9 Rhonus 1120

The Living and the Dead

The heroes stepped over the bodies of the already vanquished and into the outer entry hall. The front door was right there, tantalizingly close, but the party honored their pledge to their dead comrades and resisted its lure for the moment.

Instead, they approached an inner door that had been open when they first entered the Hall but stood closed now. Melian checked the door and found it locked and barred from the inside. He picked the lock readily enough but it took a knock spell from Elaine to move the bar and allow the door to open.

As soon as the group opened the door a fireball exploded in their midst, sending the heroes scrambling to avoid the blast. An amnizu bolted for an inner door and left two pain devils to cover its retreat.

The allies made quick work of the two pain devils and found the cornered amnizu in the last room, the security office. With no ability to escape and ten heroes before it, the amnizu surrendered. In exchange for its life the devil revealed that there was a secret door in the exhibit area that led to the Hall's important offices, including the records room where the party could find the key words to thaw and free more souls. It came up with a floor plan of the area and, after a little more persuasion, accompanied the heroes to the location of the hidden doorway.

Melian spotted the opening mechanism -- a finger-sized hole behind a flap -- quite easily. The group was unsure of how to proceed, however. With some arguing that their captive devil should be the one to trip the mechanism and others wanting to just barge in, Melian took it on himself to operate the door. He pushed the release, felt a pinprick on his finger, and suffered a minor loss of dexterity from a poisoned needle he failed to detect. A remove poison from the Rod of Health counteracted that and they continued on.

Two more amnizu were found hiding under desks in the clerical office. The party's overwhelming numbers made it easy to subdue these minor minions, though. They bound them, along with their original captive, and left them in the office.

Next they approached the door to the artifact storage room. Melian checked the door and found both an extraordinary quality lock and a poison needle trap, which he successfully bypassed. Inside the group found the original gear belonging to Enon and Ethalian, their paladin allies, along with Clement's longsword and flail, which the brothers had brought with them. They also found several other worthwhile items belonging, doubtless, to previous unsuccessful rescuers. With no clear way to identify the owners and the certain knowledge that said owners were among the dead in the exhibit area, the party took ownership of the items.

The records room also had an outstanding quality lock and, Melian detected, a magical trap attached to it. Elaine used a dispel magic to disable the trap temporarily and the party gained access to the room. There they found all of the files on every soul and outsider held in the Hall. It was too much data to go through in any detail, but they did determine that each file contained the command word to thaw and re-freeze the relevant soul. They quickly decided to free as many of the good-aligned outsiders and mortal heroes as possible while leaving the demons and chaos entities alone. There was no file on Lord Tagren, which was consistent with the story they'd been told by the bone devil curator.

The door to the curator's office opened easily but in the process fired off a cone of cold. This was followed instantly by a fireball cast by a well-dressed amnizu -- Orthrix, the chief curator of the Hall.

Melian charged in and hurled his returning trident at Orthrix, landing a glancing blow. The curator then retaliated with a darkbolt against Melian, showing an impressive amount of magical power. Two bone devils appeared, one inside the office and one outside to block any more heroes from entering easily. And as the heroes were pushed into an accomodatingly close proximity, two more amnizu appeared down the hall and cast a fireball into their midst.

Inside the office, Aria and Caenus advanced on the bone devil to assist Melian. Orthrix took advantage of their new focus to unleash another fireball. Garrick's feeblemind attempt against Orthrix failed, so he cast silence on the amnizu's desk hoping to prevent further spellcasting by the curator. Strontium, just outside the range of the silence, used his last lesser missile storm of the day against Orthrix and the bone devil and received a grievous wound from the devil in payment, causing Aria to disengage long enough to apply the Rod of Health.

In the corridor, Elaine tried reverse gravity on the bone devil and caused it to fall to the ceiling, but the creature righted itself and, thanks to an innate fly spell-like ability, continued to fight effectively. Quinn tried to jump through the affected area, which lay immediately outside the office door, but misjudged the leap and landed on the ceiling. Melian, gravely wounded and in need of clerical help, crawled out of the office and found himself also falling upward. Seeing that her spell had done no good and was, in fact, creating an obstacle to her own side, Elaine dismissed the spell and winced as Quinn and Melian then fell once again to the floor.

