"Our trek up to the temple was mostly uneventful, as was our brief stay in the initial pair of rooms. There were several inter-connected puzzle-like mechanisms that needed to be solved to open the way forward. I did a bit of heavy lifting, but for the most part the magically-inclined seemed content to do the actual solving. Completing the final mechanism did have the unfortunate side effect of stranding us between the two chambers, but each group had enough individuals to feel mostly safe (Aelon was, I imagine, quite glad to not be on the same side as myself at the time) and so we pressed on.
The following room explained why the builders of this place had seen fit to split our party. Each passage was filled with elementals of varying types, but their movements seemed incredibly erratic to us as we fought them. We later discovered that these creatures actually existed in both of our chambers simultaneously, and what seemed like random flailing to one of our groups was actually a perfectly normal, directed attack on the other. An interesting mechanism, but one that seems quite inefficient for defense. None of the creatures struck in large enough areas to present a terrible threat if their opposite lacked an actual target, meaning much effort was wasted on open air as we were left free to strike them from behind. Regardless, we defeated the magical menaces and prepared to move on again. Nathaniel pulled Alin off to the side for a quick chat before we left. I believe they meant for their conversation to be private, and I made no active attempts to eavesdrop, but their chatter was loud enough that I overheard regardless. Apparently some ambient aura in this long-abandoned temple was causing an old, magically-charged wound of Nathaniel's to act up in strange ways. I made a note to keep an eye on what that could mean for our party and continued into the next room. The two of them following soon after allayed my fears that it might have been an immediate problem for us.
The next chamber was one large, open space, allowing our two groups to finally see each other again. Aside from the room's walls, much of the space seemed to disappear into a black void, with the only navigable space being two bridges. Aelon and Mayim were dealing with one that seemed to be made of ice, while Nathaniel, Alin, and I had one made of sand. We decided not to question how that would hold up, since magic was obviously quite strong in this place, if not used in particularly worthwhile fashions. Touching either bridge, surprise surprise, alerted the guards. In this case, the ice bridge generated icy constructs and wind beasts that seemed intent on using the friction-light surface to blow intruders into the depths. Our bridge, on the other hand, spewed out gargoyles and fire beetles. Figuring I might draw the flyers off and let the other two take care of the beetles, I decided to harness the ability of my verminous forefathers and take to the walls. This worked fairly well, for the most part, with Alin blasting most of what accosted them and Nathaniel ignoring the attempted strikes of most everything else. The bridges did continue to spill forth enemies, however, and eventually it became clear that the two were in danger of being overwhelmed. I didn't fear for their lives, necessarily (the critters thus far had seemed quite ineffectual at actually getting through our defenses), but several dozen minor injuries can quickly add up into much larger problems.
I was fortunate, in my desire to rejoin my allies, that a gargoyle had decided to split off from the rest to accost me. I leaped to it, grabbing onto the beasts legs and using its own wing-power to leverage my momentum into a swing towards the bridge, dragging the stony creature along behind me and using it as a club against a beetle that had just emerged from the sand. All in all, I was quite happy with my return from the bridge. It makes me wish we had a more competent artist in the party to render the scene... but in the moment, I was merely happy to have made it in time to help clear off the minor swarm of minions and get my two allies moving back towards the far side of the room. We gave up on fighting most of the rest of the monsters that were still spilling forth from the walkway and opted to run full-tilt towards solid ground. Nathaniel ran faster than I had ever seen him move (he actually left melted pools of glass in his wake!) and reached safety first, and I was right behind him, but the shifting sands of the bridge tripped up Alin behind me, sending him sprawling onto his face and tumbling off the edge into the blackness. In a moment of terror, I turned on my heel and hurled myself back, sliding along the sand to the edge of the bridge and just barely managing to catch Alin's hand before he disappeared into whatever dangers awaited him in the dark. By this point, Mayim and Aelon had managed to cross their own bridge (I hear it was quite the spectacle, as most of Mayim's power surges were), and provided covering fire on the beetles and gargoyles that harassed me as I struggled to keep my grip on Alin's arm while still staying on a platform made of shifting sand. Eventually, the dangling wizard managed to complete his teleportation spell, sending himself to safety. I hurled myself into the open air and assumed my bat form to fly back to the rest of the party. It had been an ordeal and a half, but we managed to cross the bridges.
