Just as everyone was waking up, they heard some chattering in the hallway. It seems that 3 goblins were looking for their master, the bugbear and found him lying in the doorway of garden room number 2!
Since some things can not be discussed or reasoned out, the party quickly decided to deal with these goblins before they could run off and warn others. Ropin jumped up and launched over the dead bugbear and Relord, managed to climb the dead husk and was ready at the top. Kasas and Erky were still in the back, feeling a little bit nervous after their near-death moments and Masiry was just coming out of his meditaiton exercise and was ready to go.
One goblin dropped dead from a nice shot by Ropin, as he came over the dead bugbear, and Masiry actually outpaced Relord by cleanly vaulting the body to help Ropin attack the other goblins. However, one of the goblins got scared and ran off down the hall.
They debated about running after him, but decided to go a little slower and prep for anything that may come back first since they already knew this area and did not know anything further down. However, after a few minutes, nothing happened. No one came back and no other sounds were heard. They then continued down the corridor, opening the one other door to the right, and noticed that it was another garden room with grass, purple moss, some strange fungus and small trees. This place was where they were planting things to eat or use....They continued down to the door in front of them and came to a small broken down circular room with lots of purple moss on the floor, dripping walls and some broken sections of floor and ceiling. There was another door leading out of it and it was open. Apparantly, the goblin was too scared to close the doors on his way through....
They peered into the doorway and saw a hallway painted with stunningly beautiful - and gory - frescoes of dragons flying and destroying towns, dragons eating humans, dwarves and elves and dragons in all shapes and sizes doing what dragons do best - ravaging countrysides and hoarding treasure.They all looked at each other and remembered that this citadel was in fact dedicated to a long lost dragon cult, not only a place where kobolds, goblins and weird humans did experiments with plants and trees!
Erky volunteered to quietly go down the hallway, since she said it seemed to open up at the end.
As Erky came to the corner, she peered into the room and froze. Ropin and the others were following her as well slowly and also stopped and readied their weapons. What did she see?
Erky's eyes quickly glanced over the room and did some calculations and guesswork. When she was done, she sighed and stepped more into the room. "It is alright! I see a dragon statue, a strange circle on the floor and another door. Oh, and that goblin we saw run down here looks dead. Don't know from what yet!" She did not mention that she had thought she was looking at a real dragon for a second, since the statue was so beautifully done as to resemble a real dragon.
They came into the room and were still leery. First, as they looked closer, they saw red glowing lights in the dragons' eye sockets, the marking on the floor was in Draconic and seemed to pulse with life, and the goblin was indeed dead, but they did not see any blood or weapons around him and it was not clear how he died.
Plus, the most important finding was when Kasas looked closer at the statue and said; 'My god! This is Ashdaralon the Great! This is HER temple and citadel. It was said that she got so powerful and controled so much that a cabal of sorcerers and wizards fought with her and banished her to another realm. But not only that, they used some dark magic to pull her entire temple below ground. There is something else that I am forgetting, but that is the main part!' Kasas was excited and wanted to go check out the circle, but the others mentioned that now would not be the best since they should continue on.
To save time and perhaps come back to this area later, they decided to look to see where the door leading out of this room led.
As Erky opened the door, which was surprisiingly not locked, she looked into a dilapidated, old, crumbing small library with many books and tomes and yet another door leading out. No one was all that excited about this discovery except Kasas, who started to look through some of the books and noticed that many of the titles had to do with dragons and dragon lore. 
The others were content to keep going and opened the door into a hallway that lead to a staircase going down. 'How deep is this?' Relord said, while, Ropin, who has been impatient to find the humans said as if on cue; 'Where are the humans and Belak?' Meanwhile Kasas was thinking how to take some (or all) of these books back to the surface, when he grabbed one and as he pulled it out of the shelf, grey powder spilled out from between the cover. These books were super old and distintgrated! After a quick search, with a few more books in that sorry state, he gave up on his idea and continued with the group.
Indeed, when will this end?
No comments:
Post a Comment