Dor Leðúrēa 5-12445. Shurn vengeance by spell and blade. The passing time. Zuroolly’s tales. An old visitor visits death upon the Shurn. Exploration of the caves. The Temple of Unū-ud Ahd. Wandering of the Dreaming Souls. Galleron makes friends with a tentacled beast. The pursued.

Continued from Strangers in a Strange Land.

Day 5+

Hurriedly carrying Galleron from the stone halls, they could see the cracked plains stretching out below them under the starry sky. On the lower stairs Shurn piled from a high hole on the cliff, sliding down to the staircase below them. The creatures landed drawing curved daggers, menacingly staring up the stairs with their glowing orange eyes. Zuroolly with his blazing staff and Ferveo with his dagger rushed down the staircase to meet the Shurn. Behind, a third Shurn descended to the staircase. As Zuroolly and Ferveo clashed with the Shurn, the third began casting. Soon, three of the four fell asleep, slumping to the rocky staircase. The second Shurn raced up the stairs to where Voren stood holding Galleron’s unconscious form. Vorén looked over the side but could find no handholds to climb down off the staircase hewn from the cliff’s side. Drawing a dagger he slashed at the oncoming Shurn. The Shurn met him and the two slashed and dodged as the spell-caster hampered Voren’s efforts with cantrips. Finally, the Shurn sorcerer cast another sleeping spell and Vorén slumped to the stone stairs. An odd feeling, he thought, as he passed from consciousness.

Zuroolly’s words wound interminably through the black caves. In time, the life of the old man became more real than the lives they’d left behind. Familiar faces grew more difficult to remember, and over time grew distorted and corrupt. Around their wrists, constricting stony coils tightened at any attempt or thought to escape. Between each forever, a pair of glowing eyes would come into the cave and give each a small sip of the Nectar; just enough to wet dry and cracked lips. The sweet Nectar. As time passed they remembered less and less what the smell and taste of other foods had been, now only living for the next drop of the sweet golden liquid and the warmth it would bring to bodies that were cold and empty.

Time passed. There were times when even Zuroolly’s voice would fade and fail and leave each of them alone in the swallowing darkness. In these times, sleep would rouse them from their misery and they would find themselves in distant, sunlit places where clouds still lumbered across the skies and the crops grew, and people, all sorts of people, talked and walked through their lives. But returning, each would find himself with his back to a stone wall, and stone coils holding his wrists out from his body. Again, after another long time, a Shurn would return to the cave speaking in an incomprehensible tongue and see to the prisoners. In time they learned the footsteps of their hosts, and the sounds of their voices, the shapes of their eyes. Soon their hosts were replaced with new hosts, and then the children of those would tend to them, and soon their grandchildren and so on. Time was passing here. Their hair grew to their shoulders and longer, their fingernails grew from hands unseen and distant.

And then there were the “other” dreams. Dreams where one by one they would be taken from their restraints and carried (for they were very weak). In these dreams they would be taken to a far cave and placed in one of two large braces. There the Shurn would lance their bodies with slender metal tubes and watch as Nectar slowly issued into a shallow pool below. These dreams were not infrequent and usually ended with another gradual fade to blackness, only to wake bound in the wrist coils once more. This was the life of the Shurn prisoners for many many years. If not for a long lost companion, their years would have stretched much longer and have ended in these same caves. But alas, it was not to be.

Day 12445

One “day”, years later, a new sound issued from the far caves. The Shurn spoke loudly and with great urgency and there was much commotion. The sound of metal strike metal rang through the old stone walls, and stifled screams issued from far chambers. Zuroolly paused in the re-telling of his tale and listened to the melee, wondering what might be happening. Soon the cave was filled with a blinding light to eyes that had forgotten the harshness of sight, and a tall rag-clad figure strode into the cave. It held a blazing split staff in one hand and a long curved blade in the other. As it smashed the stone coils with it’s sword, freeing the prisoners, it spoke: “You are needed. Much time has been wasted here. Seek the Orb of Dirapzir. The Orb will tell you all you need to know. You must make haste. Rallea has been taken to Bajarada. There is more at stake than the Adjàdâr line. Trust IgerE-un but beware the servants of the Night Dragul. There is so much to tell you, but no time. You must master the path between the worlds. I must leave for the Mountain of the Rising Moon. May Te’zanah watch over you all. I have stayed too long.” As the figure left and Galleron shielded his eyes from the light to look upon their rescuer, he saw only long white tresses hanging from a deep hood and a heavily tattooed and wrinkled hand holding the handle of an exquisite long blade. The figure dropped the ancient staff and strode from the cave stopping for a moment to add, “It has been a long time.” And then she disappeared from the cave.