I retained my bat form for the time being -- it is actually quite tiring to use it multiple times in quick succession and flight is quite a useful skill at times -- and we moved onward after a short rest, traveling through several twisting passages covered in what appeared to be the stories of this land's prior inhabitants prior to their disappearance (sadly, it was in a language none of us understood and we felt using languages to understand something carved into a wall would be a waste if there happened to be actual texts later on). Additionally, we came across a strange, floating crystal, not unlike the glowing gems we had encountered earlier. We approached it to examine what enabled it to fly, only to be met with a strange voice! Only Alin and Aelon understand the tongue it speaks, but when they reply to its queries in the common tongue, it is able to return in kind. Whatever power is behind the gem claims to know the water genasi who pointed us in this direction, who it calls 'Walter', and begs us to help it, going so far as to offer us anything and everything the previous adventuring party had managed to scavenge from this place on their original trek through. We agreed quickly enough, but the crystal gave us two last pieces of advice. The first was to 'ignore the riddle', and the second was that the 'best way to move forward is sometimes not to move at all'.
Soon enough, we came upon a large crossroads in the tunnel. Written on a nearby wall in some primordial tongue (which Aelon could read, because of course he could) was the following riddle: I have many tongues but cannot taste/By me, most things are turned to waste/I crack and snap, yet I stay whole/I may take the largest toll/I assisted all of the first men/And I will pay them back again/Around me, people snuggle and sleep/Yet run when I am released from my keep/I jump around and leap and bound/The cold man wishes I he had found. Now, I'm not much of a scholar, but the game of riddles is a fairly universal one, and even I was able to puzzle out that the answer was 'fire' in short order. Still, the voice earlier had told us to ignore the riddle... The room at the center of the crossroads was filled with yet more sand, and each alternate path was sealed with a marked door. While one of those doors did indeed have a fire-like symbol on it, we decided we would take a risk on the mysterious voice's advice and disregard it for the time being.
Alin took the first step into the room, only for the sand to begin to give way beneath him, pulling him towards the center of the room. He retreated quickly and we reassessed our options. Chances were quite good that reaching the middle of the room would then progress into sinking down into some chamber beneath the place (it occurs to me that these assumptions of ours may come to being in far too many of these puzzle dungeons...). As I no longer require oxygen to survive, I offered to take a trip through the choking sand and survey the area beneath. Aelon was particularly enthusiastic about this plan, as it included a risk of me never being seen again, and the rest of the party eventually agreed that it was the best method of getting a look at whatever rested down there. I took a step onto the sands and let it begin to pull me in and down as Alin prepared a sending ritual to contact me when I reached the bottom. The trip was nothing especially arduous, even if I had needed to hold my breath, and I fell gently into the chamber below exactly as we had surmised. It was much the same shape and size as the room above, but sported four strange circles, one of which had an odd pillar of ice in its center. The wizard's sending spell completed and I relayed this information, at which point they agreed to come down for a look themselves.
