The Vision

As the last of you touches Prugg's robe, the walls around you melt away and you find yourselves elsewhere. Your senses remain intact; you are not seeing another place, you are literally AT another place, physically and concretely.

In the vision, you see yourselves flying a few feet over the surface of the frozen lake ... as you look down, you can see the spirits of the dead, hundreds of them, trapped beneath the ice, writhing in agony. Their eyes open as you pass, looking up at you and imploring your aid, to ease their suffering.

Upon the far shore of the lake, you feel yourself come to rest on the floor of the cavern, your feet sinking into ten inches of snow. Snow is gently falling. Stalactites and stones rise around you like crystalline teeth, six to ten feet high. You move forward, picking your way between these stones for a hundred paces, before reaching an open space. Here, the cavern is just sixty feet wide and forty feet high, though it extends outwards into the obscuring snowfall.

Across this open space is a wall made of black boughs, wooden limbs and branches, interlaced from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, forming in impenetrable barrier. There are no tree trunks, no leaves; the wood seems to grow directly from the rock, upwards and downwards. You reach forward and touch the wall. It is warm, and you sense that the wood is alive. It feels as hard as iron, and you sense that it is indestructible.

This wall has a gate, with wooden doors fifteen feet high and each seven feet wide. The doors are wide open. The bottoms of the door are frozen in place and cannot be moved. There is nothing to prevent the party from moving through the wall and deeper into the cavern ... from beyond there are sounds of croaking: a hollow, resounding echo, that never ceases ...

The vision ends, and you find yourselves with Prugg again.

"You do not ask," says the old svirf, "Why we do not go ourselves to destroy this thing.  We tried, once, not long after we came here.  But it is a place of great evil ... and the svirf are creatures of the deepest places in the earth.  We were born of rock above the magma, and moved upwards into these passages before even the elves came to these lands.  We have never seen the light; we are of the dark.  When we went to fight, we were overcome by our own natures; helplessly, drugged by the powers of evil, we turned upon each other and nearly all died.  Only nine of us escaped that day.  Only I am left to remember it.

"We have waited for creatures from the light to come.  You.  Your peoples were born under the sun.  You are not as easily controlled by evil as we were.  That is why we seek to help you.  There are not many enemy, but they require spirits that are not owned by the dark."

This is the last of what he says.

The experience is so powerful, the party members are transformed by it.  You feel yourselves the memories of having been to the gate, as real as any other memory you've had.  The effect is to actually increase your experience.  You each gain 25% of the necessary experience gap that separates you from your next level.

For example, Engelhart needs 7,000 experience total to move from 4th level to 5th (6,001 total to 13,001 total).  He therefore receives 1,750 from this experience (no 10% bonus).  Lothar receives 1,375.  Embla, 1,000.  Mikael, 625.  And Rob, 600.

Please add this to your total experience.

[this power to impart experience directly is a sage ability, under Instruction, which requires 100 or more points of knowledge ~ Prugg, being seven centuries old, is able to do it with much greater intensity than most]

You are each disoriented for some moments, but you may interact again normally.

The Ancient Prugg

Three days pass before you're told that the Ancient Prugg will see you.  During that time, the members of the party are able to make contact with Willa, who will send word to Fjall and Valda further up the tunnels.  You see your weapons being reforged with mithril.  You are given comfortable accommodations, though you discover that the svirf sleep on rock beds without covers or pillows.

You discover what "yarm fruit" is, as you're also reintroduced to the green, glowing pods that you discovered earlier when you encountered the ticks.  You learn that these are a subterranean melon, which sustain one another with ambient light.  They taste sweet, somewhat dry in your mouth (like apricots) and have a slight sophomoric effect that dulls your body to pain and helps you sleep at night.  Each yarm has a single large pit about the size of a human's fist.  They grow everywhere, providing a soft light for much of the svirf's lair, a light that does not compromise infravision.  You're told they are difficult to raise as plants; they would require a special sage ability.

As you are taken through the tunnels to visit Prugg, you come to a chamber where the walls are covered with apparently carved reliefs of svirfneblin.  The carving is remarkably smooth and glossy; the images are kindly, pleasant and restful.  Each one has eyes closed, with a smile, as though sleeping.

At the end of the corridor, with these reliefs on both sides, you are introduced to the Ancient Prutt.  He smiles as you approach, and nods without speaking.  He is clearly more ancient than any svirf you've met.  His visage, his body, is more rock-like than the others; in appearance, he is nearly like that of the reliefs you've just seen on the walls.  He moves heavily, ponderously, as though his limbs are too heavy to lift.

One of the two svirf that have led you here, a fellow named Trag, asks that you be free with your questions, that nothing is hidden here.

The Svirfneblin

The two-headed bear takes all of two steps, when it and the party are braked by a shouted roar, "Stilbaki!  Stilbaki, Jorn!  Deg vary aleg!"  The voice is deep, resounding, even with a slight echo.

The bear actually appears to lose height, as it cringes.

