To whom it may concern..
Now that Esk is missing, presumed lost to us, and since the impact to Sor0 is so great, and since we have no idea if we will make it out alive, I’ll take it upon myself to hastily write down what happened to us, and what we did to them..
Esk probably left off after we killed that blasted Hydra and made our way up to what we thought was the top of the ziggurat. The damned ziggurat that looks just like the one in my vision of slaughter, where the blood of the Tieflings coloured the entire fucking thing red. My tail shivers just thinking about that, we should never have messed with those boxes.
After the fire beards helped us to the room in the top, where the damned machine is, that was used to make all these ungodly undead. My paladin sense was almost overwhelmed in the presence of so much undead evil. I gripped my holy symbol in a white knuckled grip and breathed deeply and prayed to my lord. We peered around the curtain and all paled at the sight of a whole procession of skeletons, a number of clay golems and the uncanny sense of something bad, of something even worse.
Thorn darted in and cast a grease spell on the stairs that the skeletons were emerging from, causing a great chaos and buying us some time.
After the golems started approaching our tapestry I stepped inside and the battle was on! We had a hard time dealing with these. Their punches sapped us of strength and their clay baked skin was harder than almost anything I have had to fight so far.
As we brought one down something bad happened, an undead beholder, if you can imagine such an unholy abomination, emerged from the pit in the middle of the chamber! It’s gaze felt heavy on us all and the lifelessness in the room was chilling.
As one of us went down, and we tried to heal ourselves, nothing happened. The connection to our deities was faltering!! Fortunately Tritherion blessed us, and his holy aura that has been surrounding me lately helped us all resist the evil attacks of the beholder. He shot rays of sleep, charm, death, necrotic, fear and more disastrous stuff at us. We hid behind the pillar to get out of his gaze and managed to get some healing done. Nevertheless Ricardo was completely bashed senseless and turned to stone! He came back and we were able to reanimate him. Esk became permanently weak as a mouse, with almost no health left and a grey look on her cheeks from an effect of an attack of the golems.
Thorn had hidden in the rubble to get away from the gaze. He was zapped horribly by the machine that makes skeletons for his efforts. After that he decided to mount a distraction, hoping to draw the aberration away from us. He screamed something at the beholder and jumped into the seemingly bottomless pit. I’m not sure what he hoped to achieve, but the beholder ignored it or didn’t notice, and it was the end of Thorn. I can’t say I liked him much, being the lackey of those government types in Sor0, but he was here fighting with us when it mattered, and his bravery was beyond a doubt.
After dealing with a couple of the golems and having two more arrive, we started aiming at that nightmare of a beholder. I leapt onto Grifferion and went to face it. It kept shooting its rays of instant death at us, and one of them hit Grifferion, and instantly she started shooting up. I jumped off and with pain in my heart I had to dismiss her, as I felt the necrotic influence override our bond.
In the end everyone tried to stay inside the aura of Thrithereon, and that made all the difference, along with the barding help from our little leprechaun friend Corry. Hit after hit, from firebolts to withering blights to arrows hurt the flying creep, although it seemed that it could just deny us our most grievous attacks. I swear we hit it with a terrible magical attack and it just shook it off.
When it first appeared Esk screamed something like GUYS THIS IS FUCKING TERRIBLE WE SHOULD RUN! And I must admit that I almost left. It was Romero who looked at me and steadied me with the realisation that it is up to us. There is nobody else. If we do not save our Sor0, then Sor0 does not get saved. The buck stops here. It was that realisation that drove me to dance, but I am getting ahead of myself.
It was all too much for Corry who fled screaming down the tunnel that we came from, and rightly so. Can’t say I blame him, these horrors were way above all our pay grades. But hey, somebody has to take a stand right?
Just as I was about to teleport up into the air and bring all my possible might into battle with the beholder it received a fantastic sneaky attack and crumbled. The deflated body dropping to the floor. Romero grumbled something about ‘that damned kill stealer does it AGAIN’, but I was just happy to see it go down. We finished off the last Golem and after dealing with some left-over skeletons we looked around.
Someone did something clever to stop the skeletons from coming up the stairs, I don’t remember how but it bought us another minute.
Some of us started bashing the machinery around the hole, and managed to destroy one or two of the evil things.
We looked around the chamber and came upon a stack of materials that were obviously dropped there by the roaming skeletons. We could not believe our eyes, Esk took a full inventory but there were a few fantastic things. The most magical of weapons! A quarterstaff almost glowing with runes (+3), a longsword with a humming aura of power (+3), a great axe looking like it was forged in the breath of a dragon (+3), a box with a pot of magical paint, and there was a Mace. Trithereon pushed me forward and I wrapped my hand around the Mace, as our Monk picked up the quarterstaff and our little halfling raised the longsword. I also brought along the great axe for safekeeping, perhaps one of my comrades will have use for it later.
The mace (Rod of Lordly might!) was unlike any weapon that any of us had ever seen. It was of the finest quality and obviously highly magical (+3!) with six buttons on it. As it was these buttons would save our life later on!
We gave it all we had, got turned to stone and back, got denied our healing, lost permanent hit points, went down and were revived, spent almost all of our spells and abilities and in the end it was only Thithereon and his blessing and his aura surrounding me that gave us the strength to resist this hell. I emphasise this so that any reading this can know his greatness.
But no time to sit still and count the treasure, the skeletons were pressing up the ramp!!