The room itself seemed to hold nothing of interest for us aside from the ice, so we moved in to inspect it closer, finding what appeared to be a human-like silhouette in its center. Between the wizards and Nathaniel's enchanted hammer, he was mostly free in a matter of moments, at which point he awoke and stared at us. When he spoke, his voice was identical to that of the crystal earlier, but his words were... different. His tone shifted rapidly between one of utter confusion and perfect confidence, first saying he was glad to be free of the ice, then saying he would prefer to be re-frozen, that we needed to stay clear of the circles on the ground and that we should immediately stand within them. While we tried to figure out exactly what this meant, Nathaniel was struck with a particularly harsh bout of nausea as his strange, tattoo-like scars began to glow. This prompted the mysterious frozen genasi (apparently the previous party had been a whole group of them) to begin laughing maniacally, which Mayim responded to by clocking the man in the temple, knocking him out cold... at which point he bounded right back to his feet and completed his laugh! Staring directly at Aelon, he pronounced us all fools for falling into his trap 'just like all the others' as two stone creatures dropped into the room, followed by a feminine, demonic entity. The genasi merely laughs again, shouting that now we will all die (very cliche, I know) before dropping unconscious once more.
The battle that followed was a fair bit more intense than our usual fare, as all three enemies were far more competent than the thugs and soldiers of the past, or at least much tougher. As we fought, the temperature of the room raised dramatically, finally hitting an unbearable level as the last enemy finally fell. Quickly finding the air within the circles to be far cooler than that in the rest of the room, we set aside our better judgement and took shelter in them, dragging the unconscious genasi with us for good measure. He took this moment to come to and scream in fear upon realizing where we stood. We might have considered this an overreaction, had the rest of the room not suddenly burst into roaring flames that, upon contact with the air above the circles on the ground, turned into a frigid blast that threatened to trap us in the same pillars of ice that we'd found the genasi man in. The fire eventually died off, along with the cold, but there were signs that it intended to come again and again until we stopped moving. Alin and Aelon worked together to alter the ring we're taking shelter in, reducing its temperature-warping effects to convert the flaming heat into a bearable chill. When the next wave of fire died, they bolted over to the next closest circle and did some tinkering there, which reacted to the following fire blast by instantly forming a complete pillar of ice from floor to ceiling. Mayim dashed over to it, expecting to climb it into the sandy ceiling to safety, but encountered a barrier of strong winds that was keeping those sands in place and creating the current that had initially dragged us down. As she rebounded, my instinct to play the hero kicked in again, and I bolted across the room, nearly sprinted up the frozen column, and bull-rushed the halfling up into the ceiling just as the next wave of fire assaulted the circle, encasing the pillar in yet more ice.
To my shame, I found myself lost in the churning sands after entering them, but Mayim kept her head long enough to make good use of her connections to elements of Storm to nullify the section of the wind barrier keeping the ceiling aloft around me, dumping me back into the room below and creating a much easier path up than the slippery ice. Once everyone had climbed this sandy path to safety, the vindictive little sorceress saw fit to nullify the wind barrier for the entire room, dropping all of the sand down into the chamber below, blocking or breaking whatever mechanisms had been rhythmically pumping fire into it and causing the room to eventually settle into an uneasy peace. Finally regaining consciousness for the third time today, the genasi began to thank us for the rescue, only for his demeanor to shift mid-sentence and his words of thanks to turn into taunts and jeers. Mayim, either out of surprise or impatience, immediately punch the man again, though unfortunately for him she aimed for his other head this time... It shut him down just as effectively as before, though I didn't envy the lasting ache the hit would likely bring when he inevitably came to again. While he was conveniently unconscious again, our two scholars took the time to finally look over the man to see who or what might be possessing him. They fail to come up with anything specific, but apparently it's a force tied to the elemental chaos, and some of the energies involved resonate quite strongly with Mayim. It's around this point that Nathaniel speaks up and points out that each time the possession took place, the controlling force addressed us as 'you four'. We were surprised that none of us had noticed this odd circumstance, but more interesting was the fact that one of us apparently didn't 'count' in this thing's estimations. We reasoned it could easily be Mayim, whose energies resonated with its own, Nathaniel, who seemed to have magical ties to this place as well, or myself, given my undead nature. Unable to come to any definite conclusions, we eventually moved on again.
