We stand in the now mostly emptied room, just us and the tall, silver haired, green eyed man. Thokk seems to recognize him on some level, in passing. He carries a full blade and is wielding a rod. Black and capped on either end in cold iron with barbed chain lengths connecting images of hearts and wedding rings. His armour is covered with unusual glyphs that look to be used in a soul binding spell. They match the glyphs used in the creation of the war forged. The man fires a ray from his rod, hitting Thokk. It seems to do nothing, but I search my memory and realize that it injures the person closest to the one hit by it. I tell the group that before casting a Dispel Magic, greater from my staff onto his rod. I’m successful, thankfully, so we won’t have to worry about that for a little while. Then I cast Bull’s Strength, Mass on the group.Estas uses his Rod of WTF, it creates a patch of grass in the middle of the floor. I nearly choke on a laugh. But Estas follows with a successful Orb of Acid. Unfortunately for him, the silver haired man uses Quickened True Strike on himself before casting Dimension Door to pass through and reappear in front of Estas, running him through with his full blade. Estas is injured, but not to badly. Thokk closes on the man and swings mightily, fairly badly injuring the man. Ubu closes as well, flanking with Thokk and using his Ancient Mountain Hammer maneuver. He does nearly as much damage as Thokk. Alrick utilizes an Energy Ray set to fire and kills the man, nearly vaporizing him.
The castle begins to shake, and cracks appear in the floor. A thirty foot section of floor falls in and a huge war forged rises aloft above the hole. It hovers there, huge wings holding it midair. It looks exactly like the man we just faced, save much larger and a construct.
The creature casts Cometfall, all but Thokk manages to avoid it. I cast Nature’s Avatar on Ubu as well as Nature’s Purity to hit him with four rays followed by a Foresight on myself to see what’s coming. Ubu attacks the construct with his Ancient Mountain Hammer maneuver, managing to do the thing a decent amount of damage. Thokk uses one of his maneuvers to speed up my ability to attack it. I use my Foresight to know that the thing plans to cast Cometfall again, and I ready a Dispel Magic, Greater against its next spell cast before casting Ice Storm. I notice that the bludgeoning damage the spell does seems to hurt it a little while the cold doesn’t do anything at all.
Estas uses his Rod of WTF again, causing a pool of water with fish swimming in it to appear around the creature’s wings. Estas stares at the rod for a moment before putting it away and casting Shout in the form of a ray. He hits the creature, managing to injure it. I successfully manage to dispel the creature’s Cometfall.
Ubu angles himself so that his next attack doesn’t hit the others. He uses his Wyrm’s Flame maneuver and breaths a thirty foot cone of fire at the creature. It hits it and injures it pretty badly. Thokk manages to deal the killing blow, and the creature falls back through the hole. We can hear the horrible sound of grinding metal and crashes after the thing disappears.
Thokk tells us that the silver haired man is the man that killed his master. He seems surprised that he was that easy to defeat. I point out that he HAS come a very long way since that horrible day. He has learned a great deal.
We look out a window and find the city in absolute chaos. Fires and fights are every place. But we continue on, finding a secret door behind the throne. Thokk leads the way as we try to find the real plathecary. We reach a door which Estas checks over for traps. He finds none, but the locks are extremely well made. Thokk decides to just ignore the locks altogether, and attacks the lead door. He takes it down rather easily.
We find several beurocrats wearing monacles within counting money and doing several other accountancy style tasks. It seems we found the treasury. Lia realizes the creatures are harvester devils, and they make a deal with us that we can just take the money without any trouble as long as we don’t stop them from destroying paperwork.
A dwarf comes crashing into the room, screaming and with ax held aloft. We manage to calm him enough to stop him from hitting any of us. He lets us know that they’ve loaded many slaves onto the ship to evacuate them. We tell him that they’ve done a good job and instruct him to take the gold bars only from the treasury and leave the coins in hopes of it being used to rebuild the city. We head off to search for Cassius’ private treasure chamber.
Estas manages to easily find it. Everything within is very well ordered. Its neat and clean. Almost anally retentive. However, we do find several bound statues, one looks like a representation of Saoirse. Estas figures out that it’s a sort of altar to Deimos and is desecrated and unholy. Lia begins to destroy that statue before moving on to three others I point out to her that seem to be representations of priestesses from her order who have been killed.
Every chest is trapped and in such a way its beyond Estas’ abilities. We decide to haul them out to have Alaria pick them later. We check the books, some of them glow with magic when Estas checks them with his goggles.
We also find out that the purpose of the alters was for a sort of ritual that Cassius had planned to commend all souls killed under Deimos’ army be commended to Deimos. Lia curses rather a lot at that. That and the fact that we can’t find the plathecary.
We do manage to make it back to the ship all right and load our spoils before settling in for the long trip to the next port. Lia and I work our way through the refugees administering healing spells. Thokk comes up with a brilliant idea, using Estas’ Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion by setting the spell on the deck and filtering the people through it. Effectively it will manage to feed nearly every one of our refugees. Lia takes care of another hygiene issue by telling them that the magic will not work properly if the people don’t bath.
We drop off our refugees at the port with very little trouble. Though the port is concerned, and understandably so, about the number of people we’re leaving with them. However, they take them with very little argument after they realize who we are, and they get us to promise not to enter the city. It seems that they’re worried about the swathe of destruction we’ve left in our wake. We leave the refugees behind with luck wishes and move on. Heading for the Bastion.
When we arrive Thokk goes immediately to check on Kimiko, who is all right but was very nearly killed by the silver haired man’s spell.
Estas goes to find Alaria to see about her opening our chests. She agrees to, in exchange for ten percent of the contents. We grudgingly agree. The trunks are filled with gold coins, jewelry, platinum pieces, gem stones. It comes to a fairly sizable amount. Estas had identified the various magical books on the return trip to the Bastion. They all go to the members of our party that they can do the most good for.
Lia is able to figure out that Cassius is in Hell, of his own volition.
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