Eben peeks into his wrapped bundle. "Maybe you're right about that. A skull would be easier to bronze than a rubbery head anyway. You got any spells that will take the meat off?"
"I think so. I've been learning more spontaneous spells, lately. This is one of them."
She places a hand on her holy symbol and another on the carefully wrapped bundle. "Smälta."
With a wet, grinding noise, the ball of cloth diminishes slightly in size.
Eben beams with gratitude and then grimaces with buyer's remorse as mouldering, oozing charnel liquid that used to be mind flayer flesh seeps out of the cloth and over his hands. "Uh... I didn't think that one through, I guess..."
As he departs, Krekie's black eyes are bright with innocence, watching Tanith's and Eben's exchange. She takes out a pipe and lights it with a tindertwig. "You should know where they come from, Creed. That's the family you would wed into."
"Huh? Red, you're related to those things?"
Carina winces.
"...kind of. Pre-reincarnation."
There is no day and no night in this world, only an eternal rainy twilight. The embers of the fire hiss and slowly die as the group's rest stretches on. Sabir eats her dinner silently, while Krekie, perhaps in anticipation of her departure, is chattier than usual. Though her questions seem harmless, many are about the group's adventures to-date, making it somewhat hard to tell if this is innocent curiosity or a wish to gain intelligence. Clunk stands off to the side, grimly keeping watch over the forest. One can almost hear a distant song echoing from the depths of the woods.
Sleep comes easier to some than others. Clunk, of course, does not sleep. "This unit can manage the watches," he says. "It advises all of you receive an interrupted eight hours of rest. Your judgment is severely impaired by lack of sleep."
Krekie does not seem wholly convinced, but she does eventually lay down to sleep--once she is convinced that her prisoner has nodded off. A sea crow perched in one of the trees continues the vigil, however.
For the members of Spiny's Six, there is only one dream.
A great boulder rises from the pond. It looks like it has been carved, but only halfway, only enough to give the vague impression of a coiled-up dragon. A tamarack tree grows atop it, its autumn-golden pine needles
falling into the pool below and forming a golden halo around the statue.
Whoever falls asleep first is the first to arrive here, and whoever falls asleep last is the last. Those who must wait needn't wait long--time bends, as dream time often does, and it doesn't take more than a few minutes before the entire group is assembled. Forzamele is missing, as are, of course, Krekie, Sabir and Clunk.
A minute after the last arrival, silver light begins to spread across the pool, and a familiar face appears within:
The party's patron of late, friend to the late great worm-hunting wizard Bucknard, the woman who sent the party on this errand in a quest to find the truth behind the stolen history of Dragotha the Dracolich's missing phylactery, emerges from the pool. Though water falls around her, she is perfectly dry, clad tonight in a pastel blue gown that compliments her shimmering pale hair. She glances back at the boulder, lips quirking, then turns to face the party and gives a wide, relieved smile.
"Finally."
"Oh, hey! What are you doing here? Were you waiting for us?" Cuetzpalli asks, sounding a little confused as he takes in the beautiful scene.
"Waiting and hoping. You're in another plane, aren't you?" The bard pinches the bridge of her nose, then shrugs as if to brush the frustrations away. "It's fine. I just had to find the right spell to contact you, and that tasked me with a couple days' worry. Have you made it to the island? Have you found the library?"
"We're on the island and we're working our way to the library. Getting there ended up being... complicated ", Ursus explains.
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"Understood." She nods curtly. "I have a backup scroll of this spell, but it's best to be concise if we can. First, do you know of a woman named Celeste? Blonde, pierced lip, a little rough around the edges. She's in Alhaster looking for you. I don't know if I should trust her, or this 'Manzorian' who-knows-who she says she works for." She waves her hand derisively, briefly looking a little more the noblewoman and a little less the anxious bard.
"To expand on what Tanith said, Darl and his crew are dead, captured, or switched sides. Darl himself is extremely dead. That's the main threat down, so there should only be one more step until we're 'worthy' of admission to the library," Eben says, apparently not comprehending the word 'concise'. "Anyway, yeah, Celeste is good people. Manzorian is the one that sent us to Alhaster in the first place, following Bucknard's trail. She should be safe to talk to."
Carina lets out a little yawn as she appears in the dream.
"...Lashonna?"
Lashonna smiles at Carina. "Hello, there, Carina. Sorry to hijack whatever dreams you were planning on having."
She glances down at the water, where her reflection stares back at her. Her smile wavers slightly. She takes a deep breath, appearing to steady herself, and turns back to the party.
