Chapter 3 / Episode #101 — "The King Below"
Date: Planting 18, 576 CY Region: The Ruins Beneath the Drachensgrab Hills — Wild Coast Weather: Overcast. Cold wind off the Woolly Bay. Underground by midmorning.
Players Present TerryOr the Cleric of St. Cuthbert Silversun Ubermage the Magic-User Slash the Bard Tiger Wong, Monk of the Eastern Lands Kern Blackshield of Safeton Talon, Paladin of St. Cuthbert
Absent: Dog the Ranger — whereabouts unknown
Planting 18 — "Tharney of Hardby"
The ruins are still there in the morning.
They always are.
The group arrives at the entrance before the sun has done much with the sky. Among the captives freed from the slave cart is a man who gives his name as Tharney — of Hardby, he says, the port city on Woolly Bay. He is calm for a man who was recently cargo. Perhaps too calm. He turns a copper ring on the third finger of his right hand, over and over, the way a man does when he is thinking about something he has decided not to say.
Tiger watches him.
The monk says little. He does not have to.
The decision is made quickly. The group will go below. Tiger will remain above — watching Tharney, watching the captives, watching the road back toward Highport. Lady Morwen among them. Kern's wife among them. The noble brother of Dame Gold among them. The monk plants himself between all of it and whatever might come down that road, and he does not move again.
The rest go down.
Planting 18 — "Seventy Feet Below"
The entrance opens into a chamber.
Seventy feet by seventy feet of worked stone, old enough that the craftsmanship has blurred into the walls. Water covers the southern half of the floor — black and still and deep enough to swallow a torch without complaint. Two exits present themselves: a cave entrance to the south, where the water begins, and a carved archway to the north, dry and dark.
They light torches. Kern raises the lantern.
The tracks are there, if you know how to read them. Dog's boots. Leading south. Into the water. Into the cave.
The group searches the chamber instead of following immediately. The east and west walls each conceal a secret door, flanked by iron sconces. As they approach, the sconces light — old magic, still holding after however many decades, responding to the warmth of living bodies the way a hound responds to a familiar smell.
They read the carved warning near the south entrance.
Robbers, it says, will be cursed.
They choose north anyway. Dog's tracks go south, but something about the archway pulls at them — a quality to the air, a faint wrongness in the stonework, the sense of a threshold that is more than architectural. They go toward it because that is what this group does.
Planting 18 — "What the Archway Holds"
The hall beyond the arch is straight and long.
At its far end is something that is not a door.
It has the shape of a door. It occupies the space a door would occupy. But what fills the frame is not wood or iron — it is a surface that moves the way still water moves when something passes beneath it. They test it methodically, the way experienced people test things that might kill them. Weapons through the surface. Objects thrown. Nothing comes back. Nothing makes a sound on the other side.
Kern goes through.
He does not return.
Slash shakes his head. He has made his position on pocket dimensions and one-way membranes clear on previous occasions, and this occasion does not change his thinking. He stays. He watches the archway. He holds the line between whatever is on the other side and the world they all came from.
The others follow Kern through.
Planting 18 — "A Pocket in the World"
The other side is wrong in a way that is difficult to name.
The stone looks the same. The air feels the same. But TerryOr reaches for St. Cuthbert the way he always does — the practiced inward gesture, the sense of a presence behind the prayers — and finds nothing.
Silence where there should be something.
He is alone in a way he has not been alone since he first took his vows.
There is no time to process this. The zombies are already moving.
They come out of the dark in numbers, shambling and purposeful, and the corridor offers no room for formation. Terry reaches for the holy symbol, raises it, speaks the words — and nothing happens. Whatever this place is, it does not carry the authority of St. Cuthbert's name. The undead do not flinch.
Silversun's magic missiles fire and connect. Talon and Terry take the melee. For a time it holds together. Then Silversun goes down. Then Kern. The two men left standing look at each other across a corridor littered with bodies.
There is no going back through the membrane. They know this without testing it.
They go forward.
Planting 18 — "The Throne Room"
The room beyond is lit by nothing visible.
The light comes from everywhere and nowhere — pale, sourceless, cold. Pillars line the walls, floor to ceiling, old carvings worn smooth by centuries. At the far end, elevated on a dais of dark stone, is a throne.
Something sits in it.
Skeletal. Armored, or what remains of armor after long enough in the dark. It holds the posture of authority the way the dead hold everything — absolutely, without effort, without any possibility of change. There should be a crown on its head. There should be a sword at its side.
Both are absent.
Talon does not hesitate. Evil is evil. The paladin moves forward, blade drawn, and strikes. The blow connects — real, solid, the skeletal figure absorbing the impact and rising from the throne in a single motion. What follows is brief and decisive. Talon falls. He does not get up.
TerryOr strikes. His weapon glances. He strikes again. Nothing penetrates.
The skeletal king speaks.
Its voice is the sound of old stone and older patience. It wants its crown. It wants its sword. These things were taken from it, and it has been waiting in this pocket of nothing, on this throne, in this cold light, for someone to bring them back.
Terry has no crown. He has no sword. He has a holy symbol that no longer connects to anything, a cleric's hammer, and the weight of every companion he has watched fall tonight.
He tells the king the truth: he does not have what was taken.
The king regards him.
It does not kill him. It does not release him.
It waits.
On the other side of the membrane, somewhere above, Slash holds a position by a portal that no longer has anyone coming back through it. Dog is still missing. Tiger holds the road with a monk's patience and a copper ring turning on a stranger's finger.
TerryOr stands alone before a throne in a dimension that St. Cuthbert cannot reach.
The king has been waiting a very long time.
It can wait a little longer.
XP Award — Episode 101
| Encounter | XP |
|---|---|
| Chamber exploration and secret doors | 100 |
| Zombie combat | 250 |
| Skeletal king (encounter, unresolved) | 0 |
| Session Total | 350 XP |
Kern Blackshield and Silversun Ubermage fell in the corridor. Talon, Paladin of St. Cuthbert, fell before the throne. TerryOr the Cleric stands alone — trapped in a pocket dimension, his god beyond reach, facing a king who only wants what was taken from him.
Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends
Great write up
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