TenThousandBrokenDreams/Session14

Mother Cypress speaks:

"Hello to you, my little sparrows. Come closer, that I might tell you a tale of olden days. What tale shall I tell you tonight? Would you hear the tale of how Muskrat stole a single star from the heavens? Would you learn of how the Constellations fought to fill the empty space in the sky, and of what became of the falling stars that rained like blood from their wounds? Or would you hear more of the tale of the golden children of the Sun, and the turning of the Age?

"Then gather round, my children, and spread ears like elephants; and I shall tell you more of the tale of the Sun’s bright children, and what they found in the deeps of the Tomb of the Anathema."

Fetek Breath-of-Midnight smiled at the Sun’s children as he assumed a human form. Silvery nubbins, like a fawn’s first growth of horns, gleamed beneath a fall of dark hair. As Li helped a battered Thorwald to his feet, Aekino attempted to question the stranger, but to no avail; Fetek proved garrulous but unforthcoming, sharing nothing of his history or purpose, other than that he had watched our heroes for many days.

These greetings were interrupted by a vision that descended without warning upon Thorwald, Aekino and the newly arrived Fetek. Once again, Aekino wore the form of the sorceress Sharn Larenn of the First Age. Once again, she knelt in chains of jade before tiers of enthroned Solars as they gathered to pronounce sentence upon her. And as the Thorwald of that age arose from amongst his peers to speak, Fetek stood catlike at his side. Thorwald glared balefully at the prisoner, while Fetek grinned with a predator’s feral glee. Thorwald spoke…

The vision passed, but our heroes’ moment of victory and good humor fled with it. Thorwald limped up the stairs to the damaged gallery to help an equally battered Zera to his feet, while Aekino occupied himself by trying to translate the archaic Old Realm script on the walls. The mortals ignored all this byplay, for the golden light of the Solars’ animas had revealed the glint of treasure in the side chambers, and they pursued it with abandon.

Probing the doors that encircled the gallery, Zera found that most were false doors fitted out with cunning traps; if not for Thorwald’s quick reflexes, the first of these would have burned him alive. When he found a door that opened onto a descending spiral staircase, the others gathered round. While the mortals pawed through heaps of copper cash and fistfuls of jade, his fellow Exalts followed him down into the dark.

More traps littered the stairway, pressure-sensitive steps that unleashed darts and knives and scything iron blades. Zera found them all. He led his fellows down to the foot of the stair, which opened onto a broad, vaulted hall. Murky water of unknown depth lapped at the landing’s edge. Square platforms of dark gray stone protruded from the water like stepping-stones, spaced several yards apart, stretching out in a chain to where the hall curved tightly to the left in the middle distance.

“This is inauspicious,” murmured Li. She was correct.

Golden animas renewed their brightness as Li and Zera called upon the Sun’s power within them to move with the floating grace of the crane. As they leapt from stone to stone, dodging and parrying the swarms of darts the traps spewed forth from hidden slits, Fetek soared past them in owl-form. As the owl turned the corner, the others heard the twang of bowstrings, the clatter of arrowheads upon stone, the splash of spent missiles in water. Fetek swiftly returned to the base of the stairs and resumed his mortal form.

“A demon,” he reported tersely to his newfound companions. “With many limbs, in a pillar of green fog.”

Aekino blinked. “A tomescu!” He recognized the description from his studies of occult lore, and knew of their strength in battle. “Will you help my brothers defeat the demon, good Fetek?”

“I cannot,” said the Lunar with a shake of his head. “I have done too much already.”

Turning the corner themselves, Li and Zera confronted the demon, which stood atop a larger stone platform that filled most of the breadth of the hall. Li’s blades flashed through the patterns of the Five-Fold Bulwark Stance as she shattered the arrows that leapt towards her from the demon’s many bows, while Zera stood behind her and fired arrow after arrow of blazing sunlight into the demon’s cloak of fog. It cursed in the tongue of the Old Realm.

At the base of the stairs, Aekino laughed as he heard the demon cry out in pain. Raising his voice in song, he mocked the demon in the same ancient tongue. “You who know the manner of your passing,” he sang, “know that your life ends this day. You will die like an animal, cut down without honor, and no one shall mourn your ending.”

The demon roared. Li leapt forward with shining blades. Zera nocked another burning arrow to his bow.

