Session 43 – The Abbey and the Abyss

The company had sealed itself in the deep and silent places of the earth, among the tombs of forgotten saints and the dust of ages. There, beside the body of Saint Aelric, they had discovered that the holy shard of Saint Michael’s blade, which they had sought with such peril, had already been taken. Weary in limb but not yet broken in spirit, they rested and healed as they could, and in the hushed dark they weighed their path. Murchad, grim of purpose, urged that they return to the surface and confront the Inquisitrix at last, while Jack, whose thoughts often strayed to gold and plunder, spoke wistfully of unopened crypts and undiscovered treasure in the catacombs. Dwårfy and Tiv spoke little, their minds torn between duty, safety, and curiosity, and at length it was agreed that they would ascend, leaving the dead to their rest and the mysteries of the undercrypts for another time.

They retraced their steps through the winding passages with cautious haste, the echo of their boots following behind like a second, unseen company. At last, they came to the secret way by which they had descended: a hidden entrance in a hillside on the western edge of the abbey’s island, overlooking the narrow channel where their ship rode at anchor on the far shore. As they emerged, they were greeted not by the quiet of evening but by shouts from the acolyte they had put to sleep on the way in and the distant clamor of terror. From beyond the rise, to the southeast, where the abbey buildings lay, came cries, the crash of breaking things, and the ragged chorus of many voices in fear and pain. Shadows, though the day had not yet died, seemed to lengthen along the slope.

Vegvisir, new to the island and still learning the lay of the place, peered down the hill as they crept forward, and there he marked the Inquisitorial acolyte at the base, a man the party had humbled the day before with spell-wrought sleep. Recognition flared like a spark in the acolyte’s eyes; he pointed and cried out, “Infidels!” his voice shrill with remembered grievance and holy hatred. His shout was enough: in that moment, the promise of peaceful negotiation with the Inquisition blew away like ash on the wind. The company wasted no time. Vegvisir spoke words of sleep again, and the acolyte, who had been so quick to accuse, sagged at once into senseless slumber, afforded neither contest nor plea. With the immediate danger stilled, the party stood amid the rising tumult of the island, and Tiv, the cleric, wondered aloud whether every soul they now met might be turned against them.

Knowing that the compound bristled with eyes and blades, they turned to stealth. Jack activated his pendant and veiled himself in invisibility, though only for a brief span, while Vegvisir cloaked himself more thoroughly in spell-born invisibility that would endure until he chose violence. From beyond the rise, the noise of battle and anguish grew louder, carried on the wind from the abbey walls and the streets beyond. Murchad bade the others stay and keep hidden while he advanced alone to scout, slipping around the hill’s shoulder, invisible and wary.

What he beheld there chilled the heart. On the street near the abbey, a monk was beset by a wraith and a hulking shadow-beast, creatures of formless night that tore at his flesh as he screamed and stumbled while another Inquisitorial acolyte watched with a grin, as though this horror were no less than his duty. Murchad could not bear it. Casting aside the safety of invisibility, he stepped forth, his form revealed as though a veil had been drawn from him, and he shouted at the acolyte to draw the man’s attention from the dying monk. The acolyte answered not with words but with assault, striding forward to lay his tainted hand upon Murchad, the touch backed by the powers of his order.

The company surged to the fight. Tiv, Ceangal, Dwårfy, Vedica, Jack, Vegvisir, and Murchad all took their places in the fray as steel and spell rose to meet the dark. Tiv, utterly exasperated with having to deal with undead who kept crossing the veil from their world back to this one, called upon the power given to her, turning her holy wrath upon the wraith. She raised her hand and cried for the foul creature to be gone. “Be gone, demon! Go away! Leave us!” and her faith struck like a silent thunder. The wraith, no mere phantasm but a thing of hungry death, disintegrated violently under her command, unmade in an instant.  Vedica thought the gesture she made was birdlike…but not the Holy Spirit’s dove.

Vedica, ever nimble, took advantage of the distraction and slipped behind the acolyte. With the ruthless precision of a rogue, she drove her blade into a vulnerable gap and dealt him a grave wound. Her strike was followed by Jack, who came up in close combat and finished the acolyte with a clean stroke, the man collapsing before he could even call upon his god again. Meanwhile, Ceangal turned his bow upon the shadow beast still making mincemeat of the monk. His shots found their mark more than once, drawing the creature’s baleful gaze away from its helpless prey. Dwårfy trudged closer, raising a crossbow that loosed a bolt but delivering only a scratch in the creature’s dim flesh. The beast, enraged, bounded toward Murchad, but fortune and the warrior’s skill conspired to keep its claws from him. It was Dwårfy at last, closing in with war hammer in each hand, who landed the crushing blows that brought it down.

