Cyroosta convinced Boamund that, before you seal up the presumed Godlearner sorceror's ruin, you'd best give it a thorough exploration. She seemed keen on the bottles and fluids and such, potentially as a boon to her herbalist and healer role in the community (and struggle against Evracian competitors).
So in you went, with frequent trips back outside as the sorcerous shrinking defense continued its inexorable expansion on your bodies, but ebbed predictably once you stepped outside. You explored the ruined library and found an old skeleton, and began excavating it from the mud. You also recovered the shrunken party members' gear, which the preservative fluid undine had piled up in one corner of its room. There was still some of its volatile fluid there in the crucible, too.
In the central room, you experimented with the other crucible of fluid and confirmed it was a powerful, and evaporating, acid. You managed to extract a small flask of it, and found later that it did not dissolve bone, strangely enough.
Ciddar's keen eyes spotted two glass bricks set into the rear wall of the chamber, and you realized that this wall was fairly intact, unlike the corners to either side which had been caving in as in the library. First you pushed one into the wall, causing a little collapse of the ceiling as the chamber rumbled (Ciddar nimbly dodged aside), then you pushed another (under cover of a shield) and the same thing happened. Finally you pushed both and a large section of wall slid downward into the floor with a rumble. A 20m stretch of bricked corridor was revealed, and it lacked the sparkling sorcery but was intact!
You explored this corridor, which ended in another small, cubical chamber. On either side of the room were a few skeletons that were coated in glass, and stood upon old wooden plinths– there were two humans, a dwarf and a troll, and what seemed to be a unicorn. They had small labels attached to the plinths that seemed to be identifiers– the humans were �Amenh� and �Smuthsun�, the dwarf was �IGM 100/986“, the troll 'Carneg' and the unicorn Eclipse my masterpiece. The far wall was a twisted morass of glass and rubble, where a door/corridor must have once been, but it proved fairly impervious to damage. And then the magic of the room began growing, as the secret door rumbled and the ceiling around it shook, dislodging a great pile of rubble that blocked the entrance and trapped you in!
Searching desperately for an exit, you ran out of time, and the magic burst forth– but only Maugis was claimed as a victim this time. Not only was he shrunk, but he was coated in glass and yet remained alive! The sorcery, thankfully, did not return; the room was again left in shadow. You tried smashing one of the human and dwarf skeletons, but that did not help. Once uncovered, the bony contents of the skeletons swiftly turned to dust. However, soon Ciddar managed to clear some rubble and squeeze his way out. The Baronet tried to follow but got stuck and scraped up a bit before he could be extricated. And so you finally made it out of this hidden passage and chamber, and brought the “statue” of Maugis to Cyroosta to see what could be done.
Cyroosta was interested in the new passage much more than in Maugis's plight, but soon enough the Captain grew frustrated and dropped Maugis on the manor floor, shattering his prison and leaving him quite injured. But Cyroosta applied the last antidote, save a final few drops, and Maugis again grew to almost his full size. The three farmers and sailors were left in their diminutive state, but she hoped to find a way to help them. In explaining what you'd found, Cyroosta revealed that she had nebulous dreams that included words like those on the labelled statues, such as Eclipse. She interpreted this to mean that the local spirits were complaining to her of wounds in their land, and that this cursed place must indeed be destroyed or otherwise rendered less of a danger. Whatever the alchemist that had been living in this area in the Second Age was doing, it seemed to involve preserving dead things, maybe live things too, and experimenting with ways to combine their talents of alchemy and glassmaking; possibly necromancy too! This disgusted and intrigued you…
Inyana confided in the Baronet, during a private chat in her favourite flower garden, that his shrinking reminded her of something else: she'd found a filthy, muddy statue-like thing, a shrunken, dirty version of him, in the swamps. She caught it (it was animate) and smashed its head in, then buried it in her garden and refused to exhume it. But she said that the peasants had told her rumours of seeing other of these things, even late last year, and you followed this lead. Speaking to one of the farmers who saw one lately, you learned that he'd seen a living mud-version of him one day in his fields, and shouted in terror at its sudden appearance near him and its “angry” expression. He and it both fled, and that was the end of that encounter.
So what was this eerie menace? You figured that it must relate to an evil sorcerous taint leaking from the alchemist's ruin, although some of you suspected the Vadeli too, and/or something else. You searched for one but did not find a trace. Another peasant in a nearby community had been said to have seen one of these things, and spoken to it, and then he told his tale to the Rokari church and the new vicar had him burned at the stake for this heresy- sending a message that “consorting with demons” was not to be tolerated.
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