The Sixth Processional Stair

The Sixth Processional Stair is a simple broad road, with long flagstone steps leading down at a gentle incline under a vaulted masonry ceiling, wrested from the tiny crevices that the natural caverns at this depth were. Hanging from the keystone of the second arched rib supporting the ceiling is a large topaz, perhaps the size of a cherry, suspended from a silver chain, which shines with a bright yellow light that makes the path appear as if under daylight. A green sapling, with long thin leaves like rounded speartips and flowers with white filamentary petals almost like dandelion seeds surrounding a yellow core like a daisy’s, grows in a large red clay pot in an alcove where a statue that has since been removed once stood. The stair can be smelled even before the light can be seen, as this sapling emits a strong smell not unlike those of mint and honey.

The light here repels ghosts, a scheme by the Necromancer who once ruled this level. Like sunlight, like the forces that keep the ghosts in the Tomb once they enter, they dread to or even physically cannot approach this stair. Many ghosts trapped on this level, or above it, resent this fiercely.

The Withering Eye also resents the presence of this ghost trap, as the topaz used to create it was a gift to her from a family member from the Sun Court, originally one of a pair of earrings, stolen from her by one of the Necromancer’s apprentices. She cannot, however, recover it as the tree is a weakness of hers; the scent it emits is an oil to which she is allergic and which weakens her powers. A direct attempt to reclaim it would leave her vulnerable to ambush at the most critical moment.

The statue-niches on this stair are fewer, and the statues older. Though depth has preserved them, before the Gate was sealed they spent longer between times they would be touched or seen by surfacers. They tend to be older too, though; they are much more rarely replaced, as their depth deters the vainglorious and the expense deters all but the most determined of the pious.

The most eye-catching and ostentatious of the statues is King Barvold’s statue, which nearly bankrupted him to have constructed, and which he ordered be placed here upon his death (before he was laid to rest, while he was still nominally king as a ghost who could be consulted and who could enact supernatural punishment on those who defied oaths to him), to protect it from successors who might try to melt it down and recover the bronze from its body and the silver inlayed for the details of his face and the trim of his robe.

A statue of a young boy in a monk’s habit, a princeling sent off to a monastery to avoid a crisis with his brother perhaps, though the statue is old enough that scholars of royal biographers differ on who this might be, and perhaps not royal at all, hides a hole in the floor beneath it containing a large midnight-black fleece which has a magic power: laying it flat on the ground and then lifting it from the center will cause it to attach itself around a newly-formed yet adult ram, which will serve its summoner as loyally and intelligently as any dog, already knowing a great many commands. If shorn, the ram will vanish soon after, though the newly-cut fleece will have the same power. One who attempts to spin it while unaware of its power will find it tangled and resistant to any attempt to draw usable fiber from it, though one aware of its power could perhaps willfully destroy it (or disperse it) by spinning it into yarn or thread.

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The Master’s Refuge

An ancient crypt, predating the modern kingdom that now sits around the Tomb, is now refuge to two necromancers who fled the place where they did their work after a coup in their number went awry.

Of the two, one is alive, Coriparios, and one, Galemor, is dead, restored to animacy with some of his spellcasting facility but little of his genius or talent as a researcher. In life, Galemor had been master of the expedition, which the apprentice Alvem also came down with initially, while Coriparios was one of the trio of students. As their situation in the depth of the dungeon worsened, Coriparios saw an opportunity to poison his master, kill him, reanimate him, and take his place. It almost worked, except for all of the wild creations that he was unable to bring back under control now that they are free.

Food became even scarcer, and Coriparios resorted to amputating his own limbs, eating them, and then reanimating the bones, lashing them firmly to his body. This has staved off hunger for a while, but food still remains scarce. His desperation has led him to eat poisonous plants from the level above to try to sustain himself, when he can’t get anything more nourishing. On seeing adventurers, his first priority will be food: taking theirs, or cannibalizing them. Even in his weakened state he retains his rein over the spells within his mind, and his whether his hunger allows him to memorize spells anew is irrelevant as his spellbooks are scattered and not with him.

