Kyra's scream of pain rings off the dungeon walls as the otherworldly beast bites her savagely.
Goddess, preserve me!
Talhaearn's deadly lunges, combined with Seoni's trusty magic missiles fells the strange and noble beast. It lets Kyra go and whines as it passes into unconsciousness.
Kyra wheezes as she is released.
"That... really... hurt," she says with a grunt. "I am sorry we had to fight such a creature, but I thank your swift blades, my friends, or I fear that might have been my last battle."
Kyra takes a few moments to catch her breath and heal the worst of her injuries, letting the others study the next door and the strange tree-inverted room as she does so.
"This is a place with a myriad of mysteries. If our mission were not pressing, it would be a site for much study... but I fear that every second we tarry will lead to great grief to come."
The hound is alive, but dying. It is also clearly of otherworldly origin. Beautiful, but deadly.
The door leads to another corridor, curving back north and ending in another door, identical to all the others.
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Saki gives the half-elf a wide smile. "Why, thank you, Talhaearn. I appreciate it. ... Yes, I will see what I can do here." The paladin approaches the dying hound and kneels down beside it, placing a gentle hand on its head as she looks into its soul.
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"I thought as much," the Tian woman murmurs to herself, gently shaking her head. "It is a terrible shame that none of us could understand its words... this creature is not of foul intentions, much like the strange fish we saw before."
"Though wolves and wild dogs are often seen as terrible beasts here in the Inner Sea, in my culture, we often proscribe them with positive attributes--they have honourable spirits and are fierce defenders of their pack. The shisa, guardian dogs, protect our temples and castles from malign influence. I find it hard to believe a noble canine of such beauty," she lightly strokes the green wolf's head, "would be a cruel monster like many of the things we have seen in this godforsaken castle."
Taking a deep breath, Saki murmurs a quiet prayer to Shelyn in her native Minkaian tongue. A tiny snake of golden energy flows from her fingertips into the fallen wolf, quickly stopping the bleeding from Tal's sword-cuts.
---
It is with a heavy sigh that Saki realises the hatred in its soul, and she shakes her head. "May you remember your ability to love when you are reborn into this world once more," she says quietly, bowing her head in prayer as she says a few words of sending and painlessness. She then stands and, with a sad but firm expression, ends the wolf's life with her glaive.
Once the deed has been done, Saki gestures for the others to follow her down the hallway, and she heads on through.
Kyra watches Saki, giving a slow nod at her actions, and then resumes her position in the rear of the group, moving forward into the next room after Tal.
The creature is not evil and Saki has soon stabilized it. The party leaves the great hound behind, unconscious.
Scouting ahead, they come to another door. As usual, they can hear nothing beyond it and Talhaearn detects no traps.
We open the door, like the heroes we are!
An enormous machine takes up the majority of this chamber, its various complex and seemingly illogical components made up of a combination of stone and black wood. Half-engine, half-gnarled dead tree, the tendrils from this otherworldly device crawl up the walls in every direction as if to choke the chamber that holds them. A faint sound like that of a breeze rustling through leaves can be heard coming from the machine.
A tall woman with strange eyes stand regarding the machine/tree. Arrayed between you are the skeletons of three largish humanoids bearing broken morningstars. She shrieks in anger on spotting your intrusion. "You can't have it! It's mine! Kill them!"
Initiative Order
Talhaearn
Saki
Elessia
Skeletons
Kyra
Seoni
Talhaearn, Saki, go!
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Saki's eyes narrow at the skeletons, and she quickly readies herself for battle--first a prayer to Shelyn, imbibing herself with her Lady's protection, and then entering her battle-stance now so familiar to her comrades. She strides into the room, glaive at the ready for when the mindless skeletons should advance upon them.
"Elessia, I presume?" Saki says, eyeing up the woman's whip--the sacred weapon of the Calistrian faith. "Call off your unholy servants and surrender--this is your final warning."
The woman refuses to answer Saki's demand and instead touches herself with the tip of a wand, and promptly disappears from sight.
The three bloody humanoid skeletons converge on Saki, slashing with their broken weapons. The graceful paladin strikes out first, slashing one of them with her halberd. Though a solid hit, it causes less harm than she might have expected. Moreover, what wound she did cause seems already to be repairing itself before her eyes.
