The Final Battle has begun! The northern forces massed at Ivristel are facing total annihilation. Twenty-four hours of straight fighting has seen losses on both sides and ruin throughout the lower city tiers, but the walls yet hold and the majority of the demons, aberrations, outsiders and undead are outside the walls, choking the pass of Ilon and coming in waves of thousands against the gates. Demon siege weapons fling corpses and fiery, tar-soaked rocks far over the walls, crashing into castles and keeps, crumbling shops and homes.Lord of Disaster
One boulder nearly toppled the balcony Matthias, Fin, Victoria and Katcha reappeared on, but the skald grew to giant proportions to catch the projectile. With flung debris comes hundreds, maybe thousands, of flying monstrosities ranging from vulturous vroks, winged varguiolle heads breathing acid, succubi flocks and a slew of other strange and terrible entities.
Sev and Serren find their companions taking flight. Chaos, fighting and bloodshed dominate the landscape. Screams, crashes, roars, wing beats and more than a few magical explosions resound at the foot of Mount Ilon.
As the group made their way to the palace in search of Ilpa, Serren went to help reinforce the gate. He conjured a force wall, buying the gate at least a 19 minute reprieve... or did it?
Several minutes later, Serren reaches the gates and casts the force wall. As it goes up, the demon armies retract, clearing the way for an unnerving sight. The ground before the gates cracks, ruptures and spraws upward of a hundred feet. Crawling from the earth is a demon of gargatuan size, a pink, muscular giant's frame whose midsection is a thick, veined shaft dragging a massive spiked shell like some sort of hermit crab. He wears a finned mask covering all features and wields a sword it takes four arms to lift properly. In one violent cut, the force wall shatters. Demons surge in and continue their gate attack.After dodging the worst of Kizet's sonic disruption, Serren teleported away before the demon lord could launch a full attack upon him.
The Hoping
Emperor Issima guarded twelve mages on his bedroom balcony as they collectively worked on a massive-looking spell. Issima was quick to direct the group down the hall and into the foyer, where Gravant and a mage named Melmaunt guarded the ancient girl.
Rushing down, Finduilas was confronted with the problem of activating this mysterious power. There was little time to think it through, however, as demons began to breach the foyer in attempts to kill them all. As soon as the two women were pushed together, a divine fire ignited around them both and Finduilas reflexively began to unlock the ten seals in rapid succession.
Meanwhile, Sev, Gravant and Matthias did their best keeping the foyer safe, combating a slew of strange and ferocious demons.
Spell Circle
The mage Melmaunt had a problem of his own, calling Victoria and Serren over to aid in a jointly cast gate that could breach the magical wards inherent in the glacier itself. In a formidable display of arcane mastery, the two spellcasters were quickly and efficiently able to channel their power into the green mage Melmaunt and allow him to cast a gate into the Heart of the Polarbite. The strain caused him to momentarily lose consciousness, but the door was open.
At about that same time, the final seal was broken and Ilpa lurched back, breathing a divine light heavenward which blew the entire roof off. The storm clouds fled, revealing sun and blue sky, and a golden gate opened like a halo above the unconscious Ilpa's head. Suddenly the sound of clarion trumpets and rushing wind released all the forces of On-High: angels, celestials, lupinals, gem dragons, goodly magic beasts and divine elementals. The display brought tears into everyone's eyes, astounded by the beauty, and perhaps moved by the notion that maybe not all was lost.
Shaping the Prison
Without further delay, the group, upon the emperor and Melmaunt's insistence, leaped through the portal and onto their final confrontations. It was dark, flooded, and unearthly cold. Fin began to freeze over but managed a protection spell before death claimed her. Of the rest, various bloods and spells were enough, but the cold was gods aweful.
Before moving on any further, Sev decided to make the prison. In a display of druidic power and mastery not seen since the first age, the archdruid of the north summoned and sealed the four elements and merged them into a perfect container. The form he chose was a delicate flower, poetic and personal. He also chose the guardian, slipping the prison into his pocket and in the enveloping ooze of Snot.
