The Long Black Road

The party had encountered a wide area of foul black slush oozing up through the ice pack. Not wanting to risk contact with the possibly poisonous substance, they’d devised a strategy of casting Water Walk on their yaks and all the non-flying party members in order to get across. Unfortunately, just as they’d begun crossing, they’d been ambushed by a trio of Chardas, who seemed to take no issue with the muck. One of the four-armed creatures had already put Sandru on the ground, and another was slicing up Nicki.

Spivey darted in and gave Sandru enough healing to bring him back to consciousness. Despite his grievous wounds, the caravan master wasn’t cowed; he stood back up, and fired an arrow into the back of his assailant, who’d turned to face Marie. Marie, while admiring Sandru’s courage, didn’t think this was the wisest decision, so she stepped to his side, grabbed his arm, and Teleported away from the action. Nicki didn’t make any pretense of courage. He stepped back from his attacker, assumed his Gaseous Form, and proceeded to try to seep as far into the cracks in the cliff wall as possible.

Nicki’s attacker turned with a roar, and focused its fury on the small earth elemental that Koya had summoned to try to help Nicki. A few swipes of its claws, and it disappeared back to whence it had come. Sandru’s attacker, confused by the sudden disappearance of its prey, looked around for the nearest foe, and charged at Shinjiro. It seized him with its icy maw and drew blood with all four claws, one sinking deep into his vital organs. The monk began having visions of yet another death in his future. But he summoned his ki, and delivered a furious flurry that sent the creature back into the slush from which it had emerged.

Sawyer was taunting the third charda, and it swung uselessly at the heavily armored fighter. Sawyer, consumed with battle lust, whirled Suishen over his head and slashed at the beast. Two of the creature’s four arms went flying off into the sludge, and the rest of the charda followed.

That just left one, but it hadn’t been injured yet. Koya summoned another earth elemental to block its path, and tried to get her wagon moving out of harm's way. Unfortunately, she only managed to move into a convenient alignment for the charda’s breath weapon. It spewed out a cone of freezing bile that destroyed her elemental, and sent both Koya and her wagon’s yak tumbling to the ground, unconscious. The creature bellowed in triumph as Sawyer and Shinjiro began dashing across the slush towards the fallen Koya, while Sandoval, Ameiko, and Bella fired off volleys of arrows. Zhustin blasted it with a set of Empowered Magic Missiles, then followed up with another volley of standard-issue Magic Missiles.

Spivey zipped in and used her Channel Positive Energy to revive Koya and her yak. Unfortunately, the badly injured animal was panicked by its brush with death, and began struggling to get up and out of its traces, threatening to injure itself or topple the wagon over onto Koya. Sandru rushed in, using his years of experience to calm the poor yak.

Bella, tired of plinking away from a distance with her bow, sprinted across the slush to engage the beast. It saw her coming, and charged to meet her, bloodying her with its claws. Sawyer joined the battle, and Suishen bit deep. The charda’s eyes glazed over, but somehow it continued fighting when by all reason it should be dead. Bella gritted her teeth and gave it her all. Her blades slashed through the creature again and again, and it finally dropped to the ground.

While the party’s clerics doled out sorely needed healing, Sandru went to investigate the crack in the cliff face where the charda that had hit him had emerged from. Inside it opened up into a small cavern that appeared to be the creatures’ den. It had no furnishings beyond crude nests of smelly hides, but they had decorated their home with dozens of shiny rocks. Upon closer examination, these proved to be uncut diamonds, which Marie appropriated against the future need for Restoration spells to restore lost levels. One of the gems was cut and faceted, and an Identify proved it to be an Air Elemental Gem.

With the chardas dispatched, the party had no trouble getting the rest of the wagons across the black slush, and they continued on their way. The canyon they’d been traveling through opened out within a couple of hours, and they found themselves back on the polar plateau. Except that stretching out before them was a road – a straight, even surface of smooth, seamless black stone. Everyone stood staring at the unexpected sight, and Ulf was as mystified as anyone else. The stone looked much like the strange monoliths they’d encountered before, which made everyone uneasy. But it was going in the same direction as they were, so they followed it. Its surface was glazed with ice and a skiff of snow, allowing their wagons’ runners to slide easily over it.

They soon became glad of its presence. The roadway was raised a few feet above the level of the surrounding ice, and as they progressed, they saw more and more areas of the black slush on either side of the road; without the road, travel would be much more difficult. While the road appeared straight, as the followed it for several days, they had the impression it actually had a gentle curve, as if it might be mapping out a vast circle around the north pole, some 150 miles away.

There was another new feature to the landscape. On the horizon far away, they could make out a blue glow illuminating the dark storm clouds overhead. At first it was barely discernible in the darkness, but as they drew closer, it became more distinct, and they could see occasional flashes like blue lightning. The Alabastrine Peaks to their right were marching ever closer, and it looked like the glow was originating near the point where the flanks of the mountains drew nearest to their path.

After a few days of travel, one of their scouts came running back to the caravan. He jabbered agitatedly to Ulf in Erutaki for awhile, and then Ulf came back to the rest of the party. “He says there’re undead ahead – lots of them. He saw several groups of skeletons marching around like they were patrolling or something.”

The party discussed their options. Ulf and Sandru didn’t want to take the wagons any farther without knowing what was ahead; it would be almost impossible to sneak the wagon train past guard patrols undetected. It was decided that the party would do some scouting of their own, leaving Ulf, Sandru, Ameiko, Koya, and Spivey behind with the wagons. They wrapped themselves in white cloth as best they could, to provide camouflage in the snowscape. Sawyer used his Terra Cotta Talisman to summon a Phantom Steed, and they set off.

