Post by Dead Greyhawk on Feb 20, 2008 20:24:30 GMT -5
"Jasper!" hisses Otto up the shaft. "Catch!" Tying the end of his rope into a thick ball, Otto whips it in a circle and then rattles it up the shaft over his head. The ball with its trailing rope sails by Jasper's head and bounces off the ceiling, plummeting back down toward the waters far below. With a lunge, Jasper grabs the rope and searches for a place to affix it.
Carefully, the Company climbs hand over hand up the rope, collecting themselves in the trapezoidal-shaped room. While the others climb up, Otto and Jasper guard the door. Once a critical mass has assembled in the room, the other trapdoor is pried up and one of the buckets lowered down through the open shaft. The water that is drawn back up is clean, though silty, and markedly more pleasant than that Jasper fell into.
"Well, this makes it simple," mutters Raven. "Through the door we go." Chivvying the others into formation, Raven sends Al and Otto through the door. The passageway beyond runs straight a short distance and then branches to the left and right, each passage inviting the Company further on.
Otto stares at the ground, rubbing dirt and grime between his fingers. After a long pause, he tosses the soil back to the ground. "Left," he says. Raven grins at the taciturn ranger and waves him on, knowing better than to argue with the warrior.
The passage is of carved stone, but is coated with soil and grime, similar in color to that dumped into the Javan river at the entrance to the tunnels. Excavation of some sort has occurred here and likely over a long time. The map and directions possessed by Grizela and Arden Prindive are likely to be of much more limited value than previously thought.
After a long and winding path, the tunnel comes to a dead end. Mortared blocks and joints face the Company. "Left, eh?" gibes Antonus, still in agony from the deathly cold of the spectre's touch. The emptiness within him is something that he fears he can never refill.
Otto frowns at the ground before him and beckons at Perrin and Grizela. "You have keen eyes," he grates. "Use them." The half-elves search the walls for hidden passages, sliding blocks, or other secrets, but find nothing there. It is Al, who patiently stands by Otto while the rest scurry about poking and prodding at the walls, who finally has something to say.
"The floor's a different stone than the ones we've been walking on," he says, pointing back down the corridor. "See, mortared plates back there. One big slate here. This whole piece probably moves. See the wear at the corners? It probably doesn't fit perfectly." Al slings his axe and gets down on his hands and knees, crawling about between the legs of the others. "Ah, here it is. You tall people never want to get low to the ground. Miss all sort of stuff."
With a lurch, the floor begins to slide downwards at an angle. The Company crouches as the stone moves under what was the wall and then drops into a new passageway, one more dank and made of packed earth. The reinforced dirt walls bear a certain clay-like consistency that matches that found in the river.
The Company quietly hikes forward, hiding their glowing stones as best they can, as the sounds of rhythmic chanting reach their ears. The cacophony resolves into a repeated chant that can not be made out, except for the last syllable, "Dune!" A blood-curdling, bone-liquifying shriek reaches their ears, and the Company fears they have dallied too long. With an oath, Al and Otto lumber forward into a room lit by blood red light punctuated by rippling purple flame.
A great square room, thirty feet high extends before the Company. In the middle of it is a long dais made of stone, on which is a huge statue of a winged demon. The statue holds a great tulwar in one hand and a cat o'nine tails in the other, and its grimacing, leering, horned, faced glows with an unholy light. A purple, liquid, radiance slicks up its body like a growing slime as the fevered chanting of the cowled priests fills the air. "Tharizdun! Tharizdun! Tharizdun!" scream a dozen things at the top of their lungs, their arms covered in black blood, their faces and bodies covered with black and grey robes.
Over the screaming chants comes the clear sound of Winthrop's voice, dropping into octaves only reached by words of immense power. Otto and Al, especially Al, know better than to be in front of Winthrop once he summons words of power, and they peel into the room, Otto sprinting for the largest group of priestly foes while Al simply chooses the nearest.
"Kill them!" bellows a baritone voice, as the priests of Tharizdun turn on the Company, curses and admonitions flying from their lips. The foul power of the Dead God flows through the Company, gripping all of the warriors in its grasp, and Winthrop is struck by a black bolt of power that flies from the outstretched hands of one of the priests. Winthrop's flesh is laid open, ruptured from the force of the unholy casting. In a sudden turn of fate, the Company's strength is cut; their most fell warriors grasped rigid.