None of the three attackers manage to get through Saki's formidable defenses.
Anyone, go!
Kyra grits her teeth at seeing their foe disappear, and also at seeing the skeletons seeming to heal.
Stepping forward , Kyra gestures and shouts.
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Surrounded by the skeletons, Saki is forced to rely on her martial arts skills - while formidable, she is by no means as good at hand-to-hand combat as she is with her polearm. Once the brightness from Kyra's spell dissipates, she lashes out with a punch to the midsection of the most damaged-looking skeleton.
Kyra steps up and invokes the holy fire of Sarenrae, which burns away the unholy spirits animating the bones of the dead troopers. The skeletons fall lifeless to the ground.
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"Excellent work, Kyra!" Saki exclaims happily seeing the skeletons burn away into nothingness before her eyes, looking over her shoulder to give the priestess of Sarenrae a grateful smile. She then strides into the middle of the room and exclaims, "Your minions are all fallen, destroyed by holy flames! You are surrounded, Elessia; surrender and we shall have mercy on you!"
Kyra looks around warily for their target. Her allies are too spread out for her to easily call down blessings on everyone. She stays in the mouth of the hallway, to make sure their quarry can not flee that way, unseen. She takes the chance to drink a potion imbued with Saranrae's protections.
Saki and Talhaearn's weapons hit home, causing the woman to shriek in pain. A moment later, Seoni fills the area with glittering golden dust that causes Elessia to appear clearly outlined.
She backs up and finishes intoning her spell. A huge snake appears before Saki and tries to seize her in its coils. "Avenge me on her, slave!" cries Elessia.
At the same time, Elessia falls back and summons dark energies that radiate out from her, harming Saki and Talhaearn, but not the snake.
Then she looks at Saki and purrs, "My, what a strong knight you are. You should go guard the door against that dangerous big hound."
Anyone, go!
And with that, Elessia falls, her invisible yet sparkly form reaching for the tree. "No! It's...mine..." Then she is still.
[COMBAT OVER!]
Searching the area, you find an old and beautiful leather-bound book in a hollow in the bole of the strange tree. The roots and tendrils of the tree have bored into the delicate book, and Seoni gasps, telling you that the book has an overwhelming aura of magic - it is an artifact.
Saki finds that the strange woman Elessia is still alive. The paladin is able to stabilize the Calistrian priestess and bind her for transport back to Nirmathas.
Once Talhaearn nimbly rescues the book, the tree to which it is attached finally dies after millennia of a ghastly half-life. With the death of the magical lypenia tree, all the strange reality-warping effects plaguing the dungeons end. The engine no longer generates portals at random, and otherworldly monsters are no longer drawn into the abandoned dungeon. The entire underground complex shakes slightly as the book is removed, but the caverns do not collapse—the tremors are simply the result of rock shifting after the magical energy reinforcing them for millennia finally disperses.
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Unlike the standard book of infinite spells found in the Core Rulebook, Tessarael’s tome has been steadily drained of its power over the last few thousand years. Its highest-level spells were drained in the process of teleporting Tessarael to her unknown fate, and most of the other pages were destroyed as the book generated sporadic power spikes throughout the millennia. Despite this, Tessarael’s book of infinite spells is still a powerful artifact.
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Though Pavo Vos and the hobgoblin leader Kethi escaped, the true danger was Elessia, and once returned to Nirmathas, she is held as a prisoner of war.
Upon returning to Tamran, the Pathfinders are richly rewarded. The caverns beneath Fangwood Keep, finally dispelled of their magic, are utterly demolished by the Nirmathi rangers sent to reoccupy the castle, and both Molthune and Nirmathas do their best to put this unfortunate incident behind them.
