Game table

As all the party decides to get into the long canoe, it rocks slowly back and forth on its keel. The glyphs shine in Kon's renewed Light spell, from the bow where the carven cross between a sea Coatl and Merfolk maiden holds out her hands fore and aft toward Xoch', and all the way to the stern and carven rudder where Storm lies outstretched, relaxed and partially asleep already.

Xoch' sits up and casts his Thorn Whip like a grappling hook into the stone walls of the chute and heaves the canoe in and down into the hole, as the stern lifts the Goliath to the alcove ceiling and bangs the canoe against the groin vaults with a roughness that sends all the occupants into a frantic search for handholds. Duke holds onto his Kitty with a veracity unmatched. The Jaguar digs his claws into the wood.

The canoe slips into the crevasse. and wobbles down the chute. The chute is slick stone and only illuminated by Kon's axe. The rudder digs magically deep into the stone, but it is wild and free and sends the canoe careening left and right up the sides of the chute, forever correcting its parabolic motions, threatening the expulsion of the occupants.

There is neither cargo nor oars to fall out of the craft, but the party is made of flesh and does not want to fall between the rapidly falling great canoe and the stone chute, like a torqued mortar and pestle. The glyphs begin to glow bright hues as if angry.

Xoch' holds onto his seat at front, next to the excited Caine and steadfast Kon. The owl man darts his head left and right as only he can, as the craft starts to do a barrel roll and possibly smash into the stone chute walls as easily as a Maztica woman kneads masa balls in her hands. He looks back to his friends and with a moment of regret sees the danger but can do nothing to stop the canoe's accelerating descent.

Storm has the presence of mind to take the rudder. The runes under his hands warm to his touch and the blade cuts firmly into the stone and does not waver. The careening canoe steadies but continues to fall. While Storm is finding the bottom of the chute, it starts to curve less steep and no sooner has he gotten the canoe to follow the bottom of the curve, then the top of the chute opens up to reveal a rougher cave structure. Magma and fire flicker all around. Xoch' is the first to see the molten rock river flowing along side the chute and then going under a rise of the sluice right at an opening into another cave. The sluice enters the hole like a ramp. Storm steers straight ahead up the ramp since the only other option is to diverge into the magma river.

The canoe takes the ramp and shoots forth into the next cave, which seems not to have limits. There is a faint glow of magma far below where the magma river must end its waterfall, but the distance is so great, that the canoe would never survive the fall.

The keel of the long canoe fires into empty space. The rudder no longer finds purchase in stone. The canoe begins its parabolic descent into nothingness.

The panic in the canoe is palpable, but Xoch' has an escape. Why is he panicked as well? He caresses the runes on the boat along the runners down the sides. They are warm to his touch. The statute has no fear on her face. Her carven smile seems overly confident as she falls freely through the air, one wood hand forward to the party's doom and the other hand woodenly reaching back to Xoch'.

The statute continues to smile as the canoe plummets.

With the canoe falling quickly toward the lava pools at the bottom of this enormous cavern, Xoch' feels the hot updrafts making it easy for him to set wing and fly up. Perhaps it is the lightness of the canoe, but that he feels a tug on its yaw. He seems to be lifting the front of the canoe's forward angle, but the descent is far too fast. More frantically he pleads with the canoe and the statute's hand warms in his, the red fingers burning into his avian claw of a hand. He lifts his wings, pulls back on the bow, and states his will. The canoe rocks side to side in the updraft of heat and fire. Whatever of those did the trick, he is unsure, but the statute leans up toward the top of the cavern, even as the back with the Goliath still falls. The rudder strikes the lava pool and slices into the molten rock as a hot blade would, the canoe creating a large wave of slow moving magma, the keel's momentum dipping the entirety of the stern of the canoe in lava. Storm continues to hold the rudder as before, but gingerly nearer to its heated tip. The canoe rights itself in the magma and lifts with a great heave up to follow its bow where Xoch's outstretching and struggling wings seems to lift the canoe, until the canoe speeds up, runes glowing, and plants the owl back down onto his seat in the canoe. Upward the Pochteca's long canoe flies in the cavern.

Ahead, as the canoe begins to rocket, is the other side of the cavern. There are two passages that glow faintly yellow like empty eye sockets of a giant's skull seen from the inside. The canoe is flying straight for the stone brow between the two eyes that form stone tunnels in the sides of the cavern wall. The one on the left leads up to regain the elevation that the adventurers have lost in their descent into the crypt, and the other leads slightly down, as if going toward the desert that the village overlooked.

If the canoe is not directed, it will go into neither tunnel and will crash into the stone wall of the cavern to fall back in shards into the lava below.

The rudder turns in Stormslayer's massive hands and the canoe obeys. Xoch' may control the ascent, but it takes both of them to navigate the curves of the right hand tunnel leading upward as the passage veers and twists but ever goes upward until dirt and root block their path. This does not slow the canoe and it breaks through into underbrush and tree canopy, giving all those who do not keep their hands and heads safely inside the runners. Storm continues to laze in the rear as is his custom. He is the last to see the bright rays of the setting sun.

Statute lets go of Xoch's hand and settles on the ground with a slight tilt on its keel a bare couple hundred feet from the Temple to Tezca.