A humanoid just under four feet tall appears on the bear's left.  It appears vaguely like a gnome, but with more mass, a much larger head than would be typical and with skin that looks like it might have been carved of granite.  You would think its a male.  The being's hands are also unusually heavy and powerful; one carries a short mining pick, the sort used for digging, with the trowel pointed down and a 10 inch spike on the head pointing upwards.  The clothes he is wearing are heavy and seem to be made of very well-worn leather.  He is bald, with large ears covered with slits, apparently intentionally done with a knife.  His head is covered with healed gashes and scars.  He carries no light source.

For those of you from Norway, it is quite recognizable from images that were described to you as children.

"Stvem ar dug?" it asks.

As you do, lights begin to appear all over the chamber, as other svirfneblin appear all around you.

2-Headed Bear Round 2 ~ Engelhart Protects the Party

The bear's rush is potentially broken by Engelhart; whereas the bear was going to attack its way through the party, it stops and bites first at the cleric, missing by hitting AC 6.  It swings with a claw, hitting with a rolled 13, causing only 3 damage.

Because it doesn't stun, the bear attacks with its other head, rolling a 17 and hitting Engelhart for 9 damage.  Since the cleric is reduced to 34 by the first hit, this second hit stuns ... but a lot of the bear's forward momentum is gone.  Engelhart, not wounded, staggers back into 0613.

Rolling randomly between Embla, Engelhart and either Lothar/Mikael for its last attack, it spends it on Engelhart.  I roll a 16 with its other paw, for 6 more damage.

HOWEVER ... that is both paws!  The bear climbs over Engelhart and mauls the cleric for an additional 13 damage.  That will wound.  I count 31 altogether.

The bear comes close enough to Embla to cause incidental damage ... the assassin takes 2 damage, which doesn't stun.  Engelhart doesn't suffer additional incidental damage.  It is also close enough to similarly affect Mikael; the mage takes 1 damage.

For a moment, before Engelhart is hit so profusely, his lantern reveals a well, a wider chamber of with piles of broken rock and carts, and perhaps the corner of another domicile.

Engelhart is stunned, and under the bear's feet, and cannot at this time guess what the bear is doing next.

The party may act.

A Very Large Bear

Not that happy with the color scheme; one problem is that each time it changes, I have to alter the hex
numbers individually.  Please treat the purple-blue as stone house, the light grey as stone wall and the black
as area not revealed by the lantern light.

The bear shakes itself to its feet, and Embla is very surprised when it stands up, because she can now see that it has TWO HEADS.

The bear will roll a 4 for initiative.  Embla, please roll a d6.

The Constructed Passage

Presumably, the party begins to make their way forward into the constructed passage.  As I had said, the corners of the passage are squared and carefully designed; and the passage itself is nearly straight as an arrow, for the first seventy feet.  The taller members of the party have to stoop, but apart from that the passage is much smoother than the foot track you've been moving along, which has been full of cracks, dips or other impediments.  This passage is smoothed and particularly easy for those who are shorter than 5 foot 4 inches.

There's a turn of 45 degrees, then the passage straightens again. You're at the bottom of a rising slope, much like a low hill, about 20 degrees.  As you climb it, you can see there are signs of the passage being maintained now, as if someone had swept.  There are places where the stone has been further smoothed than before.

As you see the top of this slope at the edge of your illumination, Embla will stop the party, making a sign for everyone to be very quiet.  You've seen her make this sign before.  Very soft, she will say, "Do you hear that?"

You don't, at first.  But once Embla explains in a few words that it sounds like a steady flow of water, you think you can hear it.

Can I ask, before going further: what is your order of travel going forward from here?

UPDATE: once the party has moved forward, the illumination they possess will show this much of the cavern they enter (see comments).

The Lake

The temple is a collection of twenty buildings ... and you are surprised to see that while once they were apparently covered with motifs and sculptures, similar to the ones you saw in the throne room, all of these are defaced.

All of them.  Some one has taken chisels to the freizes, smashed figures and statuary, broken menhirs and anything else that might have ever had an image. They've done a very good job of it, as well.

In this place, it is hard to tell when this might have been done.  Yet there is a clear difference between the exposed, broken surfaces of the rock, and the original stone surfaces of the temple.  You know that the temple predates the 7th century, as it seems to fit with everything else that's happened.  But the exposed broken rock shows far less signs of grit and grime.  You would guess that centuries passed between the existence of the temple and the time it was destroyed.

Not far beyond the temple, there is a cliff that overlooks the lake.  And Lothar gets a flash of his vision, knowing for certain this is the cliff.  But because the vision of the cliff came from the druid who died in the squeeze tomb, that druid was never thrown from this cliff.  Lothar has no vision that connects to anyone being hurled off the cliff.

Yet there is evidence of that everywhere.  The edge of the cliff, the manner in which it is worn away; the stones next to the cliff themselves, trod upon so often that they're smooth as silk.  The cliff hangs straight over the lake, a hundred feet below; and everyone in the party has an overwhelming sense of dread as they stand near the edge.

The frozen lake itself emits an eerie feeling.  As though it were ... well, it's a ridiculous idea, and your eyes tell you different, but you can't get away from the sense that the lake actually is ...

Moving.