TenThousandBrokenDreams/Session13

Mother Cypress speaks:

"Hello, my little sparrows. Come closer, my dears, gather close around old Mother Cypress, and she’ll tell you a tale of long ago. And what tale shall you hear tonight? Would you hear the tale of Tesha Three Ribbons, a poor bureaucrat’s daughter of Calin, and of the terrible oath she swore, that no matter the cost, she would never die? Would you hear of how she ruined her family through blackmail and embezzlement to gain the wealth she needed for her experiments? Would you also hear of how, at the last, she went to the unspeakable Monarch of the Yellow Veil, who dwells in the cold places where the world ends, and of the dreadful price she paid to learn the secret of immortal life? Or would you hear more of the tale of the Sun’s bright children, and the fall of the Scarlet Realm?

"Then gather round, my children, and spread ears like elephants; and I shall tell you more of the tale of the heroes of the Sun, and how they came to the tomb of Kuro the Raven and Blessed Wind."

Our heroes rode higher into the hills. The landscape grew steeper and more precipitous; spruce, birch and oak gave way to pine and highlands bamboo, interspersed with high meadows and patches of bare rock. As they traveled, they discussed what perils lay at their back. Aekino pondered all manner of troubles: might not Vir put his son Martin, their ally, to the torture in hopes of learning where they might travel? Might the prince’s soldiers be after them even now? Worse, might not the deathknight Forty-Four Devil Blossoms track them down and make yet another effort to slay them? They mulled over such questions, except for Thorwald, who said, “That would not be a bad death.”

They finally drew near to the tomb, though not without some debate over their route, as Aekino wished to visit a nearby Manse, the Tower of Barbs, where he hoped they might find time to rest so that Thorwald and Zera might recuperate from their still-grievous wounds. The others, however, would have none of it. True to form, Thorwald boomed out that he needed no rest, while Li noted that if the Tower of Barbs were guarded, as they had cause to believe, then there would still be battle, denying them the rest that such a move would be intended to grant. Zera added that there was no certainty that they’d find anything in the tower to benefit them in any case, unlike the tomb, where they counted on finding the relics of Kuro the Raven and Blessed Wind.

As Zera and Aekino debated this matter and others, Thorwald and Li rode out in front, and their keen ears heard shouts ahead. So they sent the crafty Zera ahead over the next rise to investigate. He ran among the high branches and looked down on two groups of bandits on either side of a gorge, bridged between them by a fallen tree trunk. The bandit leader on the near side, One-Ear Shen by name, demanded passage over the gorge, while the opposing leader, one No-Nose Chou, roared insults and arrows on his rival, to whom he denied passage to “the treasure.”

Zera laughed to himself over this display, then went back to report it to his comrades. He suggested that perhaps they might reveal their true nature to the bandits and use Aekino’s oratorical magic to sway them to their side as followers and cannon fodder, but Li and Thorwald thought it unnecessary. Li deemed it best to let the bandits kill each other, but Thorwald preferred battle. “Each of us takes thirteen,” he proposed, “and Aekino can handle one. The odds are even.”

When they approached, the bandits remained locked in argument, with only a few desultory arrows shot across the gap every now and then. But One-Ear Shen reacted quickly enough to our heroes’ approach, gathering his men around him as he bandied words with Zera Thisse, whom he too accused of wanting the treasure of the Tomb of the Anathema.

It didn’t take long before words gave way to blows, and the bandits were unprepared for the fighting fury of Thorwald, Li and Zera. One-Ear Shen’s men fell beneath a withering barrage of arrows and blades, and a cold-eyed Li decapitated the hamstrung, blubbering Shen with a single cut.

