Session 0042 : A Flower for Thee

Storm Coming

  As dawn came on the 31st of Weißhexe, Samstag, the weather shifted. The spring winds that had been rising over the past days intensified.   Lev and Cathlynn both rolled high on Nature; between them they were sure: a major thunderstorm was inbound, not just a passing squall.   The wind already howled through the trees. The sky darkened instead of brightening; distant thunder rolled.   The party quickly decided:   They were ~15–20 miles from the caves – too far to reach safely before the storm broke.   Their current tents would not survive the coming wind and sheets of rain.   Best option: fall back to yesterday’s clearing (where the wagon and horses remained) and fortify.   Back at the original camp, they turned the clearing into a hobbit-hole-adjacent storm shelter:   A fallen tree with exposed root ball became a natural windbreak and partial roof.   Lilly used mold earth to berm soil around the wagon and reinforce the fallen tree’s roots.   Cathlynn used plant growth to thicken grasses, roots, and underbrush into a living, entangling green wall above and around the shelter.   Dorian rigged a lean-to roof from deadwood, set against the trunk, and the group used their tent canvas more as a tarp than a freestanding tent.   They deliberately avoided cutting living trees – everyone in this party is, to some degree, nature-aligned and uneasy about felling trees in this forest.   By the time they finished, they had:   A low, cramped, but solid earth-and-root shelter able to shield all four adventurers.   The wagon secured.   The horses anchored and partly screened from the wind.   They had about three hours of work before the storm hit. They used it.  

The Storm Breaks

  When the storm finally arrived, it did so in earnest.   The wind escalated from “annoying” to furious: tree canopies whipped and groaned overhead; branches snapped in the distance.   Thunder moved from a far-off rumble to deafening crashes within a quarter mile.   Rain came in sheets, hammering the forest floor so hard it bounced back up as mist and reduced visibility to almost nothing.   Mechanically, it was effectively a severe thunderstorm:   Visibility dropped to near–zero; ranged attacks and perception at distance were unrealistic.   Any open flame would have been instantly destroyed.   The party huddled in their earthen shelter, while outside:   The horses panicked. Several Animal Handling checks later, they were barely kept from bolting.   Lilly, the smallest, nearly got pulled by the cross-winds; only quick reactions (and a re-rolled save) kept her grounded.   With the storm at full strength, conversation became impossible; voices were ripped away by the wind. Lightning struck uncomfortably close more than once.   Then something else moved in the storm.  

The Pile in the Rain

  Through the curtain of rain, something huge and wrong moved at the edge of the clearing:   Roughly Humanoid in outline, 7–8 feet tall.   Broad, hunched shoulders. Long, dragging arms of twisted roots, vines, and branches.   A hulking shape of wet leaves, moss, mud, stone, and rot – like the forest floor had heaped itself into a person and started walking.   A shambling mound.   It approached the shelter, the party tense and ready for a brutal fight… and then did something unexpected.   A root-tendril reached out from its torso like a cautious snake, stopping just short of Lilly’s face.   When she reached out and touched it, the entire creature shivered – and then, from head to toe, bloomed with flowers along its flanks.   It gently wrapped the tendril around her hand and tugged, insistent but not painful, and then:   The ground in front of it opened.   Roots split and shifted, revealing an earthen tunnel angling down under the forest. The mound began to descend into it, still holding Lilly’s hand. Behind the party, a smaller plant-thing – another mound or a vine blight – loomed at the edge of the clearing, silent sentinel over the horses and wagon.   Every instinct shouted trap. Every druidic sense Lilly and Cathlynn had said no, this is trust.   They chose to follow.  

