Ahappi and Boamund faced off with the horse-abomination with foolhardy bravado, but that didn't last long. It had many humanoid and horsey limbs to strike and parry with, and was heavily armoured with bone and hardened mounds of dead flesh. Ahappi was stunned, then grabbed and pulled close to the monster, then as the thing began to consume him Boamund took the opportunity to run like hell, back to the others. Maugis was slowly dismantling the rubble choking the entrance, under the Baronet's watchful eye (and haughty directions), and it took some time for Boamund to convince them of the urgency to come inside and help the Captain. Soon enough, Maugis was climbing the rubble pile and was pulled down, with some abdominal bruising, to the bottom on the other side. The Baronet took some cajoling from the deafened, frantic Lord Boamund, but relented. It was a fateful decision…
You rushed down to find the Captain's right leg consumed and left leg maimed. The terrifying thing shrieked and dropped its food, rushing you. The Baronet's Sword of Menekeyil shone brightly, confirming the undead nature of the nightmare, and that sword proved its power in striking many wounds on the horse-head– but the creature was hard to kill. Maugis tried banish and holdfast spells to little effect, and even prayed for help in desperation, but to little avail. He did strike it with a thrown dagger that was surprisingly effective, and used a Regenerate spell that surely saved the Captain's life from bleeding out. Boamund's spear proved at first to have little effect except to distract it while the Baronet whittled it down, but Lord Shaven kept being kicked backwards by the heavy hooves of the horror, taking brutal wounds in the process and then having to close in again.
The fight looked bad at the start and kept getting worse, even with your most heroic efforts (all party/individual luck pts were used up!). Boamund managed to slip free of the thing's grasp with a masterful parry just as he'd been grabbed and drawn close for the killing bite. And then… the Baronet was caught, slipping on a puddle of blood while trying to parry the monster's powerful kick. It was a terrible mistake. The great rotting hoof connected and shattered his skull, splattering Maugis and Boamund with its lordly contents. And Lord Shaven fell that day, with the undead-slaying sword being knocked behind the thing, out of reach. Boamund, however, was resolute, and proved himself a true hero and loyal ally. He struck the final, valiant blow to its head and it teetered, falling with a crunch where you both had stood moments before (and where Shaven lay), but Maugis and Boamund leapt aside with aplomb. The eldritch beast lay in ruin, amongst the ruins of two great warrirors.
Maugis rushed to the Captain's body and found him barely alive. Shaven was not so lucky; there was no question of that. You recovered the sword and the two bodies and took them out, then Maugis investigated the room (finding little of note) and Boamund returned to have a final look. His keen eyes spotted a rune-carved circle in the room's centre, where the beast had first stood, and a great crack ran through that circle. A machine of some sort stood smashed and charred next to the circle, and remnants of cages or stalls lay shattered or burned around the room. A passage led downwards, but was completely buried in collapsed debris; the earthquake had rent a great crack here, too. His mind's eye reconstructed the events that led you to this baleful outcome: the quake uncovered the building and broke the circle containing the horse-abomination. It smashed the machine that may have been keeping the other cages intact, and the undead things rushed out, blasting as they came. Some of them must have blasted each other (perhaps some were also waiting in the big pillared chamber above?), explaining all the bodies outside and the undead moose-thing you'd first met. The tone of the place was of utter madness, born of centuries of being bottled, masterless, in this ancient ruin. Depraved, undead, warped things unleashed to run amok, destroying anything in their paths including each other. But you, as far as you could see, had ended it all.
Boamund and Maugis moved on some distance from the ruins and camped in a good, defensible spot that Boamund found amongst the badlands. They finally had time to rest, with their friends' bodies close at hand, and ponder how to get to safety. But as night fell, safety seemed ever so far away. In the lonely wilds, the peace was shattered, by an unearthly, bonechilling howl that echoed through the canyons…
© Copyright - 2000-2024 - John Hutchinson, Tim Evans, Pete Nash, Colin Driver and Gordon Alford