After witnessing this display, No-Nose Chou foolishly attempted to bar our heroes from crossing the gorge, but Li danced across the fallen trunk amidst a terrifying display of razored golden fire, setting most of the bandits to flight. Aided by Zera’s unerring arrows, she cut down those few bandits who stood to fight. As he hid behind a rock, No-Nose Chou shouted, “I have reconsidered; you may pass. But be quick about it!” Then he fled, leaving our heroes to administer the coup de grace to a few twitching outlaws and to haul up Thorwald, who’d attempted to leap across the gorge, and now clung to crumbling stone at the gorge’s edge.

Our heroes followed the gorge north until they found a traversable trail by which they could lead their horses across. Unfortunately the island-born Li’s equestrian skills proved weak, and her horse stumbled and fell, breaking its legs on the jagged stones below. Fortunately, the toppling steed didn’t drag anyone else down. She put the beast out of its misery and rode double with Zera thereafter.

As night fell, our heroes got the drop on yet another group of plunderers that stood poised to invade the tomb. This group’s leader proved familiar, however; she was the swordswoman Rei of Nechara, who had traveled with the Circle on the Dayshield’s Daughter. Half a dozen survivors of her demon-hunting expedition followed her, laden with weapons and demon-repelling talismans and grisly trophies of their adventures. They knew that Vir had sent soldiers to the tomb, and why do so unless the tomb still contained the riches of old? Rei planned to let the other groups in the area start fighting over the tomb, then move in to mop up and claim the treasure within.

After some debate, the two groups agreed to work together to deal with the Tul Tuin camp and win the treasure. The matter of who would claim which artifacts remained a sticking point, however, and Rei and her companions clearly felt no compunctions about coming to blows over the matter; they had defeated several demons over the past few weeks, and Rei herself had fought Li to a standstill and defeated the other three in their friendly sparring matches on the river barge.

To facilitate matters, our heroes chose to reveal their nature to Rei and her companions. They knew that their animas would blaze in the battle against the soldiers in any case, so it were best to bring matters into the open now. Their caste marks shone in the shadows of the trees as they explained that this was their tomb of old, and they sought only their battle panoply of ages past, while all other treasures in the tomb would go to Rei and her companions. Despite their fear, the mortals all consented to honor their deal with the Anathema, for their greed for riches burned hot within them. And they had survived their encounters with demons thus far, even if certain of their ill-fated companions had not, so what had they to fear from these so-called Chosen of the Sun?

Starry night had well and truly fallen by the time our heroes saw the faint glow over the next rise. Sharp-eyed Zera moved forward to investigate. He saw many campfires on the slopes of a hill below a broken pagoda. He counted dozens of soldiers there, and faint movements and glints of firelight on metal revealed the presence of sentries in the valley between. He also spotted another figure crouched behind a rock not far away, watching the camp through some strange device.

Zera crept up on that watcher with drawn bow and brought him, captive, back to the rest of the group. The prisoner proved to be yet another treasure-hunter, a scavenger lord named Kurokami, with whom Rei claimed a passing acquaintance. They took him in as another provisional member of their pact, which he quickly accepted in order to avoid getting his throat cut.

The adventurers made their plans quickly, for movements on the slopes indicated that the soldiers had spotted Zera as he’d brought back Kurokami as a captive. Then they moved in for the assault. They knew that the soldiers would have to be dealt with in order to give themselves the leisure to explore the tomb, and though some had scruples about slaughtering these mortals who only did their duty to their lord, all of them swallowed their compunctions and prepared to do their worst.

We need not go into the assault in too much detail. Suffice it to say that the swords of Li and Thorwald, the arrows of Zera Thisse, and the black glass magics of Tepet Aekino proved sufficient to slaughter the vast majority the tomb’s mortal garrison and to utterly rout the remainder. Eventually Rei ascended the hill to join them, with two of her men and the scavenger lord in tow; the others had deserted, deeming the lure of treasure less potent than their desire to preserve their own souls from the power of the Anathema.

