Chapter 13: Session 04

The party sits in relative boredom as the ship sails out into the sea, heading around the southernmost Braggol islands and out into the wide ocean. They encounter a pair of haughty Heron School archers who keep to themselves. Also they find that the half-eled Ahze said was on ship is none other than Fenwyk, the charlatan and montebanc. Lastly, is a large Ganthur named "Val" who has filled the aft hold of the ship with a massive goat pen containing fifty goats.

The first day passes without much incident, with Slip offering to help Val with the foul odor caused by his goats. Using his elemental magic, Slip "powerwashes" the area, scouring it clean. Mitu works on a battle mask, Soreiss studies, Lugh reclines with his wolf, and Rin retreats to the aft poopdeck, sitting in the shade of a tarp fastened to the high rails.

The second night, however brings trouble. Lugh and Mitu both take doses of Lugh's black lotus dreaming elixir, falling into deep slumbers. Being a cool night, the rest of the party also remains on deck, with only Rin seemingly absent. No one say much of him the second day...

Lugh finds himself in the Ymorphus, possibly the city of Oneiros. However, everything is covered in a dense fog obscuring all view, and the sense of absolute corruption clings to the place. Dark silhouettes move in the distance, and faint whispers of conversation can be made out from nearby. Lugh went to investigate...

Meanwhile, Soreiss and Val both note that something seems strange on ship. Stars and the moon both grow dim, then fade entirely. The sails are filled as if by a full wind, yet there is a definite feeling of not-moving. Below the ship, the ocean seems to have disappeared entirely. The ship sits in an empty, black void. They hear strange whispers... then feel wet things sliding unseen past them, cutting them with fine, razor thin cuts as they pass.

Val tries to awaken Lugh, but he is unresponsive. Mitu, however, comes to consciousness slowly, though he remains quite groggy. The crewmen on ship start flipping out, and Slip heads to the captain's quarters hoping to find him. However, Slip realizes that space seems odd here, the stairway continuing on and on... He races back trying to head up the stairs, barely managing to do so ahead of this darkness that seems to be stretching space around him. Soreiss, standing still and growing more and more angry, begins to decompose where he stands, changing quickly into a liche-like body as he glares up at the darkness, enraged at his inability to fight.

Mitu runs below deck, but find the stairway to be much the same as Slip had. At first, "Number Three", the echo of his demonaic consciousness, freaks out, and then, suddenly, is silent... even absent. Mitu begins to channel life energy, which has some effect... he tries to attack the darkness (I attack the darkness!), but it yields to his blow, and returns to its initial shape. After a second attempt, he notes tendrils of darkness reflecting the light -- this place seems almost alive. As the tendrils begin to move and shift, he notes several small, green snakes pushing their way out from the darkness. The snakes regard mitu, then push their way up the stairs to the deck. Mitu crawls after the snakes, even as the life energy of his healing fades away... he is suddenly alone.

Slip is cut across his back by the same wetness that slit open Val's cheek and arm, yet he loses far more blood, which drains from him at an alarming rate. Slip attempts to call upon his water mastery, but it fails him, drying out faster than he can call it.

Val falls into a meditative trance, and suddenly feels trapped, confined and unable to move. The feeling passes quickly when he hears the angry hoot of an owl, and realizes that he is laying on the deck of the ship, staring up at an owl perched atop the taller mast.

...In the Ymorphus, Lugh chases ephemera and stumbles upon a massive structure. Contained by nearly ten feet of cold, bronzelike metal, Lugh can see hundreds, thousands of faces contorted in fear. This grisly scene only frames a vast black surface, standing at least forty feet high, and perfectly flat. At first Lugh sees nothing, and then a shape grows clear... a luminous eyed shaman, with over a dozen skull-like masks in a bandolier across his dark robed body. He is somewhat portly, and a thin mask over his eyes does not cover the intricate, green pigmented facial tattoos drawn over his features... though it takes him a moment, Lugh realizes that this is the warspawn Soreiss described seeing in the last moments of unlife held by the Crypt King of Demon Lore. It was no wonder the liche was defeated; he faced a powerful dark shaman. Behind the image of the shaman come all the sounds of whispers and half spoken words... loud and yet hushed at the same time.

Lugh struggles to force himself awake, but cannot seem to succeed at withdrawing from the Ymorphus. The dark shaman reflected in the surface seems to laugh and sneer, even as Lugh invokes the power of his druidstaff and tries to wing at the dark polished surface. However, this darkness too seems to yield and return, cracking slightly, but sealing itself just as quickly. Always the darkness yields and returns, the shaman mocking Lugh all the while. Desperate, Lugh finally manages to emerge from the Ymorphus and force himself awake, but not before hearing a voice from the shaman say, "I will show you your fear...".

On the ship, Lugh jerks away. Snakes emerge from below deck, followed by Mitu, who is nearly catatonic and totally given up on everything. Lugh cries out something about the Dark Road, and gets to his feet. The snakes make their way toward Slip, who backs away, panicked. Val takes a shot at a snake as it attempts to bite the young elementalist, killing one. However, the others keep moving toward the man, while the strange owl swoops down toward Val's head, hooting angrily. Val's vision shifts first -- even as Lugh cries out not to harm the snakes, for he already sees the truth. The owl is Rin, a naked man with broad owlwings for arms, swooping about the ship and hooting at the darkness to keep it at bay. The serpents are a small Giro, a shake shaman adorned in snakeskins and bones, who takes a small knife and cuts Slip's hand to clasp it in his own, mixing blood to free him.

In turn, the little snake shaman frees Soreiss and the crewmen from their particular problems, while Rin-the-Owl seems to hoot at Mitu, to set the big Ogren free. The darkness receeds, the sails drop, and the sky is visible once more. However, Mitu is still given up... though the Giro tries to help, it is Lugh who seems able to speak to Mitu and talk some sense into him. So the Giro talks with slip instead, revealing that he stowed away to meet people who look almost just like the "five" player characters (though there are six, the Giro can only count to five, the number of fingers on one of his hands). The only difference, he tells Slip, is that in his vision, the pretty man (Lugh) held a thorny staff... so he must wait for the real people from his vision. Only after Slip tells Lugh to make his staff thorny, and the Giro is done being wide eyed, he begins to rummage through his various pouches and purses, looking for his "paper".

The snake shaman pulls out a small scroll, handing it to Slip. The writing is in an old form of Imalim, in the dialect of stones. Slip can read some of it, but it will take him time to make sense of it...

...only later does he realize that he holds in his hands the Prophecy of Ama, the Third revelation of the Fifth Cycle.

Meanwhile, Captain Ahze rushes to the deck, where his crewmen are being tended, some of them still screaming. Ahze is upset and unbelieving, until someone mentions the "Dark Road". Then his demeanor changes, and he makes up a bullshit story about having to head deeper into the sea to avoid shallow reefs. Since the party already suspects Ahze of having ties to Sable's Corsairs, they mention the old Luma's name to Ahze.

The Captain then explains that Sable must be informed, since there are standing orders to report anything out of the ordinary that may be related to the darkroad. Another day further out to sea, and the party comes across a Corsair Bastion, a rigged vessel built from the wreckage of Kuzani Steamships and more conventional wooded ships. Ahze brings his own smaller vessel along side, and hails them...