The New Remnant

Aizashi is watching Oliver and the others but remains with Arc on guard.

Elyse will cast a spell moving the air in the area near the odd tapestry and push it to one side attempting to reveal what lies behind.

Oliver reaches to push the tapestry to see behind it, but Elyse instead magically moves it to the side just enough for him to get a look. There is an open archway behind it, with the heavy tapestry serving as a door of sorts. It looks to be large, but the opening currently is not large enough to permit enough light in to see well. It would take a concerted effort to either pull down the tapestry to see inside, or someone to pull it to one side for a better look. Alternatively, you can slip into the room with a light source and take a look around.You do not hear movement, but with the tapestry opened just a little, you do hear a disconcerting noise that appears to be far in the distance. Which is odd, as the room is not *that* large and you can only hear it in the archway, not in the exterior room. There doesn't seem to be any immediate threat, but that noise ... just doesn't feel right.

"Well there is a passageway." Seeing that it is touch dark beyond, Cords retrieves his lantern and fires it up with the obvious intent to start exploring.

"If we enter right now, these other scavengers will take a while to find the entrance and follow through. That would give us a nice and long head-start... to encounter first whatever eerie thing is inside."

Oliver snaps his fingers and invokes a small orb of light, to accompany that of Cords.

"But hey, I'm all in for us having dibs on the discovery."

"Sure, let's go!"

Blornvid nods, his axe at the ready.

"So we are going in then and not taking care of the orcs first?" Stee is thinking wish they would make up my mind.

You enter in behind the tapestry with your lights and you see a large square room with its corners cut out. There are two archways on each side wall that are completely blocked, presumably by their own tapestries. (So you see that the other tapestry in the room you were in also had an archway behind it.) There are four support posts as shown by the black dots in the center room.



In each corner along each side wall, there is an altar (eight total). Each is incredibly well decorated, and most are heavily decorated with gold, jewels, and other finery. Both Elyse and Oliver can feel the magic radiating from each of them. Before you all can really focus on any of them, the noise gets momentarily louder, and it sounds like a pained wail, still very much in the distance, that then trails off. You can see it is emanating from where the altar in the southern corner of the west wall should be. It is now that you realize that only the husk of that altar is there, as there is a three foot diameter hole crudely pushed through it that goes down farther than your eyes can trace. It goes down a LONG way. Blornvid, using his past knowledge of living in underground places, can see that the hole has continuous walls going down, which should be impossible if there is a dungeon below this floor (and there probably is). You can feel heat radiating out of the hole, when you get very close it.

Taking a look around the ruined altar, you can see that there has been some activity showing that something did indeed come up out of the hole at some point. You cannot tell how long ago that was, just that you haven't heard anything moving in the room at this time.

Blornvid tries to figure out what made such a hole behind the altar.

The hole is drilled straight up through the altar. It doesn't look chiseled or worked. It looks like a underground great worm dug up through the altar to create it. However, there are two odd things about it. First, it is way too small for one of those worms to have done it. Second, it really looks/feels like it is "wrong". Blornvid doesn't think it goes down underground. He thinks it is more like a kind of gateway that a true tunnel. He feels like it is something they probably ought to figure out a way to close.

As he looks at the surviving parts of the altar, he can see that it was dedicated to a god of tyranny. In the background surrounding the altar, you can now see that the main figure is an obvious leader/warlord standing on a pile of skulls. He doesn't look like it was a lot of fun to be around.

As the group looks around, they can see that the eight altars present display a broad selection of gods. This includes the god of tyranny of the damaged altar, to a goddess of civilization, to a god of justice, to a goddess of family, to a god of music and art, to a goddess of weather and water, to a god of destruction, to a goddess of death, finally, completing the circle back to the god of tyranny.

Each of the altars has a backdrop with an abstract depiction of the god/goddess in question, with some kind of symbolic object prominently displayed. The goddess of civilization has a scroll case, the god of justice has scales, the goddess of family has a small house figure, the goddess of weather has a stylized lightning bolt, the god of destruction has a mace, and the goddess of death has a skull. All items are made of gold and look like they can be moved. The exceptions are for the gods of tyranny and music/art. The tyranny object is flat out missing and the music/art object is damaged, smashed against the floor near its altar. You can also see some damage to the music/art altar, too, though that is just superficial.

Wondering Cords as he moved up with inspecting Blornvid to look over the damaged tyranny alter. "I don't want to run into what did this." he explains as he looks over the artificial hole.

"Aye. We shouldn't linger here too long." To the group, he says, "Explore for clues if you must, but be quick about it."

Elyse will take a closer look at the broken object from the god of music/art.

"Let's see how far down this goes."

Oliver approaches the hole in the tyranny-god altar, and retrieves and mixes two vials from his backpack, producing a vial of wine. He drops the vial in the hole, and focuses with his diadem how far it falls until it breaks, or until it is farther away than the hole that Arc dug.

When you drop the flask, your detection switches to the hole after it drops about five feet or so. (I.e. almost immediately.) However, you can clearly see it continuing to drop for many more feet before you loose track of it. You hear it tap against the sides of the hole a few times, the it stops after one last tap. It didn't sound like it broke or shattered, but you're not sure. The noise it was making just stopped. However, the disconcerting moans you hear from the hole have not stopped, though the intensity ebbs and flows, wanes and waxes.Elyse can see that the object is in the form of a small harp, but it's been bent and broken, though still in one piece. As you reach out to it, you can feel it still has strong magic (like everything else in this room) and is gold like the other items.

"There's definitely a portal in this hole. The flask travelled a very long distance with just a very short fall. Any other findings from your side?"