Chapter 4: The Trial of Ghyran

Upon their return to Cinderfall, the group find themselves jostled by heavy crowds, and the party is separated. Somewhere in the press, Kyre begins to curse. "Somebody stole my box!" he snarls bitterly. With a gasp, the Mistweaver feels around in her beltpouch for the magic ring she found, but it is gone as well. "Pickpockets," she sighs dejectedly. 

The adventurers decide to split up, to account for various tasks. Wordlessly the Darkoath Champion limps to the nave of the Chapel of the Shattered Blade, seeking succor for his wounds. The monks at the entrance try not to boggle with disbelief. 

The Mistweaver, emboldened by her previous success at the Guild of Thaumaturgists, returns with more volatile reagents, but ends up injuring herself. 

The Tenebrael Shard attempts Conran's challenge, and his efforts gain him some renown amongst the local toughs. 

The Fleetmaster, his booted leg twitching as if it had a mind of its own, stutter-steps to the Riftmarket, where he somehow manages to talk his way out of his cursed boot - and for a tidy profit, no less. 

The champions return to their usual haunt to find Morgwaeth waiting for them, hale and healthy. The barbarian is not. "His wounds will take some time to heal," the Hag Queen explains. 

Descending once more into the Underworld, the party returns to Krink's Brokerage without further incident. When the shopkeeper sees them, he squeaks and hides behind his wares. They part the black curtain, and find that the passage beyond no longer emanates heat, though it still reeks of brimstone. They find themselves walking down an ever descending spiral, its crystal walls carved in the likeness of twisted roots. Shimmering insects crawl in the shadows, chiming softly as they scuttle over crystal blossoms. Birdsong and the drone of insect’s wings fill the still air, beckoning them onward. 

The Hag Queen pushes forward, leading them into the dark mists. When they emerge, they see vast and unnatural nebulae wheeling dizzyingly overhead, each twisted alignment spinning dark new fates. A sudden shout drags them back to reality, and to a pair of Gor rushing towards them, eyes filled with eager rage! Morgwaeth and the assassin exchange bemused looks and skewer them both where they stand. 

Never bring a Gor to an Aelf fight 

No sooner have they dispatched the hapless Gor, however, when Kyre doubles over in pain. "What's wrong?" the Mistweaver asks, concerned, but soon feels a horrible sensation of overwhelming sickness wracking her body as well. Fortunately, they are not ambushed, and soon recover when the feeling passes, as mysteriously as it came. Soberly, they press on to the next chamber. 

Clickety-click! Barba-trick! 

The floor moves constantly in this place, clicking and whirring as it interlocks and spins apart in ever-changing configurations of crescent tiles and seamlessly meshing cogworks. Barring their path stand a pair of cackling demons, glowing an unnatural pink hue. The Witch Elf strides fearlessly into the room, her wicked glaive bisecting the nearest Pink Horror with an horrible tearing sound, but the ragged halves soon rise again as capering Blue demons! The assassin appears behind the other, and rips it bodily in half, to the same effect. The Fleetmaster deflects the blows of these smaller demons, and carves two of them up, while the Mistweaver finishes the others with a series of icy simulacra. The firey daemonettes that replace them soon immolate themselves in a desperate attempt to take some of the party with them, but Kyre shields them with his sturdy drakeskin cloak. Before moving on, the Mistweaver finds a bag of gold, caught between two cogs. 

Carefully picking their way along the shifting panels, the group finds themselves suddenly disoriented. Moments pass before the champions realised what has been unsettling them so about this place. Within a great mirror their reflections move, but all is subtly wrong, the movements unnatural and out of synch with those they ape. Thinking another Pink Horror behind them, they are almost surprised, but the Fleetmaster catches it in one eye with his murder hook, and this time it does not split. Scanning the warped mirrors, his luck holds, and he finds not only some gold, but some scratches on the surface of a lens that seems to hint at what lies beyond. He shares this information with his colleagues.   

They move carefully into a chamber that makes them nearly recoil in horror. Here there squirms an unclean thing of metal and tentacular flesh. Waves of enchanted fury billow from the runes inscribed upon the creature's golden shell, driving the denizens of the tower to madness. Another Pink Horror appears from the undulating tentacles and charges mindlessly into the mirror room driven insensate by the coiled creature's magic. It is split by the Hag Queen, and its spawn are dispatched with ease by the party. "We appear to have found their lair," comments the Shard, in a rare moment of candor. They enter the room with the metallic, tentacled thing, and as they gingerly search the room, warm glow of tropical light suffuses them. They can feel their cares melting away as they breathe in the life-giving effluence. The Tenebrael Shard seems unaffected. Here, Kyre finds a leathery, tapered scroll within the squirming mass, fishing it out with a practiced flick of his hook. He begins to scan it, but stops abruptly, ashen-faced, and shoves it in his belt.

Shafts of kaleidoscopic light dance upon the air, each glittering with motes of fortune and fate. A skirling breeze sighs, stirring specks and lights alike into whirling patterns. Here, the sounds of battle ring through the air; they have interrupted a skirmish between two warring factions of the Tower, Scuttlings and Acolytes. The Scuttlings split their attacks between the Hag Queen and the Acolytes; when the remaining acolytes see the Aelves storming into the room, they flee into the multicolored mists! The Scuttlings try to web and stun the party, but are no match for them, and soon fall to the sharp blades of our protagonists. 

