Chapter 11: They Continue Exploring

August 23

The group begins to examine the room. Jaysek notices that there is law magic in the sarcophagus at the edge of the room. Jaysek tears open the sarcophagus with brute force, and after that, the law magic disappears. Inside is found a tablet with some unknown language and a magic ring. The king has a magic gemstone in place of an eye, and he has a normal weapon.

The group picks them up, and surprisingly, Kieron recognizes both the ring and the gemstone. The ring is apparently the Ring of Winter’s Embrace, and the gemstone is an Azlanti Seal Stone. Kieron takes the Azlanti Seal Stone and Ra the ring.

After that, the group starts looking for secret doors. Ra examines one part of the wall for a couple of minutes, and after that, he goes behind the sarcophagus between the wall and starts pushing the sarcophagus forward. He pushes the sarcophagus with full force, and surprisingly, the wall of that sarcophagus gives way, and it falls inward.

Jaysek thinks about the rooms and realizes that there are all four elements here (fire, earth, water, and air), in addition there are law, chaos, good, and evil, so there are eight different elements here, and eight was the Azlanti number. Kieron ties to see if there is something hidden, but doesn’t find anything, so the group heads out. They move past the curse trap with magical means, just to be safe.

They circle the stone but don’t find anything. After that, Ra wants a levitation spell to be able to fly up and look on top of the structure. He doesn’t know how to control the flight, so he fumbles around there for a couple of minutes before getting down.

The group tries to look for tracks, and when they are about to go searching, Jaysek walks backward and says that there are probably burned fresh human bones. In addition, a large pile of ash is found on top of the time system. Apparently, some kind of ritual has been performed here, or something.

There are six skulls, so it matches pretty well with how many people were missing from the sawmill. The group decides to still look for tracks around the entire structure. On the north side of the structure, Ra finds tracks on the ground that come straight out of the stone wall and head north. In Jaysek’s opinion, the tracks go into the stone wall, not out. Ra, however, is not sure if there is only one or two of them after all. Jaysek examines and identifies after all that these are Ra’s tracks when he returned to the others after his flying trip. The group continues on and doesn’t find other tracks.

The group fetches the boss and tells him that here are the skeletons of the missing people, and a ritual has been performed there, but those who did this to them have probably already been avenged. The boss notices that that disc, on top of which the ashes are, is rotating, so he shouts for his soldiers to rotate it.

When they have rotated it for quite a long time, flames flare up on top of the discs, and a skeleton mage riding a skeleton horse appears on the scene. The mage says something and rides away through the air. Neiia shoots at the skeleton wizard with a magic bolt, but he dodges, and the wizard shoots back with something that looks like a shooting star. Kieron jumps away, Ra, who has fallen at the horse’s feet, rolls off the disc, Jaysek also jumps away. Neiia moves herself ten feet away, the boss jumps acrobatically over the fence. The guards stand in amazement, watching the explosion.

The explosion is a really big fireball. Kieron and Jaysek feel heat, as does Ra, who has managed to activate his fire protection ring. Of the guards, two are slowed, and three are staggering on the edge of unconsciousness.

Kieron jumps up, Jaysek tries to get up but hits his head on a stone. Ra gets up, and Neiia runs forward, in case something else is coming from there. Neiia reaches behind the wall near the boss, and at the same time, the skeleton wizard fires the next shooting star toward Neiia, whereupon Neiia again moves ten feet away.

The boss, hiding behind the wall, notices that a bomb is coming to his side, so he tries to jump over the wall but doesn’t succeed and remains lying on top of the wall. The wall shatters into fragments, and the fragments shred one of the guards to death, while the boss in turn dodges most of the fragments. The fragments continue their destruction and drop three more of the guards so that only one remains standing, but he too sits down because he too is in pretty bad shape.