Pharast 28, 4713 (early afternoon, The Penance)

The farther in we go, the more I see the echoes of a long-lost grandeur. I hesitate to describe anything the Five Storms have touched as magnificent, but this place has the feel of a once-great hall deep into its decay. How long were they held prisoner here? Hundreds of years? Thousands? That is a lot of time to excavate. The rubble in the hall suggests there was a collapse at some point. How much more was there? Are we just scratching the surface?

What did they do here? Did they entertain visitors? The kami said they were forbidden from leaving, but it was a prison with no guards save for the complicated rules that kept the oni from leaving. There was nothing stopping outsiders from coming and going as they pleased. You could build an empire that way.

It really begs the question, “why so lax?” Was it assumed the oni would just sit in here and rot for all of eternity? Clearly they had other plans. Whoever created their jail (and more crucially, this arrangement) was afflicted with a startling lack of imagination. And Minkai is paying the price.

Whatever this place once was it’s more mausoleum now; a crumbling monument to another time. It’s dark, dank and depressing. Even the oni that remain are depressing. The guardian of this checkpoint, as he called it, was as decrepit as the hall itself, though at least he was reasonably aware of the pathetic nature of his role. There was this moment when I was invisible, hovering just close enough to see him when he called out to us in the darkness. Qatana, for her part, managed a very credible impression of Ichirou’s voice and insisted on passing through. He tried to talk “Ichirou” out of this decision, reminding him what had happened the last time he’d visited his sisters. When “Ichirou” insisted on going anyway, he buried his head in his hands and just shook it sadly.

Can you imagine? Proud samurai Oni of the Five Storms, reduced to babysitting. Such tales of glory and fortune he must have had.

Wretched though he was, he was in our way. And he was mounted on a gorgon because of course he was, which also made him dangerous. We went for a reprise of yesterday’s trick: Qatana cast her spell, I walled them off behind a barrier of ice (because they can’t fly), and we let them beat each other to death while we took pot shots with arrows and bombs.

His living quarters was the height of elegance with its lice-infested bed and living, wall-to-wall carpet of beetles. I swear I am not making that last one up. What was even keeping them there? This place keeps challenging my notion of “the worst thing I have ever seen”. Repeatedly. It is not supposed to be a competition.

Speaking of “worst thing I have ever seen”, the decor in this hall includes an image of a hobgoblin nursing two snakes. Just in case there was any doubt about that.

(midafternoon)

One down, one to go: we found the bonsai tree, discarded and forgotten in a dark storage room that is leading the race to dilapidation. Like everything else here the tree is barely clinging to life, probably from days or weeks without sunlight. If it wasn’t for the water leaking through the walls and ceiling it probably would have withered and died.

Yet again, I am left wondering what the plan was here. Why bring a plant—one which quite obviously needs sunlight to live—to a place completely steeped in darkness? How were they planning on keeping it alive? The only light in here is in the fire pit, and even if that were sufficient it’s two stories up. The would-be gardener was obviously not thinking this one through.

Now that the tree is safely in our possession maybe we can afford to be more indiscriminate in our methods. (OK, fine, we were hardly careful up in the pagoda. But there were no hobgoblins there, and no hobgoblins meant no tree. It was solid logic, and as it happens, we were right.)  Or maybe not. Yuka’s memories suggest Munasukaru gets personally involved when it comes to her prisoners, and that means there may be some down below. I’m guessing we’ll have to do this the hard way.

I probably should have thought of that sooner, before I sent a cloud of poisonous gas down that hallway. Fortunately, it was just a few hobgoblins, a hill giant, and these bizarre lizard things that were far more dangerous than anything else we’ve come across. Which makes me think they weren’t part of the original plan. That, and the pile of hobgoblin bones. They reminded me of that thing that attacked us up in the arctic. These lizards were blind, too, and they tore into us with huge blasts of sound. Except like everything else down here, they couldn’t fly (so maybe they were part of the original plan after all?)

Gods, it’s been a long day. I am spent. Qatana looks exhausted. Dasi’s voice sounds like it’s going out. We even lost Zosi’s puppets: they tried to walk across the bottom of the lake and something—we never saw what, but it was something big—extirpated them. They are utterly gone; there aren’t even any remains! I shudder to think what must be in that murky water that’s capable of (I assume) swallowing them whole. The pool is closed until further notice.

This underscores how unprepared we’ve been for water. We’ve mostly avoided it so far but it’s been a consistent theme and I wonder if our current tactics will hold. At the end of that hallway, where the lizards were, water pours in through cracks in the cavern walls and flows down the steps into a drain at its base. Which means we will have water to contend with down below, too. What if there’s something in the water that we have to confront?

The good new is that we have a few hours to figure this out as we are going to shelter in this hall for the rest of the day while we recover. Is this safe? Not really. Is there someplace safer? Not really. Not unless we want to leave and come back, which seems particularly unwise. If anything tries to come up from below, or descend from above, we need to be here for it.