The Eight-Eyed Basilisk

A long serpentine creature, with too many eyes and as many legs, lairs in an old crypt on the sixth level of the Tomb. Its eyes are set into its face in four pairs; one pointing forward, one behind and above them and to the side, one pair up top, protruding like a frog’s eyes, and one pair on tentacle-like eyestalks, able to scan in any direction at all.

As a basilisk, this creature’s gaze alone is deadly. Its foremost eyes are the deadliest, rapidly turning the flesh of its victims to stone. One approaching the creature’s side and catching the gaze of the second pair of eyes first is rooted in place, transfixed with fear for as long as the creature holds its gaze (giving, perhaps, a split-second as it turns its head to bring its petrifying eyes to bear, should it choose to do so). The third set of eyes can look in any direction except directly behind or below the creature, but where they loo depends on the creature’s focus. This pair lays a curse on those who meet it where any wounds they inflict on others directly (through weapons or spells, or deliberately-set traps with intent to do harm, but not through accidents where the injury is not immediately caused by a weapon or spell) is echoed on the curse victim; bruises appear, bones break, and for attacks with fire, burns appear despite a lack of visible flames. Rubbing a scale taken from the source basilisk on such a wound, while it has no immediate effect, protects that location from any further harm from the curse (somehow acquiring such wounds over one’s entire body and treating them with basilisk scales would, then, lift the curse); it can also be broken by pricking oneself on a thornless rose.

A few small mercies exist for adventurers forced to fight this monster. While its sight is impeccable even in the dark, and its sense of smell is acute, it lacks any organ of hearing. Additionally, when hungry, it prefers not to petrify its targets as it cannot eat them in that state (and, unlike a normal snake, it is capable of keeping its eyes closed), while when sated (which can last a while), it does not hunt. It also has only a very weak venom, and it does not constrict.

The creature’s lair was a family tomb for three separate and unrelated families, over the course of its history, the predecessors having been cleared out and removed to ossuaries each time. In at least one case, valuable grave goods that the temple-keepers would not allow to be removed to the surface were simply dumped in a hole and covered over with flagstones.

Perhaps it is not the only one of its kind. A well-traveled troll brought it here, whether as its own pet or as an offering to another entity that dwells within the Tomb (perhaps a servitor of the Final Court) and it has remained here since. Tracking its owner may be a challenge, in the stone of the Tomb and with the patience that these immortals have.

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The Sulfurous Hunter

The sulfurous smell that permeates this crypt does not come from anything within, but rather from a crack in the rocks under the flagstone floor. Therein lies the lair of the Hunting Smoke, an animate cloud of smoke with a sinister, cunning intelligence. On occasion, it wakes from its slumber to prowl the halls of the Tomb, a cloud of smoke with two eyes, visible like splotches of red or black if the light catches them just right.

The Smoke feeds not on flesh, but on emotion. Fear and pain, especially at the moment of death, is its preferred flavor. To do so it forces its way into the lungs of the unwary, choking them out. Incense can create a barrier against it (a wisp of scented smoke is as solid to it as an iron bar), and it can be confused if a sacrificial animal tries to inhale it as it attempts to force its way down a victim’s throat. A wet cloth over the face will also bar its way provided it has not begun its attack yet, and even then, some claim it can draw out the water. The philosophical ability to contemplate one’s coming death and the creativity to struggle against it and try to outthink it are the most savory of meals for this Hunter; base terror is emptier. Thus it prefers humans to animals. Tall tales claim it also, sometimes, manifests claws of ash and coal and rips its victims apart with them; this may be an embellishment or even an understatement of its true ability. Perhaps those tales are a misdirection of stories of how it has battled shapeshifting adventurers who have assumed gaseous form; it seems reasonable that it might have claws for such prey.