The Solars gathered the bodies of the dead and tossed them into a great heap. One corpse opened its eyes and thrust at Li with its spear, but one of the walking dead could do little against the great warrior; she cut it to pieces in a trice, then continued about her task. When that was done, Thorwald called upon the power within him to burn the bodies to ash in a blaze of sunlight, that their hungry ghosts would not haunt that place. Then he turned aside from his brethren and climbed the hill to the broken pagoda that marked the tomb where his former incarnation had been laid to rest.

There visions came upon him, as they had so often before. He recalled coming to that place with Kuro the Raven on a spring day, amid sunlight and green grass and bluebells flowering across the hillside below. “This is the most beautiful place I have ever seen,” he said in that vision, with the words of Blessed Wind coming from his lips. “It would not be a bad place for my ashes to lie.” Kuro laughed at him.

That laughter echoed harshly, mockingly, as the vision changed to another day, a dark day when Blessed Wind carried the body of his lover Kuro, slain by his own hand, in his arms to that place. He looked down upon slopes covered with the soldiers of the Realm, led by Immaculate monks and jade-armored warriors of the Dragon-Blooded Host. Setting the body down, he leaned on his great spear, Diamond Fire, and addressed them, unwilling to curse them for doing what they did, but likewise unwilling to lay down and die. White fire blazed from his spear…

… and then all was starry darkness once more, and he stood with his brothers at the top of the hill. Vines and moss encrusted the pagoda, and mats of fallen leaves covered the steps that spiraled down into shadow within. They descended.

Turning and turning, illuminating their path with the fire of the Sun, they finally found themselves before an archway leading to the lower level of a round, galleried chamber, its walls carved with images and Old Realm script. Stairs led to the second tier where doors of tarnished silver gleamed dully. Entering, they saw crimson eyes watching them from behind other archways, accompanied by strange grunting and snuffling noises and an animal stench. The eyes vanished, but the sounds and stench remained, drifting unaccompanied through the air.

Then the demon-apes returned to material form. Four of them there were, one for each of the Sun’s chosen, their shuffling gait belying an unnatural swiftness of motion. As Zera danced up one ape’s arm and fired two arrows into its skull and Li cut deep into another with his blades Radiance and Brilliance, another ape hurled Thorwald through a stone pillar with a crack like shattering bone. Aekino flung his ape toward Li with a martial arts throw, then hid behind a pillar to avoid the shambling brutes.

The battle proved more difficult than expected. Zera’s ape roared at the arrows jammed into its skull and threw the still-injured archer across the room; striking the wall on the upper level, Zera fell down in a daze, barely able to move. Thorwald nailed his ape’s foot to the floor with his sword, then smote another pillar with his iron fists, bringing down a section of the gallery upon the ape; alas, it dematerialized once more as the stones fell about it. As Li chopped another ape into four pieces with her blades, the dematerialized ape reappeared to pound Thorwald into unconsciousness. The two remaining apes advanced on Li, unleashing mighty roars so loud that they cracked stone. As Li parried the sonic assault with crossed blades, slivers of focused sound spattered across the room, striking fragments of rock from the carvings on the walls.

In the archway, a tiny mouse dropped from where it clung to Kurokami’s pack. It darted into the room, and as it moved, it grew. In an instant, the little creature had bloomed into an enormous manlike stag-beast with a great rack of silver horns. This was the Lunar Exalted named Fetek Breath-of-Midnight, heretofore unknown to our heroes. He disemboweled one of the demon-apes with a sweep of his antlers, leaving the last to Li’s tender mercies.

Our heroes stared at their rescuer. The silent moment stretched, punctuated only by the drip of blood, the panting of breath, and the creak of tortured stone. Then Thorwald groaned and opened his eyes, breaking the moment. And Li stepped forward, wiping the blood from her golden blades, to thank the Lunar warrior for his aid.

(Note: all PCs received 3 XP for this session. Li received an additional 2 XP for contributions. XP totals to date: Aekino 74, Li 69, Thorwald 69, Zera 74.)