Journal 4: Heirloom Retrieval

From the Journal of Talmuq ur'Tak

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18 Midsummer 807

We have been contracted by a wealthy half-elf merchant named Alistair Astrov, who is also a distant relative of Aalari’s, to go into the undead-controlled ruins of Old Garrod. He wanted us to fight through the undead to get to his family’s estate and recover as many of his family heirlooms as we could find. We journeyed south to the Garrod Outpost, a small fort run by the Axebreaker dwarf clan. We are staying the night there. In the morning, they are going to escort us as far as they can towards the city, but once we reach the outskirts, they will leave us and we will be on our own.

20 Midsummer 807

I died yesterday. That is the strangest thing I have ever written, but there it is. I died. I was dead. After a few of the outpost guards left us at the outskirts of the city, we had to make our own way along the road through the dead forest surrounding the city. The undead were everywhere. Zombies swarmed around in the dead forest around the road leading to the city. They mostly ignored us, but while Glendower was scouting ahead, she encountered a zombie ogre that attacked her. We came to her help, but the fight attracted more zombies, and the more we fought, the more appeared, until a giant horde was coming down on us. We knew we couldn’t fight so many, so we ran towards the city wall. I had trouble keeping up and started to lag behind with a mass of zombies right behind me. Glendower made it to the wall and managed to spring up it and lower a rope for the rest of us. Bula and Aalari made it up with no trouble, but I couldn’t manage the climb, so the others had to pull me up. A zombie beholder’s eye beam just barely missed me as I came up over the edge of the wall. We thought we had made it to safety, and paused for breath, but that’s when the beholder came back, floating up over the top of the wall. We all dashed for cover, but I was a little bit too slow. I got hit, and then all I saw was a blinding light.

The next thing I knew, I was staring down at my own disintegrated remains while the rest of the group was reeling from seeing me get killed. I tried to get their attention, but they couldn’t see or hear me. I died. My spirit had separated from my body and I was a ghost. I was still trying to process what had happened when I was visited by the spirit of my departed grandfather. Apparently he never moved on to the afterlife because he died in the process of hunting the great fish Narhuliq, and his failure trapped him as a ghost. I agreed to finish his quest one day, and in exchange he taught me how to manifest to the living and make myself visible. Then he left me. I appeared to the others and let them know that I was okay, which freaked them out for a moment, but then calmed them down. Glendower scooped up my remains and then used her sending stone to call Ian and ask him to get us help, but shortly after that, help came to us from a different source. Two people from inside the city started carving their way through the zombies towards us, an elf and a dwarf, one using a sword and the other a wand of fireballs. I still had my spellcasting abilities as a ghost, so I sent some spells out to help them, and when they made it to the wall, they had us follow them deeper into the city. To make it easier for me to interact with people, I took possession of a zombie, inhabiting and controlling its body so I could talk and touch and feel through its dead hands. Our rescuers led us through a maze of barricaded alleys cleared of enemies. One of these opened up into a small courtyard with a giant, red, angry-looking planar rift surrounded by other ghosts. Some were milling around the courtyard, but many appeared shackled to the rift, and had fused together into a giant, solid mass of ghost bodies. None of the others reacted to this odd sight, so I think I could only see it because I was a ghost. My decaying zombie body was struggling to keep pace with the others, so I didn’t have time to stay and examine the portal. Eventually, the two who were leading us, Delas, the elf woman, and Talbert, the dwarf man, took us into a sewer, which they were using as a refuge. There, we joined others, seemingly led by a one-armed asimarr named Iskarra. She said they were a group called The Remnants, who were the last survivors of Garrod. They had been trying to reclaim the city from the zombie hordes, but they were not successful, and after losing many people, they just wanted to leave. They said some power they did not understand was bringing slain zombies back over and over again. This was when I asked them about the rift I saw. They did not know anything about it, but the place I saw it in was the site of the final battle of the Alrennean War, where the litch Alrenn was defeated and his philakteree was thrown into the Plane of Fire. We changed the subject, and Glendower asked about getting to the mansion we came here for. They told us it had been taken over by a former companion of theirs who had changed through something like a possession. They agreed to help us get there through the sewer network after a rest. While we rested, one of the Remnants, Liam, one of a pair of twins about my age, offered to allow me to use his body so I could continue to interact with the world without using the rotting corpse of someone who turned out to be a friend of theirs and the father of a little girl who was in the shelter. I agreed, and when we set out, I disposed of the corpse, however I decided to stay as a ghost for the time being.

We got on our way through a network of tunnels that would lead us close to the mansion, which Liam was able to lead us through. In addition to Liam, with us were Delas, Iskara, and a human named Nevari, who was apparently related to Aalari through Alistair, and she was part of the family who owned the mansion. We ran into some ghouls in the tunnels, but they weren’t much of a challenge to defeat. After quite a while of twisting tunnels, we came to a ladder which Liam said was the closest to the mansion we could get underground. We left him and Iskara below while we went up with Delas and Nevari. Glendower took out some skeletons that were guarding the nearby entrance to the mansion and we started to head towards it, but before we could get very close, we were hit by a surprise fireball. From inside the mansion came a floating skull surrounded by flame. We had a very difficult fight, which our friends from The Remnants almost didn’t survive, but we managed to defeat the skull. However, we decided we were in over our heads, and decided to regroup back at the refuge. While we took a brief rest, Llendallyn appeared at the refuge. She brought materials she needed to resurrect me from the dead, but she could only perform the ritual under the light of the moon. The only nearby place on the surface secure enough for her to do this was the courtyard where I saw the rift. Once it was nighttime, we went up there, but I was nervous about being so close to the rift. Worrying it might affect the spell, or perhaps just to keep me busy, she tasked me with finding out more about it, so while she began the ritual, I approached one of the many spirits that were floating around, one who looked to be a warrior. She told me the spirits that were fused to the rift are trying to stop it from expanding. They had fallen in the battle against the litch, and the rift that was open was unstable, so they were doing what they could to keep it from getting bigger. We continued to talk while Landellin cast her spell, but as she finished casting, a large group of zombies appeared and started coming towards us. That’s when I saw Mannod, one of the Lightbringer’s emissaries, appear above the rift. His clothes were more casual than they were before, no longer the pristine white robes he had been wearing. He held the cubic gate, even though I was certain we had left it in the Guild’s posession. I think I was the only one who could see him, and he spoke directly to me, asking why we have so many rifts on our plane, mentioning this one, the one I saw under the ocean, and one I hadn’t heard of before that he referred to as the “big one in the sky”. This was unsettling, but I didn’t have time to process, because my spirit got yanked back towards my body and suddenly I was alive again, and we had to run. We just barely managed to make it back to the refuge before getting overrun, but they started trying to break in. We packed up and Liam led everybody to a backup safe house. We had to fight a small group of zombies at the entrance. After the fight, Mannod appeared again and said he’d been watching us for a while, but we brushed him off and we went inside and fell right to sleep.

When we woke up this morning, Lendallyn told us to decide whether to continue with the mission or cut our losses and leave. This required a lot of discussion. While we talked, I mentioned what Mannod told me about the rifts, and this prompted Nevari to say that she knew what Alistair wanted us to find: The amulet of planes. This sounded important, but we decided it was too dangerous to pursue this mission any further, and we led the Remnants out of the city. Now we’re on our way back to Wodesville. We’ll figure out the rest later.