In the Heart of the Polarbite
The portal shut behind them, the group moved through a flooded passage and into a massive basin maybe 700 feet across, ringed with seven portals. Five of the portals spewed super-heated saltwater down a demon-made lake of boiling sea 300 feet down, melting the heart of the glacier. Overhead in the dome flickering blue light revealed massive shadows of ancient dragons and demons in their true forms, each large enough to rend whole mountains. They squirmed and shifted anxiously, even as cracks formed along their prison. The glacial plane and the material plane's thin barrier was breaking.
The group quickly dismantled the portals and began using every spell they could to cool the water, but cooling a boiling lake was quite a feat to manage. They did manage to alter the temperatures slightly, but the rapid change only served the crack the walls of the basin even more.
They also discovered the water was flooded with the corpses of dead devils, everything from imps to mariliths, the final line of defense broken. Victoria animated several of the more intact ones to aid the group.
From the Depths
Then came a demonic chorus, a wave of negative vibrations in the form of sickly purple-yellow light that surged from the depths and throughout the ice. Hairline fractures became gaping cracks and a hundred foot fissure. Finduilas expended a precious miracle to heal the ice, which only began to slowly suffer the same fate as the noise continued. Matthias tried to drown the power with the loudest song he knew, a jotun drinking song, but even that proved only to slow the inevitable deterioration.
Wasting not a second more, the group dove down, down through the boiling, black depths toward the source of the disruption.
Pyramid of Time
They found the tip of a pyramid exposed in the basin bottom, the majority of it still encapsulated in the ice. It was scrolled in warnings written in every language and a part of it had been clawed open. Swimming inside, the walls were black and a large door looked to have been hastily shut and slowly bubbling around the edges, suggesting the interior held air. Matthias shifted into giant form, tearing the portal away long enough for the group to be sucked in, then rolling and getting sucked in himself in such a way it also slammed the door back on.
Everyone crash-rolled with the water into dark halls, a white light glowing somewhere around a corner far and away. The dim illumination revealed breathtaking "snap-shots" of genesis itself, pictures of Raya's birth and the actual goddess herself, of the creation of Othyr and Lordanna, and the beginnings of life kissed upon the barren rock. Most were absorbed by the scene, though Serren's pricking managed to pull them out of their stupors. Everyone was changed forever by the realistic likenessess of the two goddesses, though. Eternal beauty branded their minds, haunting them forever, and at the same time guarding against any fear.
Vaness
... the woman who weakly shuffles around the corner without falling under a similar spell as with the murals. She is the most beautiful ice elf you have ever seen, features beyond immaculate, in brilliant platinum armor dented and bloody. A ruined helm is tucked under one arm and a broken longsword in the other. Blood splatters her face and seeps from her breastplate. When she looks at you, its thoughtful, concerned, but also fierce and sends chills.Victoria accurately guessed Vaness, the goddess slipping against the wall and into Sev's arms. She was in her final moments, quickly explaining that not all the gods died. She endured to bolster the glacier against Kultuss who still lived imprisoned. Shalraza sought to free him, all the ancient dragons and demons, and birth the dragon god a son that would be beyond any other power in the universe, godly and sparked, an evil akin to the great nothing Chrysaor. It would tear down all creation, all time, and destroy not only the world and the people here in and now, but across all times, all existences. She begged the group to defeat Shalraza's guard dog Taras, then the demon queen herself, before the End of Days arrived. With a final apology, she died, despite the best efforts of the archdruid and his mortal healing.
Taras
Passing down the halls and down the pyramid levels, marked with such horrors as the true faces of Delilah, Kultuss and Laz, and all the wars and uprisings of history, the group finally found themselves staring at their own lives snap-shot on the walls. The final images were of the group passing into a gigantic room with red eyes, just as they passed into a gigantic room of magic darkness.
It took some amount of light casting and investigation to find the shadow wyrm, though much talk was had, of Sev berating his former little tyrant, of proclamations of whipped and fodder, and finally in the breaking of a back wall and the revealing of the dragon's true position:
You startle, clinging to the images of eternal beauty, for this beast nearly looks a god himself. Ebon drips from his many-fanged maw, long and sleek like a crocodile and edged with sharp fins leading to jagged crests above piercing red eyes and down a long neck and into muscular, pounce-fueling shoulders.
He must be over seventy feet long given what you see, and seeping black smoke and magic darkness."Dying time."
Experience: 3200
Objectives:
1. Defeat Taras
2. Defeat Shalraza
Loot: Immunity to Fear Effects
No comments:
Post a Comment