Shattered Star #95: Death Isn’t the End!

At the end of last week’s session, we left our heroes in the midst of a terrible battle with a demonic beast.

At the battle raged on, Karelia identified the creature as a hezrou—a powerful demon! Makani, getting into position, and ably assisted by Thaladan who seemed unable to land a good blow, stabbed the demon repeatedly. Although its preternaturally tough hide deflected some of the damage, his attacks told.

Unfortunately, this made him the demon’s priority target. It focused on him and in a blizzard of blows slew the brave scout. Shardane rushed into battle and used breath of life to return her companion to life. While Makani had been briefly killed, the battle quickly turned in the party’s favour. With both paladins now fighting off the strength-draining effects of the demon’s blasphemy, the fight was quickly over.

With the hezrou slain, the party healed and searched for the cache of magic items they had been told were hidden in the chamber. They quickly found the cache—which included a scroll of resurrection—and discussed their next move.

Many of the heroes were low on resources and so they decided to rest. Before they did so, however, Karelia sent her arcane sight forth through a crack in the wall up into the abbey above. She discovered the fighting was practically over—Ratik’s forces had won the day and now seemed in almost complete control of the now shattered abbey.

The next day, the party continued their explorations. Climbing a set of stairs up to the upper level. Here they discovered a range of abandoned rooms dedicated to running the abbey—storerooms, a workshop, bed chambers and so on.

Eventually, they discovered more stairs leading up to a set of old iron bound wooden doors. After a brief discussion, the party sent Makani up to investigate. When he reached the doors, he immediately disappeared!

This caused panic among the party. Quickly, one after another they rushed up to the doors and also disappeared.

The heroes arrived among the shattered ruins of an immense, otherworldly cathedral of truly epic proportions. Wrack and ruin lay about everywhere and high up in the gloom-filled sky a skull-faced moon leered down over the scene of devastation.

A sense of loneliness and doom descended on the party which slowly began to sap their will and personality. Quickly, Pip collapsed under the onslaught and several of the other the heroes began to suffer. Luckily, Karelia realised the party were trapped in some kind of variant maze spell. Bending her considerable intellectual and arcane skills to the task she quickly saw a way out of the trap.

Instantaneously, the part found themselves back in the abbey’s dungeon before the closed set of double doors…