After carousing in town and with everyone present, levelling up, learning new spells, weapons sharpened, and arrows bought we decided to go back to the creepy cult castle and to the Atlantean ruins underneath to try to, somehow, fulfil Ulriks plan to move the magic nullifying statue to try to get into the burney bird cage for the pretty tiara.
The idea came along when we were all together and someone said, "hey there's nothing going on why don't we go back and try Ulrik's plan." Ulrik after a long time of looking confused, probably because he comes up with some many plans and can't figure out which one everyone is talking about, got reminded by Avanna so we all decided to go.
Nothing exciting happened going through the portal, across the beach where we killed Lady Shadowfang and through to the castle, ignoring the burn stain and ash piles still lying around from the first time we visited, then going down the stairs to the basement and the ruins underneath.
It was not until we reached the bottom when we heard strange animal-like noises and grunting. Kaladin had a thought based on what he overheard in town, "Helna didn't you learn a magic eyeball drone spell?"
"Yeah, but I didn't remember it time for this trip", she replied.
"Oh well. Hey thief you go check it out, you're silent" he said then, looking at Diamond Girl and everyone else's stares followed.
"Fine" she said and crept towards the corner to peer around into the hall of the gods. She approaches the corner and looks around. She sees what looks like nine gorillas, which have red eyes, long claws and what look like thick scabs on their back, she recognized them as scabrous apes. There are also two scary looking humanoid figures, they have stringy hair, white skin with an opalescent sheen, and swords with glowing green runes down the blade.
Just as she gets a look her foot slips on seemingly nothing and when reaching out to steady herself her bow scrapes along the wall alerting the monsters and the figures to her presence.
The room goes silent. "Hey guys," Diamond Girl says in a panic retreating to the rest of the group. "There's some scary scabrous apes and two white guys who look like they want to kill us."
The group goes forward around the corner, to the corridor leading towards the hall of the gods, and everyone sees the terrifying mass of creatures coming towards us.
"Holy cow, those are wights," Avanna exclaims, "they're bad news".
Kaladin, thinking that chopping off the head would kill the snake, takes a shot towards one of the wights, however the wight sidesteps, and the arrow misses by a hair. Avanna casts spiritual hammer, to the surprise of no one except maybe the enemies, and together with Diamond Girl, Ulrik takes down two of the scabrous apes as come up to everybody.
Helna, looking ahead, casts protect from Evil on Artemisia, who is standing next to her, right before she hefts her great sword and charged into the front line against the apes. Right after the spell finishes casting, Diamond Girl who has retreated to the back goes to shoot one of the apes but again slips on seemingly nothing causing the arrow to graze Helnas arm. "Sorry!" Diamond Girl says unable to believe what she did. Helna just glares back for a second before concentrating back on the fight.
The scabrous apes fight back and claw Ulrik and Avanna, but their armour stops the worst of the damage. Helna casts sleep on the group, it manages to affect five of the remaining apes and they all slumped down face first in a row. The wights were still walking casually towards the fight seeming fine to let their minions soften up the group before they enter the fray to finish us off.
Kaladin shoots another arrow which unfortunately goes wide, as one of the wights enter the fight against Avanna, Diamond Girl, Avanna, and Ulrik in melee range. The other wight goes towards the five asleep scabrous apes and runs their sword across the backs of the comatose creatures, leaving one continuous red line across all 5 backs.
The creatures start to spasm out and eventually they grow morphing into a single creature, when it has finished morphing and faces the group, they realise they are facing a bone horror. Kaladin shoots an arrow towards it, but it flies right between some of the creatures’ ribs while they are still forming, not doing a thing.
The wight in combat attacks Avanna, hitting her with her sword and giving her a minor cut. In retaliation Avanna holds up her sigil and shouts "begone demons," this causes the wight who turned the apes to run away deeper into the ruins. She throws her spiritual hammer towards the other one right in front of her, and her hammer explodes in her face throwing her back and stunning her, putting her out of the fight. It appears the opalescent skin makes the wights resistant to magic, that would have been nice for them to know going into it.
Helna seeing the chaos unfold in front of her, is unsure what to do, she thinks through the spells she knows at the moment and lands on one that might work, but there is a slim chance. She concentrates, brings an image up in her head and casts polymorph onto the bone horror, the spell is successful transforming the polymorph just as it leaps towards the group into an earth worm.
Ulrik seeing Avanna get knocked out steps towards the wight, as the bone horror worm lands under his foot squishing it and killing it instantly, and attacks the wight and manages to do enough damage to kill it as well, where it shatters like porcelain into pale chunks and slivers, Kaladin recognises what it shatters into having a similar sliver in his pocket that he picked up in the stairwell of the castles basement the first time the group came to the Atlantean ruins.
Diamond Girl and Artemisia finish off the remaining two apes leaving the corridor quiet, but a bit messier. Avanna comes to and appears all right, just a bit dazed. Artemisia decides, because she still has protection from evil to try pick up the wight’s sword, with her non-lizard arm, apparently she decides that the least important one, that is lying next to the slivers and chunks of wight on the ground. She can feel this force pushing on her head, but luckily its muted and does not seem to affect her, the sword however starts burning and she drops it.
Diamond Girl tried to read the runes on the blade, and deciphers the current side facing up as saying "Legion of Andaquil", "strange, that's definitely an Atlantean name, but that's not Atlantean script, it looks like it might be related but it’s more of a cultist language I've never really seen before". She nudges the blade over with her foot and the other side says, "May the fear of his memory live forever."
Everyone agrees that that is strange, but no one really understands what it means.
After the intense fight we decide to rest for 15 minutes, give Avanna some time to recover from being knocked out, get some snacks and water, and to fully recover, before they continue on to complete plan Ulrik.
09/09/25