Goblin Quest - Test Your Might

The Bayside Stranglers made their camp in the Crypt of Tula, where silence had settled like dust over dragon bones. This once-contested ground, now cleared, became their sanctuary for a night. But peace is never simple.   At sunrise, they made their move.   With a sack of rocks and a well-rehearsed lie, the party approached the monastery under the guise of ransom deliverers. The place stood grim and imposing, wrapped in an ornate iron fence, its stone structures weathered and watching. A bell tower loomed in silence. Statues flanked the entrance like petrified sentinels, their faces scoured by time. The front gate stood open, inviting... or daring.   At the threshold, guards hiding behind arrow slits in a wall challenged them.   And here, Xmoek spoke. His voice - low, commanding, sharpened by something Toothy and unnatural - left little room for argument. The guards, unnerved but compliant, gestured them through and directed them to where they could find the "pet human."   As they stepped inside, the bells in the tower began to toll.   Following stone paths to a courtyard, they found him: Asmer Kell. A man worn down to the bone by grief, seated beneath a tree with only his fear for company. His pregnant wife, taken by the dragon. His soul, still shackled to her fate.   When he learned the party hadn't brought the ransom, panic took hold. Again, Xmoek’s Toothy voice cut through. Asmer, desperate and trembling, chose betrayal over despair.   He led them to the monastery shrine and laid bare its secrets.   Aeteperax, he revealed, was not just a green-scaled terror. He was something worse: curious. Obsessed. The monks had built him a "dark window," a portal not to another place, but to something else— a breach in reality, deep in the Dark Tapestry, where alien minds whispered from beyond the stars. Aeteperax listens. Sometimes, the darkness listens back. The dragon used potions to slip through cracks in locked doors.    Three lieutenants were entrusted to guard the monastery: a Grioth monstrosity in the Saints Library named Goladryth, a human alchemist in the tower named Pentosh, and a lunar naga named Thaena roaming above in the upper halls. But more than that, Asmer told them something critical.   "Aeteperax... is not his real name."   With the young dragon's true name, the party could unravel the dragon’s defenses - his control over the dark window, perhaps even his link to the far things beyond.   Asmer, still shaking, cast a spell of barkskin over the party. He offered enchanted berries as a parting gift and returned to his perch beneath the tree.   And so, the party delved deeper into the monastery of Irori.   In the monastery cathedral, Gakk’s keen eye revealed a hidden trapdoor beneath a prayer rug. It led down into shadow, into silence. The tunnel beneath the monastery stretched east, emerging in a chamber frescoed with monks captured mid-leap. There sat a high-backed chair. And in it, the Abbot.   Or what remained.   Abbot Kanjougas rose, not as a man, but as a test.   Words came first—cryptic, final—and then fists, fast and cruel. He struck Gooch like a storm given flesh. Gakk's bombs and arrows were evaded. Xmoek’s curses twisted fate to shield their ally, but even so, the blows came. One after another. Rot clung to the wounds. All the while, a key to the room containing the Dark Window dangled around the monk's neck like a promise daring to be fulfilled.   Realizing the battle could not be won, the party chose survival. Xmoek, in a desperate move, pulled a patch from his robe and conjured an iron door between them and death.   They fled.   Back in Belhaim, they sought sanctuary within the golden halls of Abadar’s faithful. There, clerics purged the rot from Gooch's flesh. The party rested. They plotted. And then, they returned.   Not through the gates. Over the wall. Another patch from the robe of wonders.   They crept into the gardens. There they found more enchanted berries—twelve, resting in a brass bowl. They took them. A sign, perhaps, that fate may still be on their side.   Their next target: the Saints Library.   Asmer had said that Goladryth—a horror of wings, eyes, and twisted thoughts—made its nest there. The party scaled the steps and breached the library without a whisper. The chamber was high-ceilinged, haunted by silence, and filled with shredded books. A wooden statue of a meditating woman swayed gently from a twine noose above.   Then they struck.   Goladryth never saw it coming.   Fire lit the shelves. Claws tore. Arrows sang. The Grioth, wielding a blade of alien glass, fought back with psychic rage. But the party fought with purpose. With fury. With unity.   And when the creature fell, the goblins exhaled.   Among the remains, they found a weapon: strange, curved, cruel. Too large to wield, but heavy with story.   The party retreated into a quiet storeroom. There, they caught their breath. Planned their ascent.   One lieutenant down. Two to go.   And somewhere above them, behind locked doors, something waits.   Not Aeteperax.   Something it whispered to in the dark.   Something that whispered back.