Episode 7 (part 5) - The Worms’ Bite

Coming down the hallway out of the rooms where the dead are reposed, Jorel and Zeek reminisce a bit about their past.  Jorel was laughing over how he had followed Zeek since he had seen the little guy battle a band of Kira Tahlah slavers, who almost got the last laugh on Zeek until Jorel rescued him from a slow-acting poison collapsed Zeek into the sands of the Dry Hills.  Jorel’s laugh stopped abruptly as a sound behind him caught his ears.  Most of the others in the party had crept around a corner and were approaching another entrance to the Worm Sea cavern.  Jorel let out a short expletive (he had been with Zeek now for even his language to be wearing off) as two stooped, armoured undead floated down the hallway, led by the very same plate-mail encrusted warrior who they had destroyed in the pit hours before, pointed their worm-writing, boney hands at the group and uttered terrible evocations in an ancient language that Jorel could make out a single word: the name of their deity Kyuss.

Nadroc and Yldar, being held firmly into place through blindingly fast hold person spells, were left out for important seconds.  Jorel and Zeek, spring into battle while calling their companions attentions.  Jorel manages to spring past the undead trio who push forward to close the party in on the Worm Sea behind them.  Zeek swats away falling Kyuss worms in strategically jumping under one of the floating divine minions, taunting and thwarting him from behind.  Conventional attacks and arrows seem to be doing little good, when Vasco, Maeron unleash their full power against them, first thoroughly destroying the undead warrior before dropping one of the spell casters who had unsuccessfully been trying to control their minds.  The third undead floats up and past the party, disappearing around the corner into the cavernous room.

Broken free of their holds, Nadroc and Yldar press with the others up to the shore of the huge cavern whose floor undulates with the sickening green worms.  Vasco sees the escaped Kyuss priest lower himself into the sea and tries to pin him to the wall with a web.  Unsuccessful, the party watches, noses wrinked and eyes squinting, as the worms suffuse his blasted and scourged body, seeming to recharge his the essence of his very-unlife.  Then the surface of the water nears them begins to briefly rumble and with a horrible splash a gargantuan green worm, its dual-rows of razor teeth shocks out of the water and lunges its massive 40' mass at the party, biting hard and fast on Vasco who through writing in tremendous pain from the hit, manages to elude being swallowed whole.  When the spray from the worm sea covers the party, and seemingly between the moments of reality, the next vision falls over them:

The immediate surroundings waver and fade, replaced by a bird’s-eye view of the city of Kuluth-Mar at its height. The streets are empty, as the thousands of citizens seem to have gathered in a mass in the central plaza surrounding the Spire of Long Shadows. Suddenly, a foul energy wells from the spire at the center of the city, sweeping outward and felling the living as it passes. For each creature that falls, you feel a silent but potent sense of wrongness, as some indescribable part of the creature, perhaps its soul, is drawn back toward the Spire of Long Shadows to be absorbed by the strange black monolith of stone balanced at its peak. As the energy builds around the peak, a shimmering image of a colossal humanoid figure, its body composed of a million writhing worms, takes form around the Spire of Long Shadows, its arms raised in triumph. Yet in another moment, that triumphant pose seems to change to one of rage, and a soul-wrenching cry of fury tears from the undulant face. The image shrinks, pulled into the stone monolith at the Spire’s peak, imploding with a horrific wet burst. In an instant, the city is quiet again, yet as the vision fades, the first signs of unlife spread through the thousands of dead bodies strewn around the ziggurat’s base as bodies, now festering with green worms rise from death. 

With the massive worm withdrawing in the real world, and his wounds nearly crippling him, Vasco weakly calls out that he is teleporting out right now. One by one the party steels their will and lay hands on Vasco who, not before a slashing force of necromantic darkness lunges out of the worm-priest’s boney fingers, blinks his colleagues back to the safety of their inn-room at Magepoint.