Galemor, for his part, is much stronger, and fleshier (if rotten and bloated). While Coriparios is maddened, Galemor is taciturn, speaking rarely except to cast spells or occasionally say a few words to taunt a foe, in an eerie hollow voice, morose at his betrayal and being left as an ensorcelled undead creature. As he is dead, he cannot learn any further spells nor improve his abilities, and his creative spark that made him such a keen researcher is gone. He resents Coriparios but has no outlet to express this, a weapon that serves his former student’s will. He will be the one to strike first if adventurers show any reluctance to feed his master. If Coriparios were killed, he would have his freedom back, but none of the things he lost on death. He knows this, and resents it.

One of their missing spellbooks is in their former lair, a closet where statues are hidden when visitors to the temples no longer wish to see them, near the Lower Sigil Hall. They would like to have it back, but the Wraith Knight makes an attempt impossible in Coriparios’s weakened state.

The two have substantial treasure between them, and the crypt they rest in is oracular. The soothsayer interred there lived seven lives in a bygone age, and all seven incarnations are interred here. A visitor can ask each body one question on a matter of prophecy and a portent will come to them over the next few days, but once one body has been asked no others will answer until after the next midwinter, and each body will only answer once. The portent will be truthful, but may be cryptic; it could be a dream, or an ominous occurrence; something clearly out of the ordinary that will, in retrospect, be a clear sign. Typically the seven lives of the soothsayer are held to correspond to different fields of one’s life, and each body is asked about its own field; some claim this makes the portents clearer, or makes it more likely that you will be told good news. These seven domains are money, love, status/rank/interpersonal power, conflict/war/fighting, action/work/virtue, family & health, and becoming/personal change/what influence one has on others beyond direct contact (including how one will be known after death).

In addition to the soothsayer’s bones, who the necromancers have exhausted for themselves, they do have a fair sum of magical gear that could be taken as treasure. Some of it is useless to them now; printed books of no magical power, some of which have had their leather bindings eaten, or reagent bottles that are only useful combined with things that they no longer have with them, but they do have some that is immediately useful and that they will use for banditry if that will help them eat.

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The Horse Grave

A sense of rebelliousness and discontent lingers around the grave the short-reigning king Barvold ordered built for his horse Windmane on the latter’s death. Within that lingering discord, however, is a tranquil spirit which can teach the language of horses to those who approach it.

The story of king and grave is simple enough; the king play-acted stories that glorified him at the expense of the actual running of his kingdom, and when a faction within the nobility determined that crowning a competent head who would back them would allow them to loot the land and its people better than leaving an incompetent in it, they proclaimed themselves for his brother, raised armies, and had King Barvold killed. The enormous expenditure on interring a parade-horse as though she were a prince, and the way the king dipped his hand freely into what his vassals had looted to pay for this, was the last straw.

The grave itself is fairly simple; a square chamber with a raised dais in glazed white limestone in the center, on which sits a marble sarcophagus where the horse’s skeleton lies, protected beneath a larger-than-life statue of the occupant, rearing

Even now, though the spirits and ghosts that may have once lingered at this grave have long since passed through the Gate, the sense of discontent remains. Hirelings brought near the Grave (even just walking past its door) should make a morale check, or similar mechanic; failure indicates that they are no longer fully loyal, either planning to act on an established grudge or inventing a new one to act on. If a person under a charm effect passes the grave accompanied by their charmer then they get a new saving throw.

However, equines (horses, unicorns, donkeys, pegasi, zebras, similar fantastic creatures, and hybrids of same) brought here may have the opposite effect, if temporarily, from the swell of pride they get for seeing their kind in a place of honor.

Accounts exist claiming that a blood offering made by revealing a plan of betrayal and then dueling to the death (whether as the betrayer or the betrayee; it may be important or not. Written records are vague and inconsistent) within the crypt itself, horse-spirits can be enticed to teach the language of equines. This may be merely a cover story to justify the executions of disloyal henchmen, however.

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The Lower Sigil Hall

In the great hall of what was once a temple where a mystery cult purified their worshippers to prepare for exalted status in death, now the sigils of foul spells cover the walls. As the War drew to a close, a necromancer from the surface came down here to research ways to turn the ghosts barred from passage through the sealed Gate into weapons, conscript them as soldiers, in service to his liege. This is the final, most expansive, and longest-occupied of his three laboratories, and the one where his experiments drew closest to success.