Along the passage to the next chamber, through the fire-marked door we had ignored earlier, Nathaniel was struck with another debilitating wave of sickness. Mayim was struck with an idea, however, and handed him her ring of elemental affinity. Wearing it does seem to alleviate his discomfort quite a bit, surprisingly enough. This interaction fascinated Aelon, who proceeded to drone a bit about how the elemental ring and Nathaniel's Spellscar must have ties to the elemental energies of this island, though he claimed neither was quite 'in sync' with them, so I was left unenlightened to what any of that could mean.
The passage eventually gave way to a large staircase, though before we could even mount the first step, the genasi woke up once again. It seemed that Mayim's thorough punishment of his head and groin area had temporarily cured him of his possession (not the conventional cure, I'm sure, but surprisingly effective in this instance) and he finally managed to introduce himself as Ferrick and thank us properly for helping to get him out of his entrapment. He also agreed to let us bind him before we moved any farther, just in case he became possessed again and was overtaken by violent urges, so that was pleasant. At the top of the stairs, we were met with a giant, crystalline ring floating in the center of a large, circular room. In the four cardinal directions were yet more sets of stairs, each leading up to some new room. Mayim approached the ring with interest, only to be met with a villainous, echoing voice that sounded quite a lot like the possessed tone Ferrick had used. He seemed a bit angry that Mayim had interrupted his earlier monologue and, further proving his dire unoriginality, told us that it was yet again time to die. He attempted to go on, but Mayim found the nearest human-esque object (an engraving in the wall) and punched that in its family jewels as well... and this worked, apparently, as the voice howled in rage and the room shook slightly. When the voice fails to return, we decided we should check out the branching rooms.
Each chamber was elementally themed and has a fairly simple puzzle or collection of minor monsters guarding a strange, glowing crystal. The first chamber we entered all together, encountering a pitch-black maze and a creature within the walls who would buffet us with gusts from the side. The darkness was of no concern to me, of course, but the little critter was quite annoying. For the next two chambers, we split up, with Mayim and Aelon going up one staircase and the rest of us moving to the other. Our way led to a fairly standard (in our line of work) chamber full of aggressive braziers that launched fire at us. Nothing we couldn't handle. The other pair claimed to have found a large, stone-filled room with the crystal guarded by another possessed genasi, who Mayim proceeded to punch in the groin 'for consistency'. Alin made it a point to dramatically sweep his hands across the crystals he acquired, slipping them off into their magical storage compartment with some admittedly impressive sleight of hand. With three crystals down, we then entered the water-themed chamber, and this one gave us a bit of pause.
The crystal here was not immediately visible, resting behind a large central pillar, and the entire room was filled with small rivers of water. Nathaniel was the first to accidentally touch one of these streams as we moved deeper into the room, prompting it to rise up, engulf him, and drag him down into the floor. Moment later, we heard a loud pounding on what appeared to be a bricked-up doorway that leaked a fair amount of water. We quickly determined that these must be reservoirs of some sort, and the rivers were designed to dump intruders into them. We worried for a moment that our fighter friend might be in some trouble, being one of the few of us that this sort of a trap could actually pose a serious threat to (considering I don't breathe, the eladrin and human can teleport, and the halfling can transform into lightning), but he proved resourceful enough, pulling out an enchanted dagger he picked up some time ago and carving a doorway into the ceiling, opening up a passage into a small pocket dimension where he was able to breathe while we puzzled out the rest of the chamber.
