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.
