"Maybe we should move on. I'd rather not risk our flight spells lapsing while we're overhead and these things don't look like they're going anywhere", Tanith warns.
Carina chugs another extract of shield.
"Might be a good idea to move on. I've got plenty of bombs, but I'd rather not use them unless I really need to."
"If there's nothing down here but worms and bigger worms, maybe we can find a way to just collapse this shaft on them."
"That said, looks like there's a lot more to this. We should probably check it out further."
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"Actually, guys..." Eben says, seeming more surprised than anyone that he's the one to say this, "I think I've got this."
He directs his dancing lights to hover above him, casting flickering shadows of himself down upon the ground and among the worms. He holds out one hand between the lights and the worms, opening and closing it in a series of quick 'snapping' motions. The shadows on the ground mimic the action, but in doing so seem to multiply and keep repeating the gesture on their own. Soon Eben's shadow is seemingly replaced with a series of flickering, flickering, shadow puppets doing 'dog-bites'.
"Ilfis itovic ve, fronnol dartakic ve, filiik si geou gethrisj SONE VILKVIRI!" Eben intones, his arcane words supplemented by a chorus of gnashing and clacking, at first barely on the edge of hearing but quickly becoming a din.
And below, among the worms, the shadows turn themselves inside out and become a near-infinite array of grinning, disembodied teeth.
"Whoa...coool...." Cuetzpalli says as he watches Eben work.
"Did you mentor under a magically inclined clown while I wasn't looking?"
"Did you mentor under a magically inclined clown while I wasn't looking?"
Astraden nods. "I mean, if I could've gathered them, a single blast of chaos should've killed most of them. But if they're not going to react, that's fine."
She watches Eben pull his trick. "That's brilliant! How did you . . . that's shadow, but with teeth? Excellent."
"Let's head west."
"I've been studying up on shadow magic ever since Ph'rexis took us on that trip. I can make a lot of different things out of it, now."
"Well, it's very cool."
The two swarms seem only slightly affected by Eben's spell.
"Right. Let's go. Worms don't care much about shadow puppets."
Eben looks more than a little disappointed at the outcome of his teeth spell. "I could also do a giant ball of water...? Nah, nevermind, we can just ignore the worms and float west, I guess. The teeth will stay here and do their own thing. Maybe they'll still munch a bunch of the worms up..." He still looks more than a little downcast at the failure of his really neat idea.
As the crew start to float west, he begins recasting his lost spells.
"If Carina still has bombs left when we come back through here, she can try and bomb the rest of 'em," Astraden says. "I've got a good spell for it, too."
The party drifts onwards and finds itself in a room of strangeness.
Perfectly preserved corpses cover most of this large chamber's floor, arrayed head-to-toe in neat rows. Thick dust obscures the walls and floors, signs of the room's great age, yet no trace of decay touches the corpses. The massive green stone blocks that line the chamber are covered with ancient symbols resembling coiled worms.
Farrukh foolishly tries to read the symbols while looking around.
The symbols give half of a fairly well-known Draconic incantation: 'That is not dead which can eternal lie.'
"Creepy. How much you want to bet that they'll come to life and try to kill us as we pass?"
"How much you want to bet we can put them down before our spells wear off?"
Tanith wasn't one to follow high society fashion but he studies the corpses from afar.
"If they are dead, we should be able to come back and ask them some questions later," Astraden says. "But I have a way to check if that inscription's true . . ."
Astraden lets out a brief burst of energy, but the energy warps. Rather than affecting her allies or giving off the peal of laughter associated with killing undead, it floats forward, quietly collecting around the disquieting corpses.
Astraden detects no undead in this chamber.
"Okay, if they're not patiently waiting undead, then it's actually way, way creepier that they're all perfectly preserved. Part of me wants to say screw this and just take one of the other exits from the worm room. Or else we just bolt through the opposite door without pausing in here."
"No undead in here. Let's just head through to the next room," Astraden says. She does so.