We eventually reached the center of the room, where there was a moderately deep pool with a silver key at the bottom of it. Both Alin and I attempted to use indirect means to reach down into the water to retrieve the key, but some magical force stopped us, striking out as it did with Nathaniel, though with far less success as we were expecting it this time. When we considered that the force in the water might be some form of advanced slime, I attempted to coax it out of the pool with my gaze, but to no avail. Aelon took a closer look and determined that, while lifelike, the entire water system was little more than an elaborate, enchanted trap. Meanwhile, Alin finally manages to wrangle one of his mage hand summons around the key and pull it free of the pool, only to be engulfed himself and deposited in another of the water chambers. Before I could grab the key from the floor, Mayim bolted by and grabbed it up herself, immediately attempting to jam it into the solid rock of the nearest sealed chamber. Aelon, noticing that there is an actual keyhole in the rock, decided to assist the over-enthusiastic sorceress by physically lifting her off of the ground, moving her to insert the key into the hole, and twisting her whole body to turn it. Silly as it looked, it worked, and the wall fades away to reveal a wall of water, and within it the crystal for this chamber. As the artificer extracted the thing from its crevice, the water attempted to lash out and drag him under as well, only to lose power as the crystal left the water, dropping harmlessly to the ground and returning to the pool. The trap taken care of, we quickly opened the other two chambers and released our party members before returning to the central chamber to see what our efforts had wrought.
Understandably, the echoing voice was none too pleased with us, and his screams shook the room so terribly that the ceiling began to gave in, and as the sunlight from outside struck the space within the ring, a gargantuan head began to fade into view. It looked something like a horse, if you were to described what a horse looked like in very general terms to a blind sculptor. When it had finished appearing, suddenly seeming to be wearing the ring like some sort of collar, it began to move, extracting itself from the floor. Thinking quickly, we jumped after the thing, landing on its back as we found ourselves suddenly back on the surface of the island, moving steadily towards the shore. We were now riding atop the dreaded Thunderhooves that Walter had warned us about.
Having no time to waste, we decided that the ring was almost certainly Thunderhooves' source of power and I dashed forward to attempt to shatter it. Meanwhile, the beast's lumbering nearly sent Mayim off its back and down into the jungle, but she managed to catch hold of some vines across its back and stay aboard, coincidentally discovering a strange, glowing glyph. Attacking it, she discovered that her dagger sank into the creature's stony hide as easily as it would pierce flesh, and the beast howled in pain, its direction wavering as it continued to try and shake us loose. From that point on, Nathaniel and I wailed on the ring until it broke while our mages scurried about finding more of those glyphs to attack. It was a tremendous effort, made more difficult by the creature quickly closing the distance between itself and our ship, threatening the remove our way home from existence. Several luckily-timed stabs to its vital glyphs eventually caused it to divert entirely from that track, though not before Walter had run out like a maniac and gotten himself trod upon, vanishing as Thunderhooves' massive feet touched down near his screaming, flailing form just as he'd told us would happen. It was certainly a shame at the time, but we were far too busy making sure the thing died to mourn.
When the last sigil was shattered, the beasts animation more or less ceased, sending it collapsing into the jungle with a resounding crash. We more or less landed on our feet some distance away, but quickly returned to the colossal corpse to survey the scene. The ring on the beasts neck had never shattered completely, but had cracked so severely that all power had apparently leaked from it. Aelon claimed he would be able to fix it, given time. Walter also appeared again as the beasts final death throes completed, still shouting some nonsense about it needing to 'heed his authority'. Despite the target of his ranting being dead, he didn't cease shouting right away. Mayim muttered something about needing to 'complete the set' before giving her now-trademark punch to the madman, silencing him for the moment. It seemed that Thunderhooves' death marked the end for whatever malevolent force had been plaguing this land, and over the next few days there was no sign of its presence. The genasi we had left unconscious in the temple were retrieved, reunited with their mad ally, and we went to work constructing a floating sledge on which to transport the magical ring back to our ship, as well as removing Thunderhooves' head so as to actually begin moving it. Within a week, we were able to load everyone aboard the Bronze Fang and set sail for home. Since the ring was too large to actually load onto the ship, we were forced to tow it behind us, meaning we had to remain sea-bound for the voyage home. Thankfully, the genasi who weren't Walter were competent sailors and have aided us in the trip significantly. As I finish writing this, Nathaniel tells me we've sighted land in the distance, so it seems we may finally be free of this dull boat for at least a few days.
Nehl Brisby
