ADVENTURE LOG XXXIV
LAIR OF THE WHITE MAW
Standing in the cold, dark night at the remains of a camp not far from the Barbarian’s Graveyard, the Flowers pondered what to do with the cooperative turncoat. Visidian, the child of the green dragon Putrifax, had been nothing but helpful from the beginning, and they believed he was on the level about wanting them to stop his mother’s madness. He’d told them Taylan’s father, a white dragon known as The White Maw, had been researching a way to defeat her, and he believed that answer still resided within his lair far off in the frozen north. He gave them his memories of that location, and where his mother resided, so they’d be able to teleport directly in and skip weeks of arduous travel. He warned them that her illusions would be more dangerous there, due to some strange power in the Elven ruins that amped up the natural abilities of dragons. When asked about any other family members they’d have to look out for, Visidian said that he had only two brothers worth mentioning. Ancidia, who had been among the people who jumped them in the cellar earlier that evening and lay dead for his trouble, and Caustus, a physical sort of fighter who would be guarding Putrifax in her seat of power. The conversation petered out, he couldn’t think of anything else to warn them about, and they couldn’t think of anything else to ask.
Except one. “What will you do now?” Calli queried.
“I don’t know,” Visidian looked lost, an effect more pitiful due to the fact that he was still sat upright within a burlap sack tied tight around him. His head jutted through a hole torn in the end. “I can’t go back to Mother. But I don’t know where to start building a life for myself.”
“You could join us?” She offered.
He looked offended, “I can’t be there when you… stop my mother. I know it must be done, but I’m still her son.”
“What about the blue dragon? Would you help us stop it?” Nightingale asked.
Visidian nodded, “I have no objections to killing one of those vermin.”
“Head to Korvosa. At the Bank of Abadar ask to speak with the priest Ishani Dhatri. He’ll be your contact with further instructions. We’ll let him know you’re on the way,” Nightingale looked around at his team, “Unless anyone has any better ideas?”
No one objected. Byron used a claw to cut the ropes around the sack, and Travis took the torn edges around Visidian’s head and ripped the bag apart to free him. While they helped him to his feet, Gale stepped away from the others and contacted Cressida Kroft with a sending spell. ”Sending a half-elf half-green dragon to join the fight. Visidian’s cooperative thus far, will ask for Ishani at Bank. Use him as you please.”
Moments later her reply came back, “Fighting fire with fire? How many dragons does our town need? Hope you know what you’re doing. Message understood, will find work for him. Thanks.” The familiar matter-of fact tone of the Korvossan Field Marshall took on a genuine note at the end, and it made him smile in spite of himself.
He rejoined the group, who were picking through the camp left behind by the ambushers and getting settled in for a much-needed long rest. There were now tents enough for all of them, and in spite of some good-natured ribbing from the others, Byron and Calli still elected to share one. Watches were set, and even after any unwinding activities, everyone got a long, uninterrupted sleep.
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It had been near dawn when they bedded down, so it was already well into the afternoon on Oath Day, the 28th, when those without Rings of Sustenance woke to join the others.
Visidian thanked them for being so understanding, and said he was going to begin his journey back south. Taylan offered to teleport Visidian to the outskirts of Korvosa, not wanting to risk dropping him inside the walls. The fellow dragon’s son said he could get himself there easily enough, but he needed some time to himself to come to terms with everything, and a long walk would be just the thing. He gathered supplies for himself, said his goodbyes, and they watched him go.
Taking into account the time of day, they discussed logistics of it, and decided they would take the evening to finish recovering before attempting to deal with the intellect devourer wearing the dead corpse of Glazareth the Ice Reaver. Those who’d faced them before described the encounters under Kaer Maga again to Taylan and Travis, trying to predict what one might do with the body of a white dragon, and if it would be able to access the Draconic powers on top of his own. They assumed the orcs guarding and excavating the caves would be home now to his many children, as well. After hours of discussion, they had a semblance of a plan they all agreed on. Their best option was going to be stealth, hoping to sneak in and find the information they needed without being detected.
Night came once more, and they again set watches, and rested.