Eben follows, still looking around as he goes to make sure they don't suddenly spring to life and grab his ankle.
Dozens of skeletons lie on the floor here, neatly arranged on the ground and surrounded by halos of stonework stained with ancient decay.
Carina shivers. "Keep going. Just... keep going."
"Maybe that's what they wanted us to do. Room full of corpses so we wouldn't expect a room full of evil undead next. You have any more of that undead detection in you Astraden? If not, I imagine just channeling to hurt them might work about the same."
"Room of corpses, room of skeletons... what's next, room of intestines and guts?"
Astraden again scans for undead auras.
"I don't think that fits the pattern, Eben. Clearly the next room will just be full of bone marrow."
"No, it works, you're going deeper and deeper in the body with each room..." Eben says, ready to argue his hypothesis with all the fervor of a necromantic university scholar.
The group flies on and comes to another fork in the path. Up ahead is a simple bronze door. To the left is a path leading east.
"Door looks interesting."
Farrukh does his normal detect and disable routine, then opens it.
Astraden keeps a wary eye down the other corridor, using her dark-sight.
Astraden stares down the passage, realizing that the reason she can't see very far is that the floor drops away only about twenty feet in.
Meanwhile, Farrukh opens the door.
Nests of tattered books, bits of fabric, and other refuse lie scattered about the chamber, curved troughs each big enough to fit a worm the size of a small horse. There's a disconcerting symmetry to the way the nests are positioned in the room, a marker of an alien will making itself at home amid the refuse of Kyuss's arrogance and power.
The chamber is occupied by a single worm naga, which has been watching the door intently. It stares at the party, eyes glittering with a curious light. They can tell that the gaze attack is being actively suppressed.
"Good morning, or day, or night," it says politely. Its voice is grating and yet somehow oily, like a broken eggshell mixed with its contents, grinding against stone. "I am Sruggut. Who are you? Can any of you teleport?"
"...Good Morning." Farrukh says. He keeps his eyes darting around the room to take in everything BUT the naga's face.
"Yeah, forgive me if I'm a bit cautious. The others weren't as friendly as you. I'm Korush by the way."
"Of course."
"So... bodies, skeletons, and then... worm naga? Does that fit with the pattern? Were they trying to say there's a little worm naga inside all of us...?" Eben murmurs. Louder, and in answer to Sruggut's question, he says "Oh, yes, we love to teleport. We do it all the time. I find the feel of etheric matter moving through my transcended form to be quite exhilarating, and in fact..." he continues in this vein, tossing in random sounding scholarly arcane phrases when needed to lend veracity to the statement. "And, of course, it offers the most valuable strategic retreat one can imagine, when threatened!"
"Letting it think we can port so it thinks we can escape if it attacks, and it might waste time trying to dimension lock us."
"Give me a reason not to bisect you," Cuetzpalli says, looking angrily at the abomination.
Sruggut grimaces at Eben, appearing to cotton on to the basis of his message to the others. "I'm no threat to you. Just a humble ascetic. But if you can teleport...agh, I've been down here so long..."
It turns to Cuetzpalli. "I can break your mind with a look. I can erase your life with a touch. You are trespassing on unhallowed ground, wormfood, and you're lucky to have found me, because I can be a friend." Its lamprey-like mouth caves in in what's possibly meant to be a smile. "Any of the Wormgod's faithful would rip you apart and use your skin as a canvas if they found you floating down here—and my kin have eaten naught but the fruits of this cursed earth for...a long time."
"I eat death for breakfast, maggot!" Cuetzpalli grins madly.
He is wise enough to let Eben and the others do the rest of the talking though. The olman works the grip of Kelmarchen with both hands, waiting for the negotiations to go down hill.
"Gross."
They'd try, and they'd fail.
"Well, thanks for your hospitality, Sruggut." Carina says after clearing her throat. "We haven't exactly had the warmest welcome here."
"By the way, did you, by any chance, happen to remember a gentleman named Bucknard that supposedly came here?"