16: WE GON’ DIE

* **Kang investigates a suspicious door. Then everyone else investigates a suspicious door. Turns out, it’s just a door. We enter a room with sarcophagi and some sweet statues. Kang and Durk dangle a burlap sack over an open sarcophagus but find only an ancient corpse in an open sarcophagus while Tarlenheim searches for traps.**

* + **Kang’s Greataxe of the Sylvan Sovereign begins to fuss. He draws it and – although he cannot see their movement – the four statues in the corners of the room move. Kang continues to silently brandish the Greataxe, which a statue attempts to snatch. Adele runs in and hits it with a hammer very poorly.**
	+ **Oris investigates (cautiously) and sees a non-corporeal, other-wordly, dead-lookin’ being standing unmoving in the corner. No one else sees this, naturally, but it definitely looks evil. Definitely evil. He repositions us strategically, but not before Adele feels a wave of unsettling power wash over her. She vomits in a corner. Nice.**
	+ **The Dead Thing begins to move through the room. Oris sacred flames it, revealing its shape. Kang manages to keep it together while Tarlenheim anoints it with a flask of oil for reasons. The Dead Thing comes after Gilda, whispering that The sorcerer will take your soul. Give it the soul of the fey thing. It attempts to disrupt Oris’s spell casting, but fails and gets tanked in the face with MAGIC MISS-ILES. Gilda says something about mirrors, so Tarlenheim looks at the room through his mirror. There is a lifeless corpse in the same place where The Dead Thing was when viewed through the mirror.**
	+ **Praxis kicks it. His foot passes through it when he tries to do so. The statues have reset themselves. Tarlenheim and Durk investigate the closed sarcophagus while everyone else thinks this is a horrible idea. Oris comforts Gilda. Tarlenheim uses a grappling hook to open the sarcophagus away from him, revealing a female corpse that (at one point) cradled a black, metal doorknob.**
* **Tarlenheim uses his grappling hook to claw-game it, but Oris gets some bad vibes and orders him to cease! The metatron shouts OPEN THE DOOR!! from the skies, psychically.**

* + **Oris: PUT THE LID ON! Tarlenheim ignores this, snatches the doorknob, and attempts to open a door in the wall. Durk scopes the doorknob and sees scripts moving across it. Adele attempts to read the scripts. We see it as it exists in this reality. The language is the language of magic, angels and demons.**
	+ **Oris has a theory! It’s an intelligent theory. More intelligent than anything else we’ve done before now, certainly.**
	+ **Chris and Magdalene silently sing “I’ve Got a Theory” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to each other in the corner.**
* **Gilda, walks over to Kang in the prior room and tries to get him to close the door. There is general cowardice and some back and forth and lots of whispering. Praxis closes the door and Oris, in a moment of uncharacteristic Kang-ness, plugs the handle in door.**

* + **Kang sees nothing unusual on the other side of the door as it closes, although all sound in the room with the rest of the party immediately ceases.**
	+ **Oris, et. al. re-open the door…to another dark dimension (the Shadowfell). It is a dark, starless night; things are moving in the shadows; it is not the coolest thing the party has ever seen over there.**
	+ **Tarlenheim: CLOSE ZE DOOR! Adele takes her light of infinite light-shedding into the space. The light ceases to be when it hits the threshold of the door. Adele gets the feeling that something – no, many somethings – are coming and rushing for the door. Adele slams the door.**
	+ **Kang gets the sense that friends are back and kicks down the door melodramatically, ejecting the doorknob from the door. He throws Gilda at Oris furiously, who flies through the air smugly. Gilda gives Praxis reason to believe that that was the realm of The Raven Queen.**
* **Tarlenheim and Adele loot the remaining sarcophagi, which have a false bottom. The cavity beneath contains a warlord’s mithral breastplate. Durk dibsees it and Kang gives it a few test punches to help break it in. The second is a map and Tarlenheim loves maps! It is of great demon made quality. Tarlenheim notices there is a marker on this map right where Heatherglen Tower (his sheriff tower!) is, and something marked out there in the woods.**

* + **IT IS A TREASURE MAP We’ll deal with that later.**
* **We continue on, Tarlenheim identifying a trap on the next door. We open it and Durk Leroy Jenkins-es it through to the next one, ramming it open (after expending every single one of his Luck points) continuing down the hall and cutting to the right, disappearing from sight.**