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They packed up their camp site, donned their cold-weather clothing they’d picked up when last in Korvosa, and when they had gathered to begin the next leg of their journey, Calli held out the Harrow cards to everyone. They each pulled a card, and hoped that should the need arise, it would give them a supernatural nudge towards success. That done, Taylan called upon his magic, and they vanished in a flurry of snowflakes.
He transported them to just behind a snowbank about sixty feet away from the massive carved ice doors set into the side of the glacial mountain. They knew conceptually it would be cold, but the air itself burned their face with the chill of it. None of them had ever been near so cold, except for Byron, whose memories took him back to the dark day Gaedren had stabbed him, had him beaten, and thrown into the ocean to feed the sharks. He’d lost a lot of blood that day, and the numbness that had filled his limbs then was the closest reference point he had. Compared to that, the weather was nothing. Taylan, too, found himself less bothered by the cold, the white dragon within him feeling quite at home. But the others pulled their furs tighter around them, and quickly got to work.
As planned, Byron and Calli climbed into one of their bags of holding, a strange sight to watch, and Travis climbed into the other with Rune and Lil Focker. Nightingale wore the first, and Taylan the latter. Gale then made himself invisible, and cast fly, so that he might hold on to Taylan’s shoulders and float behind leaving no tracks in the deep snow. Taylan then simply began his walk towards the mountain. They were all relying on his enchanted cloak to get him past, giving him the aura of one who was meant to be there.
Between them and the door were a legion of Orc troops in four squads spread around a twenty-foot radius. It wasn’t his first time brazenly walking into enemies, though, and he felt he was quite good at it by this point. The Orcs towered over him, barely glancing his way. When one caught his eye, Taylan gave a cheerful nod, and the orc snorted his disinterest before looking back to the distance, keeping a wary eye out for threats.
The doors made even the Orcs seem small. Set in a stone archway, they looked a deep abyssal blue that seemed to absorb the sunlight rather than reflect it. Cruel, jagged runes carved across the surface wept frosty mist. Taylan reached out his fingers and touched the ice, only to find they were hardened steel glamoured to match the rest of the mountain. They pulsed with a faint rhythmic thrum that seemed to match the heartbeat of the mountain itself. He started looking for a way to open them, seeing no reachable door handle. Hand against the steel, he asked in polite Draconic, “It’s me, the White Maw.” A glowing radiance stirred to life under his hand, and slowly began radiating outward across the door.
Gale, keeping an eye on the enemies around them, spotted that each squad had one figure that didn’t match the rest. Unarmored, these smaller Orcs wore hooded robes, and every one of them was staring at him. He assumed they must be casters, and had some sort of see invisibility running. They began moving towards him, so he floated up under Taylan’s cloak, curling up as small as he could manage, and began preparing spells for if it the situation called for it.
The robed Orcs converged upon Taylan, asking him questions in a language the half-elf could not understand. Taylan turned his charming smile in their direction, and greeted them in his Draconic. They seemed to understand this, and one replied in a less fluent version of the same, “What you wanting?”
“I’m here to help with the archeology,” he lied.
They looked over his small, thin frame with doubt. “You carry pick?”
“Don’t need one. My body’s a pick,” Taylan answered.
The Orcs conversed briefly in Orcish again, and then they warned him, “Be on lookout for invisible people.”
As Taylan was agreeing, the doors cracked open behind him. The Orcs all turned at the sound, then looked down in surprise at the small man stood in front of them. The Orc who had been speaking to him asked how he’d done it.
“I’m the leader of the archaeologists. The greatest of them all!” he placed his hands triumphantly on his hips, and slowly started edging backwards towards the opening.
The Orc nodded, and relayed this to the others in Orcish, whose faces all showed how impressed they were.
Once inside, Taylan began pushing against the doors to close them again, talking as he did so, “Alright, well you all keep up the good work out here, and I’ll -” The doors sealed shut again, and he heaved a sigh of relief that they moved so smoothly for him. He noticed his hand had been pushing against a rune, and moved further into the room to get a better look at the inside of the door. The ice glamour wasn’t on this side, it was the metal bare, and upon it was engraved a massive anti-teleportation spell. Getting out was going to be more complicated than they’d hoped.
