Agenar’s journal, page 229

Tymora travels with us. Not only did she smile on our return to The Glade, letting us traverse the way in a single day’s marching, she also granted Tilia’s caregiver the wisdom to save not only the furbolg’s right arm, but her life. Without his ministrations, she would have, very soon, been reduced to dust. Praise the Goddess for turning me away from testing the Stone Circle’s temptingly locked doors.

For a short while.

Once Tilia was healed, she insisted that we return to complete our explorations. This might not have been a good idea, but again, Tymora was with us.

So we returned to the mysterious dwarven tunnels, and soon stood again before the massive wooden doors of the chamber next to the giant skull. As the others debated how best to proceed, Val pushed me through.

Directly ahead, I saw an alter, crowned with a dead orc, sitting atop a stone sarcophagus. To the left I saw a tall, dark-haired woman wearing less than is appropriate for mixed company. Behind me, Val gasped.

“How nice to see you,” the woman said. “I am Ifrini, and you have come to assist me.”

“Oh god yes,” Val whimpered.

The next thing I knew, Val was opening the sarcophagus, from which Ifrini extracted what looked to be a key. The others rushed into the room.

“Hot Legs!” I should have expected our paladin to recognize The Glade’s missing prostitute. Seeing Val in her thrall, Wynlynn leapt to attack; even as she did, I used Ifrini’s human name to interrogate her.

She responded by releasing a cloud of poison above the door, trapping those still crowding through in noxious smog. Ifrini then revealed her true, winged form as a succubus. When I tried to turn the demon, she wrapped Val in an ecstatic embrace and vanished as Wynlynn’s short sword sliced the space where she stood.

The ranger rushed out, frantically following an internal direction to the surface, where we found Val, groggy, at the top of the steps and Wynlynn firing arrows into the distance. Throwing down her bow in disgust, she turned to pick up Val and kissed her; Val responded as if drinking life itself from her lips.

I cleared my throat and they broke apart, but still eyed each other hungrily. We returned to the now-empty burial chamber to learn its secrets.

As I studied an ancient map on the far wall, Travis announced it as the tomb of Scanalin Bladeoak, eldest of three siblings charged with protecting their society. There was more, but Tilia discovered a hidden passage. This led us into the most disturbing chamber yet – a dwarvish ritual chamber dedicated to Moradin the All Hammer, their god of creation, which had been obscenely desecrated and repurposed as an alter to the Blood Lord Orcas, the Daemon Prince.

This gave onto another burial chamber, for Mylarry Bladeoak, Keeper of the Crescent, who died fighting Empyreans. “Empyreans!” Travis exclaimed. “That must be what the giant skull is. Imagine if these necromancers had succeeded!” In Mylarry’s tomb, we found another, moon-shaped, key – which I quickly pocketed. We then made our way out and back to the chamber of mummies to complete our investigations.

That dreadful room led onto yet another crypt, where we found the final Bladeoak: Galladraith, may her spirit burn with Coralin’s vigor as it did in life. Her sarcophagus contained a strangely vibrating stone.

The relics we recovered seem to correspond to symbols marked on the map in Scanalin’s chamber. The first key, stolen by Ifrini, aligns with a skull marking a site far north; my crescent key matches a moon site marked at the continent’s southern tip; the vibrating stone can only signify the rumbling rocks shown at the far end of the western desert. May Tymora guide our steps.