When at rest, it dwells in the crack in the rock. The odor that comes through comes from below; Magma Wisps dwell deeper down, in force, in the acrid, smoky levels below, and the slight wisps of the poison vapors of their home give the smell to the crypt above. Careful study might allow adventurers to learn to sniff out the difference between when the creature is home and when it is not, as the living smoke absorbs material from the vapors and ejects other material into them.

While the path down is dangerous to risk (one would have to travel single file, in gaseous form, through the lair of a dangerous smoke being, in a space where one cannot change form back, facing the monster on its home ground), its shadow counterpart is a wide chimney that is home to no such monster; one need merely fix a rope and rappel. Then the challenges are reduced: find one’s way there through the twisted corridors of the shadow world, and then survive the toxic fumes below.

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The Moon Vessel

In the shadowy reflection of the dungeon, an alcove in the wall holds a life-size statue of a woman holding a large bowl, sculpted in red fired clay. The sculpture cannot be called crude, but it is not elaborate; it could perhaps be said to be painstaking work by an amateur, carefully trying to make it just so.

This is a magical shrine. If fresh water is poured into the bowl and then used to wash before it runs out (a pinhole in the bottom of the bowl allows for drainage down a channel that runs through the statue and behind it), even as little as one’s hands, face, and feet, it gives protection against attack by the undead both magical and physical. Not perfect protection, but enough warding to make the difference between a spell or blow that brings death and one turned aside completely. Further, flesh, bone, and wood so blessed will be stronger against the undead, and may, perhaps, be used to dispel undead created by sorcery. This effect lasts only until the areas washed next need it to remain clean (a very short time, in a dungeon. Shorter still, if one frequently gets in fights), though it will not falter in the middle of a battle.

Inside the statue is a large chunk of olivine, perhaps the size of a cat or a small dog. This crystal resonates with the power of the Green Moon above, which sometimes trails and sometimes leads the Storm Moon, waxing and waning in size and phase both over the course of a month, fluctuating around the size of a coin. The shrine’s power likewise waxes and wanes. Further, it is at its weakest when the Green Moon is eclipsed entirely by the greater Storm Moon, and at its strongest when its shadow falls upon the Storm Moon. Sometimes, then, the cleansed parts of the body even repel the grime and blood of battle, ensuring that their bearer will strike true.

This crystal belongs to the Withering Eye, who supervised her apprentice in the making of this statue. While the statue is unimportant, stealing or damaging the olivine inside will attract its owner’s wrath. She placed it here and left it, knowing that eventually it will be found, used, and her necromancer problem will so sort itself out. Perhaps, even, she will be able to enforce a debt upon adventurers who profited from the killing of her enemy, as they borrowed her power, her magic item, to do it.

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The Mason’s Stair

A cramped, tight spiral staircase winds down into the deep, rotation after rotation. The stone here was rough-carved, and dust has set in after the ages wore on. This stair was never meant to be seen by a prince’s eyes, as the Processional Stairs were. Instead, it was meant to deliver workmen into the deeps more directly (as the halls were arranged in its day) than the Processional Stairs were.

Like the Sixth Processional Stair, it too is warded, another blockade against the passage of ghosts in similar form: a topaz on a short chain, radiant like a miniature sun. The gemstone is protected against recovery by its original owner, first by a magical force that repels attempts to touch it, and second by a clearly-scribed, visible rune of shattering painted onto the stone from which it hangs. Removing the gemstone from the rune will activate it and break the stone. The original owner would not stand for that. The theft is one thing, which she plans vengeance for, but an adventurer who broke the stone, given the her intentions for it and how it came to her, would be marked for a fate worse than death.

Tufts of green clover grow from cracks in the walls under this sunlight, giving way to blue ghost-grass as one descends the stairs. Occasionally, visitors might encounter a pair of grass faeries, either going about their business dancing upon the grass or bickering with eachother about what grass is in what grass-faerie’s plot. This bickering is likely whether both are surfacers (who somewhat resemble bees, though they are comparably tall to a human’s wrist-to-fingertips length), both are mysterious undergrounders (whose look is less consistent from one to another, but batlike or mothlike wings are not uncommon. They are, however, always small enough to hide in a tuft of tall grass), or one is each.

