Session 42 Recap and the Take

Session 42 Recap and the Take

After a successful manhunt and brief sojourn in the waking world (just long enough to receive the latest extortion from their blackmailer), the party returned to Zyan. Hector, immortal hound of King Lathanon, agreed to lead them through the Brambles to the Abyssal Dungeon, where his master took him once a century ago.

Descending past the pagodas of the hanging merchants, the party could see the damage wrought by Bazekop’s hurricane of wrath. Not wanting to alert the demon’s human servitors, the party went rapidly down into the stifling darkness and cutting thorns below. Communicating with Hector in the language of hounds, Dozar learned that the quickest way to the Abyssal Dungeon involved crossing an old bridge over a great chasm “in which fly dark things”. Not interested in a lengthy detour, the party proceeded with some misgivings. The bridge was a grand affair, anchored to two massive boles, its massive posts capped with the copper heads of great screaming kestrals. The 1000’ bridge was clearly rotten in places, its massive boards buckled, or dangling at alarming angles into the black chasm that descended deep into the brambles below. The party proceeded forward cautiously. Although they were assaulted at one point by leathery flying things with shriveled bodies and long talons, a well-times sleep spell sent them hurtling past into the darkness. Hastening forward, the party made it across in one piece.

After a full day of travel, the party’s minds were fatigued from the constant attention required to avoid sudden drops into the darkness below, their faces and hands cross-hatched with a network of red welts, and their muscles were cramping from long contortions through the sharp brambles. Just as they began to think about giving up for the day and making camp, Hector became excited. Urging the party forward, he led them upwards. Wooden steps were set here in a twisting stair, leading up through a column of thorns that rose into the black empty space above the brambles. Above, they could see that the column wound towards a great root ball that descended from the rock of Zyan through the darkness in a great tangle to meet the column at its apex. The stairs terminated before a plain door set directly into the massive tangle of roots. Five feet high, its metal surface was streaked in rust from the moisture that ran in rivulets from the roots above. The door was sealed by a single rusted padlock, set in a metal latch. A smell of filth and urine emanated from the door, along with a sense of petty desperation and forgotten squalor.

With a hair-raising shock, Salinger and Cletus instantly recognized the portal as The Sordid Latch from In the Light of Other Moons, the potent poem penned by the Lady Settari Shirishanu. In the poem, the Sordid Latch is the first of the seven locks overcome by the rogue Holaxes as he penetrates the Abyssal Dungeon in his relentless pursuit of the inimical light of the Necromantic Moon. A greater portion of the poem is taken up by a description of the seven locks. They seem somehow to be at once metaphors for aspects of Zyan Above (the city) and meditations on the human condition. The poem indicates that there is a space or dungeon between each lock and the next, but contains little information about these spaces, beyond the suggestion that they somehow correspond spiritually to the locks that seal them.

About the Sordid Latch, the poem likens it to a cellar door in a back alley abattoir or whorehouse of Gutter or Turnabout, the most impoverished of Zyan’s neighborhoods. The poem treats urban decay as a metaphor for repression of shameful desires and desperate petty acts, as thought Gutter and Turnabout are the echoes of the sins and flaws that Zyan would rather not remember. The poem also indicates that the next lock beyond the Sordid Latch is the Gleaming Seal. It is the Sordid Latch’s opposite: a door one might have found to the once gleaming pleasure towers of Zyan, behind which topaz fountains sparkled and peacocks strutted.

As recognition dawns on Salinger and Cletus, Unasi suddenly swoons, his eyes rolling back into his head. Satareh catches him as he falls, cradling his head in her arms. In a moment he returns to himself, rising slowly to say, “The sight of the Panther Priests came upon me as I looked upon this door, revealing things that are hidden. Beyond it is a place of great and cunning evil. But there is something else that troubles my spirit. I believe that my fate is tied somehow to this place. It is as though the very reason for my existence lies within. How this can be, I do not know.” The party presses Unasi for more details, but he insists that this is all the second sight has revealed to him. He seems disturbed.

We begin the next session at this very moment, with the party standing before the Sordid Latch. (Note that the next session is on 6/13.)

Creatures defeated through charm or sleep:

Desh 100 XP
Corpse Bats 250 XP
1 Endless Flagon of Wine 1000 XP
6 Moonstones 600 GP
2 Bars of Gold 1000 GP
Assorted Coins 600 GP

XP per player 473
GP per player 314

Unasi XP to date 3102
Holsus XP to date 1504

Anthony Huso Aleksandr Revzin Eric Boyd Chris P. Gus L Cédric Plante