After taking healing and recovering time, the party sets out to restock.  They contact Celeste for more of those 15th-level caster greater teleport spells to get them to and from Kulleth-Mar, and take some time to become more liquid, with some of the treasure recovered from the worm nagas and various armour and weapons picked up and stashed in bags of holding along the way.  Zeek works on Celeste and other of Manzorian’s officials to attempt to secure a loan of more powerful weapons, but these sources respond with dry denial.  Sluthing around the adventurers and merchants in town, Zeek realizes that they have all seen his type before – a massive risk that is nearly certainly not worth even the greatest return with little or no security on offer.  This town has seen far too many adventurers come and never return.  Yldar, meanwhile, finds time to complete some of his studies of arcane archery and levels up.  Nadroc, Maeron and Vasco medidate and study on their spells.  Soon, they are ready for return.

Standing in Vasco’s inn room at the agreed upon time, Zeek asks again, why is it they are all so convinced that they should go back and get pounded relentlessly again.  Reminded of the importance of his role in this move grave threat to the living, Zeek returns to a conversation of strategy, debating Vasco, Maeron and Nadroc on the best places to teleport to and re-engage battle.  Against his better judgement, Vasco agrees on Zeek’s strategy to attempt to draw the Overworm, as they have dubbed him, into the 10' wide corridors that to his massive bulk, should be narrow enough to give the party the advantage.  Nadroc wonders what exactly is going to be the bait as their bodies dematerilize...

... and reappear in the hallway where Jorel had several days before alerted the party to the Sword of Kyuss.  Ever alert and standing more ready than they have for over 1000 years, two of the worm gods’ priests stand at the entrance of the cavern and unleash again powerful blasts against the wills of the party.  This time, rested and buffed, the party resists their spells.  Nadroc and Vasco establish walls of flame which dispatch one quickly and sends the other badly scorched out of view into the worm sea.

The party heads back down the hall to the rooms where the ancient bodies lie, when Yldar notices at the far end of the hall, the double doors that had once been closed are now open, and two more worm priests advance upon them.  The third, tatterd robes gone and armour scorched, joins them from behind.  Again with godly smite from Maeron, and flames from Vasco’s skilled hands, these three are utterly destroyed before they pose much of a challenge to the group.

Wary of the Overworm who they imagine has returned to the unknown depths of the nearby worm sea, the party moves towards the now open doors at the end of the hall.  Yldar, invisible and stealthy, enters and finds a large but spartan chamber whose only remarkable feature is a black fountain, built as an alter of burbling water to Kyuss.  Having heard Yldar’s all clear, Maeron joins beside him at the fountain alter, and is taken with an insatiable desire to have a drink.  Moments after she ingests Yldar looks at her in puzzlement as she clutches at her head with an intense and incredible pain.  Nadroc comes beside her and pulls her out of the room, looking suspiciously at the fountain, while Zeek, Vasco and Jorel look worried but continued stand cautiously on guard for any other disturbance.  Maeron screams again, hear body in sharp agony from some fast and deadly intrusion.  Realizing that it must be some worm-related disease, Yldar pours a potion down Maeron’s throat.  Maeron sputters and coughs, and a blackened and lifeless worm drops out of her nose.   Maeron is left standing, blood dripping from her face, having extremely narrowly avoided death, and the certain undeath that would follow.

Episode 7 (part 4) – Return to Kyuss’s Evil Blast Pit

Before teleporting back to Kuluth-Mar, Zeek spreads the word around Magepoint that he is the killer of Kelvos the fallen Ghaele Eladrin, and is looking for followers.  Outside the ring, they return to the inner temple, proceeding with heightened caution.  They find the temple much as they left if, the days away now only feeling like moments since the grizzly battle.  Bracing themselves for the intensity of the encounter they know is coming, they throw open the doors of the other room off the main chamber in in the Ziggurat hall.  Inside, three warriors, armoured head to toe, stand battle ready, and a crouched, armoured fragment of a man lurks behind them.  All children of Kyuss, worms writhing and crackling with its necromantic powers, these four engage an intense battle.  The hunched figure is something of a powerful cleric, healing his warrior friends, and thwarting the party with hold person.  The warriors are intelligently engage, but the four are not strong enough to defeat the group, who finally succeed blasting and smashing them all, Zeek dropping the last of the warriors down, down, down into the pit below.  Following the defeat of the temples guardians, the party encounters another of their visions of Kyuss.  The chamber wavers and shimmers, and suddenly a human man appears at one of the desks nearby. A strange gray-skinned humanoid creature with six arms stands at his shoulder. The man studies a collection of worn and pitted bronze disks arrayed on the desk before him. Faint etchings adorn the plates, and it seems as if the alien figures and symbols writhe together at the behest of some sinister wilt. The gray creature points to one of the plates, and a look of sudden comprehension blooms on the man’s face. The man, the creature, and the plates then fade away, and are gone.