Grass-faeries are shy, and tend to hide from mortals. They might give a boon for their freedom if captured, and have short memories unless something reminds them. When they do run across someone who has captured them and taken something from them before, they may come up with mischief to do in retaliation. Such a grudge never ends, and may in fact spread as one brings in other faeries as confederates and then those faeries, not caring about the original wrong but now with a taste for their victim, conduct their own mischief. Anything that could be done by tripping people, attaching burs, inflicting hay fever, and other powers of grass is within their power (even clouding a victim’s vision by making their eyes swell up and water, as long as the faerie remains near). People who are marked victims of these faeries are best advised to avoid grass (especially unmowed grass), clover, dandelions, and similar plants.

A short ways down, an alcove contains a carved representation of a stone-herder surrounded by its imps. This is a blessing for safety for the workmen in question; rubbing it provides magical protection against the occurrence of cave-ins and other mining disasters.

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The Chiming Ossuary

The walls of an ossuary corridor, the walls stacked thick and high with bones so tangled they cannot be easily parted, hide a chimney-shaft connecting the tunnel with much deeper construction.

Deep below, a chime tolls out regularly, not quite on the hours but almost, as if counting the hours of another world’s day. This chime can be heard through the bone walls. When it does, fires and spell-lights hear it as an order to go dark.

The hall itself is singular, despite the dungeon complex being bifurcated into light and dark reflections. Which reflection one exits the hall into depends on whether one does so under bright light, or darkness (or the mere light of a single candle), as is the case in other shadow portals.

Behind one of the bone walls is a disused shrine, though the way to it would have to be cleared through an arduous work of desecration. The fae-shadow creature that once lived there, as much an artifice of glamer and shadow-working as it is a material thing, has long since abandoned that dwelling to take up another, allowing the bones of mortals to be used to wall off the old place. Perhaps, under a loose flagstone in the shrine, some ritual vessels still remain.

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The Poet’s Statue

An alcove off an otherwise nondescript corridor holds a statue made of black polished basalt, showing a woman standing in a neutral pose, posed as if delivering a poem or song, one hand by her side, the other raised to speak. Larger than life (perhaps 8′ tall, not counting her pedestal), she looks down over almost every visitor she gets.

Her statue has a magic to it; anything recited (not merely spoken, but deliberately recited with each word having been planned in advance) to it will be indelibly fixed in the reciter’s mind. Tall tales suggest that an original composition made for the purpose delivered to her can give even greater blessings, perhaps enough to turn a struggling poet’s career around. Although, if one is struggling with one’s own poetry, it may be unwise to fix such a work in one’s memory.

Many of her visitors note the similarity between her cloakpin and a decorative pin worn on the Proud Maid‘s dress. They look remarkably similar, even under close inspection; some speculate that they are indeed the same pin being worn by both statues’  models.

There are two main competing theories as to who this statue is of. One suggestion is held by the upper echelons of the actors’ guild, that the statue doesn’t depict a woman at all, but an actor from the past named Aban, who was known for the fluidity with which he played different parts, men’s and women’s and non-human parts alike, dressed for the part of a woman. Initiations of new members of this inner circle are conducted in front of the statue. They point out the lack of wear on the statue as illustrative that it can’t be as old as some of the advocates of other theories claim.

Sculptors and masons would dispute that; the statue’s material is extremely resistant to weathering, and statues age strangely in the Tomb.

The other best-known theory is that it is the adventuresome bard Darisa, who discovered the impending return of the conquering sorcerer-king Malzorakh who projected his spirit from a comet on which he was imprisoned, found the exact spells from which he drew his greatest powers and their weaknesses, and learned the binding spell to prevent him from projecting again after her ally, the hero Ientan, struck him down, and then returned to her itinerant poet’s life.

