== Starday, Arodus 2, 4708; Runeforge; noon ==

Trask had launched a fireball into the adjoining hall, where we saw a swarm of creatures, which I later learned were called “sin-spawn,” racing toward us.

They did not appear to welcome Trask’s warm embrace, and so Trask blasted them with another, and one of the creatures dropped in a smouldering heap.

Our fighters moved in to attack, and I fell in behind to offer healing support. Nolin, Sabin and Avia managed to drop another sin-spawn, but things did not continue to go all our way.

A squad of human fighters arrived, but rather than attack, they held back behind the attacking swarm of spawn. All of a sudden we were engulfed in a pair of fireballs. These did not seem as potent as those Trask created, but they were plenty painful, and there were more of them.

Trask detonated another of his fireballs among the sin-spawn and more fell, and then Sabin used his Dimension Door tactic to pop us next to one of the spell casting fighters. Avia promptly killed it.

We were then hit by a volley of force missiles and another fireball as we realized there were a lot more fighters hanging out in the side wings of the great hall.

Sedgewick had been singing a song of courage all this time, and suddenly he shouted at the sin-spawn, which caused them to clasp their boney hands to their ugly ears. Trask then blasted them with yet another fireball, and the last of them fell.

This freed up the other half of our team, and Kane quickly made his way down to us and offered much appreciated healing for all of the fireball damage.

We approached another pair of fighters, but each was using various spells to visually shift their position and blur themselves into a series of wavering copies of them. This made them exceptionally hard to hit or touch.

In the meantime more fireballs burst around us.

I isolated half a dozen of the fighters with a Blade Barrier. One of them tried to launch a fireball through it, but it detonated at the barrier and blasted him and his fellows. Another tried to run through the barrier, but he did not survive the attempt.

Meanwhile Nolin, Avia and Sabin continued to grind their way through the fighters remaining on our side of the blade barrier. Task skillfully used his spells to assist, and finished off one with a set of magic missiles.

Soon there was just a pair of them left, and one of these was talking to his sword grinning evilly at Sabin, which did not bode well for Sabin.

I dropped a Flame Strike on the two fighters, which killed one of them, and then Sabin promptly killed the other.

I looked around the hall and saw a troll standing further down, with Nolin walking back from it, muttering angrily to himself. Apparently Sedgewick had created an image of one, and Nolin had dutifully run over to deal with it.

The four surviving fighters trapped by the blade barrier had one by one popped out from the room, using a teleportation circle on the floor.

This gave us time to look about the hall in which we found ourselves. And of course to search for valuables and loot the dead.

Sabin held a brief conversation with Trask about using the same spells as these fighter mages during combat. At least for Sabin’s part it was short. He made his comment, and as Trask waxed eloquently about the different and subtle nuances of various protective spell combinations, Sabin abruptly turned around and walked off. Trask kept on talking, no doubt for the befit of those around us who might have been listening. Or maybe he is just always talking like that.

We were in a large training hall for combat. Practice dummies stood along the walls, and the floor was littered with miscellaneous fighting gear. Two wings led off to either side halfway down, with doors before and after these wings. A wide hall led to another area further in.

We checked each of the doors in the main hall and found the first half a dozen were small rooms with a pair of bunks and chests in each. The next six were more like kennels, with straw, filth and stench liberally strewn about.

The wings to the left and right each ended in a large identical room with a pair of teleportation circles like the ones we had already seen.

The fighters (we would eventually find a slay 20):

[1206] 20 +1 greats-words
[1207] 20 +2 mithral chain shirts

Both Sedgewick and I replaced the armor we were wearing with a new shirt.

The sin-spawn:

[1208] 10 +1 great axes
[1209] 10 +2 red breastplates

The bedrooms:

[1210] 12 spell-books

The hall ended in a large meeting or dining area, with a sizeable pantry off to one side. Oddly enough there did not appear to be anything worth eating.

We decided to use the blue teleportation circle to to the left (from where we originally entered the hall). We knew that only four of us could use the circle at a time, and so we divided ourselves into groups. Nolin, Avia, Trask and I were in the first group; and Sabin, Rigel, Sedgewick and Kane in the other.

We cast a few protective spells and stepped into the circle.

The room in which we found ourselves was quite large and diamond shaped, with granite walls. A mural of Alasnist was on the ceiling, and the room was lit by three sets of flaming weapons embedded in the wall. At one end of the room was a wide hallway choked with a curtain of billowing black smoke.

We were immediately engulfed by four fireballs, and Nolin was near to death. For there, in each of the four corners of the room stood one of the fighter mages who had escaped the blade barrier trap in the hall. They had obviously been waiting for us, and set off prepared spells just as we arrived.