"Zeech's Great Project is accelerating. I can't slow it down well, and I don't know enough about Kuluth-Mar to even gauge how. Did this Manzorian... know Bucknard well? Is he connected to the Circle of Eight like Bucknard was?" She pinches the bridge of her nose. "Because that's the second thing. News is that Mordenkainen has moved off-world. So have Bigby and Otto. With Tenser and Otiluke dead, those dead priests in Greyhawk, Rary turned traitor, Drawmij still missing... Bucknard was paranoid towards the end, but I begin to wonder if maybe he was right. Maybe someone or something is targeting the great mortal powers." A nervous laugh escapes her. "Scary times for the 'arch-bard', hm? So you think I should trust this Manzorian, this wizard of the coast? An archmage just popping out of obscurity like he did makes me very nervous. But I need help here."
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"Yeah, he is Tenser. Faked his death, innit? Trusting him has worked out okay so far for us."
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Eben winces. "That was something we weren't supposed to let anyone know, Cuetz." He sighs. "Okay, so now you're in the loop, obviously there are very important reasons to keep that completely to yourself, Lashonna. For starters, if Tenser finds out, well, I really don't want to see what an archmage does when his trust has been violated."
"Whoops... But, it's Lashonna! She said she needed to know! Eben's probably right though. You can keep that information quiet, right?" the bloodrager asks Lashonna.
Doh! I'm just going to shut up now.
Lashonna's eyes widen at Cuetzpalli's words, and she actually takes a step back. "Of--of course! Aside from Maralee, Tenser was the dearest to Bucknard of any. I would never betray one he loved, nor your trust. Nor would I get you disintegrated."
She lets out a soft laugh. "Tenser alive. That is a secret that gladdens my heart. I will keep it close, and I will trust him."
Her expression turns serious again. "There is one third final piece of news. Two days ago, a vast shadow was seen gliding under the Nyr Dyv near the docks. No light could penetrate it. The water was ice-cold, as heavy as the deepest depths. A nearby fishing trauler's haul came out completely crushed. And whatever it was, it turned after a moment and took off in the exact direction you chose." Her lips tighten. "And then it was gone. It blinked out of sight, as if hopping to another plane. Something's following you. The servants of Kyuss seem to have finally gotten wind of our plans. Are the island's protections intact?"
"We might have... almost met the thing you're talking about. Two days ago? Um..." Eben thinks back to the last two days, but decides he needs to ask some followup. "How many days ago did we leave? Time... might be working a bit differently where we are. In any case, yes, there's an ancient intelligent hurricane surrounding the island. I don't know that it will hamper anything underwater, but then it would have to get through the gateway to this plane."
Lashonna blinks. "Well, you left the 14th, and it's the 18th now."
"Huh. Yeah, looks like we lost a day or so of time, relatively. Well, hopefully we'll be done here in a day or so, though who knows how much time going through the library itself will take. So we shouldn't be planar-timing all the way through the Age of Worms itself. Anyway, we'll keep an eye out for... whatever it us underwater."
When the party awakens, Krekie and Sabir are already gone.
"The kenku indicated that she does not enjoy conversations meant solely to facilitate partings," Clunk says by way of explanation. He turns to face the forest. "Shall we get this over with?"
Cuetzpalli gets his gear on and then casts greater false life on himself.
He seems to be glowing with a new and powerful angelic aura, a scintillation of color that follows him everywhere like a barely visible rainbow halo.
"Ready," he says, nodding grimly.
"No, you're not..." Eben says, casting his own set of spells, first on himself, then walking around, touching first Kelmarchen, then tying little strips of leather on to the clothing of Cuetzpalli, Tanith, and Farrukh, and casting an additional spell upon each of those. "OK, now you're ready."
"Appreciate it Eben."
Tanith prepares with his usual blessings.
"Hey, Clunk, can you tell if the time we lost was a one-time thing? Or is it something ongoing? Like is time moving 10% slower here ALL the time or did we just jump forward a day once?"
Carina is quiet as she rises, her eyes steely and determined.
Clunk is silent a moment. "It is difficult to predict the behavior of time in this place, but this unit believes the anomalies will stop soon. It is unlikely we will face excessive delays beyond what have already been observed."
Astraden, being late to bed and late to rise, misses Lashonna's dream. After rising and eating the last of her suspicious hardtack and jerky, she clears her throat and begins her incantations. She gives Olidammara's blessing to Clunk's overcoat, marks out a circle of silver dust around herself, and says a prayer of finding for Cuetzpalli.
"It's not uncommon for planes to have strange time effects. Not weird at all, considering how this place seems designed to resist the passage of time."
After Astraden casts her spells for the morning, enchanting Cuetzpalli's pathfinding and Clunk's clothing and placing a couple of protective wards over herself and Carina, the party sets out into the Doomshroud Forest.
What sets in first is the quiet. For the first time since they arrived, the members of Spiny's Six cannot hear the rain. Instead, there is the slow, oily drip-drip-drip of black tar from the trees to the forest floor. The leaves of these trees are large, thick and waxy, forming little 'bowls' full of the hateful stuff to cover the roots and stick to the bottoms of the adventurers' boots.
