Episode 6 (part 4): Deftly avoiding the River of Blood

Dispatching the second relief golem with little consequence of humour, the party decides to return to the hall where they were originally engaged on the quest of to retrieve the Wind Duke treasure stolen by the ghoul Moretto, they look into an additional room for more clues.  They discover a antechamber with a old, small alter to a Wind Duke, and an image of a door painted on a wall.  Yldar investigates and notices that beside a small statue of a Wind Duke is a place less dusty which looks as if it had held some other object.  At that moment, Yldar hears the murmurings of what sounds like an old soldier complaining of the foot soldiers who were thieves.  from the wall where the door was painted emerged a large wraith, its red eyes beading down at Yldar who quickly escapes the room.  The dread wraith follows the party into the main hall and they battle, with Maeron flattening the wraith with her channeled energy, and it being finished by the the hooked hammer of the Zeek the gnome.

Yldar returns to the alter and pockets the small Wind Duke statue, and hands the wraith's former magic armour to Zeek, then the party debates if they should continue by returning to the river of blood or head through the room that had held Maeron, Zeek, Alustan and Ubu to see what is beyond. While Alustan and Ubu take their leave of the party (being advised to avoid the ooze on their way out), the group decides to return to the globe sphere hall and see what lies beyond.  Down some stairs Yldar sees that a set of rungs must be climbed to go 40 feet down to a tiled mosaic floor below.  Rightfully suspicious of traps, he finds that the whole floor is a pressure plate and after a hair-raising failure, manages to disable it.  The party follows him down, and find a secret door that leads to a waterfall precipice of the River of Blood.  After chatter about rings of feather falling and fly spells, Vasco asks why they would ever want to go down such an incredibly treacherous drop.  On that note, they decide to return upriver and revisit the icy hall that led Adnan to quit the party.


Moving swiftly and confidently through the tomb now, the party re-enters the River of Blood at the Xorn bridge.  Ridding themselves of their armour the party, who are other than the elves very short - need to swim even where it is only 5 feet deep.  Maeron is momentary caught up in a current and swept down towards the main channel of the River that links to the Waterfall but is grabbed by Yldar and brought to the side channel that leads to underneath the ice hall.  Maeron again has a feeling of dread as two huge, oozing, undead (15'x15') blood clots surround them, blocking their entrence to the shallower waters.  Zeek, on being slammed by a tendril of blood, sees some of his own blood pour from his body, animate in the river and merge with the huge clot.  Horrified, the party uses its magic and slashing weapons to reduce the undead clot to cell-less fluid.

They find that the hole that Vasco, Yldar and Adnan had made in the ceiling is still open, and the party re-enters the ice hall, seeing the shattered ice golems' remains.  The look into a small room, and find a strange 15' diameter pool of snow and ice, somehow churning.  Zeek, at first uninterested, decides to test the pool, sticking his hand in and sustains damage from the terrible cold.  Yldar, remembering some of the history of the war with the Wind Duke, recalls that alliances were made with elemental weirds to gain access to prophecies to help defeat the Queen of Chaos.

The party enters the final chamber of the ice hall, Yldar and Zeek proceeding carefully along into a chamber with six statues, five of which having small statuettes of resplendent Vaati architecture, floating just above their cupped hands, the hall filled with more soft winds.  Suddenly, before the rest of the party enters the room, the sixth statue triggers a switch and lets off a blast of negative energy on Zeek, draining 4 levels from him.  The statue, now clearly an animate machine, explains how he is charged with upholding the law, and that the tomb robbery and desecration will be dealt with by death.  The impressive machine, a Kolyurt Inevitable, seemingly at will fires spells at the party, who try desperately to break through iron portcullises that the Inevitable had brought down between them.

During the battle, The Inevitable politely explains how their latest desecration was of the tomb of Sionsiar, a snow weird that Icosiol had formed a bond with during the final battles with the Queen of Chaos, who was interred in Icosiol's tomb upon her death.

Curtains of acid from Vasco, scorching rays from Yldar, and blow after blow from the Zeek and Nabiros weaken the Inevitable, who seemed to keep healing himself.  Finally he is dispatched, and the party collapse exhausted in his room, Yldar pocketing the 5 statuettes of Vaati architecture.  They see that this room only leads back to the very same waterfall that they had tried to avoid.  Indeed, the mad spider seems to be right.  If the powerful artifacts of the Wind Dukes are to be retrieved, and the actual tomb of Icosiol is to be found, they must devise a way to descend further into the River of Blood.