* + **The next room is a long hallway full of hieroglyphic-like symbols that tell a story. Kang is delighted by this picture book and reads it! It tells the story of a horrible man, including a figure repeated often and with some draconic script.**
	+ **Once upon a time there was a man who lived in a dark castle in a jagged, craggy mountain. This man is known as Barbazaal, who came forth from the Shadowfell to meet a dark queen. He lived at the time of one of mankind’s greatest historical empires, comprised of wizard kings and sorcerers. He traveled across the realms visiting great places of knowledge and magic. He battled many creatures from his position high above the land, swirling power keeping him in the air, hands radiating with power.**
	+ **This weird traveler came to an ancient empire led by a demigod-like sorcerer king enshrouded in a halo of power. The Sorcerer King welcomed the man with gifts and hospitality. The man battled alongside the Sorcerer King’s army, his cloak and enveloping strong knights who stand tall in front of him, but lay dead and dying below the cloak and desiccating their defenses.**
	+ **He continued his travels, moving from civilization to civilization, fighting with two long, thin swords and a heavy gauntlet. He walks across the hundreds of broken bodies of foes that lay before him.**
	+ **The dark man returned to the The Sorcerer King, rewarding him with a benediction, before betraying him and his people. His reign of terror continued past to this place, Westfell, where he met a tall figure cloaked in a heavy cloak.**
	+ **The tall figure possesses a set of deer-like antler and wields a brilliant and radiant staff and a grand magical axe. The dark man attacked the tall figure in the night, but the tall figure was not fooled. He fought back with the power of the earth and nature, laying low the dark man.**
	+ **In the end, a spirit with bat-like wings and curled horns came to collect the save the dark man, hiding him and secreting him away to recover in the Abyss. But while he was recovering, a great hero tracked him down, and defeated him in his weakened state. His body was laid to rest in the Barrows, at great trouble and expense to the empire and under the orders of the emperor himself. Below the body of Barbazaal is depicted the sword and gauntlet.**
* **There’s a bigass door ahead. Draconic script indicates the tomb was ordered built by the Emperor himself, very far away from their homeland and barricaded with some sort of magical door I wasn’t totally paying attention sorry.**

* + **We loot the room. Oris finds a bunch of magical books, Adele finds a black lanthorn containing an “evil-looking” reservoir for sacrificing miniature children.  Tarlenheim takes it, natch.**
* **WE LONG REST. There are some blessings – “You can take a fish out of water but you can’t make it drink. It’s much like beating a dead dog, but there’s plenty more fish in the barrel. We aren’t out of the clear yet, but by the grace of the Gods, we’ll escape by the nick of our teeth. Now go forth, and may this blessing keep you sharp as a whistle, slick as a tack.”**
* **Adele sticks the doorknob on the door. We open it. It’s really dark, you guys. We light a candle in our new lanthorn that does basically nothing useful. We fill it with oil and it’s better.**
* **We’re in a baroque and richly appointed room. It’s the worst of Beauty & the Beast mixed with the gaudiest Thai decor and embellishment. Every surface is trying too hard to be finely crafted. Everything is gilded. Everything is an art piece. It’s exhausting to the eye and Antiques Roadshow wouldn’t even feature it.**

* + **Tarlenheim flicks some of his own blood into the lantern. The lantern is much more effective now that it is drinking some of Tarlenheim’s lawful good blood.**
* **A bunch of us fail a CON save while a bunch of the others don’t. We all step on a grenade, essentially, and have half of our health nuked. Oris dies. We bring him back. It’s 9:30, we’re just now starting an epic boss battle, and it’s going about as well as planned.**

* + **Tarlenheim rushes in and rushes back. Adele slashes with her non-magical hammer and does squat. We all stumble around for a while failing at various things.**
	+ **BARBAZAAL ROLLS A 1 AT SOME POINT AND THEN MISSES ALL THREE ATTACKS AND THANK GOD WE MAY ACTUALLY SURVIVE THIS THING.**
	+ **Durk finds a lightning-infused dragon axe to go with his cool breastplate. It is an axe of his ancestors!**