Maw-nolith Awakened
You went deeper.
Ubys decomposed the Ogres on the way out and pulled the Primeval Tablet back out of his pack. He looked at it again under torchlight.
He had seen this script before.
Bestial. Demonic. The same hand as the letter you found beneath [[Talon Ashcraft|Talon's bed]] at the Toke Inn what felt like ages ago. The Heiress's auction-letter and the temple's psalmody are the same scribal lineage.
The party kept walking.
The corridor sloped down. A long way down.
You came around a bend and met a sheer drop — forty, fifty feet — into a chamber.
You climbed.
The chamber was enormous.
A waterfall ahead — five hundred feet tall, twenty wide, deafening. Two black holes opening from the side walls — one southwest, one southeast.
AC crept to the waterfall.
In the lake at its base, four black-stone monoliths rose from the water. Square pattern. Each fifty feet tall, half submerged.
On top of one — something glittered.
AC swam.
Moist followed slower, after.
It took two rounds to climb. The stone was carved with bestial runes — the same hand again, all the way down.
At the top: expertly crafted Elven chain mail. And Elven bones.
Whoever this was, had died here.
You'd just figured that out when something slapped AC's shoulder.
A tentacle wrapped his throat.
He went up.
Thirty feet up, fifty feet from the water now, a maw-mouthed thing hung from the ceiling of the chamber. Tentacles. Open jaw. Slime that poisoned on contact.
You all rolled initiative.
AC severed the tentacle holding him with a fire-fueled strike, fell, missed the monolith on the way down, splashed into the lake.
Lessie wild-shaped a crocodile and swam out to fetch him.
Moist threw Faerie Fire to light up the ceiling-thing.
Ubys Guiding-Bolted.
Falkor used Breath Weapon for twenty-two radiant.
KeYs put arrows in it.
Dhuxtyn eldritch-blasted.
The thing reached for them and could not reach them.
It went for AC and the croc instead.
It snatched both of you back up thirty feet into the air and bit you both for seventeen damage while Lessie was a crocodile in its mouth and AC was being held next to her by a tentacle.
It was bloodied.
KeYs kept shooting.
Then AC swung his shortsword. Missed once.
CRIT the second.
Forty-nine damage in fire and steel.
The thing came off the ceiling.
It fell across the chamber, over the rest of you, crashed onto the lake's edge, and slid in.
Dead.
The Quippers below you, who had been swimming up to feast on whatever blood was about to hit the water, fled from the carcass.
AC and Lessie were dropped into the lake. The Quippers were already gone.
You took a Short Rest.
Ubys asked Lessie-the-Crocodile to ferry him back to the monolith. He used his Slippers of Spider Climb to walk up the stone and retrieve the chain mail — and read the bestial runes on the way up.
Commandments of sorts. The Beast Lord's edicts. The temple was older than the cult that's running it now.
Lessie went exploring under the water.
The temple ruins continued below the lake's surface. More runes. More carving.
And at the bottom — something glinted.
A shortsword.
She picked it up in her teeth.
She brought it back.
You all knew what it was the moment she dropped it on the shore.
Elven runes on the blade. The mark of a renowned Halfling blacksmith in the steel.
Speak the word and Pass Without Trace.
AC took it.
Ubys kept the Elven Chain.
You sat at the edge of the lake while the waterfall fell.
The temple is older than the Beast Lord. The Beast Lord is older than the Heiress. The Heiress is older than this campaign. The Sword Coast is full of layered floors.
Two more holes leave this chamber.
You picked one.
Next session: the rats. Their queen on a spike. The portal in the corner.