In the middle years of the Age of Enthronement, the mysterious elves finally made their return to Golarion after millennia of absence. They traveled a nigh-unfathomable distance in the blink of an eye by remotely tapping into the power of the Sovyrian Stone in Kyonin from the Arch of Refuge in Sovyrian. Most of the elves returned to fight the dread nascent demon lord Treerazer and prevent him from using the Sovyrian Stone toward evil ends. Among these elven forces was a powerful transmuter known as Tessarael, who commanded a small army of elves on the front line of the battle against Treerazer. When the Abyssal magic of the nascent demon lord and his fiendish legions warped Tessarael’s mind and turned her against the elves, however, her brethren were quick to banish the corrupted wizard from their homeland. They expressly forbade the traitor from using the Sovyrian Stone to returning to Sovyrian, thus cutting off her only way back to Castrovel and precluding the sabotage that Treerazer’s minions had programmed her to perform there.
In order to return to Sovyrian, the brainwashed Tessarael would need to devise her own means of interplanetary transport. With aid from Treerazer’s vile forces, she constructed a tower so she could focus on her research. As she performed her strange arcane experiments—many of which explored using the elven practices of druidism as a means of expedient travel—she added numerous chambers beneath the tower. It took years for her to acquire the necessary resources and build her machines, but eventually, by using a book of infinite spells procured by her demonic liege, she was able to fuel the arcane engine in the belly of her lair. Fusing the artifact with a sizable lypenaia tree from Sovyrian, Tessarael stepped through the tree and was sent hurtling across time and space. She did not arrive at Sovyrian as intended, however, and no one has seen or heard from the elven wizard since the strange incident.
After Tessarael’s failed attempt at space travel, her ruined arcane engine continued to produce random bouts of magical energy every several decades. Monsters and beings from the darkest corners of the multiverse were drawn in through temporary portals it created, but few were able to escape the subterranean chambers. The elements quickly eroded the rest of Tessarael’s fortress, and for years the ruins of her lair lay quiet on an unusually barren hillside along the Marideth River valley.
In 4648 AR, when the secessionists who would eventually form the nation of Nirmathas broke away from their avaricious rulers in Molthune, the Molthuni generals ordered the construction of Fangwood Keep, choosing the ruins of Tessarael’s tower as the location of their border fort. The Molthuni used the broken stone from her tower in constructing their castle, and unknowingly built it over Tessarael’s mysterious underground chambers, in which a powerful relic was entombed alongside her magical inventions.
Fangwood Keep has traded hands countless times in the persistent struggle between Nirmathas and Molthune. Ten years ago—the last time Molthune held the keep—a greedy Molthuni foot soldier named Pavo Vos was stationed there, and in searching through the keep’s oft-disregarded library, he discovered one of Tessarael’s long-forgotten tomes. Though badly weathered, the magically preserved pages of the diary revealed there had once been a great artifact under this tower, and Vos decided to claim the rare item for himself. Before he could accomplish this feat, however, Fangwood Keep was besieged and taken by Nirmathas once again, and he was forced to return to Molthune to let both his plans and anger fester.
By the time Vos achieved the respectable position of lieutenant in the Molthuni army, 10 years had passed since his last visit to Fangwood Keep. Over the course of the past decade, Vos had commanded a small platoon of irregular infantry, known as Vos’s Strikers. A covert task force typically deployed deep behind Nirmathi lines, Vos’s platoon provided a perfect means of taking Fangwood Keep to find out whether the legends about Tessarael’s mysterious artifact were true. With the help of his lover Elessia—a duplicitous devotee of the goddess Calistria—he falsified orders and led a cross-border raid last month, decimating the few Nirmathi rangers garrisoned at Fangwood Keep and ordering his troops to search for an entrance to an underground vault.
A few of Vos’s soldiers found a staircase buried beneath the floor of the soldiers’ mess, and Vos eagerly sent them down it. When these soldiers failed to return, the rest of his platoon was quick to mutiny. Their efforts proved too little, too late, however, as Elessia had garnered the loyalty of a local tribe of hobgoblins, who quickly slaughtered the Molthuni soldiers before they could retreat. Now surrounded by mercenaries who care little about his fate, Vos is still eager to discover the ruins’ secrets, and he continues to send hobgoblin grunts into the level below, promising great rewards to anyone who can gain access to the elven wizard’s locked chambers and find the source of the dungeon’s power.
I appreciate getting the backstory! I'm always curious in ways the scenarios themselves don't always let me find out.
Good job, team. :D