Week 52 - I met a real nice lady.
This will be a little brief
Following the urging of the two parts of Balakarde’s spirit, the party head southwest. On the way, they meet and deal with a terrifying worm/dragon hybrid, which nearly offs Flash. They eventually arrive at a tower.
They assault the tower by means of Mend cracking the lock on the front door. Heading in, they encounter an art gallery. As they gear up to fight, a Lillend descends the stairs. As these are good creatures of legend, they opt to talk - Flash at his charming best to apologise for their break-in.
Zulshyn does indeed have the item they seek, haunted by the third part of Balakarde’s spirit, but is loath to part with it. For this third aspect of Balakarde is a superlative artist, and he and Zulshyn are collaborating on a number of works. The party drop a bunch of expensive loot on her, and they have destroyed the lich Thessalar (whose plans for her were not terribly nice), ad so she agrees and hands over a small statue.
Dull, dull, dull. Zulshyn would have accepted an artwork, but mend does not have craft painting/sculpting, and flash does not have perform. She also would have been vey glad to accept Mend’s service for a year, but Mend is committed to dealing with the Age of Worms. Out of game info: if he survives, serving for a year would not be a worry as the eve of the age of worms is Real Soon Now. But there you go. The party went with the boring option.
The passageway opens onto a relatively narrow ledge that overlooks an immense circular cavern lit by a nauseating green glow. The cavern seems to be roughly ovoid in shape. The walls, ceiling, and floor shimmer here and there with phosphorescent fungi, but the predominant source of lighting is the sloshing lake of thick green slime at the far end of the cave. Several turgid waterfalls of the stuff drool from openings high up on the far wall of the cave, and now and then thick shapes of the things that dwell within the slime lake ripple against its surface. The lake’s beaches are an horrific mix of dried crusty slime and millions of writhing worms that feast on the stuff, the sound of their rasping mouths working in unison, filling the cavern with a strangely soothing hiss.
On the closest shore of the nightmare lake, yet still nearly a half-mile from the ledge, looms an immense pile of stalagmites and upthrust pillars of green rock that form a natural castle. A huge central pillar of stone rises up from the fortress to merge with the roof above. Six smaller stalagmite-like towers rise around the structure’s perimeter. Coiled around each of these spires are immense green worms, their fanged heads twitching lazily to and fro like sentinels, observing the cavern around them. A moat of green sludge surrounds the structure, and a single crooked bridge arches up over it to a pair of massive stone doors.