Session 41 – Liches Get Stitches

  In the deep places beneath the ruined cloister, the fellowship had pressed on after a bitter disappointment. They had broken open a northern coffin, hoping to find the fragment of Saint Michael’s holy blade, only to discover that the tomb was a decoy and the relic still lost. Around them stretched a great vaulted chamber set with many stone crypts, each a silent house of the dead, their doors in various states of rust and ruin. On one wall an inscription, translated from an old tongue, spoke of a relic that “shines in the north, guarded by stones,” a riddle that had first drawn them to the false tomb and now pressed them to range further into the dark.

Murchad and Vedica led the way as the company debated which of the original passages might lead to their goal.  They decided to backtrack and explore the other two stairways they opened up from the medallion room. Vedica walked close at Murchad’s heels, as she often did, eyes narrowed and hands light upon the stone, listening and feeling for the least sign of hidden peril. They climbed a narrow stair that wound upward into darkness, roots and old stone closing around them in a suffocating hush.

Near the top, Vedica rounded a bend and stepped forward, testing the floor. There, the wall spat a needle like a serpent’s fang. The dart struck her and the company felt a sick lurch, for poison was thick in such devices, yet she steadied herself and, by the favor of fortune and the hard training of a thief, shrugged off the venom and retreated with the wound smarting but not mortal. The stair ended in a blank stone wall, and the party spent some time searching for hidden doors: Vedica, Tiv, Dwårfy, and others each laid hand upon the rock, knocking and probing, invoking dwarven stonecraft and elven lore. Yet the wall yielded no secret, and in the end they judged that they had been fooled by the inscription, and that this whole way was but a poisoned decoy to ensnare seekers of the “north-guarded” relic.

So they backtracked through the crypt-hall, past the earlier chambers, to a different passage and a second stair. Jack took the lead this time, with Vedica again searching for traps and reporting that she could find none upon the door nor upon the steps. The stair coiled up to another blank, oblique wall, the stone close and ominous. When Jack set his foot upon the slab before the wall, a hidden plate gave a faint click, and a block of stone, cunningly balanced in the ceiling, dropped like the blow of a giant’s hammer. Jack tried to leap aside, but the stone still smashed into him with terrible force, leaving him bruised and bloodied yet stubbornly standing. When the dust settled, the block lay like a tombstone before the wall, the way once again a dead end, and once again the company found no secret passage, only the cold certainty that the builders of this place had excelled at cruel deceits.

Returning to the central hall of tombs, the party turned to the many sealed crypts whose doors loomed in the lantern-light. It was there, amid the square stone houses of the dead, that their careful work with lock and lantern began to bear more fruitful rewards.

Vedica moved from door to door, listening at hinges and testing for hidden mechanisms. At one crypt, she found the door locked but untrapped and deftly picked the corroded lock. Murchad opened the door and found a simple coffin within. When Vedica examined the coffin, however, she discovered that it was indeed trapped. Attempting to disarm the device, she instead triggered it, and a heavy cornice stone, cunningly blended into the decorative masonry above, crashed down. Yet she sprang back at the last instant, and the stone shattered upon the floor, leaving her untouched save for the pounding of her heart. With the trap sprung, she raised the coffin lid, revealing the skeleton of a monk in rotted habit. Jack searched the body and the coffin thoroughly but found no relics or hidden compartments, only dry bones that soon began to disarticulate under his searching hands.

At another crypt, unlocked after similar precautions, Jack opened the coffin and once again found a skeletal monk. This one clutched something that glinted in the lantern’s glow. At first it seemed like gold, but as Jack took it up it proved to be brass: a small hinged device that he briefly mistook for a pocket-watch before realizing it was a compass. The discovery briefly stirred hope, but the hope turned to wary curiosity when they saw that the needle did not point north.

Jack turned the compass this way and that, frowning as the needle stubbornly fixed itself toward a different point. While he strained his wits to understand, a jolt of magical energy shot through the device and into his hand, like grasping a live wire. The shock arced out and struck Murchad as well, leaving both men jolted and pained. The company quickly realized that the compass bore a glyph of warding upon it, and that using it required both courage and a test of wisdom. Tiv, as cleric, examined it and discerned that the hazard lay in the act of trying to understand or direct it, not in merely carrying it.

Eventually, a more discerning attempt succeeded, and the party learned the nature of the thing: the brass compass pointed not to the cardinal north, but to the nearest source of water, and it lent a small boon to navigation besides. When they zoomed their minds’ eye back over their explored map, they saw that at that moment the needle pointed southwestward toward the watery entrance chamber where they had first waded waist-deep into the crypts. Though it was not the saintly relic they sought, they judged the item worth keeping, for in deserts and flooded delves alike the gift of finding water might one day prove as precious as any blade.

