"I will endeavor to remember to punch her in the face if we encounter her ghost again, or whatever that was," Remy remarks as you return to the catacombs.
You head north this time from the entry chamber, through the door that is cracked open. This ten-foot-high corridor smells of damp, earthy air. Alcoves stacked three high along the walls once held stone sarcophagi, each carved with reliefs of whip-poor-wills, spirals, hourglasses, bones, and other Pharasmin motifs. These houses of the dead are smashed and defiled. Blocks of broken sarcophagi have been stacked here and there to form crude chairs or dining tables, their tops strewn with gnawed fragments of bone and scraps of leathery flesh.
Four ghouls squat on sarcophagus fragments here, speaking in Necril. They pause as they see you enter and regard you curiously.
"Who are you curious living creatures?" one asks. "Have you come to join our philosophical debate?"
"Perhaps they come to try to destroy us," another wonders. "Most living creatures do not like our ilk."
"We are what we are. We cannot control our hunger, but we need not let it define us," says a third.
"Well said," the first one agrees. It turns towards you again. "Perhaps you might do us a favor, in exchange for a favor of our own? There is a warded door nearby, impossible for our kind to pass through. If you bring us skulls of the dead that lie beyond it, we will tell you a secret."
"And what would be the nature of the secret?" Dewdrop adds, fluttering down from Edric's shoulder. "I mean there's a drastic difference in value between informing us of what threats lie further in and letting us know that you passed gas ten minutes ago and didn't tell anyone. Both being secrets."
"We have been delving into the nature of undeath," a ghoul replies to Edric. "What is the state of our souls? Are they trapped within our bodies in a state of limbo? Or have they gone on to the afterlife, and are we just echoes of our former selves?"
The ghoul that offered the secret regards Dewdrop. "We will tell you of the one who is behind the troubles at the chapel. Her nature, and how she comes and goes."
"A fair value secret that would be, indeed," Dewdrop replies. Redirecting her attention to the general debate, she turns to Edric.
"There is some debate in ecclesiastical circles on that very subject," she interjects. "The appearance of consciousness and the implied self-awareness does not, on its own, demonstrate the existence of a soul. Various magics have been fashioned that supposedly can detect a soul's presence, but the argument can be - and has been - made that they merely detect traces of a soul's surrounding aura; Not the actual soul itself."
She turns to look back at the ghouls.
"But it's not the conundrum that we will solve today. Before we retrieve these skulls, what is your intentions towards them?"
"We have feasted well on the sacred bones down here," the ghoul says. "The ripe repast has granted us great metaphysical power. The more we eat, the stronger we become. The skulls will add to our strength."
"We have no quarrel with the living that do not intrude upon our domain," the ghoul says. "They taste terrible unless they've been allowed to ripen for several weeks, anyway. Assuming you stop the vampires and such that have taken over this place, we will return to the Darklands and seek other forms of entertainment."
"Agreed," the sprite declares. "Now where is this warded door?"
The ghouls direct you back to the room where Yniesse and the acolytes had been hiding. You collect some of the skulls from the burial niches and return them to the ghouls. The ecstatic ghouls thank you for the gifts.
"The one who caused the problems here is an ancient strigoi. Her name is Alirel, and she comes and goes through the holes in the Runelord's eyes down below by turning into a shadow."
With the transaction concluded, the ghouls scamper off down the tunnel...
"Now isn't that special?" Dewdrop comments once the ghouls have left. "Alirel, is it? Shall we go meet her?"
A narrow flight of stairs descends down the tunnel out of the crypt. The stairs open into the northwest portion of a damp cavern. The stone walls of this cavern bear countless scratches and gouges that speak to its creation by digging claws rather than natural formation. The floor underfoot is rough and uneven, with small piles of rubble or dirt heaped here and there. Tangles of tree roots dangle from cracks in the ceiling. Claustrophobic despite its size, the cavern is littered with gnawed bones. Heaps of dry leaves, tattered rags, and worn hides form a half-dozen crude pallets near the walls. A pair of claw-dug tunnels lead to the northeast and southeast; to the southwest, the cave breaks into an ancient-looking room.
A dero ghoul is here, performing an atonal concert on a homemade flute carved from a long-dead Pharasmin’s femur. The ghoul seems shocked by your intrusion. "What? How dare you disrupt my song! I will defend my honor by eating you, vagrants!"
The ghoul is greatly taken aback by your fierce battle cries!
"I beg your pardon?! Vagrant?! How rude!" dewdrop declares indignantly.
She waves a hand and sends a streamer of acid at the ghoul.
The ghoul dodges Edric's swing, but Dewdrop hits her with an acid arrow. Gritting her teeth, she focuses her gaze on the sprite before biting and clawing at Edric.
Success The creature is slowed 1.
Failure The creature is paralyzed. It can attempt a new save at the end of each of its turns, and the DC cumulatively decreases by 1 on each such save.
"Fine! You wish play games such as this, then ..."
The sprite gestures elaborately and a bolt of bright and burning light arcs out to miss the undead.
Remy moves to flank the dero ghoul. She glimpses its vulnerability before unleashing the flurry (of blows)!
Unfortunately, the flurry is less than impressive.
The ghoul dodges all of your attacks and responds in kind! She targets Remy with her gaze before attacking Edric again!
"Oh, for the love of ...! Will you just hold still?" Dewdrop snaps, sending another blast of searing light towards the ghoul.
Remy is confused, but it doesn't matter much as she can't seem to hit anything.
Dewdrop's searing light misses as well. Edric lands two good hits, but the ghoul responds in kind, keeping her gaze on Remy to neutralize the monk.
First casting a quickened healing spell on Edric, Dewdrop follows up with one more searing blast directed at the ghoul.
