11th of Harvest
A messenger arrives with a note from Seanus, replying that he received the money we sent and handled the monthly payment to Myraeth. He said the Emerald Eye had three guys out in Delver’s Square directing our customers to their store, but Seanus managed to get a rune-covered guy named Araki Chipestiro to get rid of them by telling him they were saying bad things about him. We’ve heard of this guy — he’s got a real scary reputation as a powerful mage of dark magic. He has occasionally worked with the Balacazars. Hm.
A guy named Zart Skoyter wants to talk to us. The Sisters of Silence also sent a note saying they want to see us as soon as we return. Seanus said that word on the street is that Kevris Killraven wants to use the Shuul to make a major strike on the Balacazars before the end of the year, so our enemies are preoccupied for now.
12th of Harvest
The sisters Vaerimor thank us again, tell us that Faestra’s sister is recovering slowly, and that they are glad the situation in Kaelist is no longer a festering wound. They bid us have a good trip.
We depart with Sael, dropping him off near his home on the way through the forest heading north. We promise to send him word of what we discover in Ar-Nampur.
13th of Harvest
More traveling through the woods. It’s chilly and rainy. We stay the night in a roadside inn near Caeralith, but it is likely our last for a while. From here we go east, and there are no towns between here and Ar-Nampur.
14th of Harvest
The road meets the coast today. Lots of sea mist covers the whole area, and it’s colder here than in the woods. It feels desolate. We travel north along the Old Coast Road until it veers inland, then we stick to the coast. We’re now on the peninsula where Ar-Nampur is located. The mist closes in around us as it grows dark. It’s slower going off the road. We camp for the night.
15th of Harvest
The terrain is very rough around here. We traverse a ravine, spy a bear, and arrive at a wooden shack. As we walk up, we see two owlbears lunging at a humanoid figure in front of the shack. Before we can do much more than shout a warning, one of the creatures fades away. The figure turns and looks at us. He is an elf with dirty blond hair (weird for an elf these days—only the Solarr elves were golden haired). He has ugly features: balding, bulging eyes, a protruding forehead, and a stooped stance. “You’re early,” he mutters as Diethan shoots arrows into the remaining owlbear.
This is Nilovas Haetharys, the elf hermit and resident Ar-Nampur guardian that Sael told us about. Nilovas insists that I was expected and am early but won’t say why or who expects me. “When they came back here after going to your city, they had a couple of them in tow—the ones they’d left behind: the corrupted Titans.”
We discover that he’s deaf: Nilovas has to be looking at you while you speak to understand what you’re saying. “You have never been there before. You’ll have to go through the sanctuaries to get where you need to go,” he said. My people came here twenty years ago to take care of things, he said, to collect the ones they’d left behind. They also had left behind some sibeccai that had been corrupted. “And that’s the problem.” He makes Archinemus promise to help me and stick close. I feel as though I understand only about half of what he’s saying.
He tells us that the remnants of the Hu-Charad’s ancient menagerie still remains in the fortress. “Not everything you find there will be an enemy,” he warns. He wonders whether we are prepared but won’t tell us what we should do to get ready.
He takes us through the back wall of his shack to stand in a circle inscribed in the floor. “Make sure you watch out for the dragon,” he cautions. Then he lifts his arm and we all vanish.
We appear again somewhere wholly different, but we can still hear Nilovas’ voice. “Air, earth, fire, water—remember!” These elements seem to match four shapes inscribed in the floor (we saw them also near the transport circle in the hermit’s shack): white circle, black triangle, blue square, and red pentagon. Nothing happens when Archinemus touches them.
Looking around, we see we’re in a marble corridor. A new voice sounds, a woman’s voice, speaking in Hu-Charad: “You heard the clarion. Welcome. All is well.” We move forward, past the bones of a behir, and hear the howl of wind. The ceilings are decorated with pictures of clouds. The air sanctuary must be up ahead.