In another coffin, discovered after Jack slew a giant toad that lurched out of a darkened tomb, they found a different relic of faith. The toad’s presence was explained by a seeping puddle in one corner, suggesting that as an egg or tadpole it had entered through some hidden fissure and grown too great to return, surviving on what poor sustenance the watery crypt afforded until the party chanced upon it. Within the coffin, the skeletal monk clutched a weathered leather prayer book devoted to the sea‑god revered by the Order of the Tidal Veil. Tiv examined it and sensed a gentle aura of protection: when the hymns were read aloud properly, they bestowed brief resistance to water-based dangers upon reader and companions, protecting against drowning, corrosive waters, and slippery perils. It was a quiet, potent gift, and the others agreed that Tiv, already the wisest and the cleric of the group, should keep and wield it.

Exploring further east, the party came upon a stair that climbed toward a strange glow. At its summit, the passage was flanked by tall statues carved in the form of seahorses bearing tridents, their stone forms looming with an austere majesty. Between them shimmered a curtain of blue light, like a waterfall frozen in a perpetual cascade, yet humming with arcane force. The field barred their passage, and some in the party speculated whether it masked a true torrent behind it, or was itself the work of powerful warding.

Tiv stepped forward, consulted the lore of her order, and called upon the spell of dispel magic. With a word of command and a raising of hands, she unraveled a portion of the enchantment, and the cascade of light parted at the center, leaving a passage through for a time. Beyond lay a stone balcony overlooking a vast, mist-filled chasm whose depths could not be seen. When Jack dropped a stone, the party listened as long as patience allowed, yet heard no impact, only the hiss of distant damp air. Later, Ceangal conjured a wizard’s eye and sent it drifting down. Even when the invisible eye descended its full range, seeing through sixty feet of darkness with wizardly vision, there was still no bottom visible, only further gloom and mist.

On the balcony itself stood two stone sarcophagi, side by side upon pedestals, each inscribed with titles of the order. The southern tomb was marked: “Mother Isolde, consort, 1127–1178, keeper of the sacrificial flame,” its stone etched with faded tidal symbols. The northern bore the words: “Master Cedric of the Veil, 1123–1179, High Priest of the Tidal Rites.” Tiv and Ceangal moved close to read the inscriptions, while the others watched the chasm and the shimmering remains of the waterfall-ward.

As Tiv finished tracing Cedric’s epitaph with her eyes, a harsh stone scraping broke the stillness. The lids of both sarcophagi shifted and slid aside. From within rose the long-dead priests of the Tidal Veil: from Cedric’s coffin a gaunt corpse-lich dusted with ages, and from Isolde’s, a wrathful revenant wearing the shadow of her old authority like a cloak. Tiv had a heartbeat in which to choose: she did not step back but raised her holy symbol and dared the power of turning.

Her first impulse was to drive them both back; however, liches and revenants were among the hardiest of foes. Though Master Cedric’s lich power resisted her, the holy light of her turning triumphed over Mother Isolde. The revenant, cowed by the divine force, recoiled and fled as far as she could, gliding back through the breach in the waterfall-ward and away into the deeper crypts in desperate flight. The lich of Master Cedric, however, remained, his eyes like cold fire in a ruin of a face.

Battle was joined on the narrow balcony above the abyss. Vedica drew her enchanted bow and loosed, her arrow striking Cedric and proving that magic-wrought missiles could pierce his unnatural hide. Jack followed with his own shot, hammering the lich from afar. Then Ceangal lifted his hands and invoked a spell of pure force; three magic missiles spun out, striking Cedric squarely in chest and limbs, their energy bursting against dead flesh to brutal effect. Dwårfy, no coward though sorely aware of the chasm at his back, closed to melee, lifting his mother’s magical hammer. With gritted teeth he struck, the blessed hammer ringing as it hit and driving the creature back a step.

Murchad then moved in for the killing blow. With a clean, ferocious strike, he hewed into the lich’s body with such force that its form shuddered and collapsed, the unholy vigor leaving it all at once. Cedric’s remains fell lifeless upon the balcony, and the company stood breathing hard amid dust and lingering magic. The fight, which had promised horror, ended in their favor more swiftly than they -- or the one guiding their peril -- had expected.

Searching the lich’s body and sarcophagus, the party discovered an amulet of the sea’s eternal motion. Whoever wore it could breathe water as air, swim with uncanny speed, and better resist watery dangers. After a brief discussion, it passed to one of the front-line fighters, so that when the time came to brave deeps and drowned passages, a stronger arm might carry the search forward. Of Mother Isolde there was no sign, though they knew that the revenant might return once the terror of turning had passed.

The company descended again from the balcony into the crypt‑hall. Their search led them back among the rows of stone tombs, where some doors stood open and empty, others locked, and one, Dwårfy discovered, had simply lost its door entirely, as though time and rust had devoured it. The dwarf peered into that cobwebbed emptiness and mused that perhaps doors were only set once bodies were laid to rest, sparing some forgotten caretaker from checking every crypt for occupancy.