The Mistweaver is drawn like a moth to a side passage. Like some hideous optical illusion, everything in this chamber stretches and runs like tallow towards a roaring maelstrom that spins and whirls below.  The others move nervously into the room after the Mistweaver, and soon see the object of her fascination is not just the whirling maelstrom, but a rare treasure glimmering before her, swathed in a green mist. It seems to beckon her on, urging her to claim it. But for any such gift there is surely a price to be paid... The party tries desperately to keep the Mistweaver from leaping into the maelstrom as she seems hypnotically drawn into the room, but she reaches out and snatches it with the rest of the adventurers hanging on, finally pulling her away before the draw of the black hole at the center of the room proves insurmountable. For the next few minutes, Morgwaeth leads the Mistweaver around as she giggles and holds up her prize, a shining amulet, admiring it while ignoring everything else around her. 

Suddenly the passage before them opens up into a black, bottomless void! Morgwaeth barely keeps the Mistweaver from tumbling into it. Before they can even decide how to proceed, however,  the yawning chasm is suddenly filled by skimming, fungoid discs. The freakish things jostle together, forming a twitching bridge across which the champions scramble. In their wake, the discs flit away, back into the darkness whence they had come. Meeting them in the middle of the room, on their own platform of discs, is a party of three Gor, who seem even more disoriented than the adventurers, though no less bloodthirsty than the last, smaller group. They fare no better. 

The adventurers step over the bodies of their foes and press on. Thick swirl the shadows in this place, heavy with the scents of rich loam and sorcery. Light pulses slow and lazy from the runes graven into the ground, each languid swell of illumination like the beat of some great beast's heart. In the middle of the chamber, a blue daemon wing skirls lazily on the updrafts, until it spots the encroaching adventurers, when it swoops lazily to attack. 

The Tenebrael Shard grabs it by one horn and leaps on its back. It begins bucking and twisting as the assassin tears great gouts of flesh from it, until it plows gracelessly into the rich earth at their feet. As the clamor of battle subsides, they see that the strange fungus which infested this chamber has been greatly damaged, and has begun to wither.

The Mistweaver finds yet another amulet in the dirt, this one a complex clockwork of interlocking lenses. As her hand closes on it, she stiffens. 'This is the way,' she declares, staring hard at the mists obscuring the exit. 

The party girds themselves and advances. 

Two statues, of a warrior and a wizard, stand here on crystal plinths. Each has a weirdly avian cast, and seem so real that they might spring to life at any moment. To the champions' surprise, the wizard statue does just that. A long finger beckons them close, and a sibilant hiss demands that they choose one amongst their number to face a test of wits... 

The Mistweaver opens her mouth to volunteer but before she can find her voice, the Fleetmaster strides arrogantly to the base of the wizard statue. Drawing close to the living statue, he listens as whispered words creep softly from its graven throat, issuing a challenge and promising a reward to those able to complete it. 

The others crowd around to see what the Fleetmaster is attempting, as he mutters and curses to himself, but no amount of craning and peering can see around his drakeskin cloak. After a moment, the statue rises once more, nods once to the Fleetmaster, and deanimates. 

After poking and prodding the statues to see if they will animate once more, the adventurers begin heading in the direction that the Mistweaver had indicated, but grasping vines come alive all around them. Lashing out from the walls and through the plates of the floor, they wrap about the adventurers' limbs! 

Struggling their way forward, they come into a strange cave lit from within by grotesque fungi that throw out a flickering emerald glare. A hideous stench emanates from its vermilion depths. The moment they first step inside, the toadstools shudder and begin to exude foul spores. A deep growl sounds from inside as something huge and angry shifts in the darkness. An Ogroid Thaumaturge appears from out of the murk! The Mistweaver sends a cloud of angry faeries swarming around the creature, causing grievous wounds, but they seem to heal almost as quickly as they open! Acting on instinct, Kyre slices his way from the tightening grasp of the lashing vines, and rushes to the nearest of the toadstools. Covering his mouth with his cloak, he hacks at its trunk until he severs it completely. 

The Thaumaturge roars and charges Kyre, lifting him bodily with one enormous horn and tossing him aside like so much refuse. The assassin steps into shadow and reappears behind the beast, ripping into him but failing to bring him down. Morgwaeth takes advantage of this distraction to run stumbling through the chamber, vines grasping and tripping her the entire way. She begins to hack at the other giant toadstool. 

There comes a terrible stirring and heaving rolling through the fungal growths and, with a sound like the sighing of the wind, they spew luminescent spores into the air, making the champions choke and retch. The Ogroid, however, seems to draw strength from the tainted air. 

The furious Ogroid turns to smash the assassin into the wall, but Kyre hooks him around the ankle with his murder hook, causing him to stagger, and giving the Shard a moment to dodge the beast's massive fists. From the doorway, the Mistweaver calls on varicolored light, which slices like ribbons of steel. Disoriented, and mortally wounded, the Ogroid falls backward on the Fleetmaster's cutlass. 

The hulking monster slumps heavily to the floor. The champions hesitate to lower their  weapons, half expecting to see it rise again. It lies still, however, the baleful light fading from its eyes. After a moment, Morgwaeth turns and finishes her demolition of the remaining baleful fungus. Pulling himself out from under the corpse, Kyre glimpses a fragment of the medallion around the Ogroid's thick neck, and snatches it before the others notice it. 

The misty chamber dissolves around them like a watercolor in the rain, and the group finds themselves once again on a nondescript street in Cinderfall. No one notices their abrupt arrival.