Inside, the sanctuary is decorated with pictures of whirlwinds, and we feel a wind kick up. Standing on the dais here and uttering the word “air” in Hu-Charad creates a breeze around us but that’s it. We tie off Archinemus and he tries to make it all the way through—it’s very slow going against the wind but he makes it to the end around the corner. We all make it through with the aid of a very long rope. (Rathondhir the faerie dragon has a great time playing in the wind.) In the next windy chamber Archinemus finds giant-sized steps rising up in midair, but he gets stuck on them, and the faerie dragon gets blown to who-knows-where. Calista casts flight on Diethan and he goes after the two of them. He latches onto Archinemus and the two of them swirl upward in the whirlwind. They discover that the giant-sized steps end at nothing in the exact center of the room, near a hole in the air. There’s an invisible shaft with a staircase going down, but it can be seen only from the top.
They investigate down to the bottom and find a large chamber with exits. I climb across the ledge and up the steps to join them, and we lodge a grappling hook and pulley system at the lip of the invisible shaft. Then Diethan flies back down to the rest of our group. Ignoring the plan, Barbatos ties himself to Tharn and casts fly on the litorian. Then Tharn leaps off the ledge. After three revolutions around the whirlwind, he and Barbatos manage to land in the shaft. Dropping off the wizard, Tharn goes back for Calista (for a litorian, he sure likes to fly), and we pull Lunes the wolf over on the pulley system. We call out for the faerie dragon, but no response. We hope he got safely away.
Thankfully, we make our way down the stairway in the shaft and into a new series of chambers. We hear loud footfalls on this level that sound as though they’re heading our way. As they draw close, we hear a screaming roar from an immense, fearsome creature. Oh no—the dragon!
But it’s not. It’s a massive shaggy creature with a big horn—like a giant wooly rhino—but we find it trapped on the other side of an invisible barrier. We decide to go the other direction, toward some hissing. Big dark blue snakes paralyze me and Tharn almost before we know what’s happening, then Archinemus and Diethan as well. Fortunately the spellcasters take them out from a distance with magic.
The halls of Ar-Nampur are filled with alcoves and faded spots on the walls, as though the place used to be a gallery but all the display items have been taken away. One chamber beyond another invisible barrier is full of display items, however: works of art like paintings and sculpture of the Hu-Charad. There’s no way through, however, so we take some stairs down.
In the center of the hall there lies a black triangle, the symbol of earth (we think). We hear a woman’s voice speaking in Hu-Charad again, but her voice seems to catch. “You have heard the c-c-c-clarion. Welcome. All is— You have heard…” As we proceed down the hall, I’m crushed by a falling stone weight but luckily no one else is hurt. The earth sanctuary here has another dais, but we can’t come upon the proper words to use to deactivate the earth effects (tremors). Then Calista hits on the idea of magically creating candles to place in the empty candle holders on the dais. However, when I attempt to light them, I begin to feel a bit queasy. Instead, we sprinkle dirt over them and the candles “light” not with flame but with shards of earth. Then I stand upon the dais again and repeat the word “earth,” and dirt and earth rains down on me from little holes that erupt in the air all around me. I am healed of all damage and feel refreshed with renewed clarity. I’m so excited about this that I convince Tharn to get up and try it. However, all that happens is he’s cut to shreds by the rain of stone and rocks. Guess it only works for the Hu-Charad.
We emerge into a stoneworking shop, but it’s been closed down, and it seems someone has already been through it. Farther down a corridor lies a cage area with a large column rising up from a pit of churning earth in the center of the room. As we watch, red stones come out of the pillar and congeal to form earth elementals. “Crush, destroy, pulverize!” they cry in voices that sound like chalk screeching on a chalkboard. More elementals form from the stone and rubble on our side of the cage wall and attack us. Commands in the Hu-Charad language do nothing to dissuade them. While we battle off the new elementals, Diethan and Barbatos cut down those first two with magic arrows and fireballs. We withdraw to Barbatos’ rope trick to lick our wounds and rest for the night.