For the first couple of hours, they saw nothing. The winds, which had been building for days, cut at them mercilessly. Then, some movement was seen in the swirling snow to their right. Everyone dropped to the ground, as a group of about a dozen skeletons appeared out of the blizzard. They trudged from right to left across the party’s path, disappearing on some unknown errand to some unknown destination. The group remained in their spot for another 15 minutes or so, but nothing else appeared, so they moved cautiously forward.

Over the next two hours, they saw several more groups of undead, shambling across the frozen wastes with no apparent pattern. Some were skeletons, like the first group, while others were mixed groups of skeletons and zombies. At one point they saw a group of what looked like the hoarfrost spirits they’d fought back in Tunuak’s lair in Iqualiat, but these were the size of giants. They were able to avoid detection; indeed, if the undead were hunting for intruders, they were doing a very poor job of it. At one point they found marks where something very large and heavy had been dragged through the black slush-filled bogs and across the roadway, but what it had been, who or what had dragged it, or where it had been taken were impossible to say.

The blue glow now dominated the sky, actually providing dim illumination to the dark polar winter night. They could now see it as a crackling ball of light that appeared to be at the top of some spire mostly hidden behind a spur of the mountains. Another hour’s travel brought them past the end of the spur, and revealed the scene behind.

Another black road intersected theirs. To the left, it ran arrow-straight, apparently directly towards the distant pole. To the left, it led to a to a hexagonal spire of the same black stone, towering hundreds of feet into the air. The Storm Tower rose from a lake of the black slush, with a shattered stone causeway leading across the lake toward a gaping hexagonal opening in the wall at the base of the tower. A huge, crackling ball of blue light floated just above the tower’s roof, while the raging white storm turned in an expanding spiral overhead. The wind was now howling about them.

There was no sign of any guards, so the group approached the causeway. The causeway stood 5-6 feet above the lake of black sludge that seethed and bubbled below, and had collapsed in several places, creating gaps. Sawyer urged his steed forwards, and easily vaulted the first gap in the broken bridge. He tossed a rope back to Marie and secured the other end to his pommel. Shinjiro sneered at the rope, and easily leapt the narrow gap. Sandoval and Nicki weren’t so ungrateful, but had not trouble crossing. As Nicki moved on down the causeway to make room for others to cross behind him, he felt a sudden chill – not a physical chill, which would have been difficult to notice in the sub-zero conditions, but a chill of the soul. He was suddenly aware that the Mage Armor spell he cast before crossing was no longer present.

Bella had had a bad feeling about this causeway, and had hung back as the others began crossing. Her intuition proved right. A charda suddenly threw itself up over the lip of the far side of the causeway. It was similar to the ones they’d fought a few days ago, but its skin seemed to crackle with some chaotic essence. It charged at Sandoval and slammed into him with its surprisingly heavy bulk. He went windmilling backwards off the edge of the causeway and into the lake of black slush below. Another of the beasts appeared on the near side of the causeway. It snarled at Bella, Marie, and Zhustin, who still huddled at the causeway’s edge, then turned and leapt across the gap to join its mate in a coordinated attack.

Zhustin hammered it in the back with a pair of Scorching Rays, but the flames mostly splashed off the thing’s thick skin. Nicki, seeing Zhustin’s result, fired his own Scorching Ray at the one on his side, but used his Elemental Spell power to convert the fire to acid. The result was the same: the acid had almost no effect on the entropic charda. Marie started to cast Air Walk to fly over to help her friends, but then realized that the howling winds would make flight nearly impossible; she cast Bless instead.

Sawyer jumped off his steed to confront the two entropic chardas, and Shinjiro rushed to his side. They both connected, but Sawyer found that his foe seemed to anticipate his normally unpredictable style of combat, and his hits did less damage. Shinjiro on the other hand, with his disciplined and focused attacks, had no such issue. However, both chardas absorbed what the pair dished out, and then retaliated with vicious attacks of their own.

Down in the slush, Sandoval pulled himself out of the muck, gasping for breath. He could feel the icy sludge burning his skin, and could only hope the poison didn’t find its way into his system. Luckily, the slush wasn’t deep, and he was able to regain his feet. He jumped up and grabbed the lip of the causeway, pulling himself back to its surface right beside the charda battling Sawyer. Fortunately, the fighter kept the beast’s attention. Without bothering to try to regain his feet, the bard began singing, and pulled out his crystal echoblade, hacking away at the thing’s ankles.

Zhustin fired off a Ray of Enfeeblement at the one facing Sawyer, and it suddenly became much weaker. That gave Sawyer and Shinjiro the opportunity they needed. Sawyer slashed twice with Suishen, and Shinjiro connected with every blow of his flurry, and the beast toppled backwards off the causeway. That created space for Bella to jump across and join the party, although she missed the charda badly. The remaining charda clawed and snapped a Sawyer, who sank Suishen into its guts just as Shinjiro delivered another furious flurry of blows. The charda staggered, but somehow continued fighting even after it had stopped breathing. Nicki, who had paused to replace his Mage Armor, now peppered it with a spray of Magic Missiles. That was enough, and it too tumbled back into the lake of poisonous slush.

The party stood, panting and bloody, staring up at the Storm Tower rising 300 feet above them. They hadn’t even made it through the door yet – what other dangers awaited inside?

The PCs earned 3,543 XP for the night, putting them at 67,198 XP, with 75,000 required for level 9. I’ll be gone next week, so the group will be doing games at Rich & Joette’s. We’ll resume exploring the Storm Tower in two weeks at Leo’s.