Desnus 8, 4722 (Early Morning)
We set out for the cairn early in the morning. I am still not sure how we got on this “get up with the sun” routine, and I’d like to register a complaint. (Someone said that the sunrise was actually an hour earlier, and really, I don’t want to hear it.)
The Whispering Cairn was pretty much as we left it: dark, empty, whispering. We made our way back to the ball room and, this time? No ghost, no gricks, and most importantly, no closed door. For some reason, Snagsby tried to walk across the beam, despite the fact we all knew it was an obvious trap, and just as predicted, a steel ball shot out of the wall and knocked him off.
You would think we’d have already learned this lesson but I guess some of us are slow.
The room beyond was an enormous cylindrical chamber with walkways around the rim and a platform in the center connected by four catwalks like spokes on a wheel, two of which had long collapsed, swallowed by the chasm below. Four galleries of intricate bas reliefs lined the walls and they animated as we approached. I didn’t have much patience for the whole thing but Viktor sat through the show and said they told the story of the Wind Dukes and their epic, final battle against the forces of chaos (he actually said all of this with a straight face), ending with Zosiel falling when a giant wolf-spider sent some sort of beam of something or other into him as it was banished from this world. The whole thing was more than a little overdramatic, but then again, so is this whole place, so I guess it fits in with the theme.
We tried to approach the center but a pair of knights descended from above and tried to stop us. I say they were knights, but they weren’t actually knights; rather, they were more like animated suits of armor. Whatever they were, they weren’t interested in conversation so we had to fight our way through, which ended up being much more difficult than it sounds. Especially since they had this neat trick where they could clash their swords together to create a boom with enough sound pressure to rattle your bones. My trick, which I liked to call “a big hammer on a pole”, wasn’t as showy, but it was more than up to the task.
We reached the final chamber by literally stepping out into the air and letting the steady stream of wind blowing from below carry us up. And it’s up there that we found what looked like the resting place of Zosiel: a white marble sarcophagus with a lid carved into a figure, and more bas reliefs in the wall around it. The figure animated as we approached, saying, “Speak my name”. Sangsby replied with “Zosiel”, and a bright light shone on it, revealing a seam where we could pull to lift the lid off.
There wasn’t a body inside, just a pair of demonic-looking horns, a diadem, and a strange pewter box with unrecognizable writing on it that Zhog used a spell to decipher. The text spoke at length of the Queen of Chaos.
Inside that was what we deduced to be a legendary item known as a Talisman of the Sphere. Supposedly it could control another legendary item known as a Sphere of Annihilation which, also supposedly, destroys anything it touches. There’s a lot of “supposedly” in all that, but such is the way with legends. According to the others, our talisman appears to be dormant. No clue what this means—I mean, I know what “dormant” means, just not when it’s used in this context—and while it’s all very much above my pay grade, it does seem like the sort of thing we should hold on to.
Desnus 9, 4722
I spent the morning working on the legal claim for the property where the house/mine office sits, and getting it filed with the assessor’s office at the garrison. My thought is that we could renovate the place and turn it into a small lodge or inn of sorts. While this is not exactly “getting out of Diamond Lake” it is at least far enough away from it that I don’t feel depressed all of the time.
While I was doing that, the others pestered Allustan with what we’d learned in the Cairn. That ended with inviting him back to the house so he could see it all for himself.
Desnus 11, 4722 (late morning)
Remember what I said about this Filge thing coming back to bite us? Today was the day.
We swung by the observatory because…never mind why we went to the observatory. We were there, and we found a note nailed to the door.
You who did this,I wish to have a discussion with you.See Kullen the half-orc to make the arrangements.S
So that’s just great. If I were to make a list of everything I didn’t want to do today, or possibly do ever, meeting with Kullen and meeting with Smenk would take the top two spots. Of course, Smenk doesn’t know who he’s looking for, or he’d have nailed that note into us instead, so at least we had that going for us.
I turned to Zhog and said, “All right. I guess we go see your uncle.”
Kullen was in his office, and Zhog walked up to him and set the note on his desk. Kullen looked up and said, “I was wondering when you’d find that.”