And a dozen tentacles burst out of the water to strike at Li of Orchid and Zera Thisse. Of course there was more than one demon. And the second, its body concealed under water, would be more difficult to fight.

Li’s whirling blades severed the tentacles that came near her, leaving a slick of oily blood to pool on the water’s surface as the stumps withdrew. Zera twisted away from the blows as best he could. He nocked and fired two arrows simultaneously, sending a pair of tentacles twitching back into the water. But more tentacles came forth to replace them, and the tomescu demon stretched forth a dozen weapons from the mist, blades and spears and hammers, all of them striking at Li of Orchid.

Back at the base of the stairs, Thorwald heard the thrashing and the shrieks of demonic rage. Though he had remained behind to nurse his grievous wounds, he could contain his battle-hunger no longer. But without his comrades’ gifts of movement, he could not make the leap from stone to stone. So he dived into the foul and murky water to swim powerfully towards the battle.

More greenish, ropy tentacles burst from the water. Tentacles and demon blades converged upon Li, testing her defenses to the limit. Though her skill was almost without peer, enhanced by the magics of her weapons and her Charms, one blow after another proceeded to pierce her defenses. Soon she would be disarmed, or impaled upon a demonic pike, or pulled beneath the dark waters to be devoured.

Then Zera looked at the slick of oily demon blood upon the water, smiled grimly, and struck at it with an arrow of fire.

The blood ignited with a roar. The tentacles spasmed and sank as huge shriek-filled bubbles rose and burst amidst the flames. Dismayed by the loss of its ally, the tomescu faltered, and Li cut again and again into its mist-shrouded form.

But the water-demon would not stay down. The mass of its scaly body sent broad ripples through the fire and water as it rose to the surface. A ring of scarlet eyes glared around its fang-filled sphincterlike mouth. Despite the purplish blood still oozing from its stumps, many more intact tentacles leapt forth to grab Zera and lift him high into the air.

Would dizziness and blood loss stop our Zera? No, of course not. He fired off another arrow from where he dangled, burying it deep in one of the monster’s eyes. It flung him at the ceiling with a falsetto croak. Like a tumbling crane, he managed to avoid the worst of the impact and aim his fall at one of the platforms (better to crash on stone than sink into the demon’s waters, he thought), where he landed with a crack and a gasp.

Would swarming tendrils and demon-weapons stop our Li? No, of course not. With dazzling dexterity, she severed a tentacle with one blade and ignited the ensuing gout of blood with the other, sending an oily torrent of flame at the tomescu demon. And as the demon severed one of its own arms in an effort to fend off the burning spray, Li cut its body in half with one prodigious blow and toppled its beweaponed torso onto the water-demon. Impaled by a dozen demon blades, the tentacled monster sank from sight.

Would grievous wounds and burning blood stop our Thorwald? No, of course not. Though the demons were already sinking beneath the waters when he arrived, he came close enough to see them through the murk by the light of his anima. Despite being cut in half, the tomescu still clung to life. Glaring, it lashed out at the northman with razor-sharp limbs. He responded with a rush of Essence, and the waters flashed incandescent as the demon’s body burned away inside its chitinous armor.

Gasping, Thorwald pulled himself to the surface and rejoined the others.

Past another bend in the hall lay a narrow ledge. There stood a pair of rusted iron double doors. A sunburst pattern etched upon the doors radiated outward from a yellow jewel at the center, which gleamed with an inner light. When Thorwald laid his hand on the doors, that inner light flared into a blaze of lightning that crackled across the iron and blasted him backward into the water.

Li fished her comrade Thorwald out of the black water. As he lay gasping on the ledge, something else came up out of the water. Though pierced and bleeding in a hundred places, the tentacled water-demon still lived! And it was angry.

Thorwald opened one bloodshot eye. Gold fire roared and howled. The demon thrashed and wailed as its eyes burst and its skin peeled away in crispy layers. With a plash, it sank into the murky water, never to be seen again. Farewell, demon.

Time passed. Thorwald and Zera rested their feverish heads on cold, wet stone, for despite their grievous wounds, the Circle agreed that they could not spare the time to properly rest and recover, lest more soldiers arrive and trap them in the depths of the tomb. Li returned to the upper chamber, where she convinced Rei and Kurokami to descend deeper into the tomb. Fetek the Lunar Exalt agreed to watch from the pagoda above against the coming of additional troops, while Rei’s men Iwa and Urei continued to sift through the money and lesser grave goods in the upper tomb.

