#20 - Sarcophagi and Skeletal Devices

Continuing with the story, as told by Magnus, Seren Barbarian and Bringer of Fire.

Rope.

We needed a rope bridge to cross the moat full of crawlies. Just one touch from one of those things had left me limp as Halbazar’s brain. And now there were dozens of them down there, trapped by the slippery walls, which was good for us. So far.

Luckily, Rendar had a handle on the situation and used Hal’s rope to rig up a bridge. It wasn’t long before Cyzicus crawled across, then me and then big and clanky. In the meantime, Xoma left us to explore the snake sculpture and the crypts.

Once we were all together, Xoma called out to let us know where he was out there in the dark. We formed up and made our way around the big skeletal snake coil and found Xoma talking (!?) to the hobgoblin-vampire mist, which had returned, and was apparently not attacking him. We sort of gathered around for a minute and spent some time saying things to the mist, nothing happened. It moved around a bit, but that’s it.

Cyzicus stayed put to keep an eye on the mist, which was keeping a misty vigil on us. The rest of the group turned to inspect the sculpture of bones, which really looked a lot like a couatl's skeleton. The couatls were lost long ago when they sacrificed themselves in the binding of great demons. Or something like that. This is more evidence that this whole mess is older and bigger than any of us.

Anyway, Cypher and the others were trying to see what the skeleton had to offer, and Xoma suggested doing a little lighted search of the area. I went with him with my lantern. It wasn’t long till we found that lots of the sarcophagi were strewn all across the floor of this great chasm, and Xoma suggested we open one up.

I wasn’t about to let some new stinking corpse attack us without letting the gang know what was coming, though. Rendar came over to see it through. After a few false starts, Xoma and I moved a sarcophagus lid a few inches and were rewarded by an awful smell and some flailing tongue slithering out at us. I tried to get the lid back on but the thing inside was too fast and strong.

The lid was shoved aside and two dead elves attacked us, staying inside their crypt. Rendar killed one ghoul outright with his swords, Doongal cast some spell that burned the other one and then Xoma hit the whole thing with his thunderbolt.  All dead (again).

In the meantime, Cypher discovered that the couatl sculpture was some kind of magic mechanism, maybe transportation? But he didn’t see how to work it. With nothing much here, we decided to make out way across the floor to the glowing windows. We soon noticed that the one of the windows had a figure in it. Size, large. As we started to walk, we saw even more figures appear in the windows. Then, what seemed like a door opened up and lots of large man-shapes started charging us. The mist moved toward them and was lost in the dark. We started to think that getting out of here was a good idea. I took a careful look and I’m pretty sure we were facing about ten of the things. That is, until the crypts started to open up and disgorge more of the living dead.

It was definitely time to go.

We all ran back into the bone sculpture. The brains went inside to try to start it up and Rendar, Cyzicus and I set up to watch the opening/door. This was going to be bad. Lots of baddies headed our way in the dark.
Xoma started feeding some hill giant skulls under Cypher’s direction. It wasn’t long before Xoma started feeding them blood. That seemed to work. The writing on the skulls gave us some ideas about where we could go and we argued for a few seconds about which to use, settling on the "western mountains," hopefully! The baddies were getting close and Xoma told us all to bleed (a lot!) into one particular skull.

A glowing mist too shape in its eyes and spread throughout the couatl's spine and then the bone bridge re-formed.  But the other side was different from the dark passage we had left: there were ever-bright torches and some light at the end of the tunnel, for instance.

The baddies were getting much too close, time to RUN.

And run we did, out of there, chased close by the HORDE of rasping, quiet dead, including more of those long-fingernail-killers from before. As we crossed the bridge, Xoma cast a darkness spell to try to slow the bad guys and keep them from crossing the bridge.. hopeful to the end. We fled headlong into the unknown…..