My hovercraft is full of eels.
Nymm 15, 998 YK
Towering Wood in the Eldeen Reaches
I handed off the torch to Defender and decided to cast fire from my hand instead, as we saw movement in the webs. Spiders of many different sizes poured out of the webs as we cleared them, some were nearly as big as Alayi’s wolf companion! I was bitten at least seven times and felt my strength sapping by the time we cleared the hallway and subsequent chamber of the creatures— nearly two dozen of the very large bugs littered the area by then.
Now that the way was clear of spiders, we had a chance to examine our surroundings. The big chamber had murals and engravings of hobgoblin warriors on the walls, a well, and an altar. The altar had a “dragon motif” and was of interest to Tomas, who found a hidden compartment in the base. Inside, he found a box containing a mirror, a magically-lit torch, coins, a valuable blue spinnel, and a statue of the dragon Eberron cast in gold. It is all very nice, but not, I think, what the “evil” that sent the golem here was looking for.
As much as we wanted to check the well, there was no easy means of climbing down and we all needed a good long rest. We cast what healing we could on each other and let Defender get to hammering the dents out of his body, planning to check the well in the morning, or at least whatever was passing for morning since we couldn’t see the sun.
After a long respite, we felt recovered enough to continue. Defender offered to climb down into the well— though the original access to it either involved a now-rotting ladder or pulley system (now sans rope), we had to resort to carefully making our way down the rocks. It was a good 40’ down, with about 3’ of water at the bottom. He carried a torch down, and Tomas ran back to the corridor with the lakefront view to see if the glow of Defender’s torch was visible, but couldn’t see it. Defender did declare the well bottom to be fairly safe though, so the three of us climbed down.
We found ourselves in a hallway filled with niches containing bones and ossuaries. The bones we could see appeared to be hobgoblin. More halls of reliquaries branched off of this main corridor. We continued on and eventually came to pair of stone doors with a circular indentation where a lock would be. Tomas inserted the adamantine disk we’d found on the golem and the doors swung open. Inside, we found a 30’ by 30’ chamber with skeletal hobgoblin guards lining the walls, leading up to an altar. We walked between the guards, half expecting them to animate, and examined the altar. While there were no hidden compartments on this one, there was a clay tablet sitting on top of it— perhaps the item sought by the evil that sent the golem? While my friends tried to determine if it was safe to pick up, I lifted it from the altar— if it was the item sought, it was better to be in our hands than left alone guarded by dead hobgoblins. Flame be praised it wasn’t trapped in any visible manner. The tablet is in some language that none of us can read, so we carefully wrapped it and placed it in Defender’s pack for now.
We wandered some more then, mostly because none of us were looking forward to the long climb back up the well. We were fortunate that we came upon a stairwell and so climbed that. It lead to a mostly-dead end, but Alayi found there was a slight breeze and dim light above us, and climbing up on Defender’s shoulders and then carefully picking her way up the rest of the way, she found herself back on the forest floor. She returned with her rope so the rest of us would have an easier time of it. I admit it is good to be above ground again, though we will have to check that last tunnel with the lake in it just to be sure we have everything that needs retrieved.
We killed a lot of spiders and as I repaired myself my companions searched the room. They found some interesting things, and a pit that goes down to another area. I went down first and soon everyone followed. We walked for a few feet then came to a door. The human used the disk thing to open it and we found a tablet on an alter. We took it with us as we left and locked the door behind us. After some searching a stairway up was found. We went up, then climbed out a hole in the ceiling. It’s a nice day, so we are going to go back down and search the other end of these ruins.