158: Springtime for Gabriel

Synopsis:

•  The party reconvened in the ruined seminary and decided to press ahead toward the Mothers' Cloister, where the Altar of the Seven World Trees would allow Isabella to summon two orbs.
• Karana was able to guide them, sensing a deep wrongness with the Primal power to the south of the ship, no doubt tied to whatever offense Gabriel was committing against Nature.

• They passed some vile studies, a collection of clay tablets, and an unusually-placed mirror. At a fork in the passages, Eilessa smelled the distinct aroma of sweet oils and rose water intended to mask the stench of decay. Something undead lay at the bottom of twin stairwells, something that began to sing along with Narra's hopeful aura. Though Narra took this as a potentially good sign, the others feared an enemy that displayed even a portion of the psion's power. Mercy sealed it away behind a thick wall of ice, and Karana agreed to keep it bound with all the force of the glaciers is need be.
• Tyvis was stricken by the defilement behind a set of rather plain-looking double doors, having hears tale of anti-druids that betrayed their sacred trust to actually drained the life out of things in order to fuel their wicked magic. Such was the immensity of the aura, enough to prove fatal to those entirely constituted of primal or arcane essence. Even normal living beings would succumb to their power eventually, but between two archdruid's staving the worst, he believed a quick and direct summon and grab could work. He implored Karana remain behind, which she did, and Narra stayed also to guard her.
• In their waiting, Narra again reached out to Terris-Thule, who deemed it wise to appear before the two. Her aura of terror was not so unlike Narra's aura of hope, and the two saw much common ground between them. Terris-Thule, above all things, desired her true divinity back, feeling, as Karana had once put, trapped, stupid, and small. Narra assured her, in time, she would again be whole, and that in the party's company she might benefit. Terris-Thule accepted the invitation. 
• When Kishar kicked down the defiler's doors, a blast of pollen swept over the party, yellow, itchy, stinging, and irritating the lungs. Tyvis dispelled it with a blast of cold, clearing the corridor ahead for their delve.
• The Mothers' Cloister looked like a massive terrarium, the interior a dust bowl, a desert, with wicker huts and a basket-altar on stilts in the center, emergent from a pentagram of terrible age and power. Gabriel's trident had been freshly etched around the pentagram, hijacking the old magic, but the specters which lurked unseen amidst the dry stillness were epochs old. Circling the pentagram were seven stunted, twisted, petrified trees, the hollow shells of what once were living world trees, the spines of seven Creations long since destroyed.
• Isabella began work on summoning forth the orbs, despite her great apprehension in doing so. Meanwhile, Kishar, spurred on by the uncertainty of the party, hacked into one of the trees with her divine render. It spewed back such a concentrated plume of pollen it threw the goddess back and coated her entirely. She began to gasp, as the pollen coated the interior of her throat and lungs. She was suffocating before their eyes.
• Kishar was saved by Eilessa's quick thinking, using water to forcibly flush out Kishar's airways despite her natural instinct. The goddess vomited back up the water and the pollen and was able to takea breath.
• The pollen began spewing from all seven world trees, and Mercy, with an almost forgotten power, summoned forth rains which cleared a minute area. Tyvis expanded the area with his own orison, around which time the draing and the defilers appeared...
• Clearly undead, ghouls with holes drilled into their heads and bodies constantly gasped in one, long, uninterrupted inhalation, threatening something no one in the party really wanted to discover. Curck's aura kept them at bay, though the mindless swarm might have all been destroyed upon the wolf's moon-cold glow if not for a bellowing order barked from the far corner, a creature horned and withered, a defiler.
• Two others emerged from the yellow fog, one wielding a massive flail and the other a thin, wheeling chain. They attacked, but proved little threat to the archdruid or the angel of death, who avoided their attacks and unleashed painful replies. 
• In the midst of the fighting, so moved by the corpses of five trees and the systems they once belonged to, Tyvis did something he promised he would never do again, something he had to do, and sacrificed his life in a combination of the greatest Primal powers at his disposal. It was a risk, certainly one that shocked the rest of the party, but proved, ultimately, to revivify five of the world trees!
• Narra immediately felt the loss and became almost mad with grief. The Abyssal portal was moments from consuming her, when the Primal power source sky-vaulted and Narra and Terris-Thule bore witness to Karana's ascension into true godhood. She assured the grief-stricken Narra that all was well before vanishing into planes far beyond mortal ken. 