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Nightingale had withdrawn from the cloak to take a look around. The entryway carved from the glacier was large enough for a full-sized dragon to pass comfortably through. Ahead, they heard the tink-tink-tink of hundreds of picks. They quickly discussed getting their friends out of the bags, but felt stealth was still the main requirement, and cautiously continued moving. Gale flew up into the shadows above, hoping to spot any other casters before they could see him, and Taylan strolled confidently along.
Deep within the frozen rift the atmosphere was a suffocating, luminous blue, dominated by a terrifying feat of elemental architecture. Spanning the void that was a dense tangle of bridges made of nothing but dense, translucent ice. They seemed not built, but birthed from walls. Thick, corded veins of frost that branched and interwove like the calcified webbing of a giant ice spider. Suspended across this frozen web, a vast colony of Orcs worked with frantic, singular purpose. All along the sides of the chasm on fragile scaffolding they burrowed into the walls with mindless intensity. The air was riotous with the sounds of their exertions and the tinkling ice cracking and falling away as their picks and ice claws dug ever outward.
The two of them weren’t entirely sure where to go next. There were so many options it was overwhelming. Taylan felt perhaps further down into the crevasse, but Nightingale suggested one of the tunnels off to the side seemed large enough for a dragon. They pulled back into the entrance way and retrieved Calli from Gale’s bag, who inched forward until she could compare what was there with the memories Visidian had shown her. She looked up, and pointed at an ice bridge with no activity at all upon it. Either the Orcs hadn’t gotten to explore it, yet, or they had already picked it clean, but she was certain that was the way to go.
She returned to the bag, and Taylan climbed upon the invisible Nightingale’s back, so that he could fly him directly up to the bridge. It would look to and Orcs that Taylan was flying, himself, and they hoped the cape would continue to protect him from further scrutiny.
It seemed to work, as no one so much as turned their way. Landing on the blue ice bridge, the air became colder still, almost oppressively so. The bridge continued into what opened to be a vast cathedral of ice. There, suspended in the heart of the glacier, was The White Maw, frozen at the moment of his death. Nightingale cast light to better see the grim tableau. Scales once the color of fresh snowfall had turned the milky-matte white of a clouded eye. One massive wing was unfurled and pinned against the ice wall like a moth in a collector’s jar, the delicate membranes torn to tattered ribbons. His head was lowered, jaw agape to reveal teeth like jagged shards of obsidian, locked in a final, soundless roar. Below him, he rested not on piles of gold, but thousands upon thousands of books, frozen over time with the rest of him in the permafrost and snow. Not mere parchment and leather, they were thick slabs of vellum and wood, covers heavy with rime. Some were frozen open, pages revealing a Draconic script that shimmered with a faint dying luminescence. The Dragon’s massive talons were frozen curled in protection around a column of gargantuan tomes, as if in his final moments he sought to protect the recorded memory of a world already forgotten by time. They continued circling The White Maw and found the far side of him was a gaping wound, Dissolved, as if by acid. The ice that coated him had grown up over time since then.
This far from the chaos of excavation below, the air was utterly still and silent other than the low thrum of the mountain’s heart, as they took in the greatest library they had ever seen. Taylan stood as still as the air, looking up at the father he never got to know, and Nightingale gave him a moment to digest what he was seeing.
Then the sound of picks faded back in, distantly. Perhaps growing closer. He took a few steps towards the entrance and focused on the sound. It was rhythmic and continuous. Insectile. “Something’s coming, time to let them out,” he whispered to Taylan, hating to ruin the moment.
The two of them opened the bags and reached in, taking the hand of their team mates one at a time and bringing them into the room to see what they’d found.
“Daddy Byron,” Taylan said with some excitement, “It’s real Daddy!”
Everyone looked up at the creature of legend in front of them, and then back to the 5’ 5” Half-Elf in front of them. Travis spoke first, “Are you short?”
They could all hear the scuttling approaching now, and split up around the room to find defensive positions and begin casting preparatory spells. Calli started singing an inspirational tune they were well familiar with.
Charging into the room were three huge insect-like beasts who erupted from the tunnels, the rows and rows of chitinous plates along their backs glowed red-hot. Seeing the party, they let out a bellowing roar, and each picked a target to rush. Calli called out that they were called Remorhaz, but she didn’t know much more about them. One grabbed Taylan up into its mouth, the sharp pincers crushing into him. Another moved on Byron, getting a nasty bite in but failing to get a good hold. The third seemed to hesitate, readying for something.
