Gods Lost and Souls Adrift

The Dinosaur Ambush

The attack came without warning. A huge Dimetrodon savaged Asuran, a powerful theropod clawed Karl, and a smaller raptor-like predator repeatedly rushed Halen before darting clear of his greatsword. The creatures kept moving, striking and withdrawing before the party could surround them.

Toby’s arrows turned the fight. He wounded two of the predators badly enough to slow them, giving Karl and Halen the opening to bring down the theropod. Toby slew the raptor and continued shooting until the Dimetrodon finally collapsed, while the badly mauled Asuran survived by dodging and tumbling clear of its jaws. The party bound their wounds, rested briefly and pressed deeper into the swamp.

Into the Primordial Swamp

After tending their wounds from the ambush, the party resumed their exploration and pushed farther into the ancient wetlands. Prehistoric ferns crowded the margins of green-black water, mist hung between immense plants and the flooded ground repeatedly forced them to pick a careful route forward.

The deeper they travelled, the less the place resembled an underground cavern. It felt instead like a surviving fragment of some far older world, alive beneath the mountain and hiding whatever lay ahead among the swamp, ruins and tangled vegetation.

The Diseased Shrine

The swamp’s nature shrines had been tainted. One altar wept dark blood while lamprey-like parasites writhed across its stone and roots. Its blessing had become a disease.

The party raised their ladder against the shrine. Halen held it firm while Karl climbed and channelled a controlled white-gold light. Asuran and Toby stripped the parasites from below. The corruption loosened, then broke, leaving only wet stone and foul water behind.

The Ziggurat of Semunyae

Quicksand and hidden channels guarded the deeper swamp. Beyond them rose an ancient stepped pyramid, its dark courses of stone lifting from the water like the spine of a buried titan.

Within lay the tomb of a high priest of Semunyae. His body had rotted, yet his soul had never passed on. With the death god absent, the priest had remained trapped between states while three former priests endured as the tomb’s undead guardians. They were mummy-like figures in ragged ceremonial wrappings: two carried ritual sickles burning with negative energy, while the third wielded a greatsword.

Halen was absent from the fight. The greatsword guardian knocked Toby to the flooded floor and struck at him while he was down, leaving the ranger trapped beneath its reach. Karl stood between Toby and the other two guardians, raised his holy symbol and forced the undead back. The power channelled through the symbol began destroying the ragged priests as their negative-energy sickles failed against him.

Asuran remained off to the side with his weapons ready, watching for the moment to intervene without crossing Karl’s line of power. When the guardians were finally destroyed, their ancient weapons remained behind, still carrying the chill of the negative plane.

Beneath the ziggurat, blue-green light revealed a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water—evidence that the temple was also a planar anchor.

The Lost High Priest

The party cleansed the sacred space and honoured what rites they could reconstruct. The high priest’s spectral form stirred. For the first time in perhaps a century, anguish left his face.

No death god came to receive him. Even so, the spirit rose and faded into whatever lay beyond. The party had done what the absent divine order no longer could.

The Green Gem and the Bow

An ancient bow fitted with its own green dwarven gem was embedded within the tomb’s stone heart. Asuran spent the remainder of the day preparing acid, then applied it carefully around the object.

The stone smoked and softened. The bow and its fitted gem came free intact. Precision had succeeded where brute force might have destroyed both.

Essence in the Stones

At camp on the Isle of Azsharan, the party tested the gems collected during their journey. The red gem appeared limited to roughly four thousand gold pieces of magical power and retained thirteen charges. Its surviving enchantment revealed hidden doors, especially in dwarven construction.

The orange gem had awakened as a source of invisibility. The lime-green disease gem recovered from the rat-ogre laboratory was recorded with eighty-six charges, later eighty-three after three were used. It was distinct from the ordinary green gem fitted to the ancient bow and remained too powerful to reshape without care. Two grey gems were completely exhausted.

During a collective prayer, Karl’s awareness was drawn inside the red gem. There he found the strongest explanation yet: the stones held the essences of dwarven nature gods, preserved, imprisoned or transformed into crystalline form. The name that surfaced was Thardar, the dwarven nature god.

The ritual suggested that several worshippers praying to the same power could project themselves into a gem more safely. Failure brought severe spiritual exhaustion. The discovery offered answers, but also made every remaining stone more dangerous.