Hello, Everyone!
Last time, our heroes made a quick detour from their walk towards the Dragon's prison following a weird path of fallen trees that they've kept on seeing for a couple of days now.
They ended up in a clearing, with an altar in the middle, a demon-summoning circle drawn on the altar, and four people 'in different states of disembodiment' (sorry for repeating myself, I kinda like that phrase now) strewn around.
Aurum decided to use his Dirum bell to speak with the dead and find out what happened to them.
(In other news, I had a birthday this week. Yaaay! I wish myself more creativity and time, mostly time, to do what I love!)
Tesaya and Bruno laid the half-elf’s body on the ground, with its back leaning on one of the closest fallen trees, and Aurum rang the Dirum bell. Its sound was hollow and distant, as if coming through a ghostly veil.
With a horrible wheeze, the corpse took a breath. Its head rose and looked at Aurum, eyes milky-white and lifeless.
Mary’s stomach clenched as the visage of her father’s corpse flashed before her eyes. She couldn’t bear to witness another of these interrogations. Even if they needed the information, it didn't feel right to make the dead speak. They ought to be left to rest.
She turned on her heels and walked away.
To distract herself from the muffled conversation behind her, she concentrated on the altar. The scroll with the arcane formula was in an unknown language but she had the spell to fix that. After she managed to translate it, the inscription confirmed that the ritual was used to summon a Demon, but the name scribbled in the margins wasn’t that of Yeenoghu.
Whoever ‘Glabrezu’ was, the summoners had tried to forcefully get him and Anchor him in this dimension, so that they couldn’t leave.
The bottom of the page listed all the steps to prevent the Demon from hurting you, once they were on this side of the veil. The cultists had obviously missed something.
Almost absentmindedly, Mary reached out and erased a bit of the line on the chalk circle. Last time she’d witnessed a summoning, breaking the circle had broken the spell. It was probably too late this time, but there was no harm in trying.
She looked at her friends. It seemed that they were just wrapping up their interrogation. She rolled up the summoning parchment and carefully stowed it in her Bag of Holding. She wasn’t expecting to summon a Demon any time soon, but who knew what the future held?
“Sooo, they had nothing to do with the dragon,” Aurum said when the company gathered again. “They were an entirely different cult, nothing to do with Tiamat. They were trying to summon a Demon to help their Lord--Yeenoghu, was it?--to help him gather strength to fight in some demon war.”
“Why didn’t they summon their Lord instead?” Mary said.
“Beats me. All he said was that the Demon they’d summoned was going to feed here in our Plane, and somehow that was going to give strength to Yeenoghu to fight the other Demon Lords.”
“They were awfully zealous,” Bruno said with a scoff. “Kept saying things like ‘my soul belongs to him’, ‘if I help him I’ll earn his love’...” The dwarf snorted with superiority. “They don’t even know how to properly honour their Patron.”
“The important thing is that it’s not part of our current mission,” Tesaya said. “We should go.”
“We can’t just leave them like that!” Mary protested. “Even if they’ve done dubious things, they don’t deserve to rot in a swamp!”
“They weren’t rotting,” Aurum said. “Didn’t you hear me when I said that something’s been keeping them from decomposing?”
"Even if that's the case..." Mary insisted.
Eventually, the rest agreed to have the bodies burned. They made a pyre and put the four cultists on top.
When it lit up, they suddenly realized that was a mistake. A column of black smoke rose above the tree tops, giving out their location to everyone and everything in a mile away.
“I think it’s time to scram,” Agatha said.
And they did.
When they were a sufficient distance away from the smoke, Mary made another of her hawk familiars and sent it to scout ahead. Immediately after she entered its senses, she gasped. There was a new trail of fallen trees about a thousand yards to their right. But this one wasn’t continuous. The trees at its end were still falling.
The Demon was on the move.
It was tearing up the trees in its way, breaking them like twigs and tossing them aside. Its low guttural roar filled the air, and ripples furrowed the surface of the swamp with each of its footfalls. It was keeping a steady pace, but not coming any closer to the party. There was--at least for now--no danger of crossing paths with it.
Mary sent her hawk to take a closer look.
The creature was about fifteen feet tall, reddish-brown, with long swirling horns over a featureless face. There were some parts of its body that gave it an insectoid look--the segmented torso, the beetle-like armour around its chest and shoulders. Its legs were covered with scales and ended with long black talons. Its arms were flailing through the air--two giant muscular ones with sharp spikes instead of hands, and two smaller, more normal-looking ones underneath them. They reminded Mary of the underwater monster they'd met in Ekoba.
Mary was sure she saw something stuck in one of the Demon's hands. She made her hawk swoop down to inspect it further and realized that the Demon’s left smaller hand had been stabbed. Blood was dripping from the wound, and something sharp was sticking out of it. The creature was trying to take it out but although it was able to reach the object, somehow it didn't budge when it pulled on it.
Was that the ‘Anchor’ that the cultists had used to keep it in this dimension?
Mary made her hawk land on the Demon's hand and try to pull out the Anchor. She heard the Demon speak, in a language she didn't understand. Its other hand came down on the hawk… and then there was no hawk. Mary got ripped from its senses and back to her own.
Nice Demon! Good Demon! Scary Demon!
Poor Demon?
Do you think our heroes should leave it alone? After all, it's not like it's hurting anyone...
See you next time when we'll find out what's about to happen!
Take care and be well!
Episodes of Mary Windfiddle's story come out every Monday and Thursday.
(Also, here's a link to the Chapter Guide, the Glossary and the Map for the series. You're welcome!)
An important disclaimer: Mary Windfiddle's story is my notes from a D&D game turned into a narrative. All the worldbuilding and NPC encounters belong to our DM, and all the actions of the other main characters (Aurum, Bruno and Agatha) belong to my co-players. My contribution to the story is only everything Mary-related (actions, reactions, inner thoughts), as well as the writing itself.