16th of Harvest
Today we start out searching the earth sanctuary for exits, which we finally locate in the ceiling. No sooner do we get through than the noise of our coming attracts the giant wooly rhino. Using all my newfound clarity, I point at it with the longsword of animal suggestion and compel it to flee. It rears back in apparent fright and turns and runs! We find our way into a room still filled with Hu-Charad artifacts, portraits, and statuary. I am in awe to be so close to such works of my people. Some of the people named in the portraits include Ao-Storan, leader of the expedition (a warrior woman); and Ka-Nadar, regent (a noble man).
Sadly, the wooly rhino doesn’t flee for very long. Just as we resume our trek down the hall, it returns to trample us. Calista manages to distract it with a spell so we can get in a few good attacks, but we quickly see that we are no match for it. We run down some stairs too small for it to follow us. But when we get down there, we step into water over our heads. It’s not the water sanctuary, though—at the bottom of the steps under water we see the red pentagon of fire. The water feels strangely warm. The malfunction we detected before earth must extend out to here.
Calista saves the day again by offering us water breathing spells so we can enter the “fire” sanctuary. We run smack into some sort of lobsterman with a glowing light that transfixes Tharn and tries to carry him off, but Barbatos finishes it with his magic missiles. The current seems to pick up right around here, and it washes the lobsterman off down a side passage.
We decide to make our way around the current toward the fire sanctuary, but the dais has no candle holders (and even if we wanted to light candles, doing so underwater would be a challenge). It would take an hour to get through the collapsed passage here, so we retrace our steps, only to have Tharn get caught up in the current and swept into the room where the lobsterman’s body floated. He sees a crevasse with water pouring through it, but we doubt that is the proper way through the sanctuary. So back we go to the dais chamber and clear a path through the rockfall.
We find double doors marked with the Hu-Charad message “The scouring of fire.” Ironically, the flood of water we experienced is coming in here through a pair of iron double doors. Using a complex set of ropes we all manage to pull our way into this new chamber where we see a column of magma. Whereas the water was warm before, it’s really hot in here. (Barbatos gets some nasty rope burns in the process.) In the air-filled area atop the column, Diethan discovers a pool of lava with a horrid-looking, three-armed, large-mouthed creature bathing in it. There is also a crack in one of the walls where water is pouring through—it’s the source of all this flooding. We surface and hear a moaning coming from within the pool, but we can’t see the poor creature trapped inside. A xorn bathing in the pool attacks us. Why does it seem interested in us, and why is an earth elemental in this water-filled fire room? We seem to be getting the better of it, but then it sniffs out Stoneblade, Tharn’s latest sword. Luckily, Calista blows it away. By chanting the elemental words engraved on the pool, we manage to drain the lava.
After the pool drains, we spy an exposed staircase going down. But we also see an eight-foot-tall humanoid figure trapped inside the pool. Strangely, he doesn’t look burned. He rises up from the pool and thanks us in Hu-Charad! He says his name is Sha-Bonel, and he has been trapped here in this sanctuary for years. “You must continue on through the water sanctuary,” he tells us. “She waits for you there.” He adds that the dragon dwells within the water sanctuary and cautions us to beware of it, for he believes it engineered the corrupt elementals that have wreaked such havoc within the fortress. I ask whether there is a secret here that we can use to fight the dragon, but he says he’s not allowed to say. He does reveal that the one who awaits us is my mother. As he fades away, I slump down onto the stairs in shock.
We spend the afternoon recovering in Barbatos’ rope trick. Diethan is on watch when he spots a great green reptilian head looking through the gushing water in the crack in the wall. While he gets in a good initial hit with an arrow, the dragon breathes a cone of corrosive greenish mist at him. The wounded Diethan scrambles back up the rope again and fills us in. So much for the element of surprise.
