Experience: pending completion of the estates
Tyvis, Thamior, Shard, Isabella, Narra, and Renato gathered the next morning to remove the Yth corruption festering in the hills. Harnessing the absolute shadow of Cadavera, Darklord Renato masked the party, and like shades they slipped across the blighted fields, past hideous beasts and tumorous 'survivors', corpses animated by their own hungering cancers and oozing infections.
The archdruid led them to the mouth of the Calalas Crypts, a catacomb spanning the yards, as a means to circumvent the roving aberrations, and more so the entity which reigned over the estates. Unfortunately, beneath the earth proved as dangerous as wandering topside, and maybe more gruesome, when they stumbled upon Dabian Calalas, former sire and archdruid of the west...
"The crypt, to this point, is more a corridor with shelved corpses, though you can barely make out their resting places with all the sloughing putrescence. Nearing a particularly ugly root, like an inverted tree stuck in the ground, you make out the horrid likeness of a vampire hung by his toes ingrained and ingrown into the plant. Boughs explode from his ribcage, branching outward and piercing the walls and ceiling. His other limbs look to have split, and roots escaped them, dried over with blood and viscera. Nearly burst in half, his neck and head are particularly fouled, brain blossomed through his flared nostrils, screaming mouth, and widened eye sockets, and the top of his skull burst and festooned with a gray fungi that seems to have displaced the organ. Spiders, beetles, and many-legged crawlers violate his body, through orifices they themselves chewed and the natural ones, all of them widened, stretched, mottled with blight... Then his lips move... Just when you entertain the notion this poor soul might still be alive, a massive, glistening millipede coated in throaty saliva pushes through the slacked jaw. It must have brushed some sort of semi-active nerve on its way down his chin, around his throat, and into the mire at your feet."
Curtains of slimy filth and bloated cillia drooping from the low ceiling animated, and the putrid walls and floor vomited what could only be described as tortured earth, Yth-infested elementals. Relatively weak at first, as their numbers were blasted, frozen, cut down, or electrocuted, new earth emerged, immune to any attack which felled their predecessors. Despite the mowing down of no less than sixteen abominations, new ones replaced them, even stronger and more resilient. They were, despite their number, secondary threats compared to two hideous crosses between men, goats, and beetles; squat humanoid carapaces filled with sentient, green slime that commanded the elementals and the wider filth of the crypts. These blight barons attacked from afar, and after Thamior and Renato mercilessly put down one of their number, the emaciated husk of a winged zombie supported by a lower half of snaking entrails ripped its way out of the corpse and attacked. Tyvis dealt with a second baron, blasting through a whole legion of tortured earth, and with the aid of Narra, Isabella, and Shard managed to bring it down.
Still the tortured earth keeps coming, and the end of the crypts is beyond sight...
Plot Developments
- Dabian Calalas died a gruesome death, and the entire Calalas family seems to have perished. The old Saspish regime is no more, save what the queen consolidated, and House al'Zareef.
Next Session: The party fights their way out of the crypts and to the archdruids' table, or dies trying. The fabled Hood of the Farseer awaits, but so too the virulent Yth responsible for so much death (and presumably Sev's fall).
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