Eberron Adventure Journal: Grasp of the Emerald Claw (3)

Aryth 3 - Aryth 10, YK 998

Part Six - Xulo:
Shaken from the sudden loss of their companion, the remaining Wolves reasoned that Brand's father must have been the one who rescued him, and clearly, he wasn't coming back any time soon. Realizing that they didn't have much time, and goaded gently by Muroni's insistence on the Prophecy, they decided to move on, despite being battered, tired and down a man.

All except one. Whitehearth refused to leave the site of his master's disappearance, and managed to convey to Luggoth that he wanted to stay there. Luggoth carried Whitehearth up to the level that held the globe of invulnerability and reluctantly, the Wolves left Whitehearth behind, secure behind the powerful spell.

Following the theory that they should be heading up, the Wolves passed through dusty rooms that had obviously once been quarters for drow slaves and the chamber of the slaves' overseer, full of chains and manacles and stained with blood. They emerged into a hallway and saw that there were exits to the ledges outside. Pel peered outside and saw that they were about 150 feet up, roughly halfway to the top. Had he remained a minute longer, he would have seen some of the dire apes walking along the ledges, guarding the temple that they had made their home.

As it happened, the Wolves did encounter the dire apes when the next door they opened turned out to be the apes' lair, holding their leader, a Girallon. The Girallon immediately bellowed with rage and attacked, smashing Pel with one of its fists. Kanatash opened fire with rays of cold from his dorje as Pel moved out into the hallway to draw the Girallon out. When it emerged, Luggoth and Pel both moved in to engage while Kanatash and Lysander fired dorje rays and arrows at it.

After the Girallon grabbed Luggoth with all four arms and nearly tore him in two, Lysander dropped his bow and moved into combat with his sword, but Pel cut the Girallon down with his scimitar before Lysander could really engage. Muroni began using her wand to cure Luggoth even as he downed a potion.

However, the fight was not as finished as the Wolves thought. Lysander, walking over to pick up his bow, saw two dire apes charging down the hallway, having come in from outside when they heard the cries of their leader. He began firing arrows at the charging dire apes, and Luggoth joined him to throw an axe and kill one of the apes. The other leaped at Luggoth, claws swinging, but Luggoth ducked the blow and came up with greatsword in hand, stabbing through the beast's shoulder. The ape swung a vicious claw into Lysander, but it was the last attack it would make, as Lysander struck back with his sword and Kanatash finished the beast off with two more rays of cold.

As the last bars of Lysander's song faded, the noise was replaced with the howls of two more dire apes! Lysander and Kanatash once again opened fire with their ranged weapons, Pel joining in with his crossbow, and Luggoth killed another with his throwing axe. He then climbed on top of the dead dire ape and attacked the other one, which already bore the scars of a cold ray, an arrow and a crossbow bolt. Enraged, the ape managed to sink its claws into Luggoth's right shoulder and left thigh and shake him, nearly tearing him apart, but Kanatash blasted the creature to death with another ray of cold before it could finish Luggoth off.

Moving down the hallway, healing Luggoth as best they could with the few remaining spells and charges of cure light wands, the Wolves found an empty room, closed the door and took a few moments to rest.

Realizing that they didn't have time to fully rest, the Wolves emerged and checked a few doors until they found a staircase leading up. They went up and found a room filled with crates of recent supplies, and quickly realized that the Emerald Claw must have already gone this way. Their suspicions were confirmed when they opened the door and found themselves facing four Emerald Claw soldiers standing guard outside the supply room. Despite their depleted magic and wounds, the Wolves managed to make quick work of the Emerald Claw, with only Luggoth suffering one minor hit from a flail in return.

The next obvious door contained a powerful glyph of warding, which Pel discovered and decided not to disturb. The Wolves then found a staircase in a room full of webbing, and they set torches to the webs, burning out the spiders who had been living there. A quick jaunt up the stairs discovered drow-sized attics, long abandoned and undisturbed, so the Wolves reasoned that the Claw had not been up there yet.

Moving down the hall to another door, several of the Wolves heard voices talking from the corridor in front of them. Pel and Lysander silently led the way, as Luggoth, Kanatash and Muroni followed from a distance. Eventually, they came out into a large room which was not the source of the voices, but which did contain something vitally important.

