Through the Darkness Into Dream

The Runewardens

Holy Emperor Rehoboth was no longer welcome in Ptolus. By order of the Commissar, troops under the command of Lord Khatru had surrounded the Holy Palace. But the Runewardens needed to get inside, where they hoped to find a collapsible magical portal that had been confiscated by the forces of the Church -- a portal that would lead them into Goth Gulgamel, the ancient fortress of Ghul, the Half God.

Sister Mara and Zophas suggested to Lord Khatru that they could go inside and help mediate a truce. The group got in and found that the Emperor and his retinue were leaving the city. Figuring that this was for the best, the group instead turned toward the matter at hand and looked through the vaults for the pieces of the magical gate. They were gone! Further investigation revealed that Satorranis, one of the holy mages who worked in the vaults safekeeping the dangerous stored materials, had not been seen for a few weeks. Following a hunch, they learned of his address and left to find him.

Sure enough, as the group approached the wizard's home in the north part of Oldtown, they were attacked on the street by summoned monsters. They fought their way inside and found Satorranis and slew him. From his apprentice, they discovered that the mage had suddenly started acting very strangely, and had tied him up in the house for the last few days while he attempted to reassemble the pieces of the gate.

Zophas and Serai were able to determine that Satorranis was a victim of the Soulriders, a mysterious group that somehow was able to take over and "ride" the souls of others, controlling all their actions, thoughts and emotions. They had briefly run afoul of these people/beings before, but never knew their motivations. Worse yet, how do you fight against such thing? they wondered.

Doing what they needed to secure Satorranis' home, Serai, Shurrin, Mara, Zophas, Aliya, Canabulum, Udalaag, and Dharim Boch, the Fateweaver who had a connection with the Urthon Aedar, all went through the reactivated gate.

The gate they used had been created by Helmut Itlestein, who had garnered the secrets of how to do so from the intelligent battlestaves of Ghul that he had recovered. Helmut had used the staves to seal the Holy Palace in an impenetrable force field, then he used the gate to get to Goth Gulgamel, where another gate had been set up to take him through the palace. The magic of the gates, it seemed, could bypass any barriers, no matter how powerful, as long as one end of the trip was in Goth Gulgamel. Thus, despite the fact that the citadel of Ghul was well-sealed from intrusion, the group was able to gain access (again).

Goth Gulgamel
Passing through the gate, Aliya discovered that they were being scried by the marilith named Drusii, whom they had recently confirmed was working directly for the powerful demoness called Lilith (lover and companion to Raguel). There was little they could do about that now, though.

Once inside the fortress, they encountered some massive, shadowy beings that spoke to them. They shadowy things revealed themselves to be the Soulriders, and said that they didn't want to fight the Runewardens if they did not have to. The Soulriders seemed to know a lot about what the heroes had discovered and, in fact, had recently decided to help them rather than hinder them (or, they implied, to deal with the situation themselves). In essence, these creatures were as worried about the coming Night of Dissolution as the Runewardens. The Soulriders gave the adventurers directions on how to get through the castle most expediently and enter the Spire itself, where the Gates of Delirium created and maintained the Entropy Sphere. Not fully trusting them, the group used their own spells to divine the best way -- although it seemed as if their mysterious benefactors were telling the truth. (Interestingly enough, during the conversation the Souldriders also hinted that even the shadowy shapes were not their true forms, but simply evil shades of some of Ghul's former servants that they were "riding.")

The Soulriders warned the group of the Chamber of Burning Souls, and beyond it the Ageless Titan. The Chamber of Burning Souls was a hellish place of torment for trapped victims of Ghul from hundreds of years previous. After dealing with its evil guardians, they encountered undead Cthorn, a race so evil that it had been wiped out generations ago in the war against Ghul.

They persevered and made their way into a vast chamber of blackness. Crossing walkways of skulls that seemed suspended in an eternal, dark void, they fought against rhodintor -- goat-headed demons that, like the kython, had been created by the Galchutt thousands of years ago. In the center of the chamber stood the Ageless Titan, a mummified undead being 30 feet tall. Rather than fight him, the group was able to parlay with the titan. They impressed him with the fact that they had been through the Seven Jewels of Parnaith and Shurrin granted him a bag of holding filled with various magic items the group had gathered over the last few months that were too evil for them to use. The titan accepted the offering and caused the skull of an impossibly huge dragon to open and give them access into the interior of the Spire and the chamber of the Entropy Sphere.

The Entropy Sphere was as bizarre as they had heard -- a mass of congealed chaos brought into being at the confluence of six portals called the Gates of Delirium. And, just as they had heard, one of the portals was gone, destabilizing the sphere and causing the laws of physics and magic to alter without warning in areas around it called Pits of Insanity.