Some claim that she is the maid, though one who has gazed at the faces of both statues would find that unlikely.

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The Faded Apprentice

After his companion’s coup against the leader and teacher of their brotherhood, the last of the necromancer’s apprentices, a man named Bordrik, fled to hole up in a crypt in the far corner of the level, to avoid his master’s fate. There he starved to death while assembling an army of ensorcelled ghosts; he remains as their leader.

His minions fight like one might expect undead to fight, and they neither embrace nor entirely resent what they are compelled to do, instead acting almost as if it were not them doing it and any meetings between their axes and intruders’ flesh is an unfortunate accident with a guest to be apologized over. One of the ghosts who had the misfortune of being so bound had been a butler in life, and even as an undead weapon retains his unflagging politeness and sets an example for the others.

Unlike Coriparios, the newly-minted leader of their brotherhood, Bordrik has gained a great deal of clarity from giving in to hunger; except for the inexhorable call downward toward the Gate (which he might be able to obey, if only by forcing his way past ghosts who are closer) and his inability to memorize new spells (though his spellbook was lost during the fighting, mooting that point), it is as if he has merely transcended his needs. Indeed, he pretends that this is the case; through magic and force of will, he has transcended his body’s needs and can carry on despite his hunger. His cravings for food are matched only by his paranoia that anyone he sees must be an enemy and someone acting peaceable is merely a subtle enemy. He is much like his colleague Alvem that way. Offers of food, provided he can be persuaded it’s not poisoned, cursed, or otherwise baneful to him, are the easiest way to pass his paranoia should his aid be needed.

Blocking off the stairs with light was his idea. Not only does it prevent him from approaching the Gate as it calls him to, and made capturing ghosts for experiment easier, but it also keeps some potential interference out of the deep. This has made him an enemy of the Withering Eye and her coven. He has managed to bluff her into inferring that he knows her True Name, though he does not; thus she both hesitates to attack him directly and has forbidden the others in her coven from speaking to him.

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The Investigator’s Sepulcher

The cavernous road to the Pale Gate is ancient, far moreso than the Tomb that now occupies it, and the builders of the Tomb were not the first to note its significance, even among mortals (the gods who created it presumably knew from the start, as would their servitors). Little is still known about the builders of the complex that the Processional Way passes through beyond the sixth Stair.

In more recent centuries, during the generations when the Tomb was first being built, a wizardess who spent her last decades feeling that she was on the cusp of unlocking some great mystery of that complex which would lead her to phenomenal power. Such was her obsession that she defied death itself, sequestering herself in the Tomb as a lich.

A lich in the Tomb has both an easier and a harder time of it than a lich elsewhere. Easier, because the natural power of the Tomb makes the dead harder to distinguifrom the living. Harder, because the Final Court does not allow mortals to slip their grasp easily, and in the Tomb one sits on their doorstep. Doubtless bribery played a role in enabling her to hold this place.

She has forgotten her mortal name, though she has not forgotten her rivals. She has painted smooth rocks to look like skulls and given them names like Murten and Olbreect, and periodically picks one up to tell them about how her latest discoveries have vindicated her entirely, or to poke holes in a half-remembered argument she had with one of them. Her necromantic senses would preclude her using an actual skull of the wrong person for this; the knowing that she is using someone else as a stand-in would be too strong for her to properly gloat.

Some of the linens in her personal trunk survived; bedsheets and even a fine dress,  the thread grown finer and wispier with age. Aside from that, she has a room of apparatus and reagents to run various tests only some of which are meaningful on things she digs up (where, exactly, she sources her reagents is a secret she keeps to herself), and several rooms of storage of artifacts of various kinds she has dug up from the temple complex below, catalogued with descriptions of half-understood visions her necromantic senses have given about them, and the results of her tests, supporting some argument about the history of the place below. She has written out some of it.