Nightingale stepped forward to plunge his rapier into the over-sized centipede-like monster near Byron multiple times, pumping it full of lightning, which fried it so thoroughly it popped, sending scraps of sizzling hot plates in every direction, hissing as they hit the ice they landed on. At the first strike he became visible, it negating his spell.
The bug who had readied lashed out at him, grabbing him with his pincers and pulling him back away from the others.
Travis swung on the monster holding Taylan in his jaws, his massive chopper burying deep into its side, releasing a burst of heat.
Byron went after the creature who’d taken Gale, pouncing and tearing into it, wrenching off some of the plates and carving into the guts inside, the intense heat searing into his hands as it died.
The body hit the ground, releasing Nightingale, and Calli noticed a small brain-like creature crawl out from the corpse. “The small Devourers are inside them!” She warned, “Step on it!!”
From within the final Remorhaz’s mouth, Taylan released his ice breath directly down the throat of the creature, but it seemed entirely unfazed by his attack.
Calli went after the baby brain, trying to spear it with her rapier. She struck it once, meeting more resistance than expected, and warned the others that though they looked like squishy brains, they had some sort of hardened outer defense.
Her tiny Lyrakien Rune zipped up to Taylan’s foot still protruding from the bug mouth and with a touch, cast sanctuary on him. The protective magic coated him like a dark blue glitter, and the Remorhaz jerked as if gagging, before spitting him out entirely.
Nightingale sent glowing bolts of magic missile zipping from his rapier into the Devourer Calli had pointed out, but it continued to scurry along. He then used his fly to rise up further in the air.
Travis chopped the remaining insectoid in half like a rotten tree, and focused on watching the head for when the brain crawled out.
Focker bestowed some healing to the half-chewed Taylan.
“Thanks, Focker,” Byron sarcastically said, holding up his scorched hands.
“Sorry, boss, he just seemed to need it more than you.”
“Yeah, fair.” He turned his attention to the still-scuttling Devourer, and pouncing it was able to finally mash it to paste.
The other two brains finally crawled out of their respective hosts. Taylan focused a flurry of snowballs on them, but the brains seemed as resistant to freezing as the bugs did. Taylan cursed at his luck, as the attack dispelled his sanctuary.
Calli warns everyone she hears heavy boot falls rushing in their directions, and drew a wand of healing to help Byron before they could arrive. Rune likewise did some further healing for Taylan.
Nightingale summoned his black tentacles to clog one of the tunnel entrances, reducing the directions they could attack from. He called upon the image of the Harrow card he had drawn that morning, and duplicated the action, filling the second tunnel, as well.
Travis focused so that his axe oozed acid as he mercilessly rained attacks down on the nearest Devourer, leaving it barely standing, and as angry as a brain can look.
Byron pounced on the other one, doing a similar amount of damage, leaving his just as furious.
The tiny brains jerk in the direction of the barbarians, and Travis feels nothing, but Byron is caught fully by the psychic blast, and looked dazedly around as his Devourer rushed away from them on its four clawed legs.
Taylan tried to catch one the retreating brain with a magic missile, but his eye beams splashed harmlessly against its hide.
Calli reached out a hand and sent the magical music staff of her hold monster spell to entwine and still it before it could get away and warn its father.
Down the tentacled tunnels, they heard an Orc giving the order to bring out long bows.
Nightingale attempted to magic missile the held Devourer, as well, but it remained unbothered by the magic bolts.
Travis swung his axe like a golf club, splitting the brain at his feet down the ridge between its hemispheres, leaving it in two motionless halves. He then jogged over to the one Calli magically held.
They knew they didn’t have a lot of time, and they hadn’t even begun looking for the research they’d come to find. Hoping to buy them some time, Taylan sent a fireball into one of the clusters of Orcs, killing those at the front, and then he approached his frozen father.
Calli looked down into one of the tunnels of Orcs aiming longbows, and sang a shrill note that burst the air between them, causing some to flinch, and one to lower his bow in a daze.
But there were still many who could fire, and from all directions a rain of arrows peppered the room. Everyone was struck at least once, many more. They had even less time than they thought.
