"Uhh... guys?" I could hear
Dante's voice from down the hall.
"We're in here!" I called out,
relieve that the footsteps were from an ally.
Dante had returned, but even after
healing, Hamlin didn’t feel well, so he stayed behind with the priests to rest.
We quickly explained what had happened
while he was gone.
When we mentioned Cairn stepping in the
water and then going into a blind rage temporarily, Dante asked, "Does
that always happen when you step in water?"
Cairn shook his head and sighed.
Dante wandered around the room a little
and pointed at the demon’s body on the ground. “What was a quasit doing here?”
he asked aloud.
“Is that what that thing is called?” I
asked back.
Dante nodded.
“Well, I believe it was doing demon
things.”
“That sounds about right for a quasit,”
Dante replied.
When he got up on the dais, the bard asked
what the golden goop was in the basin on the little altar, before walking back
down one of the sets of stairs. We told him the quasit dripped some of its
blood into the thing, and two sin eaters emerged from the pool of water in the
middle of the room.
"Oo! I wanna try that!" Dante
ran back up the stairs and over to the basin.
"Are you serious?" I asked.
Then I turned to Cairn. “Is he serious?”
Cairn just sighed.
"Of course! I wanna see if I can
summon a demon!"
"I'm leaving," Cairn said
flatly, heading for the door. I followed him.
We had just stepped outside the door when
Dante went up to the altar and actually cut himself, dripping blood into the
yellow liquid. Two sin eaters emerged from the pool in the middle of the room,
one heading toward Dante as he exclaimed, "Obey me!"
Cairn sighed and stepped back into the
room, moving into a defensive stance. I fired an arrow through the doorway at
the one that was advancing toward us, but missed.
It moved up next to Cairn. Swing and a
miss.
Shadow ran up and took a bite out of it
while the other sin eater clawed at Dante, messing him up pretty badly. He
retaliated with his shard blast thing, ripping off a good chunk of it, but it
remained standing.
Cairn wounded the one in front of him,
and I ran up, leaping directly over the sin eater, clearing it by a solid foot,
spinning in midair and smashing down with my staff on its head as I landed. It
collapsed in a heap.
"Did you see that? You guys saw
that, right? That was awesome. Tell me I'm awesome."
"You're awesome," Cairn
replied, not very enthusiastically.
“I’ll take it.” I gave him a thumbs up
and an ear-to-ear grin.
Shadow ran and jumped up onto the
platform the altar was on to help the bard. Dante managed to avoid getting hit
again and stepped back, throwing a kukri at the sin eater.
Cairn and I moved up to help, each
moving toward a different set of stairs. Cairn got to it first and finished it
off.
"Can we please not mess with demon
magic going forward?" he said flatly.
Dante suddenly started playing a song
that described the little basin on the altar. It was apparently a runewell, and
would keep summoning sin eaters until it ran out of the power that was put into
it.
“That was… interesting,” I said.
“I just remembered a song about what
this thing is.”
"Apparently… So, is there any way
to stop it? Like, break it?"
"I think boiling holy water?"
Dante shrugged. We figured we could probably get some of the priests in town to
take care of the thing.
We continued telling Dante about what
we'd done while he was gone, and mentioned the pits with zombies in them.
"Oh, and we got this off that
Koruvus guy." I pulled out the smoldering longsword. Dante asked to have
it for a little while. It gave him more reach than his kukris in close
quarters. Seemed reasonable enough, so I handed it over.
Dante healed himself and Cairn healed
his cat, and we moved along to the last set of stairs we had come upon. The
druid took the quasit's body and stuffed it in a bag before we left the room.
The doorway at the top of those stairs revealed
a small, circular room, with a mural running around it. It depicted a woman who
looked a lot like the statue Dante took the bejeweled ranseur from, killing
people. There were a lot of dead bodies in the mural. There was a small pool of
clear, clean water, only a few feet across, that was constantly flowing up to
the top, then out into another circle around it where the water washed out of
the room.
We found another spiral staircase,
heading up, but it was collapsed. I examined the rubble, and came to the
conclusion it had been collapsed longer than the town had even been in this
location.
With no other paths, we left the tunnels
and headed to the cathedral to talk to the priests. I asked to talk to Father
Zantus alone, and when I showed him the book written in Abyssal, he told me in
no uncertain terms to leave, and take the evil writings with me.
Cairn pulled the quasit out of his bag
and presented it to Father Xantus. "How do we fight these?"
"With cold iron." He looked
over at me as I was waiting for Cairn. "Please take that book out of
here."
I asked him if he knew of anyone who
might be able to help me translate them, as they were likely our best lead to
finding the enemies of Sandpoint. He said the scholar Brodrick Quink might be
able to help me, and I hurried out of the cathedral.
Cairn wanted to go to the blacksmith to
look into this "cold iron" that the head priest had mentioned. The
blacksmith, Das Korvut, said he knew of the material, but didn't have any on
hand. Cairn and I each ordered a weapon, and he said it would take some time to
acquire the material. I ordered a shortsword, and Cairn requested a new two
handed battleaxe. We paid half the fee upfront.
We found Brodrick Quink sitting at the
base of the Old Light, where I first met him, muttering to himself.
"I knew it! I knew it! They are
wrong!" the old man exclaimed to himself as we approached
"Who's wrong this time, my good
man?" I asked him.
"They all are! All the Thassalonian
scholars are wrong. This wasn't a lighthouse, it was a weapon!"
"Yes, we talked about that before
briefly," I reminded him. He blinked a few times then nodded.
I handed him the book, telling him we
found it in tunnels under the city.