Unrest among his subordinates as his research continued well past the end of the war led to the ghosts bound to his service being unbound. Though at first glance this place seems abandoned, it is ruled over by a Wraith Knight, an agglomeration of spirits forced to take form as a knight and his arms and armor. The Wraith Knight is naturally invisible, although contact with live bodies (even fresh-shed blood) can remind it of what it once was and force it to take on an appearance, at least where it was touched. Thus as a battle goes on and blood has been shed and spouted over it it will be visible as a blood-drenched silhouette, showing far more blood than was actually shed.

The Knight is compelled toward combat, though it will not attack entirely surprisingly. Interlopers who enter the Hall will hear a challenge shouted that seems to issue from everywhere and nowhere at once, to the effect of “Trespassers! As you have entered my hall, you must do battle with me! Choose a champion and step forward!” For dramatic effect, other bound ghosts may manifest as torchflames around the walls of the room, to illuminate the arena

If a champion does step forward, the Knight will circle them briefly, invisibly, a clanking as if of metal armor close enough that it must be invisible, but no sooner are they sure it must be coming from one side than it clearly comes from the other. Then the Knight attacks, lunging with a sword from behind. The Knight is a capable fighter, as befits a knight, though preternatural strength, speed, and prescient insight a split-second ahead than through skill at swordplay as a proper knight would. It does, however, have a potent enough sense of anatomy to allow it to backstab as a thief, but with the arming sword that it wields

If bested, the Knight is not destroyed, or even disbursed, though some of its constituents may cease to manifest. Only one will be dominant and capable of speaking, which may or may not be the one that was dominant during the fight; the dominant spirit may even be amenable to negotiation, the curse urging it on to battle satisfied with its defeat.

The Knight has no means to enforce any terms encouraging a one-on-one duel, nor ability to punish groups who try to team up against it. It can pursue those who attempt to flee, but it won’t go far as it fears some of the other entities in the Tomb.

After the Knight is bested, the lead ghost might ask something of the people who defeated it.

1. To carry a message back to a living loved one. The ghost knows where they were (6 months ago, a year ago, five years ago, twenty years ago), but they may have moved or since died (and may be found elsewhere in the Tomb).
   
2. To bring a token (a flower or similar) from the ghost’s home to its grave or vice versa
3. To exact revenge (for a slight the ghost incurred in life that died unreturned, for a lifelong vendetta, for the ghost’s murder (or killing in war), for conscription, dispossession, or similar exercise of power), against someone (unrepentant, moving on, repentant, who acted under duress, who was wrongly identified)
4. To ensure proper care is given to something (that a plant, animal, or garden is not overgrown and has a proper caretaker, that a person is raised without undue struggle for the ghost’s absence, that an inheritance is divided or maintained correctly), which may or may not still need that care or even still exist/live
5. That a thing the ghost had in life be recovered and brought (to the ghost’s grave, to the Hall, to someone yet alive)
6. That something be made known (how the ghost died, an episode from its life, a work (a poem, perhaps) the ghost left unfinished)
   

Returning with word of a completed task protects you and your companions from the Knight’s wrath. While the ghost remains a part of the Knight, you may be safe from it forever, so long as you have completed your duties (returning with an incomplete task angers the Knight and makes you its first target); however, it is possible that completing these tasks instead allows the ghost so served to break free of the Knight. This angers the others, but later manifestations of the Knight will have an incomplete set of gear. Free enough, and the bindings will loosen enough that the Knight can disperse; with the Gate closed, this does not mean that they can pass on.

A statue in a hidden niche allows viewing through the eyes of the Star-Mad Duke, though the Knight cannot be seen waiting in ambush

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The Block-Crushed Torchbearer

In a sealed room in a far crypt between the Fifth and Sixth Processional Stairs, a crushing block trap once deterred intruders from using the crypt for passage to a back way down. Now the most loyal of the henchmen of the Band of the Seal is trapped there as a ghost, his body crushed after he was pushed into the trap in an act of betrayal.

Milwen had grown up a servant of the royal court and an attendant to Prince Despin, and had accompanied him before many times as a porter, lanternbearer, cook, and in all sorts of other tasks during the Prince’s career as a paladin. His loyalty was impeccable, and so he was one of a few noncombatants chosen to come along on the Prince’s cursed final mission to seal the Pale Gate, and one of even fewer who, rather than withdrawing from the Tomb as the combatants made their final approach on the Gate, accompanied them to the very brink of the Dead as the Seal was cast, then to flee.

