15th session: The castle in the woods

7th moon, 28th day, year 4553

After killing the mercs and the ogres, the brothers explored the towers and the barn. In the barn they found several items indicating that a giant lived there. This made them somewhat more cautious, but they pressed on. As they were about to enter the main building, they suddenly heard something large approaching. It turned out to be a hill giant, but about 4 wellplaced darknesses leveled the fight, and the giant went down quickly.

With the giant dead, the T'orghs turned their attention back to the main building, which they found to be barred, from the outside. Entering the building, they found another door which was barred. Leaving that, they explored the other parts of the fort, finding a throne-room, a weapons chamber and a lot of bedrooms, but nothing interesting except signs of battle.

Going through the barred door, they went down to the cellar. Going north, they found a halfling in a cell, who was afraid of undeads. He begged the brothers to bring him along, but they refused. Moving further down the corridor, they ended up in a torture chamber with quite a few bodies. Ukerin wanted a hand, unfortunately the bodies turned out to be ghouls. Battle started and soon two brothers were laying on the floor, paralyzed by the foul touch of the undead. Glazmar managed to finish the battle by commanding all the ghouls into one of the empty cells. Unfortunately for him, the halfling had left his cell and ambushed him as he was locking up the door, and the halfling was no halfling, but instead a wight. Glazmar was struck twice getting his lifeforced drained before it was killed.

After a short break, the T'orghs moved on, and found a huge library with tombs. As they entered, a voice rang out of the darkness. Leave my books alone. Tagar ignored the warning, and was swiftly attack by a ghost. The battle was long and hard, moving from the library and back to the stairs up, going on both in the mortal world and in the Underworld (Nalfein changed to wraithform). The ghost was mostly possessing Tagar, but also trying to drain the years of the other brothers. Ukerin was struggling to make a ritual that could banish the ghost, when Glazmar had the idea to run back to the library and use detect magic to find the book it might be protecting and then destroying it. Although he didn't manage to finish the task before the ghost had made him a very old dark elf.

At this point, the dark elves decided to take a small break and get some sleep. They went back upstairs and Tawri animated some mercs as skeletons to guard the area, should anything come out from the depths.

7th moon, 29th day, year 4553

The next morning, the brothers went back down. The only room left was a huge temple, with a crap-ton of skeletons and monster zombies, which were re-enacting a dark ritual over and over again. After some fireball and lightningball tossing as well as some commanding, all the undead were destroyed.

 

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