A few hours later, the Essence had renewed itself within the hearts of our heroes. Tepet Aekino drew upon that power to evoke the Emerald Countermagic, whose raving display of green fire extinguished the storm-jewel’s light. The iron door creaked open. Leaving the scavenger lord Kurokami to watch over the injured Thorwald, Li, Aekino, Zera and Rei descended into blacker depths.

Li led the way along the narrow, serpentine stair, which descended deep into the bedrock of the hills. At last, it opened onto a spherical chamber about five yards in diameter, its stone surfaces webbed with cracks and fissured that glowed an ominous green. A golden door gleamed on the far side.

Enthralled by the door, Zera slipped past Li and made his way across the cracked and broken floor, his feet dancing nimbly over fissures and jagged knife-like protrusions. He stood there in front of the gold door for a time, peering at its bas-relief of Kuro the Raven and Blessed Wind. And the green light brightened and flowed upward through the cracks in the stone.

A streamer of green light twisted free of the ceiling and, like a demented earthworm, probed blindly at Zera’s shoulder.

“More demons!” cried Aekino. He knew what they were, these unholy living wounds from out of the bowels of Malfeas, whose touch carved gashes through stone and flesh with equal facility and vigor. He knew, too, how they might be driven off, but there wasn’t time to convey that knowledge as the green crawled down Zera’s arm. Fortunately, enchanted weapons could destroy them, and at that very instant, Li’s blades leapt from their sheaths.

The living wound shrieked and dissolved at Li cut it in half. Zera jerked back in surprise and shock, for in dying, the demon had cut a wide, bloody slash through his chain shirt and the skin beneath. And the demons came forth in earnest, boiling up out of the fractured stone in a nightmarish green tide.

Flash! Slash! The swords Radiance and Brilliance sizzled through the air. Green and gold clashed. The emerald tide ebbed as Li of Orchid pierced the demons, one by one, leaving them to sputter out like dying candles. And then they were gone.

Li twisted the sword Radiance free of the stone in which it had become locked when she impaled a living wound as it crawled toward her over the floor. Rock splinters flew as the blade came loose.

Zera Thisse pushed open the golden door.

The demoness Sondok stood revealed in the doorway. What can one say of that terrible being? Who does not know the tales of She-Who-Stands-In-Doorways, mistress of blood and blade, ghastly guardian of halls and portals? Shall I tell you of the crown of gold and garnet upon her cloud of night-dark hair, of how her sword and axe shone with the oily gleam of Malfean steel, or of how stars glittered in her scarlet eyes? Or shall I leave such things to your imagination?

In any event, she gave the Sun’s children pause in their reckless probing of the tomb’s dark depths. Aekino was first to overcome his dread. He tried to sway Sondok into permitting them passage, if only to spite the one who had bound her there, but she would not, could not, comply. He questioned her then, hoping to win some shred of useful knowledge, and they traded questions for a few moments.

From the demon, our heroes learned that Sondok had guarded the burial chamber of Kuro the Raven and Blessed Wind for the last twenty years. She had been summoned and bound by a man whose name she did not know, one who might well not have a name at all.

From our heroes, the demon learned that each of the four had Exalted in the past year, and that they knew of no others of their kind. They claimed that their next step, after the tomb, would be to enter and purge the shadowland of Kaihan, and that their ultimate goal was to break the hold of demonic and necrotic powers over the peoples of the Threshold.

Tired of the exchange, aching from his wounds, smarting from the demon’s superior tone, and impatient to retrieve his grave goods, Zera Thisse nocked an arrow of radiant Essence and fired. Sondok simply kicked the door shut. The blazing arrow shattered on the door’s golden surface.

Our heroes looked at each other in silence. Then Li kicked the door back open, her blades thrumming with daylight, to reveal their foe. And the final battle for the tomb began.

It was a difficult fight for our heroes. All of them were wounded, and Thorwald lay elsewhere, unable to turn his power against their demonic foe. So Li stood once more in the fore, blades skirling with white and gold, trusting to her Five-Fold Bulwark Stance to repel the demoness’ Malfean blades. Rei stood at Li’s back and thrust past her at every opportunity, interjecting her blade whenever Li left an opening. And Zera balanced on a precarious rocky ledge to launch golden bolts of Essence past his allies.