Into the Roots

  The tunnel led into a low, damp cavern complex:   The ceiling hovered around 5–5.5 feet for much of it – a stoop for most, comfortable for Lilly.   The floor was mossy, slick, and rich with the smell of rot, earth, and water.   A subterranean stream ran along the left, its water cold and surprisingly clear.   Bioluminescent fungi glowed soft blue around pools and along rock faces, giving just enough light to navigate without torches for those with darkvision.   Once below, the shambling mound:   Led them along a root-lined ledge.   Extended several vines to point down-tunnel, into the darkness.   Bloomed its flowers again, then, one by one, withered them in the direction it pointed.   Lilly interpreted: something bad lay that way—something that hurt plants, corrupted roots, and spilled blood.   When she called it “bad,” the mound physically slumped down into a two-foot-high pile, as if exhausted or afraid. It seemed clear: it wanted help.   The party advanced cautiously, leaving the smaller plant guardian behind to watch the mounts.  

The Half-Sunken Temple

  Following the tunnel, the party emerged into a broader cavern:   A ledge of stone and earth circled parts of the chamber; beyond it, a wide, clear pool filled most of the floor.   Half-submerged in that pool was a small, ancient temple structure, sunken and drowned over who-knows-how-many years.   Around the water’s edge clustered thick patches of bioluminescent fungi.   The water itself was unsettling:   In some places pristine – cold and crystal-clear, with rock and strange cave growth visible at the bottom.   Around one particular edge, however, the water was clouded, fouled with waste. Goblins, it turned out, had been using the sacred pool as a latrine.   That, more than anything, explained the shambling mound’s misery.   They weren’t alone in the cavern.  

Goblins at the Pool

  Dorian, scouting ahead in stealth, heard it first:   A Goblin voice in the dark, singing in Goblin and muttering prayers as it tossed what sounded like fish entrails into unseen water.   The wet rrrip of something soft being torn, followed by a splash, repeated.   Then another Goblin voice, farther back in the darkness, complaining that the first was paranoid and telling him to “hurry up and feed that thing so we can get out of here.”   Two goblins. One actively feeding something in the water.   The party tried to move quietly, but the cavern floor was slick and treacherous. Cathlynn rolled poorly, slipped, and went face-first into a shallow pool with a splash.   That was enough.   One Goblin – a regular scout – moved toward the sound and spotted Cathlynn in the water.   Before he could shout an alarm, Dorian put an arrow clean between his eyes. The Goblin dropped face-down into the pool, blood clouding the sacred water.   Advancing carefully, the party found more:   A second pile of vines and branches near the water’s edge, hacked and half-disassembled – another of the plant creatures, chopped apart for materials.   A crude, half-sunken statue on a stone plinth at the far right of the chamber, waist-deep in the pool: a rough idol of Maglubiyet.  

The Idol of Maglubiyet

  Up close, the idol was grotesque:   Its body was built from packed mud, dead plants, and the hacked vines of the murdered shambling “kin.”   The surface was studded with small animal bones.   One hand was held low, palm open. The other was raised, gripping something.   Its “face” was smeared to evoke a leering goblinoid features.   That “something” in the raised hand was worst of all:   The severed head of Ikiri.   Her eyes were open but milky; her jaw slack.   Her face was marked with runes in blood and mud, praising Maglubiyet and binding her death into the offering.   It was clear: this was the crude “temple” where the sacrifice had been performed.   Dorian, goblin-wise as ever, identified the Goblin tending the idol as a Goblin hexer – a spellcaster and ritualist. The party engaged.  

The Hexer and the Elk

  The hexer proved notably tougher than his kin:   He opened by blinding Dorian with magic, coating his eyes in some spectral, stinging substance.   Lev immediately burned a Lesser Restoration to cure the blindness, bringing Dorian back into the fight.   The hexer hurled other curses and hexes, but the party kept closing the distance.   Lilly, out of higher spell slots and patience, went big:   She cast Conjure Animals and called eight Fey elk into the flooded chamber.   Great antlered shapes appeared in the dim light and charged through five feet of water, hooves churning, antlers down.   The image of a Goblin spellcaster suddenly finding himself surrounded by a wall of furious elk is one no one at the table will forget soon.   One elk in particular landed a devastating critical hit, slamming into the hexer with enough force to almost bowl him off his feet.   Zephyr attempted to polymorph the hexer into a chicken, but the Goblin’s will held.   Lev followed up with a Guiding Bolt, bathing him in radiant light and making him an easy target.   Cathlynn’s crossbow and Dorian’s arrows hammered him further.   Badly wounded and clearly outmatched, the hexer retreated onto the plinth at the idol’s feet, shrieking about The Heretic “defiling the temple.”   And then he vanished into the water.   His body rippled, became translucent, and collapsed in on itself, merging with the pool. No corpse. No splash. Just gone.  

