Dungeon Oracle

The ascendants slowly advance forward through the northern passage. Calamity and Grantham stay hidden behind the wall, while Vercingetorix slowly creeps forward. The light of the red-flamed torches is more than sufficient for his reptilian eyes, and he sees scattered throughout the chamber are statues of black stone, depicting humanoids of varying races. Some have weapons drawn. Others have hands outstretched before them, as though attempting to ward off a blow. One of these figures blocks a short and narrow passageway that leads from the room.

The glass columns to which the torches are attached are filled with a swirling green gas. Visible between the columns, at the far side of the room set into a niche about four feet off of the ground, is a semicircular brazier of tarnished brass, unlit.

But most noteworthy in the chamber is an enormous petrified four-horned dragon’s skull that levitates in a shrine.

Adorning the shrine are diseased organs, candles of green flame, and censers burning with pungent incense.

The stone door opens weightlessly under Calamity’s scarred red hand. Anka and Vercingetorix peer into the revealed corridor beyond as Lord Grantham stays sharply focused on the grotesques, wary of any sudden movement, or perhaps another apparition. However, all remains quiet and still in the vestibule.

Behind the door is a low corridor of rough stone, dripping with cold moisture. A low, droning chant of many voices, barely audible, emanates from the damp stone walls. Calamity must crouch to enter the passage, and even in doing so, his horns scrape the stone of the arched ceiling. More torches of feeble, sickly light line the walls. The corridor opens onto three branching passages. Each of the three passages ends in a thick, rotting wooden door.

Vercingetorix stalks down the darkened hallway, his slitted reptilian eyes drinking in the traces of light that reflect off the bleached bones in the rightmost archway. The tunnel runs straight for over a hundred feet to a light at its end. Calamity walks a step behind, jagged black sword poised over a notch in his shield. The mystics follow, casting glances back at Father Sun, perhaps for the last time.

Though the advancing thief finds no signs of traps, a loud clattering echoes down the passage as a skull falls from the wall of bones. Its jaws wrench open and shut, and in a strange screeching voice, it wails, “DEATH IS A MERCY!” The further the ascendants advance down the tunnel, the more skulls dislodge themselves from the wall, wailing similar warnings— “THE THREE SEEK VENGEANCE TO THE SEVENTH GENERATION!” “DEFY THEM NOT!” “THE TOWER IS BUILT UPON THE ABYSS!”

At last, the tunnel reaches its end, opening onto a roughly round chamber, like the vestibule to a grand cathedral. Gothic arches support a high ceiling overhead. The room is dimly lit by the sickly light of torches whose wrought iron sconces shaped as withered arms. More of the dim light pours from foot-high letters of some unknown language that circumnavigates the walls of the entire vestibule.

Standing in the center of the room are three grotesque statues of hooded priests, each facing the very center of the vestibule, and each holding an iron box in both hands. Dark droplets of moisture drip from the eyes of each of the grotesques. A sword of crumbling brimstone has been thrust through the chest of one of the statues.

Three closed doors of weathered stone lead out from the room.

Your first sight of the TOWER comes long before you find yourself at its doors. The wastelands of Va’hal Geth are a wide, flat plain of lifeless salt, leaving nothing to obstruct your view of the TOWER. It is an impossible structure, standing behind the horizon, behind the sun itself, black against the unblinking sky. Once a great glittering sea surrounded the base of the TOWER, but that was in the time of the Ancients. The Ancients have faded, and with them the sea.

In the wastelands, there is nothing to mark the passage of time. The very rising and setting of the sun becomes unreliable. Whether the long walk to the TOWER took weeks or year, neither you nor your fellow ascendants can say.

But at last the unvarying wastes give way to change, a scant forest of blackened, twisted trees. Humans hang from molded rope from every tree, swaying violently in the never-ending winds that blast the open plain. Tarnished and broken shields bearing the templar’s cross are laid at the base of the trees. Amid the trees are low huts of ancient stone. Peeking from the half-opened doors of the huts are the occasional pair of reddened or yellowed eyes. These are the traitorous ascendants who have given up the quest to ascend the TOWER, who have vowed their service to the Triumvirate for a paltry share of immortality spent in eternal servitude. They are weak and lowly. You bite back your revulsion for them as you make camp in this village of the damned. The TOWER awaits you tomorrow.

At long last, you reach the entrance. Behind you, the traitors have gathered to watch you, knowing that you will either die inside, or that you will soon be one of them.

The Entryway

You crane your neck to look upward, to see the enormous stone blocks that comprise the TOWER leading up into the lightning-torn heavens. Somewhere above the gods themselves are waiting. Not one entryway, but three stand before you. Three archways, each five feet wide and ten feet tall, lead into the dark. Each stone archway is flanked by the graven images of faceless angels. The feeble sun barely illuminates the interior of the archways, enough to show walls mortared with human bones.