Trask cleverly isolated two of them by erecting a wall of force. This gave me an idea, and so I asked Avia if she could heal us while I worked on something else. She complied, surprising us with the efficacy of her channelling!

I then entombed one of the fighter mages in a wall of stone. Honestly, if you you are going to launch spells at us at least try to avoid standing in a corner of a room with stone walls.

This left one fighter mage, who tried to put a brave face on his now hopeless situation.

“Stop right there! If you think you can challenge the High Lady Athraxis, then you are mistaken. You have not proven yourselves nearly enough.”

After this little disclaimer he hit Nolin with a scorching ray. Nolin hit him back with something a lot more sharp and solid.

The others then popped into the room, and Kane immediately healed those of us nearest the circles. Trask placed a flaming sphere under the fighter, and I moved over to Nolin and healed him.

The fighter was sweating now, and casting furtive glances at the wall of smoke behind him, “You are not worthy to challenge the high lady! You will never become the high lord of…”

Nolin cut his speech short by cutting off his head. He is good that way.

Kane wandered over to the wall of force and made threatening gestures at one of the fighters, who cowered in response. This was an odd sight: a three foot tall halfling healer making a six foot tall fighter cringe.

The other fighter cast a fireball at the ceiling, obviously judging how high the wall of force reached, and he used this knowledge to scorch a few of us with a well aimed fireball.

This small degree of success was short lived, as Trask dropped the wall of force and we kicked the shit out of our two remaining foes.

Looking around the room we saw that smoke was an illusion. We also noticed that the walls of the room were covered in a thin script, but I was to distracted at the time to translate what they said.

The six flaming weapons lighting the room were a pair of +1 long swords, a pair of +1 ranseurs, and a pair of +1 great swords. We plan to take these with us when we leave Runeforge.

By now the fighter in his stone chrysalis was ready to emerge as a beautiful butterfly, but apparently he had had difficulty with the lack of air and emerged as a corpse instead. We took his stuff.

Rather than pass through the smoke (or illusion thereof) and encounter whom we felt sure was the most powerful being in the Halls of Wrath, we thought to try the other teleportation circles first. We returned to the hall and, keeping the same grouping as before, popped into another hall.

It was the smallest hall we had encountered in Wrath thus far, but it was still large. It was narrow and long and stretched down from the end where we arrived, past a number of very large tables, and ended in three large alcoves at the back.

Parchment, books and alchemical supplies littered the table tops, and standing around the tables were more fighter mages. They were in the middle of a heated argument, and did not notice us at first.

“…but each generation is going to worse and worse…”

“…unless we get the sin-spawn back into human form…”

Trask interrupted their debate with a deadly arc of chain lightening. This surprised us (where was the fire?), but it surprised the fighters even more. In fact three of them died from the shock.

The others began to pop in as we hastily tried to make room for them, and Sabin Dimension Doored Nolin and I into the thick of things.

Nolin killed one while Sabin killed another two. The remaining fighter called out “For the Lady!” as he hefted his sword and launched after us, but Sabin used his newly acquired Swipe spell to take the sword, and I killed the stunned man with a well placed icicle through the eye.

Notes on the tables indicated the fighter mages were trying to solve two serious problems that threatened their well being:

1. the constant in-breeding of warriors over the millennia had degraded their quality, and

2. the practice of converting the aged humans into sin-spawn had further depleted their numbers (that plus the hostile encounters with the denizens of the other halls), and they were trying to find a way to convert the sin-spawn back into humans.

Well, we had solved problem 2 for them. I guess we solved 1 as well, and in the same way.

It was kind of sad, really, but then I realized these people were stuck in the same sort of unchanging thought patterns as everyone we had encoutnered trapped in here. Ten thousand years of isolation is not good for creativity.

Other notes described forging magical weapons and armor (we kept those). In fact the entire place was a well stocked magical weapon and armor lab.

At the far end of the hall, in the center alcove was a large vat of stinking flesh colored goop. The notes identified it as something called proto-flesh, but smelled horrific and I kept well away from it.

The constant barrage of fireballs we had endured today had drained our healing ability, and even Trask had commented that he could not cast as many fireballs as he felt comfortable having on hand (I am guessing that number to be around a dozen). And so we decided to head back to our base in the Halls of Greed.

We made it back to the main entry hall of Wrath without incident, but as we were leaving we heard a loud thunderclap, and as we turned around we saw a cloaked figure swirl about and vanish.

We arrived in Greed without further incident, but Trask was distracted and muttered to himself the entire way back, “That lightening spell was actually more effective than my fireballs. That can’t be right. How can something be better than fire?”

Sabin spent an unusual amount of time looking at the goldfish in the fountains as we walked back to the stufy, and seems very thoughtful.