Hiya,
Sea Season, day 1 of the new year Solarum Temporum 1623: you walked blinking out of the dawn back into the familiar blasted landscape. Whereas weather in the canyon during Sacred Time had been non-existent, now the season's winds came blowing in from the west, keeping the mists moving but not dispersing them, as Iphara's power remained strong this season. You wondered, then, what would Fire Season bring? The land was scarce of life and water but Boamund and Miguel did well to scrounge what they could. There were more abundant signs of Second Age civilization here: many bits of ruins, patches of old road, but nothing of true interest at first.
Mid-morning, set on a sloping hillside you found a dome of pale flickering light, ~3m diameter, and investigated. Boamund found that it had a cool empty feeling but was harmless, so he stepped in and was bathed in the strange light, which stuck to him as he left the magical dome. He continued glowing as you travelled, readily visible from the edge of the fog.
Later that afternoon, you heard a screech followed by a resonating boom and vibration, off some minutes in the distance. Warily approaching, you found a smoking, blackened crater of ~25m diameter with remains in the middle hidden by the smoke, and remnants of Uz bones scattered around the crater. With some inspection, you realized that a smouldering round rocky shape about 1m diameter was silently, very unnaturally ascending every 2.5 minutes or so, then crashing back down with that screeching explosion into the same spot every 2.5 minutes later-so some ancient Godlearner sorcery was cycling through, over and over, every 5 minutes, slowly deepening and widening this crater. You had to dive out of the way to avoid the impact once, and easily did so, but wisely figured it was not a good thing to stick around.
Boamund heard movements and spotted Giranois crossing your path ahead. You approached and soon they spotted you-a group of them, perhaps a family unit, fled ahead while their war leader, fully armoured and bearing a big stone axe, approached with squinty-eyed caution. He was a squat, very ugly man with an angular, flattened, barely human face that was like a squished frog's. He replied to your hailing that he was Axe-Faced Scrodge of the Brogha family; at first he was sceptical that you were the Thralls of Granno but you quickly convinced him and he relaxed. He explained: “Our elder Three-Eared Maarn saw bad things in the weeks of prayer, and warned us. The bad things came-it is what the Giranois feared, the return of the spider-monsters. We Brogha fled in time but others did not. We Brogha will hide here in the shadows of Good Toad Food and hope for safety. There is no hope in fighting the spider-monsters. Even the swamp-spiders feared them in Granno's time.” The spider-monsters lay in the swamps to the south whereas you were headed east. You were about to leave Scrodge when he continued giving you information. He was insistent that without Granno's power no one could defeat these spider-monsters, and you would be wise to avoid them.
Ensuing discussion revealed that the swamp-spiders' queen had a deal with Granno to keep peace and not eat the people of Granno if they kept the faith and stayed out of their swamps. Yomil had allies from the evil oceans that brought spider-monsters before the Shattering, but Granno led his people to fight them off, and they have been gone since. At this point, Scrodge got a grunt and a side-eye from a fellow Brogha listening in while telling this, and looked angrily over, barking “Everyone knows that, is no secret! Even Thralls of Granno should know. They are no necromancers in service to Yomil-that they have proven! Now is no time for petty worries so shut up!” Scrodge then explained that the Brogha elders remember that some of Granno's enemies were spider-folk, some like a humanoid spider and some a spidery human; but the worst were the monster-spiders, which were nightmare blends of the worst of both humans and spiders. The first spider-folk came from afar, over the accursed seas, and once were friends of Granno but eventually betrayed him. Miguel reasoned that these were the Arachan Timinit servants of the Vadeli; humanoid spiders that live in Jrustela and seldom come this far away, but to hear that their kind or twisted forms of them are is not good news! Finally, Scrodge said that there is “a forbidden, decrepit ruin from Yomil's time-no Giranois dare near it.” He urged you avoid it to, but was his urging genuine or was he trying to pique your interest in it? You said you'd check it out and then go deal with these spider-monsters. Satisfied, he left to rejoin his fleeing family.
Soon thereafter you came to the ruin that Scrodge had pointed toward. Approaching the complex presented a view of the low, looming ruin (about 6m high on average), with crumbling walls supporting the squat windowless stone structure, and surrounded by bare dirt and rock except a few scraggly weeds poking through in patches. The building had an irregular rectangular shape as if it were a hodgepodge of integrated sub-buildings. There were numerous visible areas where the exterior surface had large black pockmarks on it that appear edto be from blasts, scarring the Second Age architecture and leaving only hints at remnants of attached bas-relief statuary or other decoration. A discomforting stillness hung over everything amidst the clinging mists; the breeze of Sea Season stopped blowing close to the ruins.
You saw corroded bronze double doors yawning half-ajar into a murky chamber on your side of the building, so Boamund peeked in. The floor sloped downward into a slightly underground chamber subdivided by short stone walls. Bones (of horses) cluttered the stalls enclosed by these. Entering the room, Boamund and Fraud were confronted by frightening visions of the energies that swept through here at the Shattering: they felt the ground quake, heard shrieking of horses, and saw a purple wave of energy lash through the room, scattering the bones– but after the vision, nothing hadchanged here. The room seemed safe so you all came in and found a bronze door at the far end inscribed with an elaborate design featuring Law, Metal and Mastery runes (you recognized these as designs inherent to Zistorites; the foreign cult of the machine-god, former allies of the Godlearners in this region of Seshnela, and artificers of parts of Arvonesse, the forge under the Mountain, the Venator, and more…).
