Rocky

2 Kuthona 4709
Snowy mountains… somewhere

Candal knocked on the doors, and then he and Rogar attempted to open them, with no success. As they pondered what to do next, I opened the doors (I’m sure they had loosened them) to find a large, circular chamber. It contained three dwarven statues and a lever on a 30’ disc. The room smelled musty and had no visible exits. As we searched for a way out, both Rogar and Kasa started to mess with the lever (the former recognizing dwarven craftsmanship), and it occurred to me that it looked like the only means of moving on from the room. We all scrambled onto the disc, which turned out to be a platform, and as the dwarf pulled back the lever, the floor shook and rumbled, and we began to descend.

The platform moved for about a minute, and I suspect that we went about 200’ into the depths of the mountains. When it stopped, we stepped down into a larger chamber, with columns along both sides holding up balconies. Figures holding weapons stood along each balcony. I had a weird sense of déjà vu (I’ve been in very few grand halls of any sort). We started to look for a way up to the balconies— attempting to open doors we found between the columns, when I realized that Candal had become impatient, using his holy steed as a sort of ladder to get himself and Rogar up to one balcony. As they examined a statue, it screamed and attacked the human— gargoyles had apparently moved into the abandoned dwarven halls and were not happy to be manhandled by the paladin. As Candal and Rogar tried to fight them off, I clambered up to the balcony railing and began to chip away at the stony creatures, who seemed more interested in attacking the paladin than Rogar or me. We managed to slay two of the three. Salma got up as well, knowing healing would be needed as soon as we fought off our attackers. Tythe stopped working on opening a door long enough to drop the last one with an arrow.

It turned out that the gargoyles were the most exciting thing in the grand hall; we moved on to another set of doors. They opened into a 20’ wide passage that slopped upwards, with a cracked and gouged floor. Looking at the doors behind us, we found them to be damaged as well, as if something very heavy had smashed into them. We made our way up the ramp carefully after checking for any obvious trap triggers, until we found ourselves on a landing….