Aithaloessa reloads before stepping forward to defend Antarah as best she can, if there’s anything else lurking nearby.
“Do you think we can get him back on his feet again?” she asks Tariq, glancing nervously from the mage’s wounds to the dark archway beyond.
"Sure" Tariq replies, "Though I can't tell in what state."
The priest asks for divine intervention, quite confident that Sarenrae will help one of Her devotees in Her own temple.
Noticing the communication with the Goddess is a bit faltering, Tariq tries again without a mention.
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Antarah wakes up twitching like a hurt spider. He thanks Tariq and says "Remind me to help you however you would need." Unfortunately, he wasn't conscious to see Aithaloessa and Yasmeena's contribution to the fight. He ends up saying "Maybe we should explore together." If everyone would come with him, he investigates the dark room next to the students room. Later, he says "We should open those chests in the beds foot", meaning the room that Tariq inspected
The chests in the room with the beds contains only more dirt.
In the dark room there is nothing to see, but a mold encrusted door.
Aithaloessa considers the door in the dark alcove, using her eclectic training to try to guess 1) if the door leads to any place more interesting than a closet, 2) if it’s been disturbed lately, based on how the mold’s growing, 3) if the mold is dangerous. Not necessarily in that order.
Aithaloessa is sure, that the mold is the same that grows on bread and cheese - just bigger.
Yasmeena also keeps her weapons handy, wary of more enemies. "The courtyard should have cooled by now, we may wish to see what our fires revealed. I wonder what the caravan thinks happened here, they must have seen the smoke?"
"Whatever is revealed there is probably turned to ashes" Tariq comments, "though maybe it offers intel on what to expect. I'd do that before opening a door which might hide more perils."
Aithaloessa nods, and steps away from the mold-encrusted door for now. “I think I also saw a passage to chambers to the northeast of the courtyard.”
She addresses Yasmeena’s question with a weak grin. “Hopefully they’re thinking about clearing scrub, and not of pillage.”
With that, the guardswoman sets off to close the circuit back to the courtyard. A few paces down the wide hall, though, she spots a doorway into another room she hasn’t nosed about yet.
Given the shape everyone’s in, she approaches carefully, senses straining for signs of anything amiss.
The door looks unsuspicious. And behind no one waits to jump Aithaloessa. A sagging wooden balcony overlooks this large room, which must once have been the monastery’s library. An overpowering odor of musty, rotting paper and old leather fills the air here, and hundreds of books—most too damaged even to open without destroying them—litter the floors. Empty bookshelves line the walls of both levels.
There is nothing magical in the library.
Wanderin through the place and looking over the piles of books Antarah's and Tariq's eyes catch a glimpse of a book, that is well preserced half buried under others. They synchronously reach down to pick it up. This unusual book is called Courts of Stone and Flame, and is a treatise on genies of the elemental planes.
"An interesting read" Tariq thinks aloud, "though for less interesting times, maybe." Once the room is checked, he moves on, and hopefully the rest also with him.
In the former garden, only the scarred skeleton of a now dead tree remains in a field of ashes.
Aithaloessa is quiet from the library to the blasted garden: solemn, but mostly unrepentant, and with a cool mask of professionalism concealing her thoughts. Privately, she’s a bit unhappier. A climate mostly dry enough to give a lost library a fighting chance, and yet… Whatever happened here, they didn’t have time to even bury the books to get them out of the air, if they couldn’t get them away. Tragic, really.
The skeleton of the tree isn't helping her mood. She nudges the edge of the court of ashes with the toe of a boot. “Turn these in and then replant and hope for the best?”
She muses aloud for a moment, but doubts that it’s worth mucking about the cinders before such time as the reclamation of the monastery is well underway. Barring the dark door in the corner behind the group, there’s only a bit left to explore, and Aithaloessa presses on.
The brightly painted walls of this small chapel, probably meant for personal prayer and reflection, stand out as unusually garish for the otherwise reserved architecture notable elsewhere in the monastery. On the walls, numerous rectangular wooden plates traced in gold filigree depict a strapping warrior battling creatures of fire, riding a chariot on the wind, and engaging in other acts of noble heroism. It is the same figure depicted elsewhere in the monastery, but the sheer number of images here suggest that this shrine was especially important to the clerics who honored him as a saint of Sarenrae. Perhaps a quarter of the gold plates have been pried away or hacked apart by long-absent vandals.
Opposite the door, dominating a section of the north wall, stands a man-sized statue of the warrior, its face marred by what look like numerous blows from an axe. The statue holds both hands in front of him, bent at the elbow, palms up, as if expecting an offering. Several deep rents from similar axe blows make it clear that someone tried to hack the arms from the statue decades ago, but was unable to do so.
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In the library, Antarah allows Tariq to inspect the book before taking it himself and handling it carefully. He takes a quick look into it and stores it carefully, putting it inside a piece of cloth before putting it in his backpack.
He walks with Aithaloessa and sees the small chapel in wonder. "Is this one of the heroes depicted in the art along the monastery, you think?", he asks her about the statue.
Antarah attempts setting a few gold pieces on the statue's hands.
"Wonderful..." Tariq comments at the sight of the shrine.
Looking at the statue, he wonders whether he has anything worth of being offered. "Probably not, but the hands on that position suggest that..."
He tries pressing the hands down, as if the weight of an offer would have activated a lever.
Nothing 'hidden' jumps the eye and no seccret mechanism starts working.