There was a passage beyond the door, which was fairly intact save some charring peeking through edges of the ceiling. On further investigations of the ruin, you reasoned that the upper storey of this complex had burned down and almost entirely collapsed, but the ground floor persisted. The passage led to a left-turn down a long passage which also sent off a rightward passage, but also there was another intact bronze door on your right side near this first corner. The door opened easily. On entering the room a prickling sensation was felt on the skin as if some sort of energy was passed through (later experiences revealed that this was a preservative/containment enchantment). The small square room had a strong chemical odor and was lined with stout bronze shelves housing numerous intact barrels of various sizes. A short stairway upwards led to another door and passage to a room, where the floor was almost entirely gutted through collapse and fire as was the floor below. 10m below was the gray stone of a cellar chamber's floor. There was an rotting old doorway on the opposite side of the room on this level. There seemed three possible ways to walk across the space - a charred and crumbling section of floor clung to the right wall, a narrow pathway of fallen but still robust fire-hardened beams stretched across the centre like a bridge, and a sounder section of floor, only burned at the edge, ran along the right wall. Boamund did not like the look of this place so he and Fraud were turning around to go back when something bad happened.
Bog liked the spicy smell in the room of kegs and checked one out, boring a little hole in one with his tusk. A hissing noise escaped and the keg rumbled. He wondered what was going on and soon felt like there was danger, so he turned to leave the room via the entry. Just as he was departing, the room began exploding via a chain reaction across the kegs, echoing loudly through the halls and shaking ashes and dust from all cracks. The ancient ruin held, and the magics of that chamber contained the explosive damage, but Bog was crippled by multiple injuries and knocked unconscious for many minutes; Miguel and Fraud were also deafened by the massive boom.
Near that corner-doorway there was also an alcove-like passage, in which rubble choked entry into a much larger, charred and partially collapsed chamber, visible through a gap at the top of the rubble pile. You held off exploring beyond that rubble for now.
You returned to the first passage and explored the first right turn, finding only a collapsed, burned section of about two rooms; nothing interesting or safe to explore further. So you went down the long passage, which turned left to end at doors on the right side and doors on the left. The left doors' bronze was sculpted elaboratedly into twisting metal branches and other abstractions of vegetation; even the handles. The right doors were heavily corroded, with their Law runes barely visible. They were stuck shut but Boamund forced them. The room was conspicuously bare, with a strange texture to the stone walls which seemed scoured clean even of plaster, with the mortar showing signs of crumbling. The centre of the floor bore a 1m diameter bronze hatch, scarred much like the doors, and coated in some sort of whitish mucus or grease. There were double doors on the far side that were also badly corroded, and you figured they must lead back outside, to the north end of the building.
You opened (indeed, the doors seemed to open on the own) the other, tree-like doors into a bizarre metallic garden-courtyard, featuring facsimiles of local and exotic plants of many kinds in many metals. Cobbled paths led through the area, which was open to the sky; one path led straight; another bent to the right and went toward a low stone shack, overgrown with bronze vines, near the garden's middle. The plantlife quivers as if tussled by a nonexistent breeze. And it was not friendly plantlife, as Boamund found: entering, he soon encountered an aluminium vine that tried to entangle him, but he hacked it apart and took the remnant as a prize. He and Fraud then made a rush for the stone shack's bronze door while Miguel tended to the insensate Bog. Fraud faced an iron thornbush that lashed once with a flurry of iron thorns that stuck into his flesh; he ran to safety and extracted them. Past the door, plain stone stairs descended into a 6m half-domed stone chamber whose centre was dominated by a huge machine about 3m in most dimensions, emitting many grinding and whirring noises that made it almost impossible to hear (but Fraud, still deaf, did not mind or notice). The machine had a plethora of gears, dials, levers and nozzles, and numerous pipes reaching into the ceiling above. Fraud tried dropping some of the iron thorns into the gears and they did seem to stick and smoke, so you fled. As Fraud and Boamund ran back down the path, a golden flowerbed blasted Fraud with flames; and Boamund was assailed by a leaden tree branch that whacked at him; but both of you survived fine.
You returned to the rubble choking the side-passage. The rubble was easily climbed and allowed entry to a vast chamber (once certainly a series of rooms), which is a confusing labyrinth of rubble piles and collapsed ceiling forming major obstacles to movement and sight, although the masonry was stable. Boamund led the way as a low, growing howling echoed through the chamber. Miguel took Bog to hide in a corner while Fraud joined Boamund. Just then, a hideous form leapt at Boamund from stealthy ambush-it was a twisted grey-green corpse of what seems to be multiple human bodies stitched together in impossible ways, and augmented by bronze plates, fanged jaw, raking talons, and more insane mechanical devices. It crippled his left arm, bypassing his shield, and then as Fraud leapt in to defend him it tossed Boamund's barely conscious body aside and bit viciously at Fraud. However, you fought heroically and desperately against this wicked monstrous “mecha-ghoul” and with repeated blows to its armoured metal head you brought it down, although the fight was one you'd never want to repeat. Miguel returned as Bog began to stir again, and brought you healing as you patched up, your hearing returning as well, and you thought about your next move. This place had diverse dangers and while its masters were long dead, clearly they had left undead in their wake.
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