The Doors

August 16, Albanus 1

As the band paused on the steps, Severus had a moment of epiphany.  The indecipherable writing on the wall bore a resemblence to Old Rostillan -- though it was much more archaic.  The simple sign beside them seemed to read "South:  Storage.  East:  Vault."  That last word -- "Vault" -- was repeated by the arrow on the floor.

From ahead, a deep growling "voice" answer the man.  Sounding, for all the world, like a dog trying to speak.  Corvina cast shade-sight and sent her gaze ahead, peering under the door.  Inside was a simple bedroom of sorts.  A bedroll lay in one corner, a portable writing desk in the other.  A black mastiff with yellow glowing eyes was, indeed, speaking in a language no one understood.  Listening to it was a pale man in plate-mail, wearing a faded paladin's tabard crusted with tried blood and dirt.  When the dog fell silent, the man snapped orders to the room's third occupant -- a lithe, red-haired woman whose bat wings and petite fangs gave away her succubus heritage.

Quickly, the party took up positions around the door, ready to launch an attack as soon as the door opened.  But the door didn't open.  Inside, Corvina saw the succubus pick up a letter from the writing desk and vanish.  The man, meanwhile, closed his eyes in concentration.  (Far above the party, thousands of bats heard his silent call and began winging their way towards the party.  But they didn't make it in time, so they don't get a part in this story.)

Severus broke the stalemate.  Still invisible, he cast spider climb and scampered up the wall beside the door.  Then he popped the door open and pulled himself through.  Just in time, as the rest of the band launched their assault.  Gaius dropped the fiendish hound with a single well-placed arrow between the eyes.  Titus and Leyna charged through the now-clear doorway.  Titus headed straight for the fallen paladin.

And realized, with a start, that he recognized him.  The creature in front of him had once been a young paladin named Laetus.  They'd met in Bendigroth, when Titus was a squire.  Newly made a paladin, Laetus had been a little shy and awed by Titus' knight, Sir Darius.  Titus didn't remember much about him except that he'd been quiet and polite.

The thing standing before Titus, eyes blazing, bore little resemblence to that awkward young man.  Calling on the power of the Gods, Titus struck him hard.  Laetus hissed in pain -- then returned the favor.  Shadows welled up around his hand as he struck the paladin, sending a sliver of icy cold into Titus' heart.  As Titus staggered, a faint flush of warmth crept into Laetus' pale cheeks.

Leyna, meanwhile, cut to the right to flank Laetus -- and plowed directly into the invisible succubus.  The two women toppled over ( the succubus with a flurry of shrieks and flapping wings).  Leyna managed to scramble back to her feet.  The succubus began to murmur a spell (probably teleportation, to flee with the message she clutched), but Leyna slashed her and the spell dissolved into a screech of pain.  Another blow nearly cut the creature in half, but the succubus managed to crawl under the desk and begin her spell again.  Unfortunately for her, Severus had prepared for this moment.  Clinging invisibily to the wall, the Count stabbed the mauled demon.  The succubus appeared as she slumped to the floor dead, and Severus snapped up the letter that she held.

Titus and Laetus were still exchanging blows, and the vampire was badly injured.  As Leyna finally got into the flanking position she wanted, Severus yelled, "I have the letter.  Let's leave."  As he hoped, this caught the vampire's attention.  "Fool!" Laetus snapped.  "Drop that at once!"  He began to turn towards Severus, and as he did, Gaius sank two arrows into him.  Laetus screamed... and dissolved into a cloud of mist, which immediately began to drift towards the door.  Severus cast an illusion over the door, making it appear to be sealed, but the vampire saw through the ruse and seeped into the main hallway.

The band followed him, planning to trail him back to his coffin and finish him off.  Laetus led them down a flight of stairs... and into a room guarded by three armor-clad mummies wearing gold-edged helmets and gilt armor.  Corvina and Severus whipped out two scrolls of fireball, and the room exploded into flames.  Two of the mummies were slain immediately.  One came staggering across the room towards the party, covered with roaring flames.  Titus stepped up and neatly cut him in half.  Unharmed by the explosions, Laetus slipped under a door to the south.  Opening it, the band found a corridor that led straight ahead...

