Session 5
From AngilleWiki
The Temple of Strife was carved from three different pitch-black materials: obsidian, black granite, and black marble. It looked like the top had been sheared off, almost like a huge sword had swept through it hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years in the past. The group was able to find a place where a column had shattered a part of the wall, and climbed through a crack into one of the towers. This particular tower was dirty, smelled of rotting loam and fungus, and had mold growing on the walls. There were two exits to the room, but one was blocked off by several of the blocks that had fallen from above, and the other was blocked by a heavy iron portcullis. A quick examination of the portcullis revealed a mechanism to lift it by a pulley system, and the party quickly started down the unusually warm hallway between towers, setting up a quick-release system if they had to make a quick getaway.
The second tower had been gutted by a fire, and still smelled of ash and had a miasma of dust and ash on everything. The dust made it easy to tell that humans and imps had traversed this room, but only very recently had an imp been through. Again, the party continued around the huge temple, through a hallway with dead branches underfoot. The third tower had, amazingly, a tree in the center of it, but the tree had deteriorated out to a hollow thing full of termites and the stink of rot. Dead vines crept up the sides of the tower. Almost out of rope, the party decided it would be a good idea to conserve as much of it as possible, and started jamming branches etc into the pulley mechanisms to make sure it would be easy to escape.
The third hallway had noticably damp walls, with trickles of water coming from... nowhere seemingly. The party investigated a series of holes in the wall with a quarterstaff, finding nothing but that they were probably ducts of some sort, heading down. The room at the end of that hallway had a pool of brackish green water, with dribbles of slime down every wall. The party checked the pool with the same staff, and found and avoided a pit in the center before continuing through the rest of the towers. Rust and useless weapons and armor characterize the next hall and tower, and Kovar is disturbed by the ruined implements of war hanging on the walls. The last hallway and tower are completely empty, save a whistling wind that whips up and down the walls of the structure. A quick study of the room, which is bordered on the other end by the same fall of rocks that bordered the first tower, reveals a trapdoor hidden in the floor, which the party climbs into with trepidation.
As of yet, nobody had seen anyone else, imp or human. A quick jaunt around a circular ramp leading down led the party to a heavy wooden door, behind which was a grisly room with an altar covered with frescos of Strife creating and destroying the world. A shrivelled and desicated body of a dead woman was found next to the altar, and the door on the other side of the room was never opened, as the party found a lever in the side of the altar, which caused it to move aside revealing a passageway. On the other side of the obviously unhewn passage, the party found a large cavernous room with a pit, several desicated bodies, Grishona unconcious on a slab, and a large stone door.
The party, unready for much of anything at this point, bed down after recovering Grishona and tossing the dry corpses down the apparently bottomless pit, and hope that nobody attacks them all while sleeping. Miraculously, nobody did.