She is quite ornery of late, as the stairways down have been blocked off with light from the stolen twin topaz suns, and she dares not approach them. She has taken that time to focus on preparations for the next push of her study and analysis of the considerable amounts she has already gathered, but still wants to return downward. Depending on her mood she may offer to reward adventurers who remove the light wards from a stairway, or she may simply refuse to speak to them at all. She has been known to work with visitors and ghosts, though she tries to avoid diverting ghosts too long or drawing too much attention to herself and her place in the Tomb.

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The Catacomb of Slaughtered Stone

The Stone-Herder known to mortals as Bassak has faced a tragic turn in its tale in recent years. He has fled, with his shrine, to the gate between the Chasm and the vaults of the seventh level of the Tomb to nurse his wounds, sealing that gate to all others.

As with so many tragedies in the Tomb, Bassak’s tragedy began with the Band of the Seal. His shrine, close to the Processional Way, put him into direct conflict with the Band when they came through, the only one who could bring the ceiling down to close their path, and a powerfully enchanted blade still sinks deep into the creature’s stony body, yet to be drawn out, along with many other wounds, from picks, hammers, and magical weapons. Indeed, were Stone-Herders not spirits that seldom truly died, and were it not for the power of the Tomb as the destination of dead things, Bassak would have been slain for trying to deter the Band from their course. Thus he is called the Slaughtered Stone.

As he tried to recover, then a Necromancer came upon him, and, finding him in death’s grasp, ensorcelled him as a servitor. Bassak, though, ageless, older than the written spells that the Necromancer knew, eventually gained the upper hand in their battle of wits and slipped his bonds, retreating into the catacombs and sealing the passage to the Chasm in a rather hasty job (an unnatural-looking seam is visible between the basalt of the chasm and the granite brought up from below to seal it), in an attempt to besiege his enslavers, who used that passage to raid the bee-hive above for honey and meat to eat and wax for candles. Only a Stone-Herder’s command, or long and dedicated work with picks and carts (the barrier is perhaps two yards thick) could reopen the path to the Chasm.

The stones yet obliged when he ordered them bear his shrine to his new station, and again when called them to deliver to him nuggets of gold and purple-black gemstones, in defiance of the Stone-Herder’s station (whose powers must never be used for personal wealth or, especially, as a form of mining) and an embrace of his undead abominability, there to entice the trolls, goblins, and satyrs above and the magma-wisps below to his aid against his former enslaver and his accomplices.

Quite the collection of treasure can be found at the shrine, besides. Its original place beside the Processional Way, and his then-kinder demeanor (for an ageless Stone-Herder) other made him into a sort-of representative of Stone-Herder-kind to mortals, who brought him offerings to ensure passage safe from cave-ins and other hazards of the underground both in the Tomb and beyond (many who worked in mines carried offerings here); all the treasures of the surface and even some of underground transformed by surfacers, such as coins and jewelry of gold, but also animal sacrifices, trophies from magical beasts, and fine wines. Adding that to the proceeds of his recent mining, and what he has looted from the necromancer, and his war chest is quite substantial. He will take it as an insult if mortals ask for any of it in payment for ousting the Necromancer, however; mortals should avenge other mortals’ blasphemies against the gods for piety, not payment. Indeed, any mortal that expresses a wish for payment in any way, even by eyeing the treasures, in his eye shares the same hubristic greed that left him in this state, and he may respond to the insult with lethal force. This is even true if the mortal visitor comes into the shrine to find Bassak sleeping in a form indistinguishable from a boulder, which is often. A mortal who manages to speak with him will likely be tasked with inviting the troll Jorhilde and her family to his aid.

To further deter mortals from attempting to take his treasure, he has arranged things so that the only way to reach his shrine, aside from ordering stones to part, is through a mazelike catacomb. His newly-twisted powers with his reanimation allowed him to breathe an unlife into the bone hands and skulls that rest in that catacomb; now the hands skitter around, whether alone (where their bones sharpen to a clawlike edge at the moment they strike) or on half or full arms (which allow them to take up other bones and hurl them at their adversaries). Either way, they also dessicate those they strike, and the wounds they leave putrefy if not treated properly. The skulls fly, bite, and report everything they see to their master. Some even lead groups of hands, improving their marksmanship and coordination.