Winthrop, quickly identifying this priest as being of some great power, attempts to enthrall the priest, convincing him of the Company's friendship. His attempt succeeds, as the same baritone voice bellows out, "Wait, wait! It's all been a big mistake! These are our friends!" Winthrop smiles a grim smile.
The demon statue continues its horrible transformation and gives the appearance of motion, as if the wings twitch slightly, the hands tremble in anticipation. Winthrop raises his arms, and a bolt of lightning forty feet long and ten feet wide impales the statue, sheeting through its thighs. With a resounding shot, the glowing, rippling stone sheers in two, and the statue careens down to the side of the dais, crashing in a tumult. Bits of the stone, now black and blackened, shoot throughout the room as it chips, cracks, and snaps into bits.
The baritone voice booms forth once again. "The bastards! They are not our friends! Kill them! Kill them all and flay their souls," it exhorts. Winthrop sighs in resignation.
Hugh stands forth, his broadsword a tongue of flame as he draws a great rune of pursuit in the sky. "By Trithereon's might, shed your bonds of rigor!" he pronounces, and lo, it is done! All but Otto are freed from the evil god's grasp, and the priests begin to fall like wheat before the scythe. Perrin strums his banjo and limns the priests in glowing light, but also illuminates himself in the process. His control over the banjo is none too good yet.
None of the priests are immune from Raven or Diego's shafts, and the two of them are not the least shy in moving in among the priests to deliver a barbed shaft to the eye or throat. Al quickly moves to Otto's aid, where priests are bludgeoning Otto towards unconsciousness. Hugh steps forth and returns the favor, grasping the most powerful of the evil priests in Trithereon's grasp. A flurry of magical bolts from Winthrop fly forth into the remaining priests and the battle is ended.
Perrin and Antonus quickly move to secure the held priest while the others are searched to make certain they are dead. Each is found to be heavily armored in platemail of a serviceable type and carrying both mace and shield. The robes are surprisingly well-made, sewn from fine, heavy cloth, and each have the sigil of the Dead God, the inverted ziggurat, woven into their front. Antonus begins collecting them from the dead, claiming that they will come in handy. None of the priests seem to carry any valuable objects on them, perhaps implying that their abodes are nearby.
The rest of the Company search through the room and discover that on the far side of the dais, hidden from sight by the towering statue, was a strange metal altar. The altar is made of an odd alloy, a metal with a wet glistening to its surface and waves of darker material that flow through it. A dead male halfling or some faerie creature lies on the metal slab, his skin and bones sunken inwards as if he had been collapsed from within. Embedded deep within his chest is the handle of what appears to be a pulsating ruby dagger, made of a single, huge gem. "Al! Hugh!" shouts Raven. "Figure out what's going on here."
Antonus scuttles over to the metal slab, avoiding the hubbub. The robes he has collected are in a pile on the far side of the room, mounded in a high ring, blocking the Company's sight from the pile's middle. Antonus looks at the dead body and then peers around the altar. A silk bag lies on the ground under the metal slab, a bag about the right size to hold the ruby dagger. Using his quarterstaff, Antonus first pulls the bag over to him, then he edges the ruby dagger out of the small corpse, and last he works the dagger into the bag.
Raven turns to the collapsed statue and notes that the pedestal on which the statue stood has a small door in the base of it. The pedestal is hollow. The large metal slab altar must roll back up inside it. Indeed, a moment's time spent on hands and knees reveals that a series of stone cylinders sit under the metal altar and allow it to be rolled. As Raven contemplates the small door, he again wishes that Dell had come with them into the tunnels. He eyes Jasper, who is poking one of the dead priests with the end of his halberd while whistling the cry of a sparrow. "What we are reduced to," he marvels before beckoning them over. "Ok, we need in through that door. Find out if its protected by poisoned needles or other unpleasantness."
"That wouldn't be very nice," pouts Jasper, as Raven rolls his eyes. He goes to work on the door, examining it closely, but yet at a distance. Assured that something is going on, Raven turns back to the altar in time to see a great pillar of fire erupt from it. Hugh stands smiling, eyes alight with vengeance, as he pours more holy water upon the slab. The water erupts into flame as it touches the metal surface, causing a geyser of liquid fire. The rest of the Company runs over to see what has happened as Raven grabs hold of the frenzied priest.
"What are you doing?" he shouts, though it seems obvious.
"It's a foul, foul altar that must be purged! Purged with holy fire!" exclaims Hugh as Raven shakes him.