Exhausted again from battle, but not nearly as savaged as their previous encounter, the party decides to barricade themselves in the room to recover and explore its contents.  The room is a kind of Hall of Knowledge, covered in books on topics of the planes, arcana, religion, and history.  The most intriguing feature of the room, however, are 12 illuminated jars, each carrying tiny, writhing worms, inscribed with runes.  With the guidance of one of the books and the clever deciphering by the Seekers in the party, it is determined that these worms, if they manage to reach the brain, may impart knowledge, the runes on the worms corresponding to something of the domain of knowledge learned.  None in the party decide to try it, not knowing if the worms might kill or stupefy them before the knowledge is imparted, they decide that these are best taken back to Magepoint for a more controlled exercise.  While the magic users rest and meditate, Zeek and Jorel fashion crates out of furniture in the room to haul the jars containing the worms safely out.  The Seekers pick 20% of the best books for sale or storage in the Seeker library.

Their rest is uninterrupted.

After much discussion and some brief excursions around the rest of the Ziggarut where frescos of Kyuss the man and Kyuss the god ruining a city with armies of undead dominate entrance rooms’ walls, they decide to brave the descent into the hole revealed by the ancient, evil blast pit.  Nadroc with his lightning sword of Aaqa, and Yldar flying with the cloak of the bat, see that the pit is riddled with side-tunnels and ledges, and Yldar, in bat form, blind senses that at least one of those side tunnels has an occupant.  He also determines that some 500 feet below, the plunging tunnel ends by opening into a room with an undulating, writing, green floor, illuminated slightly by the everburning torch thrown down a week earlier by Zeek.   

Warned of what might be to come and equipped with feather-falling Maeron, Vasco, Zeek and Jorel  simply leap off the edge of the pit into the darkness below.  About 120 feet into their plunge down the hole, the heads of three worm nagas, familiar from having emerged from the same pit early in their exploration of the Ziggarut, emerge into the light.  They are writhing up, twisting and spinning around each other in a motion which makes them appear to be riding on the air.  Over the next 12 seconds of falling, both the party and the nagas unleash their respectively impressive power and engage each other.  By the end of the 12 seconds, the three worm nagas corpses are falling to the chamber below, and the party has managed to catch hold of a ledge of the side-tunnel these nagas emerged from to catch their breath before proceeding.  The Seekers in the group decide to look down these tunnels before proceeding further, and follow them basically horizontally for over 10 minutes, checking all the while they are not getting lost.  Finally, a correct turn is taken and the group finds themselves in the worm nagas’ nest, and in possession of their collective treasures of gold, platinum, and few magic items.  They divide and pocket the loot before returning to their vertical drop to the depths below.   

Somewhere before the end of the tunnel drop, the party members other than Nadroc feather fall into a ledge that holds them while Nadroc goes below and looks at the extent of the wormy threat.  Below, hundreds and hundreds of Kyuss worms of all sides writhe in a massive pool on the floor.  Nadroc manages his flying expertly, and hovers just beyond the ceiling of the chamber below, unleashing fireballs and a particularly deadly wall of fire, leaving a smoking, smouldering and stinking ground of charred worms.  Giving the all-clear signal, the rest of the party finishes their drop and enters the chamber of smouldering wormhusks.

They walk around this new area for a few minutes.  To the south, they see a massive, dark chamber with a sea of worms in its sunken floor.  To the east is a closed door.  To the west, a passage to a new room, which the party follows, observing hundreds of seemingly freshly dead corpses which Maeron correctly identifies as being in a kind of mass gentle repose, somehow triggered by some of the runes on stones in the room.  The next adjacent room is similar to this one in most respects, except that none of the human and humanoid bodies are in repose, they have completely decomposed.  Maeron speaks with dead to find that one man, at least, was ritually murdered to aid Kyuss in building an army of undead in his ascent to deity-hood.  Other than this, he knows little and Maeron and the others leave him in peace.