Session 22

The party began the session resting beside the teleportation circle at Cloudwatch. During the night, Winry woke to a sharp pain in her leg, as if a burning dagger had been driven into her thigh. She woke Chloe and asked for help. On the surface, the wound looked closed. There was no fresh injury, only the ugly scar left behind, but the pain was intense.

Chloe first tried a healing potion, but it did nothing. Winry was not injured in the usual sense. She was sick, or something close to it. Chloe searched through her supplies, prepared a herbal mixture and gave it to Winry. Winry drank it reluctantly, and the worst of the pain faded. A dull ache remained beneath the surface, but it was bearable.

The rest of the night passed quietly. In the morning, the party woke to cold, calm weather. They built a small fire, prepared food, tea and coffee, then began discussing where to go next. Winry told the others that her leg had woken her during the night, though she insisted she was fine for now.

While the others remained at camp, Chloe returned to Cloudwatch for one final look. She went to the bench where they had found Winry and put on the Mask of Seidrkona. Through it, she began to understand what the mantle allowed her to perceive. She could see when something did not belong. A stone brought from elsewhere, a disruption in the natural order, a detail out of place. The world revealed itself differently to her.

Then she saw what lay beneath the courtyard.

Under the flooring of Cloudwatch, hundreds of bodies were stacked in neat rows. Different races, different genders, all preserved by the mountain cold. The place had not only been an observatory. It had been a grave.

Chloe looked back toward the camp and saw the others differently as well. They appeared as living entities surrounded by life energy. Then she noticed Winry’s leg. From the wound, black ichor was moving both upward and downward through the flesh. Winry was sick. Something was spreading inside her.

Chloe also tried to call back the wolves she had sent with Needles, but they did not answer. That taught her another limit of her new power. Seidrkona’s influence was not worldwide. It reached only into her immediate vicinity. Slowly, Chloe began to understand that Seidrkona was not simply a title or power. It was a responsibility tied to what she could now see.

Still wearing the mask, Chloe returned to camp. When she approached Winry and began speaking, the group reacted with fear. Chloe heard her own voice as normal, but to the others it sounded calm and authoritative in a way that was difficult to ignore. They knew it was Chloe, but at the same time, something about her felt older than Chloe. Older than any of them.

She told Winry what she had seen: black ichor seeping from the wound and spreading through her body. Scarlet wanted to confirm it herself and cast Detect Poison and Disease. The spell confirmed what Seidrkona had already seen. Winry had gangrene. She needed professional help, a doctor and a surgeon.

Winry marked a line around her leg and made the decision clear. If the blackness passed that line, they would cut the leg. The group agreed.

They packed up camp and moved to the teleportation circle. Cael stepped inside, but nothing happened. The circle they stood on was active, but it had no functioning connection to another circle. It could not take them anywhere.

The only way down was the narrow stairway leading from Cloudwatch to the foot of the mountain.

They began their descent. Step by step, they moved down through the cold. After twenty minutes, they found themselves back at Cloudwatch, standing where they had started. The path had looped them back. The mountain was caught in a paradox.

They tried again, and the same thing happened. Every descent returned them to the top.

Along the stairway, they noticed six obelisk statues, each marked with a different symbol: a triangle with a hammer, a wave, fire, two moons with three stars, a tornado of wind and an open mouth filled with sharp teeth. At first, they ignored them and kept trying to force their way down.

They tied rope to nearby rocks and attempted to climb down without using the stairs. That failed as well. Cael descended by rope, but his body was still strained from the previous day, and he did not have the strength to climb back. The party had to pull him up.

They then tried shutting Cloudwatch down. Winry returned to the control board, pulled the pylon from the console and caused the great telescope to fold away as the observatory closed. A few minutes later, the blue aurora appeared once again. They tried the stairs, but the paradox still returned them to Cloudwatch. With no result, they reactivated the observatory.

Eventually, they returned to the obelisks.

Winry touched the fire-marked obelisk with her lit torch, and the sound of embers stirred within it. They poured water over the wave obelisk, and heard waves striking a distant shore. They struck the hammer-marked obelisk with a warhammer, and heard the movement of mountains and earthquakes beneath the stone. They blew air into the tornado obelisk, and wind howled through it.

When they threw a rock into the jaws-marked obelisk, a black outline appeared beneath its foundation. Cael then touched the jaws obelisk with his pinky. There was no wound, no blood and no pain. His pinky simply disappeared.

The moon obelisk gave them trouble. For a while, they had no idea how to awaken it. Eventually, they cast Moonbeam upon it, and the two moons began to shine.

They descended again, but still returned to Cloudwatch.

Then they remembered the story of the Creators that Geri and Freki had told them the day before. They tried activating the obelisks in the order of the Creators: hammer, waves, fire, air, moons and jaws. Once again, the stairs brought them back.

So they reversed the order.

This time, the path opened.