As the last echoes of that clash faded, a dreadful realization dawned. From over the abbey walls and along the streets came more cries and pleas for help, the sounds of fighting, and the splintering of wood and stone. The attack was not confined to the hillside. All about the island, shadow beasts and wraiths were falling upon monks, nuns, and guards alike. The company could see, farther up the way, city guards locked in desperate struggle with more such creatures, and another Inquisitorial acolyte standing among them. Tiv spoke of their duty not only to themselves but to the people: if they did nothing, this island might be stripped of life entirely. “Let’s not let this island be barren,” she said, and in that grim jest lay a vow.

They ran, no longer bound by the measured pace of battle but by the urgency of rescue, boots thudding across the paving stones. Vegvisir, calling upon his enchanted boots, sped ahead, using his vantage and speed to survey the fields of conflict. Over the abbey wall, he heard and glimpsed battles in the courtyard garden where monks labored under the assault of more shadowed horrors. The party split only as far as the flow of the streets forced them, converging again where the fighting thickened.

In the street before the abbey, they found two guards facing a wraith and another shadow beast, with an acolyte behind them, his hand already burning with the power to cause grievous harm. Before the party could intervene, the acolyte reached out and laid the curse of wounds upon one of the guards, felling him where he stood. The company charged, Tiv at their head. She once more lifted her hand against the undead and turned another wraith, which disintegrated under the force of her holy fury as though it had never been. The others followed in quick order. Vedica’s arrows flew true, Jack’s bolts and blade struck the acolyte, and Ceangal, with a keen mage’s cunning, split his magic missiles between acolyte and beast, wounding both with darts of force. Dwårfy used the narrow windows in the abbey wall to fire upon a shadow beast in the adjoining room, his bolts threading through stone-framed gaps to draw the monster’s blood.

Within moments, the street-side foes were cut down, but screams still rose from the rooms inside the abbey walls. Through those same narrow windows came cries of a nun beset, and the sounds of a struggle in a small chamber beyond. The company did not hesitate. Dwarfy planted himself by the window, firing crossbow bolts into the chaos within, while Vegvisir, his boots of speed activated, ran to find an entrance that would give him passage into the inner courtyard. The path he found was a narrow way, open to the sky, leading into a garden yard where three monks fought for their lives against shadow beasts and wraiths. There too the attack had come with ferocity, and the monks, armed with little more than gardening tools and scant courage, were overmatched.

Seeing the scale of the assault, Vegvisir turned to one of his most powerful arts. Standing where he could see the heart of the struggle but not yet risk the lives of the innocent, he called forth an ice storm. Hail and frozen shards roared down from the sky in a square of bitter winter thirty paces across, a storm that spared only one outlying creature but engulfed the others in a frigid maelstrom. In that blast of unnatural cold, the wraiths and beasts caught in its center were shattered and unmade; when the storm passed but a moment later, three of the enemies lay destroyed. Yet the tempest left the ground slick and treacherous, and the fight was not yet finished. One beast remained, menacing a single monk who still stood, and Vegvisir stepped closer, attempting to snare the creature with his whip, only to find that his weapon passed through its shadowy form.

Murchad, Vedica, Jack, Ceangal, Dwårfy, and Tiv all converged on the courtyard through the narrow passage. Tiv, breathless but unwavering, ran at full speed, while the others dashed to close the distance. Vegvisir, forced to abandon finesse, drew a silvered dagger and struck with all the skill he could muster, his blow landing solidly in the beast’s uncanny flesh. Murchad followed with a mighty strike of his own, the two together driving the creature to a staggering retreat. Yet it turned upon Vegvisir in its pain, its claws raking across the mage and leaving him grievously hurt. Tiv could see how close he stood to death and muttered, with grim humor, that she did a great deal of first aid for him even when she did not spend her spells.

The company pressed harder. Slings and arrows whistled through the air; Dwårfy and others moved in, though footing remained treacherous from the fading ice. At last, with a combination of Vegvisir’s dagger, Murchad’s steel, and Vedica’s and Tiv’s attacks, the final beast in the courtyard was brought low. The nun they had heard through the window, Sister Talusa, stood bloodied and shaken, marked with a red stain but alive. Dwårfy, ever a dour soul but not unkind, gave her a wave, and she returned it faintly. The company was still not granted peace, for more cries came from deeper within the abbey and from the town streets beyond.

