Session37

November 20th 216B The party reunites at the colorless lodge. Then head out to knock over the tower. Using disintegrates and burrowing creatures, the party manages to topple one of the world's great works. Subsequently the party starts burrowing their way down through the underground portion of the tower. They use the habitrail as a buttress to hold open the tunnel in the earth, and Alex digs through stone as an umberhulk. Halfway down the party is attacked by a dozen shadows. But the group takes care of them easily and soon hits a "Forbiddance". The party apparently knocked a hole into a small enclosed study. Alex throws down a net and animates the furniture to climb into the net. While the group in the whole is distracted the rear guards are assaulted. Murgan feels waves of magic paralyze and drain him of memories. Jaenelle (disquised as Murgan's familiar) screams a warning to the rest of the group but has to teleport Murgan away before he can be killed. Down below the party hear the scream and look up to see a number of small metalic pebbles rain down the tunnel. The beads explode, throwing people out of the tunnel and slamming others into the forbiddance. Some of the furniture merrily catches on fire, and Herunaro and Alex both teleport the group to safety. November 21th 216B The party spend a few days acquiring magic items and spells to deal with further attacks by Gulthias. After about 4 days of equipping the band ventures out again in the hopes of catching Gulthias. November 25th 216B The party come back to the tower only to find much of their work destroyed. Holes have been filled, buttresses removed, etc. Alex is able to quickly get things working again due to his fabricate ability. The party once again burrows down into the forbiddance zone. Using explosives, disintegrates, and yet more burrowing, the party manages to break into the heart chamber. The heart is massive avian heart almost 20 feet around. The party debates what to do. Korvath begins the elaborate rituals required to summon forth a celestial ally. Others watch the heart for movement. Herunaro detects movement by the heart and tries to zap it with disintegrate but his ray appears to pass through the nebulous form. Instead he zaps the chains holding the heart in place. The heart (apparently buoyant) floats up to plug the hole into the chamber. About this time things get weird. Herunaro begins whispering through gritted teeth that "the party's 'two faced friend' is there". Swiftwind looks at Alex and Korvath in puzzlement until Herunaro hisses, "Kiri". Kiri then makes himself evident, thanking the party for all the hard work retrieving the heart for him. There is much tooth gnashing and hand wringing by the group but no one can think of much to do. Herunaro prepares a disintegrate spell but chickens out at the last instant. Kiri flies down to the heart and is stopped dead by its size. Apparently he thought is would way about 8 tons less. (rough estimate is that the heart weighs approximately 20 thousand pounds. At that size it is above what most spells can manage.) While Kiri is dealing with the heart another power appears on the scene and interrupts Korvath's spell. Herunaro notices a blond haired, trenchcoat wearing mage with a battered longsword standing next to Korvath. After a word from the stranger Korvath begins muttering to himself and pulls out a silver box. "The heart was meant to be kept in the box guys, we can't let Kiri get it.", Korvath says this at the same time that Kiri casts a 9th circle spell. Someone hears him call upon "the slayer of gods" to power his spell. With this he polymorphs the heart into a human heart and immediately is encased in cage of force by Gulthias. After a moment Kiri disapears from the cage and the party springs into action. Gulthias is racing for the heart, Herunaro disintegrates the force cage, Alex places a wall of force behind the heart cutting off Gulthias and Korvath dives into the pit snapping the box lid shut around the heart not quite noticing that the heart changes a moment before he reaches it. The party regroups to teleport and Kiri reappears with a sage from the Lothian Artificers guild. Interestingly enough not the group traditionally allied with Kiri-joleth or Weejas. He tells Korvath to hand over the heart and there is a long stand off. The Lothian mage is told to leave and a moment later Korvath hands over the box smiling as he does so. Kiri collapses and then disapears even as the group hears spellcasting. Magical sweeps of the area reveal several archmage level spells having recently been cast. Traces of a temporal halt are present around where Kiri's body fell. Kiri is no where in evidence. The group retreat and try to figure out what happened. Meanwhile interesting things have happened elsewhere in the world. Weejas is now know as Jaas by many of her flock. (Apparently this happened several weeks ago, but has taken a while to trickle out as far as the baronies.) Weejas has given up all semblence of death and law to concentrate on magic, knowledge, and divination. Jaas is now considered a divine oracle and there are changes in her order to bring it more into those lines. Death and law look like they were in the process of being handed over to Kiri when "the incident" occured. As far as Jaas's priestess can see Kiri-Joleth appears to be gone. A little researching by the party reveals that he had been in the middle of unearthing a forgery operation in Winn when he encountered high power resistance (at least one archmage level caster). He was in the middle of cleaning up the aftermath when the heart caught his attention and he headed to the baronies with some haste. When the party saw him he was still fairly marked up from his battle and his battle plate was badly pitted. Apparently one of the attacks up north had been an attempt to trap the soul which he countered. The forgery operations were eradicated but at least one mage escaped. It is thought that the heart was probably switched for something that had trap the soul cast on it. The spell from earlier in the day had taken down his protections and the second one caught him without any of his usual defenses up. That either destroyed Kiri or placed him in the hands of Constantine who was in the process of announcing himself as the new god of death, luck and trickery. Not a lot of people were happy with Constantine's new interests. The order of Jaas was worried that Constantine (aka. The Smiler) would not be able to control the combined energies of the heart and the godslayer (Kiri's sword originally from Jaas, who had gotten it from Athena.) Basically there is only one god of death now, and he enjoys games of chance and had a weapon capable of killing gods. A lot of powerful figures are resting uneasily. The party was able to learn a bit from Chandra. (high priestess of Jaas) Apparently Nerull and some of the other "dark" gods were gods who were corrupted by other powers. The Smiler being naturally chaotic is at risk of blundering too close to the edge, Kiri who was very lawful was reliable in that he would not do anything foolish. This is the main area of concern currently. But that is the affairs of immortals and not really the concerns of the party. The party come back briefly to the site of Nightfang spire to divert the nearby stream to flood the underground levels of the tower. Alex discovers a passage underneath the tower that seems to stretch for a long distance - they wall it off using walls of stone with metal between them. SESSION END evening of November 25th 216B NEXT TIME : Bad day for big hair EXPERIENCE TOTALS (Session 37) ----------------- Korvath Alex Herunaro Swiftwind Jaenelle Murgen 78637 76428 77164 79433 79239 38583 DEATHS Kiri-Joleth