The party descended for hours. The weather favored them, and at last the stairs ended above a field of untouched snow. No tracks marked it. No sign of passage disturbed it.

Chloe was the first to step forward. She sank into the snow up to her chest without touching the ground beneath. She felt movement under the snow but ignored it at first. Using her quarterstaff, she tried to test the depth. She never found the bottom, but she did strike something hard.

Then the snow began to move.

A huge eyeless wyrm burst from beneath it, flying toward them with a massive mouth full of razor teeth. The party fought the creature, only for its mate to arrive and join the attack. After several brutal minutes, they killed both wyrms, but not without cost. The group was battered, and Cael fell deep into the snow.

The others rushed to help him. Scarlet jumped in after him, but her first attempt went badly. She became stuck with her legs in the air and her face buried in the snow. The group pulled her out, then tried again. This time she reached Cael, and with everyone’s help, they dragged him free.

Rollo harvested scales from the wyrms, and the party opened one of the carcasses to look for the heart and glands. The heart was enormous, as was the gland, which was filled with translucent blue liquid. They removed the heart and stored it in Winry’s pocket dimension. When they tried to harvest the gland, they nicked it. The blue liquid spilled out, freezing everything it touched: the tools, the carcass and the surrounding area. They had to abandon it.

To cross the snow safely, they used stones protruding from the surface. Scarlet and Rollo made it across without issue. Cael and Winry tried together. The first jump went well, but on the second Cael fell straight into the snow. Winry saved herself. By luck, Cael managed to grab the stone ahead of him and pull himself out before another wyrm sensed him and came after him.

The party escaped the snowfield and continued down the mountain.

The weather turned against them. A blizzard caught them exposed on the descent. Cael slipped, crashed into the others and knocked the entire party into a slide toward the edge. Scarlet reacted quickly, firing an arrow ahead of them that summoned vines. The vines caught and restrained them before they slid to their deaths.

They got back up, scolded Cael and continued.

Eventually, they reached a small alcove with a cave entrance. The cave was warm, inviting and safe-looking, so they decided to rest there for the night. Almost immediately, they noticed something was wrong. Their magic did not work. Winry opened her pocket dimension, but nothing happened. It was only a little box.

That put everyone on edge.

They built a small campfire near the entrance but did not go deeper inside. Rollo sent Mr. Slinkless into the cave to scout. The passage continued for some distance before splitting into multiple tunnels. Then, without warning, Mr. Slinkless vanished. Rollo could no longer see through him or feel him. He was simply gone.

Chloe and Scarlet took the first watch. From deep inside the cave, they heard dozens of small footsteps. The sounds came from everywhere: outside the cave, above them, below them and within the walls around them. The party decided to retreat into the pocket dimension for safety, bury the box in the snow outside and wait.

A few minutes after they entered, something struck the box. The dimension shook like an earthquake. Then it happened again, and again. They began throwing items out to buy themselves time. The shaking stopped briefly, then resumed.

Finally, they decided to throw out the wyrm heart.

Cael was completely against it, but he understood why it had to be done. They threw the heart out, and the shaking stopped. The party rested, though not well.

When they left the pocket dimension, they found themselves deep in the dark cave. Around the box lay dead bodies of pale, eyeless creatures with sharp teeth and claws. The outside of the box was scarred by gnawing and scratching.

Then they looked deeper into the darkness.

Hundreds of the creatures were turned toward them.

The party began backing away. In the cracks of the walls, the creatures moved with them. Every step the group took back, the creatures stepped forward. Somehow, the party escaped the cave.

Chloe donned the mask again and learned what they were.

They were called Vaurgûl, Ghouls of the Deep. They were not native to this mountain. They came from Khazural, from the Deeproots. They were cleaners of the deep places, creatures that ate anything: flesh, stone, metal and even one another. Killing them did not end them completely, because they were fungal beings. When one died, it released spores that would eventually create more.

The party refused to take the cave path.

Instead, they found another route down the mountain. It was more dangerous and more exposed, but it avoided the Vaurgûl. They climbed along cliffs and jumped across rocks, descending through rough terrain.

During the descent, they encountered two colossal elementals fighting over territory. The creatures hurled rocks at each other while the party ran through the chaos, weaving between impacts as quickly as they could. One elemental was killed and began to fall directly toward them. The party escaped by a narrow margin.

At last, they reached the foot of the mountain.

They found themselves in the salt pits, surrounded by great mounds of salt and still pools of brine. Within the pits and pools lay hundreds of bodies, perfectly preserved. Their belongings remained with them: backpacks, tools and weapons untouched by time.

The party wanted to take the safer path around the pools and avoid disturbing anything.

Cael had other ideas.

As he moved toward the far edge of the salt pools, he spotted a backpack and pulled it from the salt. The moment he grabbed it, a hand rose from the salt and seized his arm. A creature made of pure salt emerged, screaming, then drove a blade into his chest.

That is where Session 22 ended.