The Dauntless II

After making a quick plan, Antoinette ferries Suki over to the wall, and Suki immediately leaps onto the boggard atop the wall, quickly dispatching him. However, Antoinette gets attacked by an even larger, more vicious crocodile and swallowed, though she doesn't remain in its belly long, biting her way out fast. Antoinette falls back, and the crocodile follows, biting and swallowing Dorrak next, who remains stuck in its stomach while the others beat on the crocodile, including Suki jumping back down and aiding in the attack, with Antoinette tearing into it to kill it and freeing Dorrak from the belly.

Suki, Antoinette and Dorrak are able to push the door open easily between the three of them. The interior walls of this hallway are covered with six-inch wooden spikes carved to resemble dragon’s teeth. Along the north wall stand four wooden doors, and a statue of a humanoid dragon stands in the center of the room. Standing in the middle is a large, muscular frog-headed clay statue, and as you enter it jerkily animates.

The golem stumbles towards the group, and immediately lays a haymaker into Suki's chest, where she feels a rib crack under the blow. Django tries to patch her up, as he does, but the wound pointedly refuses to be healed, leading Antoinette to recognize the curse of the Clay Golem's punches. Determined to kill it quickly, the group surrounds the golem, unleashing on it, before Suki strikes twice in quick succession, culminating in running her fauchard through the golem's chest. The damage shatters the golem, falling apart around her blade.

Retreating back to the wall briefly, they spend a couple hours for Dorrak to use his healing to brute force his way past the curse.

When the party comes back in they open a door to a hallway that acts as some sort of dormitory. A group of Charau-Ka and Boggards are hanging out with no armor and weapons on. The group quickly curb stomps them.

Smoked meat and roasted fish hang on hooks embedded in the walls, while clay jars on the floor are packed full of yams in various stages of fermentation. A heavy metal cooking grate covers a glowing pit in the floor. Lying on top of the grate, basking in the heat of the pit, is a large, sinewy canine, bald and skinless with exposed and rippling muscle. It looks up when you enter, yawns, and stands up, looking like it's ready for a fight but honestly not really into it.

Dorrak first approaches with food and dog toys, but quickly gets an expression of absolute canine disdain. He apologizes, and there's a brief back and forth discussion about how the Nessian warhound got here, soon finding out that it's bound here, but would like to leave. They negotiate an agreement where the hound lets the group go in peace, and they agree to kill the one binding it and free it.

Chunks of iron are scattered around this room, while a trench filled with molten rock bubbles along the base of the western wall. Anvils and forging equipment lie here and there near the trench. Two charau-ka with draconic features much like the one that guarded the black pillar are here forging weapons with hammers, but notice your entrance and ready themselves for battle.

Suki rushes in with a quick strike while the rest of the group follows... straight into the perfect set-up for one of the charau-ka to breathe flames upon them. Meanwhile the other dips its hammer into the molten lava they were using as a forge, and wades into battle. Suki jumps over the pair, and a moment later gets brought down by a ravaging series of strikes from one of them, before getting back up again from Django's heal. The battle rages for a moment longer, ultimately leaving the party battered, bruised, and burned, but both Charau-Ka dead.

A pair of immense, fossilized vertebrae run along the central ceiling of the next room. The walls are carved with images of huge, spiny dragons ravaging jungle landscapes and burning entire cities to the ground. Sleeping mats have been placed along the walls to the south. It is immediately apparent to most of the party that the carvings are of or honoring Dahak and evil dragons, but more interestingly, Suki realizes that the skeleton supporting the structure is that of an immense dragon, and recalls both her own lessons growing up and the story told by Nketiah, where the Ekujae slew Dahak's physical avatar and threw the body to the jungle. As Dorrak and Suki go to open the doors leading north, they both trigger a trap, triggering a phantasmal image of Dahak to strike them. Suki barely comprehends its un-reality and narrowly avoids death.

The fossilized ribs of a massive creature support the ceiling above, while the walls are carved with reliefs of an immense dragon burning cities and eating other dragons. A charau-ka wearing leather-lined robes is here, kneeling before an altar while two small crocodile-headed humanoids flank him.

The kneeling charau-ka barely gets a moment to wonder what's going on before he is flanked and attacked. The party quickly floods the room and kills the priest with him only getting a few strikes in. The small crocodile headed humanoids quickly grow to massive size. Though they put up a good fight, tripping Antoinette, Fleur, and Suki at various points, they too are dispatched relatively quickly.

This room is more elegant than any of the others within the fortress, covered with fine inscriptions, geometric patterns, and exquisite calligraphy. There are also two chimeras here.

As they bust in, the chimeras quickly tear at everyone with all three heads, ripping into them all, and one sprays them with powerful poison breath, but they eventually fall to the combined blades, fangs, and divine power, but not after badly wounding most of the group. On inspecting the room, Dorrak finds that the Dahak prayers scrawled on the walls in Draconic grow increasingly irritated by the Cinderclaws and the notion of worshipping Dahak as a destroyer.

