Whispering Cairn, Part One: Face In The Darkness (Session Two)

18th Day of Readying, 595 CY (September 10th 2005 Session)

The Party awakes in the morning and gathers at Deanr’s place. They go to various places around town and sell of the goblin weapons and armour they recovered. They then head up the road towards the Mine Managers Mansion. Mason notices that someone is watching them as they leave town. It is Tirra, an elf adventurer from Greyhawk. She is rumoured to be in town with two others that have told people they are here to search the Stirge Nest Cairn and plunder all its riches. Everyone in Diamond Lake knows that was plundered years ago. When they arrive, Analyn and Alex scout it out to make sure the goblins did not return. They then head towards the Cairn.

They find the entrance covered with shrubs, branches and other pieces of foliage. After clearing it out, they find an entrance way heading off into the darkness. The walls have intricate designs on them with hints of colour specks of paint suggesting at one time this was elaborately decorated, though with some gaudy colours. There is a whispering sound in the hallway, sounds almost like words.

Making their way down the hallway, they come to a four way intersection. To right they find a deep yet empty alcove. To the right they find another alcove of the same dimensions, but there is what appears to be a Halfling sized bedroll there. Alex and Analyn sneak in and check it out and find an old rotted bedroll that falls apart when they search it. They also find some wood chips that looked like someone had been whittling here. They find that the walls have small tubes built into the designs that are sending air down into the Cairn. This is where they surmise that the whispering sounds they hear are coming from.

They continue down the hallway and come to a second four way intersection. There they find the left branch blocked by a cave in; off to the right they find a dead end with a broken mirror stand with strange runes on it. Deanr interprets the runes to be of some sort of runes for names and others are runes of power for travel. They surmise that at one time a portal of some sort stood here. They find some black glass shards on the floor and scoop them up for future use.

They continue down the hallway further and come to another four way intersection. To the left is another cave in. At this time they notice the odour of wet animal hair and spore. Alex and Analyn, who are scouting ahead of the rest of the party hiding and moving silently, stop and start looking for the source of the odours. They then hear the low growl of some beast and turn in the direction it comes from, the cave in area; they see two small points of light in the shadowy debris. At this point the rest of the party is coming up behind them. They silently decide to wait to see what happens rather than giving away their position.

As Ozzy comes into view, a large wolf comes charging out of the cave in area, heading straight at Alex, followed closely by two smaller wolves. Analyn shots an arrow at the large wolf, scoring a direct hit in the throat of the wolf. Not realizing it is already dead, continues with its charge and collapses and comes skidding to a halt at Alex’s feet. The other two wolves continue on towards Ozzy, apparently unaware of Alex they pass right by him.
Deanr steps up and fires a crossbow bolt at one of the wolves, scoring a critical hit in the eye, dropping the wolf in its tracks. The third wolf makes a failed attack on Ozzy and he rages, swinging widely, cutting deep into the wolf killing it. The adventurers then hunker down for a moment to assess their surroundings. They have found themselves in a chamber that splits off to the right and left, with a cobweb choked passage leading away to the north.

They send Alex to investigate where the wolves came from and he mages to wiggle his way through the collapsed passage into the wolf den. There he finds the remains of the boy they are looking for and various other bones and remains. Searching through the bones, Alex finds the skeletal remains of what may have been an elf. In this he finds a gold arm bracelet and a decorative indigo lantern. Not finding anything else he pulls the remains of the buy out of the den, return to the party and reporting his findings.

The party then heads to check the west wing and finds a raised platform at the end of it. Analyn climbs the stairs up and stand in the middle of it. Looking around she appears to be standing in the middle of a room with seven hallways leading of. Each hallway dead ends with a chain hanging down, and a lantern hanging at the end of each chain. The lantern colours are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Though this is only a mural on the wall, it appears very life like. After investigating the mural further, they determine it is not a portal.

They then continue down the north passage way, clearing out the cob webs as they go. They find a set of stairs going down. Ahead they see a green glow that flashes and sparkles. Making their way down the stairs they find a large room like the one in the mural. A large sarcophagus sit is the centre of the room on a raised dais. Around the room, spaced out evenly, are seven hallways. Each hallway is about forty feet long and dead ends just like the mural in the hall above. Each hallway has a chain hanging down for a forty foot ceiling, a lantern at the end of the chains. Be low each lantern is a slightly smaller than five foot diameter circle carved into the floor. The only difference is the red and indigo lanterns are missing. The green lantern is giving off light which is being reflected off the ceiling by small bites of glass and shining metal. They inspect the lantern and find it has an everburning torch in it. It gives the room an eerie appearance. At the end of the hallway with the blue lantern is what appeared to be a tunnel forty some feet above the ground, heading off in a north eastern direction.

