Duped

June 26, 2007

All of us got together to discuss this development of Marcus receiving a vision of a temple to the east. This is apparently where the ritual is to take place in ten days. It is however, a good distance away. It would normally take us about four days or so to get there. Reese showed up after Lisha and Malcolm talked to the rest of their party. They kindly informed Reese of the situation who was still in Arabel at the time.

Malcolm's group had done some scrying on this temple and got the rough layout and a description of who is currently there. It was definitely going to be a challenge.

After much deliberation, we decided that I could manage to take everyone via shadow travel to get us all there quickly. I used most of my energy on the traveling but managed, somehow, to get us to our destination in about eight hours. Something gave me a very large boost. In addition to that, the travel was very uneventful.

We camped out for a while and made plans to approach the temple and use ethereal potions to get to our destination far below the temple. This allowed us to avoid any contact with any of the people hanging around. They appeared to all be Shar worshipers. This was a good thing to avoid. We wanted to disrupt the ritual and then leave. Personally, I didn't want to get into a full-fledged war with all the Shar worshipers that were there. We found a set of double doors at the bottom of the passage and they were highly protected by wards. We decided to wait for someone to come out. Pretty soon two acolytes came down the hall and disabled the wards to allow themselves through. We snuck in behind them and sat back to watch the main priestess performing the ritual as the acolytes fed her and cleaned her up. This had apparently been going on for some time, and she was approaching the end.

We waited until the acolytes left, and proceeded to launch a very well coordinated attack on the priestess. We did very well, as her feet were the only thing left of her. Unfortunately, all the magical energy she had been building up over the last few days managed to burst forth and ripped open a portal to the shadow plane. Go figure. Malcolm and I jumped into action and did everything we could to close it immediately. It took a tremendous amount of energy, but we managed to close it. Not, however, before the shadow dragon came through.

He made it a point to thank me for all the help I have been in setting him free, and crashed through the doors and tore through the temple, eating and killing all the way. He managed to slaughter a tremendous number of people before he flew away.

I managed to get enough of my energy together to get us all to the nearby village of Daerlun, where we stopped to rest and figure out what we were going to do from there.