There followed then a desperate running battle through the abbey, its side rooms, and its adjacent courts, as the companions became not adventurers seeking treasure, but the last bulwark against an island’s annihilation. They hurried from fight to fight, with scarcely a breath between. In one chamber, Tiv again burst through a doorway to find a wraith tormenting monks, and with a now-familiar gesture, she lifted both hands and flipped off the undead again in a strange mixture of irreverence and holiness. “One for each wraith,” she said, and under that “holy profanity,” as the others called it, both spirits disintegrated at once. The sight of her double-barreled dismissal of the dead became a dark sort of jest among them, the only laughter to be found in such a bleak hour.

Again and again, Vedica used her bow when opportunity allowed, slipping through chaos like a shadow at the edge of lantern-light. Jack, often late to each melee by quirks of position and distance, nonetheless arrived in time to hurl crossbow bolts or drive his blade home against acolytes and beasts, grumbling good-naturedly about always being the caboose. Ceangal’s bow sang tirelessly, and now and then he turned once more to magic missile, sending bolts of force to finish wounded foes or split his power cleverly between targets to hasten their doom. Dwårfy, whenever he could force his way through doorways choked with allies, waded in with hammer and off-hand weapon, dealing heavy blows; once, he nearly fell when a shadow beast tore into him with terrible strength, injuring him so gravely that Tiv and Vegvisir had to staunch his wounds with first aid and magic alike.

Vegvisir, for his part, balanced the conserving of his arcane strength with the immediate needs of survival. He used his dwindling store of silver sling-stones carefully, each one launched at a shadow beast or wraith with desperate precision. At times he missed, and at times he cursed his own frailty, but again and again he found a way to contribute: a sling-stone that finished a wounded beast, a spell placed so as to spare innocents, or a step taken at great risk so that others might see where to go and whom to save. Between combats, Tiv used what skills she had to bind the worst of their hurts, especially for Dwårfy and Vegvisir, who drank his healing potions until he had no more.  “I knew I’d been saving these for a reason,” he said. “Welcome to the reason,” replied Murchad, dryly.

Throughout these struggles, the Inquisitor’s acolytes proved themselves as deadly to the island’s defenders as the shadow-creatures. In one clash within a building, an acolyte placed a sleep enchantment upon defenders only to find his magic thwarted by the resilience of his foes, while in another, an acolyte’s cause wounds felled yet another guard before he himself was shot down by a storm of arrows, bolts, and blades from the party. Once, Murchad carefully used a poisoned bolt he had prepared beforehand, hurling it at an acolyte and dropping the man outright with a single, deadly strike. The party fought not only to keep themselves alive but to shelter the guards who still stood, though too often those guards paid the price. One guard, trying to aid the party against a shadow beast, stepped too close and was torn apart in moments, his courage rewarded only by a swift and brutal death.

The company’s path wound from the outer slope near the secret catacomb entrance through the abbey’s outer rooms, into the inner garden and its flanking buildings – the refectory, an office, and another passageway, then out again toward the town’s edge. Along the way, they reached the quarters of the townspeople and the library doors through which they heard librarian Alexander, who had helped them earlier, calling for aid. All the while, debates flickered at the edges of battle: whether something they had done in the catacombs, perhaps slaying the lich and the revenant they had found there, had triggered this attack, whether the acolytes and their Inquisitrix had chosen “now or never” when the party descended below. There were bitter jests and weary sighs, lamentations that they could not have one peaceful day upon this island, and repeated, almost plaintive talk of wanting an “island vacation” unmarred by shadows and screams.

Yet, though exhaustion tugged at their limbs and the din of conflict seemed endless, they did not falter. Again and again, Tiv raised her hands in that strange sign of defiance and faith that caused wraiths to unravel; again and again, Vedica and Jack and Murchad stepped into harm’s way to keep a beast’s claws off a terrified monk or nun. Ceangal’s arrows and Vegvisir’s spells flew where they were most needed, and Dwårfy’s hammer thudded like a tolling bell of doom for the enemies of the living. In such wise, they carved a bloody path through the abbey compound and the streets nearby, rescuing some, arriving too late for others, but always pressing on toward the next cry for help.

At length, they came near the library, where the door stood open, and Alexander’s voice carried out in desperate appeal, while in the street outside, two guards fought yet more beasts. The party drew up, weapons in hand, hearts steeled for yet another battle among many. Initiative was called for, and as Murchad rounded a corner to gain sight of the next threat, they all prepared to commit themselves once more.