...into a pale, white mist that echoed with screams.  Laetus' gaseous form disappeared into the fog, as the band hesitated, unsure what this new evil signified.

Titus' ability to detect evil had been largely useless since they entered Hakarim.  The whole city reeked and the pulses of dark energy that spiked up every minute or so made his inner sight completely grey out.  But when he looked at the mist, the city's previous evils paled next to it.  To his inner eyes, the mist was utterly black, with no breath of cleanliness to it.  Even the pulses paled beside it.  And Leyna noted something disturbing:  the mist was moving, inching its way up the corridor towards them at a glacial pace.

Screams, shouts, and cries of fear welled up from the fog.  Suddenly the ghostly figure of a man appeared at the mist's edge, running into the darkness away from the band.  Tensed, the party watched but did nothing.  A few moments later another man appeared, rushing towards them.  He wore decorative armor, like the mummies they'd slain, and was wide-eyed with terror.  The band braced themselves as the screaming man neared... but when he hit the edge of the mist, he simply vanished.

Unwilling to enter the foul mist, the party abandoned its pursuit of Laetus and retreated upstairs.  When they read Laetus' half-finished letter, they guessed that this mist was the "Effluvia" the vampire mentioned -- and which he feared would reach "the Vault" before they were ready.  And so they decided to investigate the Vault and find out what it held.

A long, smooth, featureless tunnel led east, towards the Vault.  The party marched on and on.  When they were perahaps a hundred yards down it, Titus noticed that the pulses of dark energy stopped.  It appeared that this force had a very defined radius;  it was, in a sense, a spear of energy spiking up from somewhere deep within the earth.  Once they passed beyond its range, the ambience of Hakarim improved dramatically, until it was no worse than your average ghoul-infested charnal pit.

The eastern hall ended in an enormous pair of stone doors.  Beautiful workmanship -- dwarven no doubt.  Every square inch was covered with runes that neither Severus nor Corvina could decipher.  But in their middle was a symbol everyone recognized:  the eye and hand of the Sleeping God.  One pair of plate-mailed tracks led to this door and passed within.  Clearly only Laetus had come down this hallway.  The doors opened easily, despite their enormous weight, to reveal a vast cavern.

Full of bones.  Skeletons lay thick upon the floor, as far as the eye could see.  Hundreds were piled up at the doors, as if scores of people had died trying to claw their way out of this place.  As the band slowly picked their way through the room, it became clear that an entire city had died in this Vault.  Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of corpses littered the floor.  Some bore faint teeth-marks, as if starving survivors had tried to devour them.  Some were huddled around tiny bones, as if they'd died trying to shield or comfort their children.  Here and there the party found symbols:  a pentagon, sign of the Pentad;  sometimes a hand with an eye in its palm.  But very few belongings had survived.  And, disturbingly, there was no sign of any containers for food or water.

Clearly if the mist reached this place, the results would be catastrophic.  Severus, re-reading Laetus' letter, noted another chilling fact.  Laetus spoke of "Hakarim's Vault"... not "the Vault".  Which implied there were more places like this.

But what could be done?  How could they shepherd so many souls to the Afterlife, out of the grasp of this necromancy?

After much debate, the band hit on a plan.  Marius and Corvina would perform one of the rituals for consecrating a battlefield, the blessing that drew Askelius' gaze to a large place and all the souls within it.  Marius started by consecrating the Vault's doorway to Legis Ianuarius, Legis the Warden of Boundaries.  Then he and his sister began to work their way around the edges of the Vault, praying.  Titus and Leyna followed them, swinging thuribles of sweet incense.  Gaius kept watch at the door, while Severus searched for tokens and keepsakes amongst the bodies (things they might be able to bury properly, later).