The viscous drip-drip-drip forms an uneasy, irregular sort of rhythm to the adventurers' journey. It's dark and humid, with an unpleasant smell between burning bone and molasses hanging thick in the air over them. Spiders make their webs above pools of tar-sap to catch small insects lured in by the tar's foul sweetness.
The most unsettling part might be that the party can see some signs that things weren't always like this. A clump of wild chamomile grows green and healthy, sheltered from the sap by old spiderwebs. The bones of what used to be a truly enormous elk are nearly swallowed up in insidious black vines. Here and there are even scattered marks of intelligent life--a broken wagon wheel, a scrap of cloth, the moss-eaten remains of a cellar descending down into the earth. But the deeper in they go, the fouler the forest becomes. Surely nothing natural could live here for long and escape corruption. Not even the spiders.
Astraden walks alongside Cuetzpalli. "So, does it feel good to have Zyrxog dead? I bet Eligos will be glad to hear he's finally done for."
"Yeah, definitely, that bastard had it coming for too long." Cuetzpalli nods. "Eligos will be very pleased, I'm sure. Soon as we get out of this horror-show we can let him know." The Olman is clearly very put off by the corrupted forest, looking like he wants to crawl out of his own skin.
Carina shivers and hugs herself to Tanith.
The party has been traveling for two hours through the murk and foulness when they come to the top of a ten-foot cliff. Astraden's spell on Cuetzpalli guides him further in, down the cliff and beyond. Down below, across a shallow, muddy, half-clogged creek, is a clearing lit by the glowing puffballs that seem to grow everywhere and on everything around here.
Six tall black trees grow in a ring around the clearing, facing the party. The trees are reminiscent of aspens, but their bark is the same mucky, oily black as the sap they leak. Many of the trees in this forest are twisted into terrifying, monstrous shapes, but on these six trees in particular, the party can almost see faces contorted in agony in the black bark.
At the center, framed by the two arching parentheses of trees, is one more mark of past life here--an eight-foot-tall standing stone. A sputtering silver light shines out from the stone, a mystical sigil resembling a many-petaled flower. Runes wind around the glowing flower, some sort of ancient spell, message or warning.
Let this gateway grow hale and green
And its guardians safe in dream
As long as the forests untouched remain
By the whispers of gods and by magics arcane.
Eben just barely recognizes the runic script. "Ohhhh, hey, that's Druidic. Not something you see in the written form very often. I have no chance of translating it, though. Where's Anlathi when we need her?"
"Look at that light. One last bit of life holding on in the middle of all this darkness." Cuetzpalli squints at the stone, but makes no move to approach until someone more bookish approves of the move. "No one knows what those symbols mean?"
Astraden shakes her head. "Might be Druidic, yeah. Is this where the undead druid are from?"
Astraden approaches to within sixty feet and scans for magic.
Tanith builds up a good sweat performing his usual morning workout and dedications to Kord. He prepares his usual prayers before the party ventures down into the swamp.
Endure Elements [Tanith] - all day
Resist Energy Lightning [Tanith] - 3 encounters
Greater Magic Weapon [Tanith's Poleaxe] - 1 full dungeon
Ironskin [Tanith] - 2 encounters
Carina shivers and hugs herself to Tanith.
The big man wraps an arm protectively around the shivering alchemist.
"Not the worst ruin we've visited but not the kind of place I want to stay overnight. The 'Doomshroud' sounds like some kind of monster. Cuetz, you see any interesting tracks over the last couple hours?"
Tanith stands very still and listens for songs, mournful or otherwise.
You also notice an especially curious ambient effect hanging over the clearing. It entwines with your magic, bonding with it like water to water, and it takes you a moment to realize what it is:
It's another detect magic spell.
Even as you realize this, the 'feelers' the stone is extending outward suddenly snap. Six long threads. It's as if the very presence of magic--or perhaps your kind of magic--has set something off. Or broken something fragile. Something terrible is about to come from those six trees.
Astraden gazes upon the magics at work here, and briefly, all are quiet, trying to help her concentrate. She suddenly recoils as if struck.
A moment later, there is a tearing, splitting sound, like wood peeling from wood.
The trees begin to dance.
No, not dance. Writhe. Contort. As if there are things inside of them, as if they are a spider's silken cocoons for her prey now thrashing for freedom. The trees sway from side to side, and a song fills the air sung by six voices as sweet as honey.
Laughs bright Moon at bitter Sea
Tethered, bound, like I to tree
She pulls the waters where she will
But shades 'low Sister Sea are still
And in black wind the stars will fall,
The Moon will die, the Oerth will crawl
The Green will fail, the Worm is free
To harvest, drink, like I from thee
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"Just one really old dino-print," Cuetzpalli responds.
Then the trees start.
He shifts instantly into a battle-stance, raising Kelmarchen. "Nobody drinks me!" he yells, pointing it at the closest writhing plant.