Milwen held close by Despin through most of the levels of the Tomb as the gods and ghosts who resided there realized what had been done and who was to blame, but this crypt is where disaster struck. A block in the ceiling came down as a trap, and Despin leapt through the narrow door, his armored frame blocking the way and leaving Milwen to take the weight of the falling block.

Now he lingers as a ghost. The room is sealed, though the locks could be picked or the doors broken. While he has little personal overall interest in the Band’s mission, especially now, he will discuss the betrayal and his perspective on the Prince at length. In his view, that one lunge for the door, despite his magic armor, the blessings upon him, his supernatural strength, showed everything that could be said of Prince Despin as a man. When faced with a threat, put in a position where he had to act immediately or risk his life or the lives of those around them, he chose to save himself. Whatever deeds he may have done before, and Milwen was there for most of them, he was no hero, because he chose to save himself at the cost of a companion’s life, rather than risk himself to save another.

Adventurers could, perhaps, convince him to assist them, perhaps by doing favors for him or for the family he left behind or the family he was to marry one from on his return. His memory is not great, especially after his death and subsequent time trapped, but he remembers some of the route taken by the Band on the way down and up. Further, his death in a trap has given him supernatural knowledge about traps, enough that he can warn of which landmarks have traps and what not to do for fear of triggering one.

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The Cannibalized Chandler

A bound ghost lingers not far from the lair of the necromancer whose spells once bound her to serve. Her name is Olena, and candlecraft is her trade, though in the recent chaos, she has found herself short on supplies.

Olena was murdered by Lady Ilenora Casrei. Her memories of this are fragmented and scarcely available; she flickers between three forms, depending on how much she remembers at any given moment, and while a change of form and memory will shift her mood, they do not change her capabilities.

In her first form, she looks much as she did in the last weeks of her life. She’s on the tall end of medium height, maybe a few years short of middle age, but her hair has gone prematurely gray and thin and her body is gaunt. She wears a faded yellow dress flecked with grime and dirt. Food and water, even washwater, were scarce at that point in the siege, and as a commoner and not a soldier she had the worst of it. Most of the time this is the form she will be seen in when first met.

The sight of a knife or sword can cause her to remember her death, however, and in that state she will bleed rather excessively. Her dress will have been cut to tatters, and she will have a kitchen knife still embedded in a wound to her chest, stabbing downward between her ribs just below her right shoulder. Her dress is soaked red in many places, and strips of cloth torn from the back of her dress hang down behind, dragging across the floor and leaving bloody streaks (despite their appearance, these are still part of her “body” as a ghost and change with the rest).

Finally, she can sometimes take a visage with chunks of flesh already flayed from her body, her ribs and arm-bones exposed, when the aftermath of her murder is forced back into the forefront of her mind. Regardless, though, she retains the willpower to focus despite the pain.

A necromancer found her ghost like this and put binding spells on her to compel her to make candles for him, in order that he may bind other ghosts. While the work is a distraction from her pain and her plight as a ghost before the sealed Gate, she resents the evil use they were put to. It has been some time since he or his apprentices have attempted to collect candles from her or have brought her wax to work in.

Traversing into the Tomb has given her some not-insignificant magical powers. First, because she died betrayed, she can sense betrayal; she can smell if anyone around her is plotting to betray anyone else, or if anyone around her has a betrayer plotting against them. A look into a prospective betrayer’s eyes can allow her to discern details of the plot as clearly as if she were reading a shop-sign. Likewise, as she breathes betrayal in by scent, so too can she breathe it out. She can whisper things to be heard only by one person in present company, but only so long as they warn of or urge betrayal (fabricating a betrayal plot, of course, counts as urging betrayal)

She can also do things with candles which should by rights be impossible. She can restore length to a burned candle with a spell, and she can knows the secret lore to create candles that do impossible things (such as shedding light that reveals invisible things, or muffles sound, or makes wounds bleed more fiercely, or allows sight through closed doors, or even that never burns down). Such candles are spoiled if ever touched by direct sunlight. If she is won over as an ally and given food, she may repay her allies by turning raw wax into candles.

She is ravenously hungry, as one might expect given the circumstances of her death. While she lacks the Hunger Chorus‘s power to steal already-eaten food from the stomachs of the living, she is fully capable of using ghostly powers to cause food to fall from packs unnoticed so that she can eat as soon as its bearers have turned their backs. Food can also be used to make an alliance with her, by trade or gift.

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