible. We resumed our journey, quickly leaving the construct behind. Barely a few hours later, Zivilyn spots some figures along the riverbank and a shadow further up in the mountain. The figures by the riverbed turned out to be elves wearing curtains or tapestries as togas, definitely an unusual fashion statement, and wielding some really crude weapons. The made it clear they wanted us to stop, but spoke only Sperethiel and some language none of us could understand.
Sandrin and Rama took the lead here, since they were the only two of our group that spoke a language the elves could understand. From what they told me, the elves seemed to be both confused and not quite sure of where they were. We were taken to their home, a Theran style mansion that looked as out of place as the elves themselves. There we found a few more elves and bunch of humans, dwarves, and windlings.
Since I could not understand the language, most of what I describe next is a retelling of how Rama and Sandrin described the events. The elves were Therans who had set up their own kaer in the mansion. The humans, dwarves, and windlings were slave servants. Since the kaer was so small, the humans were showing some fairly strong deformities due to inbreeding. Since they were Therans, they assumed that Moe, Zivilyn, and I were Sandrin's or Rama's slaves, but at least they acquiesced and let us inside when they were corrected.
Inside we met the patriarch of the family, an old Theran functionary, who explained that they were sure their house used to be far to the east, but could not recall any names of specific locations. Looking at the state of the inside, it seems likely that they ran out of supplies like clothes at some point and had to resort to using tapestries, curtains, and carpets for clothing.
As Sandrin and Rama chatted, there was a weird noise from the roof. I went outside to check and found a frozen turd falling to the ground. Apparently this was a "present" from a nearby group of Icefliers. The patriarch seemed to know about Rama's liferock, his mansion had been built near it along the river, and offered to give us directions and information if we removed the flying monkeys.
We made our way up the side of the valley and shortly found the proverbial barrel of monkeys, the fight was brief and irritating but not dangerous and we were back at the mansion within a couple of hours. There we were offered a feast of biscuits and hard tack and only Rama's culinary skills saved us from that tragic fate. Over food we got some more information about our situation: the liferock was on an island in the middle of the river and would be hard to reach without water, the source of the river would be a bit further from the liferock, marked by a statue. The patriarch also suggested that a salt construct may have issues crossing a river, especially one rich in true water as this one should be.
Sandrin promised to let Throal know about the mansion so that supplies could be sent. He would also make sure that the supplies came with a copy of the Compact and the Book of Tomorrow and people prepared to read those to anyone who could not read them themselves.
Fed, we set off again with a borrowed rowboat. The island was only a couple of hours further along, and would indeed be hard to reach without water as the riverbed dropped surprisingly far with sheer walls. We continued on up a cliff and a dried waterfall and soon reached a statue in the riverbed.
The statue was surrounded by weird pinkish glowing crystals and 3 elves wearing leathers decorated with more crystal shards, I was later told these were two of the Theran old man's children that had left for unspecified reasons. Left and got busy since the third seemed to be the daughter of the siblings. These elves spoke Throalic but as soon as Rama mentioned restoring the river flow the "mother" decided she wanted us dead instead.
The fight was brief and brutal, the elves were clearly deranged even if the "mother" had a keen grasp of tactics and directed her three children, yes two more popped out of hiding, with skill. Skill alone still loses to skill and brute force as Rama and I proceeded to dismantle the "mother" and eldest daughter while Sandrin engaged the "father" and Moe and Zivilyn magnified our prowess.
Soon after the first two kills the "father" ran off with his remaining daughter, leaving his male child to our mercy. The siblings had made some cryptic comments about serving a "parliament of glass" which given the other going ons we assumed to be horror related. This led to our decision to be light on the details about the fate of his children with the patriarch when we saw him again, nobody wants to be told "we found you long lost children, they are incestuous horror cultists".
Clearing the crystal from the statue was a simple job, even if it tried to zap us repeatedly. With that done water started flowing again and filled the riverbed surprisingly fast, so we made our way back to the island.
Here we got to see the beautiful and no longer dry waterfall fill the river just in time for the horror construct to arrive and try to cross it. I admit not really believing the old man when he said the water would stop it, but even a Theran can be right: the construct could not reform in the flowing water and each time it attempted it lost part of its mass, eventually wearing down to nothing. Elementalists say that water quneches fire, but it did seem quite good at washing away earth too.
Finally we grabbed the boat and made it across and Rama reconnected to his liferock. I still know very little of the connection between obsidimen and their liferocks so I can only describe the basic events of what happened next: obsidimen started walking out of the crystalline surfaces of the liferock, first one, then more and more. The first one to emerge hugged Rama and started talking with him in a much less disturbing family reunion that the elven one would have been.
When asked Rama's brothers had some information on this "parliament of glass", they said it was a mistranslation of something closer to "crystal dominion", a kind of horror that did not target namegivers directly but rather things around them, which sounded like the thing in the caves of Koylos, the salt construct is also something a Crystal Dominion could create.Statistics:Posted by sigfriedmcwild — Sat May 23, 2020 6:40 am
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