The room had walls extending up over a hundred feet high, with gauzy webs at the height of about sixty feet shielding it from the sunlight above. At the center of the room was a mammoth throne of stone and metal sitting on an inscribed disk of unblemished iron. Around the periphery of this disk were wooden crates, a few barrels and a wooden table strewn with a clutter of paper, pens, measuring devices and other items. A rotund female in work clothes worked around the inscribed disk, and didn't seem to notice Lysander and Pel as they came in.

The two moved out into the chamber, and the female worker turned around. "Oh, thank the Sovereign Host!" she said. "The Emerald Claw has been forcing me to decipher these runes!" Her ruse quickly faded, however, as she moved back around the throne and then yelled, in a masculine and familiar voice, "Guards! They're here! Take them!" before drinking a potion and vanishing.

From another nearby entryway, the Wolves saw the warforged Scimitar and eight Emerald Claw soldiers charge in, and the battle was joined. Lysander began an inspiring song as Scimitar engaged Pel in combat and Muroni, Luggoth and Kanatash ran toward the room to join in.

Lysander began firing his bow, killing one of the soldiers, as Luggoth joined the battle between Scimitar and Pel. Muroni rushed to engage the Emerald Claw soldiers, supported by Lysander's bow from a short distance away. Kanatash used the last of his psychic reserve to unleash a fiery energy missile on Scimitar and four of the Emerald Claw soldiers, killing all but one of them and severely wounding Scimitar as well.

While Lysander picked off two more of the Emerald Claw soldiers, Luggoth and Pel slashed away at Scimitar, rendering him inert. From there, it was easy for the Wolves to dispatch the remaining Emerald Claw soldiers.

As the battle wound down, Pel looked and noticed that a pattern of lights had emerged on the throne, one that had definitely not been there before the fight. The Wolves pondered what this might mean, trying to find clues in the notes on the worktable and recognizing the names "Scorpion's Eye" and "Garyx's Eye" as the names the giants had for stars. Then Muroni stepped up to the throne, trying to get a closer look, and vanished.

The Wolves realized that she had been either teleported or destroyed, and after some small discussion, Lysander led the way by jumping onto the throne. They were then transported to a chamber deep below the earth. They found themselves standing atop a giant-sized set of steps, fifty feet high and descending into a great vault filled with hulking, dimly glowing pillars of stone. They could see cords extending from each pillar, some made of metal, some of more organic material, all leading to great draperies covering something massive at the other side of the chamber.

At the foot of the stairs, they saw the figure of the rotund woman writhing and twisting in pain. As they watched, she twisted and took on other forms: Rarwog, the half-elf captain of the Jade Fury. Then, the pale and scarred form of Garrow, the vampire they had faced in the Mournland. "Fine!" he screamed. "Take it and be gone from my mind!" And with that, he flung the creation pattern in his hand deep into the chamber.

The Wolves wasted no time engaging their enemy, as Lysander fired his bow and Kanatash unleashed a fiery energy missile. Pel cast Protection from Evil on Luggoth, who began leaping down the massive, 10 foot stairs. Garrow, realizing he was no longer alone, called out to the Blood of Vol and healed himself as Kanatash, Pel and Lysander continued firing at him.

Garrow called out to the Blood of Vol once more and became infused with divine power, withstanding another blast of fire from Kanatash and an arrow fired from Lysander as Luggoth quaffed a potion of bull's strength and continued moving in.

Garrow drank a potion to heal himself further and moved toward the nearest stair, cutting off line of sight from the Wolves. Lysander, believing the vampire to be an immense danger, produced a scroll of haste and cast it on the party, which gave Luggoth the burst of speed he needed to jump down and begin attacking Garrow in earnest, slashing a wickedly powerful rent in his flesh with his greatsword.

Garrow responded by reaching out and touching Luggoth with the power of the Blood of Vol, draining some of his life but not killing him. Luggoth responded with another powerful sword blow and killed Garrow. Even as the Wolves were reaching for their stakes, they realized that Garrow was not what he had seemed. He didn't become gaseous upon death, but instead took on a pale white sexless form. Garrow had never been a vampire... he had been a changeling.