"Hmm… It seems like some sort of
beastiary… No, no… this is just a Lamashtu holy book. It's not useful to anyone
who isn't a priest of that deity." He handed it back to me.
"I'm a priest of Lamashtu,"
Dante said.
"No you are not," Quink
replied.
"I could be."
"You are not deformed, nor are you
a Mother of Monsters."
Dante walked a few steps away, looking
dejected.
"Was the Sandpoint area settled by
anyone else since the Thassalonians built here?"
"You don't know much about the
Thassalonians, do you, my boy? They disappeared millenia ago." He went on to describe a number of ruins around
the continent.
I managed to interrupt him after a
couple minutes in order to answer the question he asked, and told him I had
only been able to study the language from some books I came into, but wasn’t
able to learn much about their history from them.
I think I sort of reset his train of
thought when I did that, because he blinked a few times then looked around at
each of us for a moment.
Dante was using the jeweled ranseur as a
walking stick now, and it caught Quink's eye. He said it looked like the weapon
belonging to Alaznist, one of the Thassalonian Runelords. There were seven of
them in total, but he didn’t really feel like talking about them more.
Dante took a closer look at the ranseur,
then said sadly, "Aww, it isn't magical."
Cairn mentioned the seven pointed stars
we found in the ruins under Sandpoint. Quink said it was a symbol of
Thassalonian magic, each point of the star representing a different Runelord
and their school of magic. That was all we were going to get out of him about
the Thassalonians that day.
Later that day, we escorted the priests
into the tunnels when they were ready to cleanse the altar, in case there were
any enemies that had somehow escaped our first pass through or snuck in through
some hidden passage while we were away. It hadn’t been long, since the priests
wanted to cleanse the evil as soon as possible, but you could never be too
careful where demons were involved.
It ended up being a rather uneventful
expedition.
We met with the mayor again, and
informed her of what we'd found in the tunnels so far. Dante suggested she
increase the guard on the different entry points to the town, and encourage the
militia members to stay armed at all times, because the attack Tsuto hinted at
could come at any time. She agreed.
We descended into the tunnels again and
took the easterly branch. It continued on for about 600 yards, before it
started to angle downward and water was starting to drip down the walls, before
eventually becoming fully flooded.
We turned back and took the final,
northern path, and it led to a beach. There was a burned out firepit, and some
half eaten rabbit carcasses. It was at the base of the cliff somewhat northeast
of Sandpoint.
We told the mayor, then decided to turn
in for the day, and return to the water-filled passage the next day. Cairn said
he had a spell he could use, but would need to prepare it first, that would let
him breathe underwater for a couple minutes, so he could more easily explore
the sunken passage.
We returned to the tunnels and Cairn
cast his spell, then dove into the water. After a number of minutes, Cairn came
up the passage behind Dante and I, still fairly drenched after walking through
the streets to get back to us. It turned out the passage circled almost the
entire town, and the current was fairly strong. His spell wouldn’t have lasted
long enough to come back the way he left.
We reported our findings to the mayor
once again, and she said she would look into solutions, maybe recruiting the
Carpenter's Guild to find a way to seal or collapse the tunnels.
The next day, the blacksmith approached
Cairn and I at the Rusty Dragon as we ate lunch, and let us know the shipment
he was expecting that morning never arrived. The cold iron for the weapons we
commissioned, as well as other supplies, and gold to pay for finished goods
were all missing.
We came to an agreement that retrieving
the shipment would cover the other half of our payment.
As we headed out, Cairn marked a spot on
the cliff above the exit we'd found so that we could post lookouts to see if
anyone was coming toward the cave entrance.
We found the missing cart fairly
quickly, the horse drawing it lying slain next to it, and the cargo left
intact.
We followed tracks that led away from it
and came upon Pauper's Grave, a cemetery north of where we found the cart. A
man's body was in the middle of the cemetery, stripped naked and cut open.
As we moved closer, we could see a seven-pointed
star carved into the man's chest. When we got even closer, I heard rustling in
the trees and bushes around the cemetery, and spotted humanoid, probably undead
things moving toward us.
"Hey Dante, that Bardic Knowledge
thing have anything to say about what these things are?" I asked as I
fired an arrow into one of the creatures.
"Yep. They're ghouls."
They closed in on us as Dante began to
sing, Cairn and I taking chunks out of a couple of them. Shadow took a bite out
of one, but recoiled, spitting and coughing and looking a little ill.
Dante skewered one with his new
longsword, then I got bit. I immediately felt a little weaker and somewhat
nauseated.
Dante was carving up ghouls with his
smoldering blade, felling three of them while I struggled to land a hit. I got
hit again and drank a potion after the bard killed the ghoul on me.
Cairn finished off the last one, and we
decided to take the dead man's body to the cart while Dante ran back to town to
get a horse to pull it.
When we returned, the blacksmith paid
Dante with a small sack of gold. "I had deals with the other two, but not
with you. Thank you for your help." He said he would expedite the work on
our weapons as further thanks so we could better take care of the threat to the
town.
We made our way to the cathedral and
Father Zantus offered to cure the disease from myself and Shadow. I thanked him
for his assistance and excused myself to go get Brodrick Quink to see if he
knew of any sort of ritual the Thassalonians might have done with corpses since
their runic marking was on the body.
Unfortunately, he didn't know about
anything like that, and it took a couple minutes after we arrived back at the cathedral
to even find that out because he dry heaved for a few minutes when he first saw
the eviscerated body.
I guess just describing the situation to
him would have worked just fine. I took note of that for the future, though I
hoped we wouldn’t be finding a lot of bodies in that predicament.
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