Tairn

1532.7.8
Danger averted, everyone looks around the storeroom more closely. Shelves inset into the walls must have once held goods. The bodies of the goblins lie stinking on the floor. Everyone moves back to the light streaming from the open roof above and on to the cloister on the other side of the dark stone path. A similar five foot diameter terrace lies outside the cloister and a five foot hallway penetrates further into the temple. As Malperder looks down the hallway, he sees a flickering light from a large room beyond and a lump on the floor twenty feet away. The lump is a rotting tapestry on the floor. The room beyond is immense. Two wooden beams stretch the length of the room and each is lined with six flickering candles. A triangle of three posts five feet high are off to the right. A thin line of silvery metal connects each stone post. To the left are more stone posts at random heights and arrangement. Malperder moves towards the triangle of posts and finds two eight foot metal poles on the floor by each of the posts. An arm bracer on each of the poles would allow one to wear the poles. Malperder notices a paper fan on the wall with a small ledge above it. Banic announces that the fan is magical as are all of the candles. Keddick takes the fan off the hook. Varende, Malperder and Kordis hear a disturbance, perhaps a wind or breeze from the corridor. They look out but see nothing. Varende mounts the random height posts and jumps from one to one. He looks at the candles with his head even with them. Each is in a small metal tube attached to the beam. He jumps and balances his way back to the floor.

By unanimous assent, all follow the darkstone path again. A wide staircase leads to a long, wide hallway. At the far end, three doors break the passage.

Malperder and Jack lead down the passage. As the move forward, their weight opens a swinging door in the floor. Jack falls in, but Malperder miraculously moves back to stable ground. Malperder, Varende and Kordis hear a splash from the pit as it closes again. Varende runs forward and starts pushing down on the pit. He gets it partly open. The Dwarves throw Keddick’s rope down to Jack, but no one moves to help him as he drowns. He is under the water over thirty seconds before he swims to the surface and gets ahold of the rope. Jack climbs out of the pit dripping wet. Varende leaps across to where he thinks the hinge is, and tries to jam the hidden hinge. Others move across the pit jumping, running and leaping. No one falls in. Banic is last to come, and the threat of water causes him to stone shape the floor over the pits seam. He moves across the pit covering and it holds.

The right hand door is a ten foot wide double door with ornate carving on it. It is obviously Dwarven made. The left hand door shows a monk, hand outstetched towards a Dwarven King reaching towards him from the other door. Their hands meet at a small hole in the left hand door. Varende fiddles with the hole and moves a mechanism within. Regardless, the doors will not open. Malperder and Banic recognize the Dwarven figure as King Thoral of clan Glordar, leader of another group of mountain dwarves. He was middle-aged when they were boys a few hundred years ago.

Next, Malperder bursts open the door on the left side of the passage. Condensation covers the door and the air is warmer around it. Inside is a large pool and the room is filled with steam. Malperder sees no exists and closes the door again.

The group moves to the double doors at the end of the hall where the dark stones lead. Two feline heads with shaggy manes and wide open mouths are close together at hand height in the middle of the doors. A bar sits across the back of each mouth. Malperder, Banic, and Jack try to open the doors to no avail, pushing, pulling and eventually tying a rope to one handle and all pulling together. No amount of effort budges the doors.

Everyone moves back to the Dwarven carved doors. Jack tries pushing on the human figure while the Dwarves push on the Dwarven figure. It doesn’t budge.

Steps are retraced. Banic intends to open the wall to chase Kak. He shapes a two foot deep depression that is three foot square. A two foot diameter metal ring falls to the floor, but no room is revealed beyond the stoneshape. Keddick examines the ring. He picks it up and notices his fingers disappear into the ring but don’t come out the other side. He looks through to see the dark large room beyond. Varende wiggles through the ring but his feet catch and he can go no further. He is somehow magically stopped from passing through. Jack has a similar experience. Kordis throws a fireball through the ring and it explodes some distance away but doesn’t reveal much. Keddick passes through the ring as a gas, but he comes back quickly. The ring is taken to the dining room, and Keddick attempts to teleport into using Dimension Door. He and the Dwarves appear 30 feet past the ring.

<somewhere in here the group encounters three water creatures and a steam creature in the pool room, but the order is out of my memory; nothing else is found in the pool room; Jack is badly burned by acid from the water creatures>

Everyone passes the rest of the day with the intention of resting the night in the dining room. The ring is left laying on the floor with the portal side down. Some time after support, Banic screams in pain as a creature appears from nowhere and bites him. It disappears as quickly. No one knows what it was. It had two legs, a long tail, and a trilateral maw that hurt Banic badly when he was bit. It appears and disappears again near the exit to the dining room. Everyone mills about. Suddenly it appears and bites Kordis. He is able to react quickly and lashes it with fire. Varende rolls into place and stabs it to death. The blue-skinned grotesque body provides no further clues to its origins.

Keddick creates a rope trick to last the night and all crawl within to rest.

1532.7.9
The night passes uneventfully, and in the morning the group approaches the Dwarven carved door again. Keddick chants words of power, lays his hand on the door, and then shoves it open. It opens to reveal a stark thirty foot diameter room beyond…