As Dwårfy pushed deeper into one corridor to the south, a sudden cry escaped him. From up the hall, limned by Jack’s lantern, the revenant of Mother Isolde had returned, gliding silently over the stone, eyes fixed with poisonous intent. The company reacted at once. Tiv flung a stone from her sling, though the shot struck the wall. Vedica, lining up a long shot down the hall, managed to pierce the undead form with a well-placed arrow. Jack sprinted closer to bring bow and horn to bear, while Ceangal prepared a spell of greater fury.

When the moment was right and the revenant stood away from the main group, Ceangal unleashed a fireball into the passage. Flame burst in the confined stone corridor, filling it with roaring heat. When the fire cleared, the revenant yet moved, badly scorched but unbroken. Dwårfy, who stood in the path of its attack, met it with hammer in hand. The undead woman raked at the dwarf with venomous claws, wounding her and forcing her to fight off the chill of poison with all her dwarven toughness.

The struggle might have turned grim, but the fellowship had momentum now. Dwårfy struck back with his beloved hammer, then with his other weapon, smashing into the revenant’s failing form. A final missile from Murchad brought Mother Isolde down at last, her body collapsing into a heap that did not rise again. On the revenant’s hand they found a ring, fine and strangely wrought, which proved to be a ring of wave command. It did not summon water elementals, but whoever wore it could, once each day, seize control of such a being if it were present, bending the living waters to the bearer’s will. They elected to give or at least entrust it to Ceangal, whose magic might most readily call or confront such creatures in the future.

Further south along that same corridor Dwårfy noticed another barred gate, akin to the northern one near their earlier battles. Through its iron bars the party saw yet another sarcophagus and, lurking in the alcoves at the back of the room, three large spiders. The gate itself was locked. Judging lightning and bouncing bolts too risky in such a confined space, they chose a simpler plan: ranged attacks through the bars before Vedica opened the lock.

They managed to kill one spider, causing the other two to run to the near corners of the room, out of line-of-sight from the bars. They’d have to go inside before killing them all.

On Tiv’s urging, Vedica quickly picked the gate’s mechanism, though the act of opening it cost her a turn. Once the bars swung inward, Jack moved in and sounded the horn of blasting against one of the spiders, the reverberating note dealing it grievous harm. The spiders tried to skitter out of view into the corners, but Dwårfy and Murchad pressed in with steel and hammer, supported by the others’ missiles. Dwårfy, emboldened by earlier successes, charged one of the spiders and smashed it with her mother’s hammer and her off-hand weapon, finishing it in a flurry. Murchad killed the last of them with a solid blow, and soon the room lay quiet save for the crackle of Jack’s lantern.

With the spiders slain, the party finally turned its full attention to the sarcophagus in that chamber. The inscription named the occupant Saint Alaric. Here at last, they felt, they were close to the heart of the quest: somewhere in these saintly tombs lay the tip of Saint Michael’s blade.

Examining the metal coffin, they noted two features. First, there was a keyhole where a lock, presumably of fine workmanship, sealed the lid. Second, the sarcophagus bore a carved recess shaped like a cross and a scallop shell, suggesting that some special relic or key, matching that holy form, would be needed to open it safely. Neither cross-shaped token nor fitting shell was in their possession, and they recalled with some frustration that a previous puzzle had required the pommel of the saint’s sword to deactivate a trap; that key had already been used elsewhere.

Vedica, in searching the sarcophagus more thoroughly, looking for traps, found instead another inscription carved along the underside of its lip, somewhat hidden among the weathered stone. The words, pieced together with care, read: “Caged waters’ depths hide the key to saintly treasure.” The phrase stirred memories of the watery entrance where they had first come into these crypts, a place of half-flooded stone and trapped channels. It also echoed the theme of their recent discoveries: the compass pointing to water, the prayer book of the sea‑god, the amulet of tides, and now a hint that some “caged waters” held yet another key.

There, in Saint Alaric’s chamber, surrounded by slain spiders and the heavy silence of the dead, the company weighed their wounds and their dwindling strength. Dwarfy and others had taken serious hurts from stone traps, undead claws, and the heat of their own magic. With the clue to “caged waters” in hand but the path to that hidden key still unclear, they chose to halt their delving. Healing prayers and potions were brought forth, and talk turned from battle plans to tending injuries and marking the maps.

So the session ended with the fellowship still beneath the earth, lantern-light shining on a saint’s sealed tomb, armed with a compass that found water, a prayer book that warded against drowning, an amulet of eternal tides, and a ring to command waves. Their next venture would lead them, by that last inscription’s hint, toward the “caged waters” that hid the key to Saint Alaric’s sarcophagus and, perhaps, at last, to the lost fragment of Saint Michael’s holy sword.