Amber Ablaze – blogpost 16

We are at the Sacred Stone Monastery to find the Black Earth cult. We succeeded in sneakily entering the Monastery and we’ve found a key where we don’t know the lock of. We descended the stairs and were seen by four enemies that we’ve now killed.

The party takes the door to the North that reveals a hallway. Lurlille just walks into a room adjacent to the hallway, without checking if anyone is inside it. Luckily, it is just another hallway, but it is partly collapsed. 

“What are you doing Lurlille?! Come back to us!” Mivyre says hoarsely. She does, and with her and Celeste in the lead – and me directly behind them for protection – we explore some more hallways. I feel I need to be able to protect them and act quickly if something should happen. It seems like the inhabitants of this Monastery are mining for ore or stone… I see a lot of rubble in the dead-end paths. Some parts of the paths are collapsed and dug out to restore them.

Lurlille doesn’t seem like herself. She walks into a dead-end pathway and starts to dig in the rubble. 

“Why are you doing this?” I ask. 

“I want to think about the stuff I want to do, I want to decide what to do instead of Mivyre.” she replies. 

I tell her I’m happy with Mivyre and his leadership. I think most of what he’s doing benefits us as a party.

Lurlille grabs my leg and starts crying all of a sudden: “DID YOU KNOW MIVYRE IS A DRAGONBORN?! NOT EVEN A REAL DRAGON?!?!?!”

I can see the news is really upsetting to her, but either way, I say: “Yes, I knew. Everybody knew.”

A flash is visible in Lurlilles’ eyes. She starts pinching me, but it doesn’t really hurt. I feel sorry for her. 

I pull her off my leg, grab her wrists and pull her in front of me, at eye-level (her little legs dangling in the air). “I think you should dig further.” I think she needs a little break for now before she can take orders from Mivyre again. 

I walk back to the party to give them an update.

It takes a while before I find everyone. I lead Mivyre, Solarion, and Celeste to the place I left Lurlille. She’s managed to get to the other side of the rubble. Tomen is away, we don’t know where he is, but he’ll probably be fine. We discuss what to do: follow Lurlille or stay here and go our own way. I think we cannot leave anyone behind, so I want to go after Lurlille. As Tomen returns, he informs us he heard voices in the other hallway opposite us. Now, the party wants to investigate that area. However, Tomen agrees in his vague way (“The river cannot be directed, we need to follow the stream”) with going after Lurlille through the rubble, and starts to dig. The second the whole is big enough for me to crawl through, I do so. I dash to catch up to Lurlille, but I totally miss her in the dark. She is so small that I trip over her on my way to the light at the end of the tunnel. With a big THUD, I fall face-first to the ground. Lurlille and I have a small conversation about the noises Tomen heard to the East and decide to go back to the party and use this path as an escape route. On our way back, I see Celeste walking towards me. She’s acting odd like she thinks I cannot see her. I stop her with a finger pointing at her forehead. She is totally surprised and now believes I got some sort of magic that can see invisibility. I choose not to correct her.

Quitely, we approach the area where Tomen came from. We hear whispering at the other end of the hall – like people try to keep quiet. We enter and see a couple of cells with prisoners inside. They are very frightened. Lurlille recognizes a dwarf from Mirabar. This, stupidly, gives me hope to find my brother among the prisoners, so I start looking in all cells. I see farmers, people from poor villages, but not Fury. The locks on the cells are very large. Lurlille and Mivyre try to open them with the keys they found. One of the keys fits all the locks and we release all prisoners. The dwarf tells Lurlille that a couple of Lurlilles friends were brought downstairs earlier this morning. We thank them for the information and Lurlille leads them to the escape route. The rest of the party waits for Lurlille to return.

We immediately start searching for a way down and come across a staircase behind a barred door. We try all keys, but none of them fits the lock. Near the bars, there is another door. Celeste opens the door and we find a giant Umber Hulk in the room. It is blind and the claws it normally has are taken off. It is very aggressive, so we attack. At one point, I am too slow to avoid the Umber Hulks’ attack. It takes me in his arms and bites me. I hear something break inside my body. The next thing I feel is horrible pain and I faint shortly after.

As I am revived, I attack the beast a couple of times, but my actions seem futile. I quickly slide to a different position – behind the Umber Hulk and hit it with my longsword. After a couple of minutes, we kill it. Mivyre takes the hide off the Umber Hulk to use for armor. In the same room, behind bars, we see a pillar of natural stone surrounded by red earth. Mivyres’ key opens the door to it. In the corner of my eye, I see Lurlille walking off towards the barred staircase. I pose to go after her, she has an opportunity to find her friends, so we should help her. To show my strength, I bend the steel bars where Lurlille is waiting. Unfortunately, still, no one can go through the bars, but my party is impressed. Celeste tries to break the lock with her shortsword but fails.

To build up our strength, we decide to take a short rest in the exit hallway we’ve discovered and after, return to the red earth room. Mivyre saw a door there he wants to go through.

The door leads to a crypt. There are multiple graves and a big sarcophagus. Lurlille activates her driftglobe and lights up the whole room, so we can see enemies if there are any. Skeletons are scattered across the floor and near the walls. 

“We are not alone….” says Mivyre. He feels undead in this room.