The party then decides to check out the passage way and develops an elaborate rope and pulley system to get up there. They go get the mule and bring it in as far as it would go. It would not pass where the dead wolves were. They tie it up here getting their equipment. Seems they have this idea they might get pushed out of the tunnel up there and fall forty feet to their deaths. Analyn, Alex and Ozzy go up and prepare for the worst, and as expected, it happened.

Analyn made her careful down the tunnel until she sees what looks like a bas relief of a face with an open mouth. As she got closer, it looked like one of the face that was seen on the sarcophagus down below. Just a few feet from it she hers a click and suddenly things start to happen. The eyes in the face start to spin and a many colours are seen in them, red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, and violet. A wind starts to build from the face. Before she knows it, Analyn finds herself being blown out of the tunnel by one hundred mile an hour winds. Alex and Ozzy realize this is bad, jump off the ledge to end up hanging below. Analyn gets blown out of the tunnel and barely catches the chain that holds the lantern. She hangs on for dear life as the winds build to hurricane force. The party member below also find spot to hide and wait out the wind. It lasts about ten minutes and then as suddenly as it came, it went.

The party then decides maybe it is safer to play around with the sarcophagus. Deanr thinks the amulet around the neck of the figure on the sarcophagus is a symbol representing a name, maybe "Zosiel", a powerful elemental figure. Alex and Analyn check it for traps and low and behold, one is found. They determine it is a magical trap and have no way to disable it. The idea then comes up to tie a rope around it and then standing back pulls the lid off. A cone of flame shots harmlessly out of the sarcophagus for fifteen feet. They then carefully go look in and find it empty. They search it for secret compartments and find nothing.

The idea next floated is to go back to the hallway where the room mural is and investigate it further. When they get back there, they discover the remains of the mule. It seems to have hung itself in the winds that blew through the hallway when the trap was set off. Again finding nothing special about the murals they collect the equipment off the mule and have Ozzy drag it outside. They then go back down to the sarcophagus. They decided to play around with it.

Ozzy tries to push it clockwise and discovers it moves all the way until the head points at the yellow passage. The sarcophagus stops with a click, the circle that was under the lantern rises up to just under the lantern. This appears to be some sort of chamber that would fit one medium sized person or two small ones. Inspecting the chamber the adventurers find it to be empty.

They then push the sarcophagus again and moves until it stops, pointing at the green lantern. Another chamber rises up and as it does, it makes all sorts of weird grinding and rumbling sounds, like stone rubbing on stone. This chamber seems to be empty as well. They then go to push the sarcophagus again and they hear the same grinding, rumbling noises from the green shaft.

The sarcophagus head points at the blue lantern and this time nothing happens. They then push it again, stopping at the indigo lantern. Another chamber rises up from the floor. This time they find the body of a medium sized humanoid that looks like it has been crushed. They pull the remains out of the chamber and search it finding some gold, silver and a small ruby. They then push the sarcophagus again and it stops at violet. Nothing happens. Once again pushing the sarcophagus, stopping at red, nothing happens.

They continue to push it around to orange, the original spot. Nothing happens at orange either. Sitting back and debating what to do, they decide to push it to green and investigate that chamber. As they pass by yellow the chamber goes up and down again. Coming to a stop at green, the sounds of grinding and rumbling stone can be heard. The chamber rises about half way out of the whole when it shudders and drops down back down the hole, smashing to pieces at the bottom.

A few moments later they hear the sounds of a thousand tiny feet skittering up stone. It gets louder and louder until suddenly bursting out of the hole is a swarm of yellow/gold beetles. The swarm starts moving towards the group and they run for all they are worth out of the Cairn.

Just at the exit they stop and prepare to battle the beetles. They bust oil vials on the stone floor and then wit with a lit torch for the beetles top reach them. Once the beetles enter the oil, Ozzy lights it up with a torch. Hundreds of beetles burn up in the flaming oil. Those that don’t continue on to attack the carcase of the mule, these are quickly killed. It is noticed that the beetles leave behind a slime trail that appears to be acidic.

Following the beetles was a strange looking insect like creature with six legs, legs that look like sharp swords. It has one eye, no mouth is apparent. It moves to attack Ozzy. The party quickly get the beast surrounded and dispatch it without too much trouble.

They return back inside to the hole where the chamber fell. Looking down it goes off into darkness. They then drop a lit torch down the hole and see it is about one hundred feet to the bottom. The sides of the hole are scarred and pitted and looks easily climbed. Realizing that they are about out of spells the group decides to head back to town. At this point, Mason informs the party that he thinks they were spied on when leaving.

After discussing it, they take all the lanterns from the Cairn and take them to the old Mine Manager Mansion. They bury them in two different spot s around the yard, and make so many tracks it would be impossible to determine what was going on here. They agree not to speak a word about the Cairn to anyone in town. They agree that all they did was find the boys body in a wolf den and killed the wolves.

They return to town to return the body of the boy and recuperate from the days work.

They all gained 350 experience points for the day.
Total to date; 600 experience points.