Li quickly discovered that measures of mortal skill held no weight when dueling a demon of the blade. The demoness grinned as she caught the blade named Radiance in the crook of her axe and, with a derisive fillip of the wrist, sent it winging through the air at Aekino. The sorcerer survived only by virtue of his training in the martial arts. Without thought, he clapped his hands together, catching its blade between the palms of his hands with the tip mere inches from his throat.

Aekino tossed the blade back to Li, who lashed out at her opponent. Zera fired arrows. Rei struck past Li at the demon’s flank. And then, with a running leap, Aekino jumped over everyone’s heads to land in the passage behind Sondok and took off down the passage at a run.

The demon screamed with fury. This was her doorway! None could pass! She grasped at Aekino, but her hand closed only on the trailing hem of his robe, which slipped out of her hand. She hurled her sword after him, but only succeeded in shearing off a lock of his hair. Axe raised, she turned to pursue the fleet-footed sorcerer, only to have Zera send an arrow through the back of her knee.

But Li would not let this opponent get away so easily. She pressed Sondok hard, taking a few cuts from the demonic axe to keep the demoness from chasing Aekino down. Then, at the end of a high cut that caught the demon on the cheek, she caught her foe’s golden crown on the tip of her blade, spun it there, and flung it over her shoulder, where it clattered into a stony fissure and vanished from sight.

As Sondok shrieked in unmitigated fury, Rei shoved her way into the fray and seized the demon’s arm long enough for Li to bury her blade in her opponent’s chest. Against any normal enemy, this would have ended the fight. But Sondok snarled and uttered a terrible curse, one that crackled across her hand and blazed a terrible path through Rei’s Essence. The mortal swordswoman gasped and crumpled to the ground, all of her strength burned out of her in an instant.

Sondok then spat the Old Realm word for “pain,” and the word leapt from her mouth in a blaze of scarlet fire. It sizzled and spun through the air toward Li.

Sweat trickled down Li’s brow as she raised her blades. How could she parry a word? But she never lost faith in her skill. In a flash of gold, she cut the crimson rune to ribbons. Shreds of reddish light flew in all directions. Where they struck flesh, they caused spasms and stabbing aches and tingling pins-and-needles twinges. What terrible doom would Li have suffered had she been struck outright?

She did not stop to consider such matters. She pressed the demon back into the hall, and back and back. Aekino, who had run to the very end of that hall, returned to catch the demon from the rear, holding her own black sword. Li’s blade cut through the haft of the demon axe. And the two of them stabbed and cut, hacked and thrust, until the demon fell bleeding from a dozen mortal wounds.

Sondok locked eyes with Li of Orchid. Red blood dribbled from her lips. “I shall see you,” she murmured, “in hell.” And her body dissolved into a stench and a dark reddish vapor.

She was gone.

Our heroes trudged past the blackened spot. At the end of the narrow hall they found a round room carved with images of the reign of Kuro the Raven and Blessed Wind. At the center of the room lay a broad stone sarcophagus, bearing effigies of the aforementioned worthies upon its lid. Zera Thisse stared for a time at these images, one of a former life, the other of a lover in that life.

He shook his head. “Let us open it,” he said, and the three put their backs against the rocky slab and cast it down.

Within lay dust, and ash, and scattered bones. Amid the debris, marked by the searching of an unknown hand, there lay only a sheet of rice paper. There were no gleams of orichalcum, no glittering spear nor bow of starfire. No trace of the relics of the former age.

Zera took up the paper and read from it aloud. It said,

“As the waters flow down to the sea,

“So too does all wealth flow to the princes of the earth,

“And all lore to the wise.

“Seek your riches in Kaihan amid the ruin of ages,

“Where they reside in a palace of dust.”

Li bowed her head. Aekino cursed and spat. Zera crumpled up the parchment and flung it back into the sarcophagus, where it cast up a plume of his former life’s dust.

They turned and walked out. The dust drifted down in their fading golden shadow.

There was silence again in the tomb, and darkness.

(Note: all PCs received 3 XP for this session. Thorwald received an additional 2 XP for contributions. XP totals to date: Aekino 77, Li 72, Thorwald 74, Zera 77.)