Focker flew over to hide behind the massive white dragon’s corpse, while his ‘boss’ Byron drew his own bow to return fire down one of the tunnels, burying an arrow between the eyes of one of the rival archers.
Travis finished off the final Devourer as casually as he’d done the previous, splitting it neatly in two, and looked pleased at the accuracy of his strike between the hemispheres.
Taylan peered through the ice encasing his father and the books, trying to spot the research in amongst the hoard, and as he circled it he found a section of his father’s leg somehow not buried in the ice. He reached out and rested his palm against the old scales, and they fell away, crumbling from age and exposure to the elements. Underneath was a large bound book of notes, and upon the cover was the name ‘Putrifax’ in the same Draconic script. Taylan snatched the tome up, and called to the others that he’d found it, and opened the bag of holding he still carried to drop them inside.
Calli rushed back to the bag of holding Gale carried from whence she came, her and Rune disappearing into the extra-dimensional portal inside.
More arrows filled the room, and those remaining in view began to resemble porcupines.
Nightingale made himself invisible again and held the bag open for Byron to join her, which he did right away.
Travis ran towards Taylan, literally diving into the open bag, his axe nearly splitting it open disastrously, but the lingering magic of his Harrow card cushioned the sharp edges to tuck them away safely. Focker, who’d been hiding behind The White Maw, joined him.
Taylan made himself invisible as Gale scooped him up once more to fly back from whence they came. A final volley of arrows struck them on their exit out the one tunnel not blocked by tentacles and Orcs, firing blindly into the room. They shot out over the blue ice bridge and down into the webbing of ice and Orcs hammering away at the walls, and tried desperately to remember which tunnel was the one they arrived in.
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The Orcs filled onto the bridge above them, guided by another robed figure who pointed where they should be aiming, and arrows were launched in their direction. Nightingale dove sharply down into the crevasse to put more distance and ice bridges between them, deep into the gully of jagged ice. Speeding along, they approached a colossal ice bridge that resembled a frozen spine more than a structure, ribbed and slick with a constant bone-chilling mist.
On one side of the spine-bridge, a few more robed Orcs appeared followed by more archers. They rushed forward, but refused to step onto the bridge itself. Instead the casters pointed at the invisible duo and instructed them to fire in that direction.
Turning against the crowd, Nightingale flew into the opposite tunnel across the bridge, knowing if the Orcs were afraid to enter, it was a bad idea, but needing a break from the continuous arrows. Taylan had been focusing on healing them up while he flew, but they couldn’t keep it up forever. Within the bags, the others had the same idea on how to best use their time, healing as best they could while they waited to be released.
The size of the tunnel reduced drastically inside, and Taylan had do dismount so they could continue forward within, eventually having to crouch and crawl. It suddenly opened up again into a much larger round chamber, with more of the small tunnels heading out in every direction. The chamber had unnervingly warm air that smelled of ozone and wet fur. The smooth glacial walls throbbed with bio-luminescent light that wasn’t coming from the ice itself. To their left a massive depression had been gouged into the ice and lined with the shredded remains of mammoth pelts, shattered pine trees, and bleached rib cages of Frost Giants. It was all frozen solid, as if whatever colossal thing that slept there revelled in the cold, or had no need to keep itself warm.
As their eyes adjusted, first they noticed their invisibility had been purged by something within the room, and then they picked out thousands of small dark shapes against the glowing wall, nestled into honeycombed indentations of the dome above. They looked like overgrown four-legged brains. Their pinkish-grey flesh glistened with a thin layer of slime. It was more of the baby Intellect Devourers. But they didn’t attack, they simply waited, their collective presence creating a low psychic hum that reverberated against the back of their skulls.
The noise was sharp into Nightingale’s brain, pressing into the back of his eyes like a growing migraine, and interfering with his every thought. He retreated back into the small tunnel with Taylan, and they got the party out of their bags to fill them in on the room ahead. Nightingale told them he saw a flickering of natural light within one of the small tunnels opposite the chamber from theirs, and that would be the fastest way out of the mountain. They’d just have to make it across.
Out of the bags, everyone could hear the hum, and the persistent headaches took root in their heads as well. Only Rune and Taylan had managed to resist the psychic pressure.