The rescued lay on the floor in agony. They tried to move their arms but they were too stiff to bend. They tried to stand but their legs protested, having no memory of the weight they were meant to bear. Slowly, painfully, they pulled themselves upright and after learning to balance, slowly crept from the prison that had been their home this unknowable time. Strewn throughout the warrens were the corpses of the Shurn, the internals of their twisted bodies opened for all to see. The trademark luminescent eyes now dark, dull and opaque upon their faces. Their rescuer had carved mercilessly through their bodies like a reaper of wheat, leaving their opened corpses to dry. Picking through the carnage, the group scavenged a few unbroken glass flasks and the small amount of Nectar that could be gathered. Also among the bodies were found a number of curved silver daggers and an exotic spiked chain of which they could only guess the use. The Shurn warrens they found were tunneled away from proper corridors which Voren soon discovered emerged at the staircase where they had been overtaken, how long ago? More warrens were found including a moving panel of wall that opened above the stairs (where the Shurn had slid down from) and a somehow familiar room with wall-racks and a shallow stone pool in its center; the chamber from their “dreams”. The low chatter of the Shurn was now gone from these caves.

Down a central hall they found a pair of beautiful metal doors without handles. The doors were fashioned into swirling shapes and many eyes. After inspecting the doors, Voren grabbed the metal irises of the largest eyes and turned them as knobs, opening the doors to the vast hall beyond. As they stepped in, green crystals lit along the high pillared walls. Each wall was inscribed with thousands of letters from an unknown alphabet, in lines of words that rose high above the stone-worked floor. As they advanced into the great hall the green crystals along the walls began to glow softly, extending the soft emerald glow deeper into the hall.

In the receding darkness a figure of light stepped into sight, stopping to look around this strange subterranean place. After taking in its surroundings (but not seeing the group) it continued through a doorway on the right wall. The group followed the being of light into a corridor and down some stairs into a smaller chamber with barred cells inset into the floor. As the light from the blazing split staff broke the room’s dark slumber a chorus of groaning rose from the room’s central pit. Within that recess could be seen zombies reaching toward the new light. Examining these foul prisoners, the Chaos of this place became evident as their features and limbs migrated slowly around their desiccated bodies. The figure of light passed across the walkways that ran above and between the recessed cages and through a doorway on the room’s far side. Through the arch and down the stairs they watched the light stepping through a metal door but try as they might, they could not open it.

While most of them fought with the closed door, Voren ventured back into the great hall and explored farther into the darkness. Soon the wall crystals’ light revealed a wall inscribed with letters and an elaborate metal gate at its center. Beyond the wall, the top of a large rounded polished stone could be seen. The Neveren wished a closer look. Pushing the doors open he found what he was looking for. As the others retraced their steps they found Voren standing at the open doors staring into the shadowed space beyond. Zuroolly noted Voren’s manic rocking and knew something was wrong. He crept along the wall and pulled his companion away from the open gates, closing his own eyes to close the elaborate doors. Voren stood in silence for some time trying to piece together what he had seen. He could remember only pieces of the statue beyond those doors, something too hideous to comprehend. He wondered why the sight of it returned to him terrible memories of a past life, his life in the Waking world. He tried to understand all of it, but the more he tried the more jumbled and confused everything became.

As the group tended to Voren, another (or the same?) being of light stepped from the side door and looked around the hall as if lost, like the first. This one turned and headed toward the partition that Voren had opened, passing ghost-like through the elaborate metal doors. It was decided to see where the spirit forms were coming from, so they opened the side door. As they explored the area beyond, Voren turned right and strode off into the darkness, climbing unseen stairs, and trailing his hand along the curving wall. In the darkness he found a door and after wrestling with it, pulled it open with metallic screeching. Continuing through he could hear the others responding to the sound, but continued forward into the dark. The others caught up with their wandering companion at the top of the second staircase beyond the door, which was fortunate because Voren stood at the edge of a giant round pit. Somewhere deep in the pit they heard the slow sliding of moist flesh. Voren turned to leave. Galleron, tempter of the fates, found a chunk of broken masonry against one wall and threw it into the pit. Something below hissed and the sound echoed through the domed chamber and down the corridor where Voren was retreating. At first a single tentacle lashed up from the darkness below, so Galleron drew a Shurn dagger and awaited that which might emerge from the deep shadows. A shifting mass slowly rose from the darkness and two toothed tentacles flailed upward striking and ripping through Galleron’s clothes, and tearing gouges of flesh from his body. Zuroolly and Ferveo snatched their horror-struck companion form the pit’s edge and exited the room but their wounded fellow was too stunned to keep up. Behind them the tentacled mass heaved it’s wet monstrous mass over the pit’s side. Ferveo picked up Galleron and charged down the stairs, back toward the great hall. Zuroolly slammed the metal staircase door shut and listened fearfully as the swiftly moving mass smashed and squished onto the other side of the door.

Once gathered back into the great hall, the group listened in horror at the sound of a distant door opening in the darkness.

Continued in Into the Orb of Dirapzir.

Characters

• Galleron
• Voren
• Zuroolly
• IgerE-un
• Is ShyA-da
• Rallea Adjàdâr
• Te’zanah

Played: 28 Feb 2002