At first, nothing happened.  But when they were halfway around the Vault, they suddenly heard a little boy's voice call out from the center of the room, crying, "Mummy, what is that?"  Oddly, the child seemed to be speaking Rostillan, a language they all understood easily.  The clerics hesitated, but Marius insisted that the ritual should not be interrupted, and so they pressed on.  Severus and Gaius saw nothing.  But as the rest of the band progressed, they began to see dim shapes in the darkness within the Vault's center.  Shadowy men and women staring at them.  Soon shades trailed along beside them, watching their prayers with dazed, empty eyes.

When they were three-quarters done, a ghostly man suddenly screamed, "Infidels!  Heretics!" and rushed towards the clerics.  Leyna quickly stepped between him and Corvina and the man blundered into her.  And through her, dissipating into nothing but a chill breeze.  Another shrieking form charged.  Then another, and another, until a constant stream of howling shades streamed out of the Vault's heart.  Yet the ghosts did no harm, and Marius and Corvina forced themselves to ignore their gibbering.

As they neared the entrance again, the consecrated doorway began to glow with a soft, golden light.  And when they reached it, a soft sigh whispered out of the center of the Vault.  A gentle breeze curled towards the doorway;  where it passed through the blessed portal, it coalesced into misty forms that passed through the doorway and vanished.  More souls came, faster and faster, and the breeze became a wind that whipped through the dusty bones.  Ghosts rushed past, some weeping with relief, some howling in fear and snatching frantically at the door in a vain effort to hold onto this world.  And when the last soul passed through, the Vault's doors slammed open, shattering their hinges.  The golden aura that had surrounded them faded and disappeared.

And suddenly Corvina heard a woman's voice in her head, which simply said, "Flee.  Flee now."

The priestess didn't need to be told twice.  "Run!" she shouted -- and did just that.  The party pelted back down the corridor.  At first they could see no reason for concern.  Nothing followed them.  There was no sign of danger.  However when they reached the room where they'd fought Laetus, a gong began to ring out from the depths below them.  Someone had set off an alarm.  And all of Hakarim was rousing itself.

The band didn't wait around to see what this entailed.  They sprinted for the surface -- and emerged to find that it was high noon.  The sun, hot and golden, burned in the sky above them.  Still, they didn't relax.  They charged back through the jungle, crushing corpse-flowers left and right until everyone was covered with their sickly sweet aroma.  Upon reaching the shoreline they signalled Tem and the waiting boat urgently.  The Altanians rowed in as quickly as they could (with a very worried Sir Marcus, who could barely sit up).  And when the boat was ten feet from the shore, their pursuit emerged from the jungle.

It was Dennek, the Altanian hunter for whom they'd been searching.  Dessicated, pale, he was clearly dead.  And his eyes were two black stones, devoid of any light.  The party felt a chill as his gaze passed over them.  It lighted, for one second, on Leyna, and the warrior felt her heart freeze for a long moment, before it began hammering again.  Cold power radiated from Dennek and the party braced themselves as he stalked forward.  But before he could reach them, Marius stepped up boldly and commanded him to flee.  And, to everyone's amazement, Dennek hesitated.  Muttering, shaking his head, he cringed back and began to stagger back toward Hakarim.  Whipping out their bows, the party followed, filling the hunter's corpse with arrows until he dropped, once more, into a true death.  Titus then ran up and wrapped the man's body in his cloak.  The corpse was light as a feather and hollow, as if it had been eaten out by the evil that touched it.

With that, the band scrambled into the boat and shoved off.  Yet Hakarim was not quite through with them.  The wind began to pick up, from an unnatural direction, and clouds scudded in from the west.  As the rowers drove their curragh north, the waves grew choppier.  Wisely, the fighters shed their armor.  Soon the sky was covered with a black pall and the little boat pitched about.  But just when it seemed they might be driven to shore, they passed some invisible barrier and the wind and waves stilled.  Behind them, the storm still grew.  However the curragh passed beyond its reach and continued north towards Noricus.