They suspected Daddy Devourer wearing the dead white Dragon Glazareth the Ice Reaver would be nestled inside the frozen nest in the corner, and they knew he had a bone to pick with them. The group once more refreshed their preparatory spells in anticipation of what could be a very deadly fight, indeed.
Most notably, Taylan cast a Protection from Evil upon them all, and all but Byron were able to shake off the pain of the psychic hum.
When there was nothing left for them to do but enter, Calli began to sing, but casting a virtuoso spell, wove in a second bardic song with the first, so that she would not only boost their efforts, but would also drag down anything an opponent tried.
The barbarians entered first, followed by the Half-Elves, and finally Nightingale, whom they know would be a feast for any lucky Intellect Devourer who could bring him down.
From an unseen lower area hidden behind the bed pit, three Orcs and an ordinary looking man walked out. The man spoke, looking directly at Nightingale, “Eyes much better now, can see a spectrum of colours now, perfectly. Thank you for this body, killer of children.” With that the body began to contort, growing in size until it was the form of the white dragon they had killed, its missing horn hanging off Byron’s pack.
The dragon bared it’s fangs at Gale and hissed some arcane words at him. Nightingale felt the magic slink through his neural pathways, but forced it away again through sheer force of will. What once was Glazareth took to the air, climbing in altitude about forty feet into the air.
Taylan held two fingers to his forehead, then pointed at it, and fired off a disintegrate, that just glanced off turning a small chunk of dead flesh into dust.
Travis raged, hulking up with extra mass growing seemingly larger in size, and threw his axe at the dragon, acid and fire trailing in its wake and making a satisfying squelch as it connected. The side with the fire seemed to char faster than the acid burned, and he made sure everyone knew fire was the way to go. He then turned and ran to the right around the dome, away from the party, beginning to scatter them out from a convenient cone the dragon could exploit.
Calli fired her crossbow at the dragon, hitting only once after a misfire and a miss, and then used her boots of haste to run in the opposite direction to Travis, towards the Orcs.
Nightingale turned to Byron, gestured up at the Dragon with his head, and then lifted him up into the air, flying around ten feet above the Dragon, before dropped the larger man directly on top of it.
Byron fell with a fierce grin, landing heavily between the Dragon’s shoulder blades, where he used his claws to once more slice into the spinal column and rip out one of the supporting bones. It went limp, and in a repeat of the previous time they killed it, Byron rode the corpse to the ground, letting out a triumphant holler as it crashed.
From the head, a large Devourer climbed out. The Orcs charged across, one to Travis, one to Byron, the last to the nearer target of Calli, but entering the range of Calli’s music threw them off their best hits. Byron and Calli took hits, but Travis was left unscathed.
The adult Devourer made a jerking motion towards Nightingale, who again fended off the psychic attack, and then it ran towards one of the small tunnels.
Taylan pointed at it, and again sent a beam of dark disintegration towards the retreating brain. The shot looked like it was going to go wide, so Calli cast a gallant inspiration, and the sound waves pushed it back on target.
The beam hit, and ate away at it rapidly, turning the Devourer to ash. The Orcs grabbed at their heads and began screaming, before collapsing motionless to the ground, and by the hundreds the baby and juveniles in the walls began falling to their doom, as well. The psychic hum that had been pushing in at their minds vanished.
They didn’t have time to celebrate, however, as they heard the Orcs finally approaching over the bridge behind them. Byron finished breaking off the dragon’s other horn as they started crouching down to crawl single-file into the tunnel Nightingale indicated as the way out. It was a tight squeeze, but before long they did indeed exit into fresh air.
They were around the side of the glacier, looking out across an expansive frozen sea of ice.
Travis’ eyes lit up, and from his bag he withdrew the trophies of his mightiest kills. “Right ya fucken cunt, where are ya? Come on, ya fucking Dauntless!”
A strangely warm breeze brushed past them, and suddenly trapped in the ice far out at sea, a mighty sailing ship suddenly appeared. Travis looked as if he was ready to run all the way to it, but Taylan swept everyone up in his teleport to arrive next to it on the ice, crossing the miles in seconds.
The wooden boat was covered in sputtering runes, and looked as if it had seen better days. Much better. As if it had been the hell, and back.