“It says you’re supposed to be the one we talk to,” Zhog replied.
“Yeah, Smenk wants to meet with you.”
“Does he want to meet with us, or does he want to hurt us?”
Just in case it wasn’t clear how dangerous this situation was.
“Probably both…but, I think he really does want to meet with you because he wants something. He didn’t say what.”
“So is it a meet, or is it an ambush?” Zhog asked.
“If it was an ambush, he would have had us set it up.”
Kullen suggested having the meeting just after the Feral Dog closed at midnight.
Desnus 12, 4722 (small hours)
The front doors to Smenk’s run-down mansion are always open. Supposedly this is because of some promise he made to the town long ago that he would always be available to his miners. In reality, his property is patrolled by his thugs, and anyone who gets too close is encouraged to move along, sometimes with the assistance of a lead pipe. And that’s your character study of Balabar Smenk.
We arrived at the Feral Dog at midnight and made our way downstairs once the last of the patrons had been shown the door. Smenk was waiting for us with Kullen’s crew, and Kullen himself followed us in and took a position along the wall. Zhog had asked him who he would stand with if this thing went south, his employer or his kin. Kullen said that if we did something stupid, we’d be fighting him. And if Smenk did something stupid? “We’ll see.”
Smenk sized us up for a bit then began, “I’m in a bit of a situation, and I could use some help.”
I barely managed to suppress a snort at this. If he noticed it, he didn’t let on.
“And yet,” he continued, “it occurs to me you’re in a bit of a pickle as well.” He shook his head and said, “Poor Filge. It seems someone ransacked the observatory and murdered the poor guy. I’m sure the Sheriff would want to know all about this.”
And there it was.
Yeah, we killed Filge, but he also happened to be a necromancer who exhumed corpses from our community, turned them into undead, and in general performed necromantic experiments on whatever bodies he could come by. Given what we found in his bedroom and dining room, it’s been one of his hobbies for a very long time and he was planning to set up shop in Diamond Lake—the man brought furniture with him for stars’ sake—so was I worried about what passes for the law here? Not in the long run, not really, but we could find ourselves detained for weeks until it got sorted out.
“But, you help me out with a problem,” he continued, “and I can forget I knew anything about such matters. There’s a cult, calling themselves the Ebon Triad, operating secretly under Dourstone’s old mine, and I want them gone.”
Of all the possible things he could have said, this is perhaps the least expected, and most alarming. A paladin’s training leans more towards the practical than the academic, but we are expected to at least have a passing knowledge of the various deities and religions on Golarion. I came across the Ebon Triad in my studies. They seek to merge the gods Zon-Kuthon, Urgathoa, and Lamashtu into a single overgod. Is such a thing possible? No clue, but no good can come from the faithful of these three working together.
Did I say alarming? I meant panic-inducing.
I leaned forward and exclaimed, “You are not fucking with us here, are you?”
Look, I don’t curse in front of others anymore. Really; I don’t. It’s rude, it’s crude, and it rarely endears you to them. But I grew up with plenty of people who did, so when I was younger, I did, too. Catch me off-guard, especially with something as distressing as the Ebon fucking Triad in Diamond Lake, and I’ll fall back on old habits.
In short, he was serious. Smenk did some poking around on his own, and his investigation turned up a separate shaft at the bottom of the mine that leads down to where the cultists have set up shop. He even managed to pilfer that green worm we found on Filge.
So why us, and why now? Because, a couple of nights ago, Smenk woke to find the head of his servant in his bed, and he’s genuinely terrified of what the Triad can and will do, and how soon they’ll be doing it. And that’s the short version of why he chose to hire blackmail us. He was so frightened he was even willing to loan us some magic weapons to deal with the “unkillable” undead mentioned in his letter.
He asked Kullen, “This your boy?”
Kullen nodded.
He turned to us and said, “I’ll get supplies to you through him.”
It didn’t escape me that we had just signed up for trespassing. As a general rule, Abadar frowns on this sort of thing, but I am also willing to bet he’s more concerned with threats to public health and safety. A cult devoted to merging the three worst deities known to man sounds like a threat to public health and safety to me.
So. Trespassing it is.