The immense skull of a fossilized dragon looms from the northern wall of this smoky, dome-ceilinged ritual chamber, its hollow eyes flickering with fiery light. Molten gold pours from the dragon’s mouth into an immense stone bowl below,an offering basin made from the monstrous dragon’s collar bones and shoulder blades. A raised stone slab sits in the center of the boiling metal: a pedestal to offer sacrifices to a dark god. Ribs rise up in the southern portion of the room to support the ceiling, while the hollow space under the skull to the north of the bowl seems to have been furnished as a personal shrine, study, and sleeping nook. Chained to the sacrificial altar on its back, molten gold pouring onto its chest, is a young red dragon, growling in agony, and before him is a blue half-dragon boggard holding a dagger in one hand and a staff in the other. She turns, angrily noting the invading outsiders, and shouts for an attack.

"Hello again, mother," Suki spits, her eyes turning as crimson as the scales currently covering her arms as she charges into the room with her fauchard swinging wide to cut deep into the half-dragon boggard leader. "I brought some friends home with me."

"Insolent WRETCH! I should have killed you when I had the chance!" Belmazog replies, as the two lock into combat, though Suki quickly shows her upper hand as her new friends quickly surround the boggard. She briefly gets knocked down, just to get back up through healing magic delivered by her allies.

Blood boiling, Suki lays into her adoptive mother with her fauchard, carving off chunks of semi-draconic flesh. "You will never hurt me, you will never hurt anyone again." She says, panting, as she brings Belmazog back to the brink of death, before lowering her fauchard's point slightly. "Goodbye mother," She finishes, closing her eyes and turning towards the middle of the room as Django drops some divine wrath on the Boggards and Nova bloodily rips Belmazog's throat out. Unfortunately, a moment later a beam of fire bursts from the dragon skull's eyes, one of several that had been fired during the fight, and strikes Suki full-on in the heart. Collapsing backwards, everything goes dark.

But Django was having none of that. He'd already lost one friend, he was not going to lose another. Burning the last of his healing magic, he poured life into Suki, who re-awakens with a gasp, while Dorrak looks over the two boggard underlings. "Your leader is down, your companions are dead, leave now or perish," He says, and they brook no argument, high-tailing it out the doors.

As Suki's wits return to her, she finds Antoinette and Dorrak have moved to freeing the red dragon in the middle of the room, who seemed interestingly to have not been harmed by the Divine Wrath Django had dropped. With a roar, the last of her pent up rage and frustration, she leaves her Fauchard where it lies, and leaps atop the podium to tear into the chains on the dragon with her clawed gauntlet. Recognizing the Cinderclaw gauntlet for what it is, the chains give easily beneath it, and between the three of them they quickly loosen the chains enough the dragon can break free.

Immediately taking to the air, it proceeds to burn out the fell magic in the skull with a searing assault of flames.

"I had never thought to see a red dragon ask me for help," Antoinette states, in awe of the current situation. "Though I have seen many things I thought I would not lately. You have also immediately helped us in turn. For that, I thank you."

The dragon turns and flaps his way back to the ground, landing on four legs and bowing his head slightly. Now that he's freed, you can see the damage that has been done by whatever the Cinderclaws were trying to do; a magical chasm has been carved into his chest and become filled with solid gold, with one jagged golden spike sticking out. Curiously, the spike does not appear to be metallic, but crystalline, suggesting it isn't part of the gold itself. As he land and the magic of the skull dies down, gold ceases pouring from its mouth, and what's already in the pool cools not into solid gold but to obsidian.

"Your... assistance is... appreciated? Is this how one expresses gratitude?" he seems slightly confused by the notion.

Dorrak chuckles at the thanks. "It is. Am I right to guess that those writings outside, becoming disillusioned with the Cinderclaws and the worship of Dahak, were yours?"

The dragon shudders. "Yes. Let me ask, do you know what it is to look upon the face of a god? To know that all of your wrath and hate could burn the whole world clean, and that you would then be nothing but a dying spark in the face of an inferno? No, I have no love for Orhendad." This last word is the Draconic for "Great-grandfather.

”That is understandable,” Antoinette replies. ”Destruction, in the end, does mean the ruin of everything. That inherently involves the death of self and anything one may ever care about. True we do not share your unique experience, but we have found ourselves at odds with Dahak in many notable ways.”

"Then you understand," the dragon nods sagely. "You must... forgive my manners? Is that the phrase? I am called Kyrion. It is your pleasure to-hrrmph. It is... good. Great. Well met."

Antoinette smiles kindly. ”You are free to speak as you will,” Antoinette replies. ”You’ve shown well enough that you are not the typical dragon. My name is Antoinette. It is truly a pleasure to meet you. What will you do now that you have been freed?”

"Leave this accursed jungle, for one," Kyrion says. "Then I will have to start rebuilding my hoard."

The dragon shudders. "Terrifying. Although you may misunderstand the situation. It is not Orhendad himself who was sealed away by the elves. He remains in his domain in Hell. What exists on this plane is a living fragment of his power, a manifestation he created many ages ago. That was what Belmazog was attempting to sacrifice me to revive, and whose bones we stand beneath now."

"Regardless, we still need to stop it," Dorrak frowns. "Do you know of any others trying to revive this avatar, or will the rest of our task be as simple as finding the keys to open the gates and opening them?"