"The ruby knife is shattered," comments Antonus, who has come away from the pile of robes to see what the hullabaloo is about. Indeed, the silk bag is charred from the flames, and the dagger within broken into shards.
"Go back to work," commands Otto, glaring at everyone else. "What's the metal made of Al?"
Al dithers, hems, and haws, seeming unwilling or unable to answer until Diego suddenly bursts out, "Kelanen's curved blade! That's a huge slab of mithril!" Indeed, the altar seems wholly made of mithril, enough for several sets of full plate armor or a score of heavy weapons. Hugh continues to rant and rave about how the altar must be destroyed, but it is plain that several others are contemplating what they might do with such a mother lode.
A clicking sound from the back of the statue's pedestal signals Jasper's singular success at opening the door. A repository for the altar is plain, but also within are an even dozen heavy gold candlesticks. Each has a partially burnt red, black, or grey candle mounted in it. "Leave it until later," directs Otto. "We're not here to loot the temple. It'll still be here when we get back."
"Of course it will be here," says Diego. "I will take special care of it in my castle." The others look at him through slitted eyes. "I think that Castle Diego, home of Lord Diego, has a nice ring to it, no?" The rest of the Company just ignores Diego's delusions of grandeur.
The Company stuffs the bound priest into the hollow pedestal and piles his dead compatriots around him, attempting to clean up the signs of battle, even though the statue lies cracked and smashed to one side. "Maybe they'll think there was an earthquake," says Antonus. The others look at him questioningly. "A very localized earthquake."
Antonus blocks the Company's exit from the temple. "I have repaired and cleaned the priests' robes," he says. "We can don their garb and sneak our way in. Then we won't need to fight everyone the moment we see them." The Company is dumbfounded by the idea; not fight everyone the moment the Company sees them? With some cajoling, Raven is convinced of the idea, and the Company dons the gray and black robes. The robes are surprisingly well maintained. The rents from the Company's weapons are neatly sewn shut with a professional hand using minute stitches. The bloodstains are gone, and the robes even have a faint flowery odor to them. "A friend did the stitching," says Antonus coyly in response to Raven's querying glance, "but cantrips cleaned the blood off."
The Company, looking like an unholy procession, heads back out and up the sliding block. Following this corridor past the room of the false well brings them around two corners to where a door is set in the right hand wall. Thes Company forms up on the door; Otto preparing to smash through the door while Al, Raven, and Diego support him.
The door flies open, revealing a large room with a tall rectangular slab off black marble sitting in its midst. Three sarcophagi stand open against the right wall, and a handful of lumbering corpses prepare one their brethren on the slab to be used in further unholy rites. "Hugh!" shouts Otto, as he moves into the room. The undead do not respond to the presence of the four warriors, clad as they are in their vile robes. But, once Hugh enters the room, the undead know that they are not in the presence of their masters. The plodding corpses turn to face the Company, while funereally wrapped corpses rise from their sepulchers and lumber to the attack.
Al and Otto hack down the zombies while trying to close to these new threats, and Raven fires impotent arrows into the rotting, lumbering hulks. But Diego, Lord Diego, stands stock still, gibbering with fear, shaking and quaking as the undead lumber toward him. Al, Otto, and even Raven, now wielding Frostbrand, swing their axe and swords into the two plague-ridden corpses, lopping twitching limbs from them, but the zombies stagger up to the paralytic Diego, ready to bludgeon him to death. "Begone foul unlife!" shouts Hugh as he etches the pursuit rune in flames in the air. The zombies stagger from the flaming rune and the might of Trithereon turns them to dust.
The remaining undead quickly fall before the other warriors and Diego is saved. Behind the door is a smoking censer burning foul incense and on the opposite wall are shelves filled with beakers of chemicals, bandages, small gore-encrusted knives and various pins. Otto and Hugh eye the bandages and unguents, trying to determine if they might be suitable for binding wounds, but a close look at the sacks of pustulence that were the two undead in the sarcophagi makes up their mind for them. They leave the bandages behind. As the Company leaves the room, Raven sidles up to Diego. "Lord Diego, your castle awaits...if you have the stomach for it," he whispers. The back of Diego's neck turns a deep red and he convulsively grips his horsebow.