• The resulting backlash of life-giving power blasted away two of the three defilers and dispelled every last ounce of undeath from the chamber. The trees, renewed, began to grow. It was a time for rejoicing when, from the swelling roots and widening leaves, Tyvis emerged, reborn from the reintroduction of five more world trees into the Yg-Raya system. He was nothing short of a demigod of Nature now.
• Narra made it a point to appear before Tyvis and slap him hard across the face for such a bold and potentially final action, and yet their exchange was cut very short...
• Isabella continued her ritual, but was almost immediately interrupted when the trees' growth became violent and unchecked. They burst the walls of the Siege chamber itself and threatened to explode further into the ship. All became chaos as the floors, walls, and ceilings exploded around them, and other chambers began to fall or flood into one, massive well where the trunks and roots held dominion. 
• Isabella scrambled to salvage something from the chamber, making her way to the woven basket and exhuming, to her shock, the mummified corpse of the Highking Gloriandel. Why would the fallen king of the elves be entombed in a place like this? And how in all the heavens and hells did he get here after his legendary defeat at the hands of the God-King Nor? Terris-Thule appeared beside her, asking similar questions, and the two found a strange and sudden connection in their unfinished apotheoses (and in their fashion senses).
• Mercy, terrified in the most calm way possible, made a decision somewhere along the lines that the Gate was threatened and that all must be done to protect it, however not even Kishar's blade could deliver any lasting damage- not unless she used its ultimate slaying enchantment, which would only kill one anyway. Tyvis did not consider that an option.
• Matters were made worse when a bubbling thunder and a hideous roar marked the waking of the bloodyth at the bottom of the draining pit, whose thick, bloody tentacles exploded from the churning waves and crushed then nearest branches and roots effortlessly. Something several hundred yards wide like a cross between an octopus, a humpback whale, and a bleeding human skull lurched its way to the surface. A Ythlord...
• Narra attempted a truly long longshot to reverse their fortunes involving the Ethereal, the ships, and herself in an earlier time, but failed to make the proper connections across the infinite gulf of possibilities. Eilessa, frustrated at the apparent waste of time and resources, looked for an alternative means of slowing the trees down, and mid-sentence inspired an idea. 
• Tyvis would utilize his Wyld summons (proven to work within the Siege) to create a momentary portal, which Eilessa and Narra could build upon through ship manipulation and mental amplification, and create a rift in which the other ships could help transplant the trees and maybe nullify the threat of the waking ythlord. It was another longshot, but not quite that long...
• As the Siege crumbled and fell around them, the blood pits from the Well of Souls was breached. A tidal wave of boiling blood, ectoplasm, and dying souls raged toward them.  Terrified of true death in such a state, Terris-Thule fled back into the Ethereal. She took Isabella and Gloriandel's corpse with her. 
• Mercy, Curck, and Kishar fled the wave by racing deeper into the heart of the Siege, led by the angel's nether-senses to the Gate. The passage they used was momentary, and closed just after.
• Tyvis, Narra, and Eilessa were left to face the oncoming wave, then attempt to move the trees, defeat the ythlord, and somehow spare the Gate (and the people who now fought for it below).

Objectives:

• Mercy, Kishar, and Curck have taken the opening between crashing debris, roiling roots, and and heaving walls- guided by Mercy's nether-senses to the Gate far below; They will undoubtedly meet opposition, but time is of the essence. Gabriel's hour is at hand, but can three do what the entire party originally meant to accomplish?
• Tyvis, Narra, and Eilessa remain in the growing blood pit, now consuming the majority of the ship, as five world trees reach and rage against the confines of the Siege and the surfacing Ythlord. They must transplant the world trees, spare the Gate, and defeat the bloodyth. But can they be enough?
• Swept away into the Ethereal by Terris-Thule, Isabella must overcome the effects of the pure plane of thoughts, dreams, knowledge, and nightmares and turn the desperation of the goddess of fear to the party's advantage. And why is Gloriandel's corpse beginning to look... well?
• All pray for Christopher, who became separated in the chaos.
• Orcus remains the untapped ally or unseen enemy in the bowels of the ship, his prison potentially breached. However, without his prized skull he is not at his full strength. He does have minions, though, including the Confessor, that make seek to obtain his property during the carnage.

Experience: Level Up 26!