Chapter Five: Bapdis Orjo's Gift of Reconciliation

Sure.

Vhezyen will also use the Detect Magic to gauge the entire room, the garnets, etc looking for any auras that pop up.

Not finding any magical auras on the skull or garnets, Vhezyen begins to suspect that the dirt monster was, in fact, an earth elemental, and that these objects might have been mere ornamentation.

Domarc knows little of elementals, but it's not inconsistent with anything he's heard that they might merely return to the inanimate form of their constituent element upon death.

Vhezyen scouts ahead down the south exit, looking carefully for any hidden surprises that might either endanger or benefit the party. Finding none, he follows the 40' length of passage to a large chamber, about 40' wide and 55' long. The south wall is rounded. A little over half the way to the back of the chamber is a massive quartz crystal cluster, about eight feet wide at its base and reaching up to a height of about six feet, greenish-gray in color.

An ornate but worn wooden cabinet stands against the east wall of the chamber, paint peeling from the floral patterns carved into it. On the west wall, the party sees something terribly strange.

A large wooden board is affixed to the west wall, about 20' long and 10' high. Pinned to the board with metal spikes are what you can only guess is the dismembered, flayed body of a creature unlike any you have seen in the Werld.

The two halves of its barrel-shaped body, neatly bisected, are side-by-side on the left side of the board, showing the strangely geometric and mostly hollow structure of the creature's insides. Three legs are pinned to the right side, two intact, one partially flayed open. Three arms are lined up along the bottom of the board.

The creature had a smooth, pebbly, brownish-red hide; three claw-like digits on each limb; a circular, sharp-toothed mouth on the top of its body. There are notes scrawled all over the wooden board with a charcoal pencil: blocks of text, arrows, diagrams of the creature's anatomy. The language is not one any of you recognize.

Updated map:

Felor can only speculate as to its origins, but as for its inner workings, it appears to be almost entirely given over to a digestive system: the mouth on top leads to a large hexagonal stomach cavity that branches out fractal-like into many smaller hexagonal cells, some of which still have little deposits of crushed crystalline rock inside them. Outside of this system there are other gemlike masses, mostly up around the top of the body. Three yellow spheres in particular look to Felor like they might have been the creature's eyes.

Domarc finds no evidence of traps or locks on the cabinet. Mordred examines the crystal, but takes away no particular insights.

The cabinet has three shelves inside. On the bottom shelf are various digging and stoneworking tools: chisels, mallets, picks, hammers, shovels, a mattock. On the middle shelf are tablets, scroll cases, and a little wooden case containing writing implements. On the top shelf is a glass flask containing a cloudy-looking liquid, a folded green cloth with brown trim, a few yellowed bones, a sealed glass jar full of dirt, and a copper bowl containing a few uncut gems of varying size: a large emerald, about eight small garnets, a walnut-sized yellow topaz, and two amethysts.