Dewdrop finally connects with her searing light, striking the ghoul square in the face! The ghoul shrieks as the light completely incinerates her, her wretched body crumbling to ash! All that is left behind is her +1 resilient leather armor.
"Well struck!" Remy shouts in congratulations.
In a leather sack nearby is a pile of gemstones worth 1,200 gp in all, as well as a fade band talisman, a 6th-level wand of overflowing life, and a set of greater goggles of night.
Dewdrop nods in agreement, stuffing the gemstones and wand into her bag. She tries on the goggles - which seem perfectly sized for her diminutive form - before handing them to Edric. "You could probably use these more than I can."
Using her knowledge of first aid, she tends to her companions' injuries.
After healing up, you continue down the tunnel the ghouls indicated. The eastern wall of this room has fallen away to connect the ancient stone chamber to the larger cave beyond. The wall to the west is decorated with a six-foot-tall carving of a beautiful woman’s face, her lips parted slightly in a cruel smile. The woman looks exactly like Remy.
"That's her. Me. Sorshen," Remy says.
The carving’s slightly parted lips form a three-inch gap through which a dark tunnel can be seen leading deeper into the earth. A faint draft of cold air occasionally moves into this tunnel.
Dewdrop looks over the carving for a moment and checks the magical aura surrounding it before turning to the others with a smirk.
"I can't believe that people were actually using that for an activation word. Old Farnswaa was only using that as an example in his treatise on magical activation methods. He didn't expect people to take it so literally."
She shakes her head and moves close to the opening.
"Last one on the other side buys the first round tonight," she says before calling out, "'Consume me, Runelord Sorshen!'" Her form blurs into mist and vanishes through the lips.
As you transform into mist and are sucked through the tunnel, you feel stronger...
After a minute of vertigo through the darkness, you emerge from the a ragged hole in the wall of a chamber and swiftly transform back into your solid forms while in mid-air!
This room’s original purpose is hard to discern, as most of the floor and walls collapsed into a sprawling, rubble-filled pit. To the north and west, jagged ledges 20 feet above the ruined floor each give access to an ornate double door framed in worked stone, while to the northeast, a ten-foot-wide, five-foot-tall passageway slopes downward. Overhead, much of the chamber’s original construction appears intact, featuring an inverted model of a strange, gothic city with miniature spires and towers extending into the room like tiny stalactites.
The area is suffused with a low, ominous sound, as if a distant but immense heart beats somewhere within the surrounding stone...
The sprite has no issues at all avoiding the short drop and flutters down to land on Edric's shoulder. "Can't beat wings for flying," she says with a smirk.
Remy flips and lands in a nimble crouch on the ledge before rising to her feet. "That was a hell of a thing." She looks around.
The top third of the room’s walls are set with smoky quartz and obsidian mosaics in abstract swirls. Dewdrop recognizes the art as an impression of a location on the Shadow Plane. Unfortunately, as she looks closer, she can see tiny black flames mirroring your movements in the swirls above, ad scraps of shadow converge on the flames' location. A moment later, the flickering dark flames flare up and the sound of an entire city populace screaming an alarm fills the room! No doubt any creatures nearby have heard the cacophony!
Dewdrop as well simply shrugs off the cacophony. It's not much worse than the cheering at the universities sporting events that she's regularly expected to attend.
She looks this way and that, fully expecting the alarm to bring enemies.
With her perfected fortitude, Remy ignores the screams as well! The three of you stand unharmed, watching the doorways. And, sure enough, the west doors open as a pair of strigoi rush in to attack!
Once winces as you unleash your battlecries. They shift into forms of pure shadow, slinking along the walls, then re-manifesting their physical bodies to attack Edric!
As the creatures move in attack, Dewdrop flutters up to be visible above her companions. Channeling her nymph blood, she throws a disabling glance towards them.
She then blasts the nearest of the undead with a ray of sunlight.
Remy moves to flank Edric's foe before unleashing the flurry.
Dewdrop blinds the strigoi with her beauty! She blasts one with searing light, then Edric and Remy team up to finish off the undead! The other strigoi lashes out blindly, managing a lucky hit on Edric.
Assuming that Edric needs little assistance to finish off the last of the opponents, Dewdrop gestures casually, sending an arc of lightning at the creature.
The second strigoi quickly falls before your assault! The doors from which they emerge lead into a crypt. A half-dozen ten-foot-wide alcoves, each containing a pair of ancient stone sarcophagi, extend from the walls of this room. The lid of each sarcophagus depicts a carving of a reclining figure, its mouth open in a silent scream. Each of these open mouths are actual holes in the stone lid. At the western end, the hall widens into a larger chamber, its walls adorned with iron shackles hanging from metal rings driven into the stone wall.
A search reveals a hidden door at the far end of the room.
"Wait, before you open that," Dewdrop says, holding up a hand. "Let me deal with ... this." She gestures at the various wounds decorating the lizardman's scaly hide.
She spends some time applying healing magic to said wounds.
"There. Now you're all ready to be hacked, bashed, and bit all over again," she says with satisfaction.
Clustered columns and gracefully pointed archways adorn the walls of the chamber past the secret door. A double door stands in the southern wall, while two more stand in alcoves to the east. Facing these two doors on the opposite wall are two additional alcoves, each of which frame a large stone sarcophagus with lids carved in the shape of screaming reclining figures. To the north, the walls each depict a detailed carving of a cityscape made of spires and pyramids. A block of stone that appears to have been partially carved into a statue looms where these angled walls converge.
A powerful strigoi waits for you here in front of the statue. "You have made a mistake coming here. We will be your doom," the strigoi hisses.