Lysander walked back into the draperies and cords and found both the creation pattern and the fourth schema, the only part not currently plugged in. Before he could do anything, he felt a strong compulsion to complete the pattern, which he resisted.

Now wary of the pattern, the Wolves began to look around. They saw that what was hidden beneath the draperies, and connected to the cords, was an enormous, primitive warforged, about thirty feet high.

The Wolves argued back and forth about what to do with the creation pattern. Natural curiosity and a potentially great story was compelling Lysander, but the compulsion he had felt made him nervous about putting the pattern together. Luggoth was indifferent, but leaned towards leaving it incomplete. Pel felt that the Traveler's will would have been to put it together, but he was also nervous about its potential for evil. Muroni stayed out of the argument, but her presence reminded the Wolves that this event was clearly meant to be, in some way, a playing out of the Prophecy. If they didn't complete the pattern, maybe they were failing to continue along the path destiny had provided for them, and they could prevent some good thing from happening to the world.

Finally, Lysander offered up "Can it be any worse than falling out of the sky on an airship?" Pel agreed, and he put together the fourth schema and the creation pattern.

The pattern rose into the sky of its own accord, levitating up to the massive warforged and melding into its chest. A terrible voice filled the minds of all present, speaking at once no language and every language. "I... am... complete! Xulo... is... whole! And now, Xulo has a body!"

With that, the warforged began moving, and its intentions were clearly hostile. Pel, Luggoth and Lysander began hacking away at the cords, hoping to shut down the power to the warforged, which was unleashing not only physical might but some sort of psychic attacks of despair and confusion. Luggoth fell prey to one of these, trying to escape but being prevented by Xulo's elimination of the teleportation effect that had brought them here.

Xulo smashed Kanatash into the ground, and Kanatash decided to feign death to avoid future attacks. The other Wolves quickly realized that there were too many cords to effectively sever before they were all killed, and then Kanatash hit upon the idea of firing his dorje at the creation pattern itself, which seemed to work.

Xulo brought both of the warforged's mighty fists down on Pel, breaking the changeling's body and leaving him dead on the floor of the chamber. Desperately, Kanatash and Lysander fired at the creation pattern, and finally Kanatash managed to shut it down. The creation pattern clattered to the floor, undamaged but temporarily intert, and Lysander quickly separated the parts out to the different Wolves, dropping the creation pattern itself into the Heward's Handy Haversack.

Lysander picked up Pel's body, and he walked with Kanatash, Luggoth and Muroni up to the throne, which was working once more. They quickly and quietly backtracked, stopping to pick up Whitehearth, who after several hours had decided that his master was not returning here. They emerged from the giant temple and found Chinxero waiting for them.

The travel by riverboat took five more days, depositing them in Stormreach on Aryth 8. Lysander knew that he had only a few more days to find someone to bring Pel back to life before his soul would be gone beyond the reach of most priests, and so he called upon Muroni to use her local contacts to help him. Together, they found two things: One was that there was a Cleric of the Sovereign Host who could help, but he was out in the jungles of Xen'drik for at least three more days. The other was that there was another priest who could help, but he was definitely of a... darker religion.

The priest didn't identify himself by name as he met with Lysander in one of Stormreach's alleys. He said only that he worshipped the same pantheon as the Traveler. Lysander, desperate to get his friend revived but worried about consequences, managed to convince the priest to reveal that he was a worshipper of the Keeper, the god of death. He agreed to revive Pel in exchange for a favor owed by the Wandering Wolves at some point in the future. "If you refuse this favor, my god will take back the gift he is about to imbue your friend with. And punish the rest of you as well."

Reluctantly, Lysander made the deal on the behalf of the Wolves. After two days of preparation, they gathered in a private ceremony and watched as the priest called upon The Dark Six to raise Pel from the dead. The priest smiled as he left the makeshift temple he had created. "Feel free to stay here for a while, it's quite safe. I'm sure we'll be seeing each other again soon."

XP: 4575 (EL 6)/3763 (EL 7)