Ethalian sought to forestall more fireballs from the amnizu by charging and attacking them single-handedly. He did keep them busy, but one last fireball streaked by him and exploded in the middle of his allies, putting Melian out where he lay. The creature paid with its life on Ethalian's next stroke.

Orthrix proved to be a formidable mage. While the bone devil kept the party's fighters occupied Orthrix unleashed a storm of cold, black energy bolts that impressed even Strontium with its power. It then incapacitated Garrick with a wrack spell that left him doubled over helplessly in pain. Even after Elaine's lightning bolt finished off the bone devil, Orthrix stood alone and held his own against five of the heroes. A small stone circling his head absorbed magical attacks and he had potent protections against physical blows, making him maddeningly difficult to harm. Then Orthrix cast a repulsion spell, rendering much of the party unable to even approach, let alone attack.

In the end, Quinn brought down the diabolical mage with drown, a powerful spell that filled the devil's lungs with water and left it collapsed and drowning on the floor. Strontium stepped forward and grabbed the ioun stone from its orbit and the party watched the head curator choke and die.

With only their captive amnizu left of the enemy, the party had free run of the Hall. Garrick, being the only one in the group who could read the infernal language, took the lead on grabbing files from the records room and running up and down the exhibit area calling out code words. The paladins stayed with Garrick both to protect him and to keep an eye on him, though Strontium felt sure Garrick would not stray too far as long as he needed their amulet of the planes to get out of Hell. The rest of the records and paperwork from the Hall they piled in Orthrix's office, where Audas destroyed the fire-resistant paper with vitriolic eldritch blasts. Some of the heroes defaced the walls by writing words of praise to Belain.

Finally, after as many souls had been freed as the party could manage, it was time for the living and the dead to part company. The heroes embraced their new friends, wished them well in their afterlives, and watched their souls vanish as they stepped outside. The statue of Lord Tagren likewise dissolved as soon as they carried it outside, freeing his soul. The party assembled on the steps and used the amulet of the planes to return to Marhaven.

Their first order of business, as promised, was to take the Chimera to Belain and return the personal effects of Enon, Ethalian, and Clement to the Church. They were greeted and honored by the ArchCleric's ministers, and once they had told the tale of how the men had helped to free so many souls trapped in Hell the heroes were declared friends of Belain. As a gift, the clerics presented the party with a crystal vial of blessed diamond dust which, if sprinkled on the remains of a dead body, would perform a resurrection.

Armed with this extremely valuable gift, the party returned to Aria's home village and to the monastery they had rescued from the mutant army several weeks before. Aria took the vial of dust to the crypt where her father had been buried, sprinkled it over the body, and watched as her father returned to full life and health.

The group spent long hours with Lord Tagren, eager to learn what he knew of Azazel and its plans. He spoke freely and at length, no longer under any form of control. Highlights of his story were:

Azazel

• It's a creature, something like an aboleth but huge and vastly more powerful.
• It is physically trapped in a cave below Marhaven but has a number of minions – mostly mind-controlled captives – who receive telepathic orders and obey them. It is physically possible for a Medium sized creature to enter Azazel's cave but the cave is so deep underground that creating a tunnel big enough for Azazel to exit is impossible.
• Tagren does not know Azazel's specific goals or plans but it has complete contempt for pretty much all life on the planet and even more so for the gods who created it all.