The Company pushes further down the corridor, and it ends in a large oaken door, heavily bound and shod. Otto pushes against it and finds the door flexes unnaturally, as if the edges of the door were sealed to the frame. "Magically warded, I suspect," he says. With his strength magically enhanced, such a door is not the barrier to Otto as it might be to a normal warrior, and, with several mighty kicks, the doorframe is shivered loose, coming away from the wall along with the door.
Carefully, the Company climbs hand over hand up the rope, collecting themselves in the trapezoidal-shaped room. While the others climb up, Otto and Jasper guard the door. Once a critical mass has assembled in the room, the other trapdoor is pried up and one of the buckets lowered down through the open shaft. The water that is drawn back up is clean, though silty, and markedly more pleasant than that Jasper fell into.
"Well, this makes it simple," mutters Raven. "Through the door we go." Chivvying the others into formation, Raven sends Al and Otto through the door. The passageway beyond runs straight a short distance and then branches to the left and right, each passage inviting the Company further on.
Otto stares at the ground, rubbing dirt and grime between his fingers. After a long pause, he tosses the soil back to the ground. "Left," he says. Raven grins at the taciturn ranger and waves him on, knowing better than to argue with the warrior.
The passage is of carved stone, but is coated with soil and grime, similar in color to that dumped into the Javan river at the entrance to the tunnels. Excavation of some sort has occurred here and likely over a long time. The map and directions possessed by Grizela and Arden Prindive are likely to be of much more limited value than previously thought.
After a long and winding path, the tunnel comes to a dead end. Mortared blocks and joints face the Company. "Left, eh?" gibes Antonus, still in agony from the deathly cold of the spectre's touch. The emptiness within him is something that he fears he can never refill.
Otto frowns at the ground before him and beckons at Perrin and Grizela. "You have keen eyes," he grates. "Use them." The half-elves search the walls for hidden passages, sliding blocks, or other secrets, but find nothing there. It is Al, who patiently stands by Otto while the rest scurry about poking and prodding at the walls, who finally has something to say.
"The floor's a different stone than the ones we've been walking on," he says, pointing back down the corridor. "See, mortared plates back there. One big slate here. This whole piece probably moves. See the wear at the corners? It probably doesn't fit perfectly." Al slings his axe and gets down on his hands and knees, crawling about between the legs of the others. "Ah, here it is. You tall people never want to get low to the ground. Miss all sort of stuff."
With a lurch, the floor begins to slide downwards at an angle. The Company crouches as the stone moves under what was the wall and then drops into a new passageway, one more dank and made of packed earth. The reinforced dirt walls bear a certain clay-like consistency that matches that found in the river.
The Company quietly hikes forward, hiding their glowing stones as best they can, as the sounds of rhythmic chanting reach their ears. The cacophony resolves into a repeated chant that can not be made out, except for the last syllable, "Dune!" A blood-curdling, bone-liquifying shriek reaches their ears, and the Company fears they have dallied too long. With an oath, Al and Otto lumber forward into a room lit by blood red light punctuated by rippling purple flame.
A great square room, thirty feet high extends before the Company. In the middle of it is a long dais made of stone, on which is a huge statue of a winged demon. The statue holds a great tulwar in one hand and a cat o'nine tails in the other, and its grimacing, leering, horned, faced glows with an unholy light. A purple, liquid, radiance slicks up its body like a growing slime as the fevered chanting of the cowled priests fills the air. "Tharizdun! Tharizdun! Tharizdun!" scream a dozen things at the top of their lungs, their arms covered in black blood, their faces and bodies covered with black and grey robes.
Over the screaming chants comes the clear sound of Winthrop's voice, dropping into octaves only reached by words of immense power. Otto and Al, especially Al, know better than to be in front of Winthrop once he summons words of power, and they peel into the room, Otto sprinting for the largest group of priestly foes while Al simply chooses the nearest.
"Kill them!" bellows a baritone voice, as the priests of Tharizdun turn on the Company, curses and admonitions flying from their lips. The foul power of the Dead God flows through the Company, gripping all of the warriors in its grasp, and Winthrop is struck by a black bolt of power that flies from the outstretched hands of one of the priests. Winthrop's flesh is laid open, ruptured from the force of the unholy casting. In a sudden turn of fate, the Company's strength is cut; their most fell warriors grasped rigid.
Winthrop, quickly identifying this priest as being of some great power, attempts to enthrall the priest, convincing him of the Company's friendship. His attempt succeeds, as the same baritone voice bellows out, "Wait, wait! It's all been a big mistake! These are our friends!" Winthrop smiles a grim smile.
