IN OUR LAST SESSION…
… our heroes made friends with some dwarves led by Uddar, priest of Berronar Truesilver. The dwarves had been trying for some time to get through the door leading to the Vault of the Throne. So far they have been unsuccessful. Uddar helped the heroes to identify the creatures heard the previous night clomping through the hallway: kor!
Uddar and crew had helped the heroes up in to the space above the hallway, and participated in the fight against the flameskull. The heroes had hoped to perhaps use the kor’s ability to teleport to pass through the door.
Their other new friend, Jermiah, who they had freed from the previously-explored vampire spawn lair, seemed to feel that the militiamen had it within themselves to open the door. Once the attempt to use the kor’s teleport ability seemed infeasible (or would take too long), the militimen, accompanied by their Segurian dwarf allies Strom and Throm, Jeremiah, Uddar and his three associates, the centaur Alamein and his ranger friend Attickus, the heroes all pushed on the door together…
“You strain, your party members sweating alongside. Dust and plaster fall into your hair. Your muscles burn, tendons stretch and threaten to snap. Your breath is hot and increasingly ragged against the cold stone of the door. Through gritted teeth you urge your allies on for one last push, and the door begins to creak and then with an audible crack and a rush of air, the door gives.
You find yourself blinking in the dim but seemingly omnipresent light of a great stone hall, in the grandest dwarven fashion. The themes that you have seen previously in Dol Seguria — on the forest door; in the spectacular entrance beyond the drawbridge; at the base of the stairs where the orc drummers pounded out their mysterious message — are all represented in this space. The stonework is exquisite, the carvings perfectly in tune with the natural color gradations of the marble, slate, granite and sandstone. The minutely intricate art of the stonemason’s craft converges through the walls and ceilings of the space on two enormous doors. Your back and shoulders still aching from prying open this far more modest door all but groan at the sight of this new obstacle.
Despite all of this grandeur, your eyes quickly settle on the floor before the colossal doors. A hundred, perhaps a thousand corpses repose in an angry and dismaying pile, at places five or six bodies high. Most are skeletal, though bits of dry flesh and desiccated clothing remain here and there. Some have been clearly dragged from the main mass and been gnawed clean. The majority, though, seem to still lie as they fell, in some forgotten day long past, in some horrible conflict or holocaust. Glancing along this dismal collection, you quickly realize that with only a handful of exceptions, while the skeletons seem to represent a great variety of races, dwarven corpses are glaringly absent.
The scene is simultaneously spectacular and spectacularly gruesome. As your brain attempts to take it all in, Strom beside you lets out a heart-rending groan of misery at this tableau, and, simultaneously Throm draws the longsword provided to him by Dmitrov from its well-oiled sheath, and in a single, effortless gesture,slices it through the neck of his brother, such that Strom’s head momentarily hovers in mid-air as his body, now beginning to fountain blood, slides sideways and collapses with a crunch to the flagstones, before the severed head itself thuds wetly alongside.
Throm now turns the shining sword, slick with the blood of his fellow inward. His intent is clear: he means to disembowel himself.
A scant instant before he can complete that task of self-mutilation, there is a flash and a pop and an odor of brimstone, and near the great doors, a foot or so before that hellish pile of deceased, two forms blink into view. One lavishly dressed, his longe blonde hair uncharacteristically unkempt, a smirk on his unshaven face, the other dressed in black robes, white paint on his face, his dark eyes red and manic. “Too late,” Segur says with some cheer to Throm.”
And that’s where we left our heroes.