“I think it must be,” Aithaloessa says, “though I’m not sure what to make of the chariot, compared to flying under his own power, like in the reliefs around the courtyard.”
She sounds decidedly wistful, as if weighing the likelihood that she’ll ever be in a position to compare methods of flight herself.
Seeing Tariq and Antarah handle the damaged statue, Aithaloessa quickly realizes what they’re thinking, and runs her gaze over it in turn. “Based on those axe marks, I don’t think it’s a question of weight. Or if it is, it’s something ridiculous.”
She double-checks quickly for signs of any shenanigans: tracks, or suggestions that the thing could rotate, or just confirmation that the statue was built into place after all.
She shakes her head, wondering if it could even be a question of magic, in which case the only thing she can contribute is her own wits.
With nothing more than the stunning beauty of this room, all move on to the next passsage, into a small antechamber with Carvings of religious significance to the cult of Sarenrae lining the walls, but none seem to involve the everpresent figure of the other murals.
Further in that direction is an austere octagonal chamber that has a tall roof and an aerie of leering gargoyles perched atop each point where a wall meets another wall. An unholy stench of rotting meat, dried blood, and animal excrement hangs heavy in the air, no doubt from the fine crust of gore, animal carcasses, matted leaves, and guano covering the floor.
"Smells like more animals. Are we ready to fight more baboons or whatever?" Tariq warns. It might be that the animals are gone or dead already, bus ones never too careful.
Antarah carefully moves into the chamber, looking out for threats. But he looks the wrong direction. From above a stirge attacks him and attaches to him.
It starts to suck out his blood.
The stench of the new nest doesn’t help, but Aithaloessa gasps especially at the something that drops down to attach itself to Antarah, proving Tariq’s warning all too prescient.
Her glance flickers around the most badly scraped and bruised of the adventurers, and she wonders if it would be most prudent to fall back and try to draw out whatever might be lurking in the octagonal chamber, buying a bit of time. She raises her pistol and waits for an opening or any more of the strange buzzing, flapping things to appear, trying to place them from her studies. What are these things?! Stryg-… stir-
Yasmeena draws her scimitar and sets herself for battle in her special stance, ready for another one of the creatures should it come near.
Antarah kills the little bloodsucker. Yasmeena offers herself as landing pad for a stirge, only to turn on it, and cut it in half. Being careful, Aithaloessa gets nothing in front of her pistol, which is probably for the better.
Tariq advances carefully, posting close attention in case he spots another creature.
He seems too distracted trying not to step on the remains and stumble, though.
Ibhrim still enjoys the art in the passage and doesn't notice the rather silent combat in the next room.
The last stirge comes down on Tariq. And he also pales, as he loses a non-trivial amount of blood.
Yasmeena spins and thrusts with her scimitar again, trying to skewer the bloodsucker off of Tariq.
The stirges have no chance against the combined attacks.
Strewn about the floor are 43 gp worth of loose coins, a chime, and a fine silver bowl worth 75 gp.
“Everyone alright? Mostly?” Aithaloessa asks, stepping forward again. Spotting the long chime on the ground, she stoops to pick it up before looking around the room, trying to figure out its original use, and maybe just a bit nervous about the risk of more weird giant mosquito critters nesting among the gargoyles.
Some sort of belfry, or other way of calling the believers to prayer? Or something else entirely, she muses.
"Well, if that's all," she says drily, turning back to face the others, "do you think we can settle in and wait for the rest of the caravan? Or just check that there aren't any skeletons in that moldy closet. I think most of us could use a break." Either that, or run to Zastoran and hope Nethys is feeling generous.
"Mostly..." Tariq feels weak, but he's up to whatever it comes. He's a tough guy after all! That, and there's not much else to explore besides the moldy door.
"Let's see what's behind that door."
“Gladly,” Aithaloessa says, following Antarah back to the room one over from the stirge nest. Standing in front of the hacked statue, and feeling a bit silly despite herself, she raises the chime and strikes it sharply, letting its tone ring out.
The single note reminds her absurdly of setting a key, and she turns apologetically to Yasmeena. “Don’t worry, I’m not planning to inflict my singing voice on you all again quite yet.”
As the chime rings, it causes the statue to move a bit and reveals a secret door that springs a little bit open.
It takes some strength, but the statue can be moved away and then the secret door can be fully opened. Behind it, a flight of stairs leads down.
"Oh!" Tariq exclaims. "Someone has a light source?"
Once the lighting problem is solved, Tariq offers himself to lead the way down.
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After helping open the secret door, Antarah's mouth hangs open at the secret passage. After taking time to recompose himself, he speaks an arcane word and with a movement of his left hand, four light balls spring into existence. At his will, three of them fly down the stairs, illuminating the passage.
Yasmeena smiles distantly at Aithaloessa's self-deprecating humor, but gasps when the secret door opens. "Amazing!" she says.
The stairs into the dark are lit up and a turn becomes visible. Some more stairs down then in the opposite direction lead to a crypt.
The monastery’s undercrypt is a series of ten-foot-wide rough-hewn passages dug in a double-cross formation. The main thoroughfare runs north to south, with two similar east-west passages crossing the main hall about fifty feet apart.
An eerie silence pervades the cool subterranean funerary network, which must contain the bodies of scores—if not hundreds—of honored worshipers of Sarenrae in shallow niches carved into the walls of the east-west passages. Many of these skeletal remains have been roughly tossed from their niches, and countless bones and skulls line the floor.