Kallaebri and Himself

• Kallaebri was asked to lead a party to investigate rumors of a powerful evil lurking in the deep trench near Marhaven. Some suspected an old, particularly powerful eye of the deep or some such. It was just supposed to be a recon, but when the group didn't return after a month Tagren became concerned and started looking for them. There was a possibility that Kallaebri might be pregnant – a secret he'd shared with nobody – and that drove him to keep looking even as others gave up.
• He was about to give up the search when he got word of an aventi ghost haunting a deep crater outside Marhaven. Rather than risk raising hopes he went quietly alone, leaving Aria with his good friend Master Relvin for safekeeping. The “ghost” was Kallaebri, all right, but it was a trap – when he tried to rescue his wife he was set upon by the ulitharid Shendrothar and a small adventuring party. They stunned him and brought him before Azazel, where his mind was enslaved.
• When he was taken he discovered that Kallaebri was in fact pregnant, and that this was why Azazel had set the trap for him – he wanted to observe how mortals raise their young.
• Azazel realized early on that as long as it controlled Kallaebri it didn't need to fear Tagren. Eventually it allowed Tagren to escape enslavement, but promised a slow and painful death for his wife and son if Tagren attempted to leave its service. Kallaebri, on the other hand, has remained under Azazel's mental control the entire time and is convinced she is still doing the will of Aventernus.

Aria's "brother"

• His name is Andronus, after Tagren's father. He was born in captivity to Azazel.
• Azazel seemed fascinated by the process of raising Andronus. It observed every aspect of the boy's upbringing and insisted that he be brought up in aventi tradition and educated accordingly. Tagren trained Andronus as a monk, hoping to fortify the boy's will against the day when Azazel would try to enslave him.
• From the time he could reason, though, Andronus spent almost as much time with Azazel as he did with Tagren. It would summon the boy for hours at a time and discuss gods-knew-what in the depths of that cave prison.
• At the same time Andronus was learning the martial arts from Tagren, he was also learning secrets of psionic power from Azazel. He has combined the two into a hybrid form of martial/psychic discipline and practices now as a willing follower of Azazel.

The mutant army

• The army is of recent creation. Azazel originally planned to subvert the sahuagin by posing as a powerful god and taking mental control of the sahuagin leadership. When the sahuagin raids on the coast were beaten back by adventurers, Azazel decided it needed a better class of thug to do the job of wiping out the underwater civilizations.
• To that end, Azazel negotiated a deal with the illithids through Shendrothar, a ulitharid who serves Azazel willingly. The illithids got hundreds of fresh brains from the Eldmoor prison colony, and in exchange they created an equal number of half-illithid sahuagin warriors.
• The warriors were trained by Kallaebri and two other fighter types in Azazel's control. Tagren was tasked with teaching the leaders to command, which he did grudgingly because he had no choice. He, Kallaebri, and Shendrothar became the generals in charge of the force with instructions to take out the villages one at a time, spreading maximum terror in the process.

Azazel's inner circle

• Azazel seems to like surrounding itself with capable mind-controlled or willing minions. It particularly enjoys subverting champions of the gods, particularly clerics and paladins.
• Kallaebri is kept under enslavement. She believes she is still doing the will of Aventernus, and that belief – probably with some help from Azazel's psychic power – continues to fuel her spellcasting and maintain her paladin's abilities.
• Shendrothar is a willing accomplice. The ulitharid is Azazel's primary envoy to the mind flayers because they are strongly inclined to respect a ulitharid. Shendrothar also plays a lead role in training and commanding the army.
• Andronus, sadly, is also a willing follower of Azazel's. He sees it as a sort of mentor, far greater and wiser than his father, and craves the power that it shares with him. The boy is quite talented and accomplished in his rare class.
• Two aventi fighters who were part of Kallaebri's last party are still alive and under Azazel's control. They have been gaining levels by fulfilling tasks set for them and have become formidable.
• There is also an aquatic elf wizard among Azazel's inner circle. Tagren has had little contact with him and isn't sure whether the wizard is controlled or willing. He comes when summoned and goes again when Azazel is finished with him.
• There may be others as well, but if so Tagren has no direct knowledge of them.

The most surprising revelation for the party came when they asked Lord Tagren about the gloves left for Aria and the carved figurine. Tagren had no knowledge of either; he had nothing to do with Aria's gloves and no idea what the figure was supposed to mean or be. The party could only conclude that there was another actor involved -- someone, or some group, of whom the party had been completely unaware. Who was it, and what was their agenda?

The party returned to Marhaven, leaving Lord Tagren with his old friend Master Relvin and the task of helping to reassemble the scattered shreds of the aventi people. There was much work to be done for all of them.

<MR>
2/21/09