The demon statue continues its horrible transformation and gives the appearance of motion, as if the wings twitch slightly, the hands tremble in anticipation. Winthrop raises his arms, and a bolt of lightning forty feet long and ten feet wide impales the statue, sheeting through its thighs. With a resounding shot, the glowing, rippling stone sheers in two, and the statue careens down to the side of the dais, crashing in a tumult. Bits of the stone, now black and blackened, shoot throughout the room as it chips, cracks, and snaps into bits.
The baritone voice booms forth once again. "The bastards! They are not our friends! Kill them! Kill them all and flay their souls," it exhorts. Winthrop sighs in resignation.
Hugh stands forth, his broadsword a tongue of flame as he draws a great rune of pursuit in the sky. "By Trithereon's might, shed your bonds of rigor!" he pronounces, and lo, it is done! All but Otto are freed from the evil god's grasp, and the priests begin to fall like wheat before the scythe. Perrin strums his banjo and limns the priests in glowing light, but also illuminates himself in the process. His control over the banjo is none too good yet.
None of the priests are immune from Raven or Diego's shafts, and the two of them are not the least shy in moving in among the priests to deliver a barbed shaft to the eye or throat. Al quickly moves to Otto's aid, where priests are bludgeoning Otto towards unconsciousness. Hugh steps forth and returns the favor, grasping the most powerful of the evil priests in Trithereon's grasp. A flurry of magical bolts from Winthrop fly forth into the remaining priests and the battle is ended.
Perrin and Antonus quickly move to secure the held priest while the others are searched to make certain they are dead. Each is found to be heavily armored in platemail of a serviceable type and carrying both mace and shield. The robes are surprisingly well-made, sewn from fine, heavy cloth, and each have the sigil of the Dead God, the inverted ziggurat, woven into their front. Antonus begins collecting them from the dead, claiming that they will come in handy. None of the priests seem to carry any valuable objects on them, perhaps implying that their abodes are nearby.
The rest of the Company search through the room and discover that on the far side of the dais, hidden from sight by the towering statue, was a strange metal altar. The altar is made of an odd alloy, a metal with a wet glistening to its surface and waves of darker material that flow through it. A dead male halfling or some faerie creature lies on the metal slab, his skin and bones sunken inwards as if he had been collapsed from within. Embedded deep within his chest is the handle of what appears to be a pulsating ruby dagger, made of a single, huge gem. "Al! Hugh!" shouts Raven. "Figure out what's going on here."
Antonus scuttles over to the metal slab, avoiding the hubbub. The robes he has collected are in a pile on the far side of the room, mounded in a high ring, blocking the Company's sight from the pile's middle. Antonus looks at the dead body and then peers around the altar. A silk bag lies on the ground under the metal slab, a bag about the right size to hold the ruby dagger. Using his quarterstaff, Antonus first pulls the bag over to him, then he edges the ruby dagger out of the small corpse, and last he works the dagger into the bag.
Raven turns to the collapsed statue and notes that the pedestal on which the statue stood has a small door in the base of it. The pedestal is hollow. The large metal slab altar must roll back up inside it. Indeed, a moment's time spent on hands and knees reveals that a series of stone cylinders sit under the metal altar and allow it to be rolled. As Raven contemplates the small door, he again wishes that Dell had come with them into the tunnels. He eyes Jasper, who is poking one of the dead priests with the end of his halberd while whistling the cry of a sparrow. "What we are reduced to," he marvels before beckoning them over. "Ok, we need in through that door. Find out if its protected by poisoned needles or other unpleasantness."
"That wouldn't be very nice," pouts Jasper, as Raven rolls his eyes. He goes to work on the door, examining it closely, but yet at a distance. Assured that something is going on, Raven turns back to the altar in time to see a great pillar of fire erupt from it. Hugh stands smiling, eyes alight with vengeance, as he pours more holy water upon the slab. The water erupts into flame as it touches the metal surface, causing a geyser of liquid fire. The rest of the Company runs over to see what has happened as Raven grabs hold of the frenzied priest.
"What are you doing?" he shouts, though it seems obvious.
"It's a foul, foul altar that must be purged! Purged with holy fire!" exclaims Hugh as Raven shakes him.
"The ruby knife is shattered," comments Antonus, who has come away from the pile of robes to see what the hullabaloo is about. Indeed, the silk bag is charred from the flames, and the dagger within broken into shards.