The Catacomb is further protected by twisted magic; an enchantment on it causes those caught within it to confuse right and left, at least some of the time. Bringing companions and discussing which way one is going at every juncture and only moving on once there is agreement as to which is right and which is left is a sure way to beat this enchantment, but the unwary will be lost to wander the catacomb and worn down, never reaching its end and being slain or ejected depending on the mood the spell takes that moment, and how Bassak directs it.

Also by the shrine is a spring of healing water, rerouted from its natural place by careful application of stone-herding. Bassak dared not go out to touch it with his enemies about, but with the water here he has tried it. Though it restores him some, it also unbinds the spells restoring animacy to his body and allowing him to slip free of the laws that bound him while alive; it is likely that the healing water would leave him inert before it restores him. Already, he has cleansed himself to the point that the weight of his crime of mining bears down on him; he dares not attempt to heal himself further until he has driven his enemies from the Tomb. Perhaps not even then. The healing spring has also only strengthened the grip Bassak’s stone has on Prince Despin’s sword embedded in him. Removing it would be almost as much an injury as when he was first stabbed, though perhaps enough reanimating magic remains that he may still retaliate.

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The Miserly Assayer

A dead man serves the Final Court as a functionary. This duty fell to him only recently, in the scheme of things; he was not a particularly faithful man, or a folk hero, or anything of that sort, but rather, he had a soul of a very particular type, made so by continuous lifelong effort, and so, rather than passing on into an ordinary sort of afterlife, he was conscripted to serve the gods. Contrary to what one might expect of one who contorted his soul through lifelong effort at a task, he was not a monk. Indeed, the furthest thing from it; he was a merchant.

At his death, he was stripped of his name, and of the burdensome aspects of his humanity, all to make him more efficient in his work to achieve his new purpose. He is stationed in a small shrine, which takes a shortcut where the Processional Way veers through a statue gallery. Ghosts pass through, and he assays them, as if he were counting coins, noting where they gleam and the weights of their flaws, and the burdens of their misdeeds. He prepares a report on each to send to the gods below, that each ghost may go to their proper afterlife once passing through the Gate.

His powers and insight into the nature of a soul are not restricted to the bare souls of ghosts; he can read the living with equal facility. For those few live ones who approach and receive an audience (easier, perhaps, since the closing of the Gate; though roughly as many ghosts arrive at the Tomb now as did before, they tend to progress downward slower, and in larger groups and less order (so when they do pass, they do not all wait for him to review them all). With fewer ghosts to assay, he has more time to oversee mortals, though if a ghost does come he will quickly shoo the mortals out), he can identify alignment, misdeeds that weigh on them, either in the consideration of the gods of the Final Court or even just by their weight on the thoughts of one being weighed, and prescribe means of atonement and amends for when such things are possible. He can even identify curses, their causes and effects and how they might be removed.

If his name were to be discovered and spoken to him, he could, perhaps, gain some semblance of his humanity back. The gods of the Final Court below would not look highly on such an act, but with the Gate sealed there is little they can do to express that displeasure. This might make him more pliable for giving readings to living visitors at the expense of his duties. He was not a remarkable man in life; he was singleminded at his trade at the expense of all family, indeed all social ties that were not business, but despite that did not distinguish himself as a great master. Nor was he an ancient; there might be those still alive who knew him in life. Perhaps, also, were he so restored, he could turn his powers on himself, and know why he was placed here: because with that singlemindedness, there was nothing for him beyond the Gate. A flight of fancy suggests that even that could be changed, were he restored; perhaps, when the gate reopens, he can join the ghosts passing through into the next life.

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