They were soon greeted by an Urthon Aedar named Baenarum who was not at all surprised to see them. They did not even need to explain who they were. With his guidance, they actually entered the Entropy Sphere.

Dreta Phantas
This brought them at long last, to Dreta Phantas -- the Dreaming City, the Stolen City, and the Soul of the World. This elven city of graceful spires and golden domes, built thousands of years ago, was the seat of power of the Dream King, the Warden of the Worldsoul. When the Elder Gods and the ancient heroes that served them stopped the Galchutt from destroying the Seven Chains that held the world together, they cast the Vallis Moon (where the Seven Chains manifested) far into the stars and gave the Soul of the World to the first of the Dream Kings. But through sorcery unimagined today, the dark elves stole Dreta Phantas and hid it away deep under the earth.

The line of the Dream Kings, however, was gone. The Elder Elves within the city held off the dark elves for generations, using the magic of the Hexamon : a group of elves who had committed their own spirits into the very substance of the city. Dreta Phantas was held in a state of eternal magical siege.

And even as the heroes arrived, the dark elves prepared for a final assault. With the help of someone called the "Architect," the dark elves of House Urganth were using the energy of a dead god (an elvish god of light named Ardaen) to power something they called the Dayslayer, a freshly forged lance of artifact-level power. The Dayslayer would kill the sun, put the world into eternal night, and then with the power it absorbed from the sun's soul, break through the protections around Dreta Phantas. The Urthon Aedar were about to launch a counterassault on Sinistar, the dark elf fortress where the Architect put the finishing touches on the Dayslayer. After speaking with the Hexamon (who take the form of a giant six-sided obelisk), the Runewardens offered to go as well.

Serai suggested that to help them in their quest, they get the Eye of Ardaen, a relic of the dead god that he used with the Company of the Black Lantern against dark elves once before (plus, there was the appeal of the irony of justice in that they would be using the might of Ardaen against those who would misuse the might of Ardaen). The Eye was in the possession of the Clerics of Gaen in the city. Baenarum said that it would be no problem, and left, returning shortly thereafter with the Eye. The group then realized why the Urthon Aedar had such mysterious and fearful reputations -- they imagined what the people in the Temple District must have thought when an enigmatic armored figure showed up, broke into the temple, ignored any wards or safeguards, and took the artifact without a word of explanation or a bit of subterfuge.

Sinistar
Sinistar was a vast subterranean citadel built suspended over a huge natural lava flow. The Urthon Aedar and the heroes teleported to it and immediately began fighting dark elves and demons. The Dayslayer itself was guarded by a half-fiendish deep dragon that the PCs managed to best in a titanic struggle. The Architect, it turns out, was a Galchutt agent (a mind flayer) who had been manipulating the dark elves. Canabulum turned him to stone. The heroes destroyed the Dayslayer and returned to Dreta Phantas carrying the petrified Architect.

After much celebration, the Hexamon told the heroes that the only way to restore the city to the surface -- which certainly would stave off the Night of Dissolution, at least for a time -- would be to recover the stolen Dreaming Stone and the Cask of Frozen Dreams. This cask holds every dream ever dreamed (both waking and not), and the stone represents every dream still to be dreamt. Moreover, the cask and stone, they learned, could restore the memories of Aliya's cousin Calista, who seemed to possess important but unattainable knowledge -- at least that's what the group learned in the Seventh Jewel of Parnaith.

The cask and stone were stolen when the city itself was wrenched into the underworld by a demonic creature who seemed to be behind the event in the first place. This figure was not unknown to the Runewardens -- it was the creature called Savan. All was coming to pass just as Mara had seen in a dream long before. Savan was the Dreamer, she was the Dreamspeaker, and Sokalahn the half-fiend lich was somehow the Dreamwalker.

But there were schemes within schemes afoot. An object in the possession of the petrified Architect activated when it was brought into Dreta Phantas, calling upon carefully structured contingencies. It opened a portal through the city's defenses straight into the heart of Dreta Phantas, where the statuelike mind flayer stood. Kython came through first, and then a traitorous Urthon Aedar named Kohath the Betrayer, who had turned against his people long ago. Kohath called through the gate to usher in a creature called a shoggoth. Finally, an entity known only as the Crawling Chaos stepped through, announcing that the stars were right, the dark prophecies had come to pass, and that he -- the harbinger of the awakening Galchutt -- was there to bring upon the Night of Dissolution.

Next Time: A sacrifice foretold in a dream. One final trip to the Dark Reliquary.

Special (Kinda Sad) Note: The expedition through Goth Gulgamel was Sean Reynolds' last game session with the group before he moved away. He took a lot of pictures that night of us and of the miniatures set up and put them here if you're interested.

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