"Go back to work," commands Otto, glaring at everyone else. "What's the metal made of Al?"
Al dithers, hems, and haws, seeming unwilling or unable to answer until Diego suddenly bursts out, "Kelanen's curved blade! That's a huge slab of mithril!" Indeed, the altar seems wholly made of mithril, enough for several sets of full plate armor or a score of heavy weapons. Hugh continues to rant and rave about how the altar must be destroyed, but it is plain that several others are contemplating what they might do with such a mother lode.
A clicking sound from the back of the statue's pedestal signals Jasper's singular success at opening the door. A repository for the altar is plain, but also within are an even dozen heavy gold candlesticks. Each has a partially burnt red, black, or grey candle mounted in it. "Leave it until later," directs Otto. "We're not here to loot the temple. It'll still be here when we get back."
"Of course it will be here," says Diego. "I will take special care of it in my castle." The others look at him through slitted eyes. "I think that Castle Diego, home of Lord Diego, has a nice ring to it, no?" The rest of the Company just ignores Diego's delusions of grandeur.
The Company stuffs the bound priest into the hollow pedestal and piles his dead compatriots around him, attempting to clean up the signs of battle, even though the statue lies cracked and smashed to one side. "Maybe they'll think there was an earthquake," says Antonus. The others look at him questioningly. "A very localized earthquake."
Antonus blocks the Company's exit from the temple. "I have repaired and cleaned the priests' robes," he says. "We can don their garb and sneak our way in. Then we won't need to fight everyone the moment we see them." The Company is dumbfounded by the idea; not fight everyone the moment the Company sees them? With some cajoling, Raven is convinced of the idea, and the Company dons the gray and black robes. The robes are surprisingly well maintained. The rents from the Company's weapons are neatly sewn shut with a professional hand using minute stitches. The bloodstains are gone, and the robes even have a faint flowery odor to them. "A friend did the stitching," says Antonus coyly in response to Raven's querying glance, "but cantrips cleaned the blood off."
The Company, looking like an unholy procession, heads back out and up the sliding block. Following this corridor past the room of the false well brings them around two corners to where a door is set in the right hand wall. Thes Company forms up on the door; Otto preparing to smash through the door while Al, Raven, and Diego support him.
The door flies open, revealing a large room with a tall rectangular slab off black marble sitting in its midst. Three sarcophagi stand open against the right wall, and a handful of lumbering corpses prepare one their brethren on the slab to be used in further unholy rites. "Hugh!" shouts Otto, as he moves into the room. The undead do not respond to the presence of the four warriors, clad as they are in their vile robes. But, once Hugh enters the room, the undead know that they are not in the presence of their masters. The plodding corpses turn to face the Company, while funereally wrapped corpses rise from their sepulchers and lumber to the attack.
Al and Otto hack down the zombies while trying to close to these new threats, and Raven fires impotent arrows into the rotting, lumbering hulks. But Diego, Lord Diego, stands stock still, gibbering with fear, shaking and quaking as the undead lumber toward him. Al, Otto, and even Raven, now wielding Frostbrand, swing their axe and swords into the two plague-ridden corpses, lopping twitching limbs from them, but the zombies stagger up to the paralytic Diego, ready to bludgeon him to death. "Begone foul unlife!" shouts Hugh as he etches the pursuit rune in flames in the air. The zombies stagger from the flaming rune and the might of Trithereon turns them to dust.
The remaining undead quickly fall before the other warriors and Diego is saved. Behind the door is a smoking censer burning foul incense and on the opposite wall are shelves filled with beakers of chemicals, bandages, small gore-encrusted knives and various pins. Otto and Hugh eye the bandages and unguents, trying to determine if they might be suitable for binding wounds, but a close look at the sacks of pustulence that were the two undead in the sarcophagi makes up their mind for them. They leave the bandages behind. As the Company leaves the room, Raven sidles up to Diego. "Lord Diego, your castle awaits...if you have the stomach for it," he whispers. The back of Diego's neck turns a deep red and he convulsively grips his horsebow.
The Company pushes further down the corridor, and it ends in a large oaken door, heavily bound and shod. Otto pushes against it and finds the door flexes unnaturally, as if the edges of the door were sealed to the frame. "Magically warded, I suspect," he says. With his strength magically enhanced, such a door is not the barrier to Otto as it might be to a normal warrior, and, with several mighty kicks, the doorframe is shivered loose, coming away from the wall along with the door.