Crimson Thread

  Suspecting trickery, the party regrouped.   Lev cast detect magic, scanning the chamber.   Dorian drew on the unique property of his bow – the enchantment known as Crimson Thread.   Focusing on the hexer as his quarry:   He loosed a mundane arrow at the base of the idol.   A glowing red line appeared in the air, tracing the arrow’s flight and then continuing on, indicating where the quarry truly lay.   The Crimson Thread pointed not into the pool, but around the far side of the chamber and into a side tunnel.   Before pursuing, Lev quietly told Cathlynn the truth about Ikiri’s head. Her scream echoed through the caverns; Tiggeth howled with her. Dorian carefully removed the head from the idol’s hand and washed the blasphemous runes away in the clear portion of the pool, whispering prayers to Mielikki to cleanse the insult. The statue itself would have to wait.   There was still a Goblin to kill.  

The Hexer’s Last Laugh

  Following the crimson line of force, The Heretic pushed through waist-deep water into a narrower side passage. The water shallowed to around two-and-a-half feet, making movement easier.   At the end of the glowing trail:   The Goblin hexer stood in a tight chamber, half-turned, grinning with pure spite.   Behind him, more dark water.   He bounced and clapped, taunting them in Goblin, clearly expecting some final, horrible surprise to spring on the party.   Dorian did not give him the chance.   One arrow, clean and fast, took him in the neck.   He dropped to his knees, gurgled, and slumped into the water.   The party barely had a heartbeat to enjoy the justice of it before the real threat surfaced.  

The Aboleth

  From the black pool behind the dead Goblin, something vast and unnatural rose:   A massive, eel-like body slid forward, easily filling the width of the tunnel.   Translucent, pallid flesh glistened; its length stretched back into darkness.   Three luminous eyes sat in a vertical column, opening one by one to regard the intruders.   Slick tentacles uncoiled from beneath its body, tasting the air.     Dorian’s Arcana check (23) confirmed their worst fears: this was an aboleth.   Between Dorian, Lilly, and Cathlynn’s knowledge:   Aboleths are ancient aberrations, older than many gods.   They have perfect memories, recalling worlds and ages long gone.   They are deeply intelligent and psionic, capable of dominating minds and warping the flesh of those they touch.   Stories say they are functionally immortal – you may destroy a body, but its mind returns, reborn somewhere in the depths.   This one, dwelling in a forgotten subterranean temple under the roots of the forest, had been fed by goblins and was likely the “green one beneath the roots” that had frightened the elk and twisted the trees.   It attacked.   One tentacle lashed out, crushing a Fey elk to paste in an instant, sending its spirit back to The Feywild.   Its central eye flared, turning on Lilly, trying to enslave her mind.   Lilly, bolstered by Lev’s Bless and a strong Wisdom save, threw it off.   A second tentacle struck her, dealing a solid hit, but she remained standing.   For a heartbeat, it seemed like the fight might actually happen.   Then the numbers sank in:   Its armor was too thick; their best attacks were barely getting through.   Dorian shouted the only sane order: “Run!”  

Retreat from the Deep

  The retreat was chaotic but surprisingly controlled:   Tiggeth tugged on Lilly’s clothes, urging her away. Lilly responded by:   Jumping onto his back.   Wild shaping into a tiny red-banded lion spider, clinging in his fur while he bounded back down the tunnel.   Lev snatched up Zephyr and used his Eladrin Fey Step to teleport further back, trying (unsuccessfully) to frighten the aboleth as he vanished.   Cathlynn cast Spider Climb, scrambling up onto the cave wall to move at full speed above the waterline.   Dorian used his Crimson Thread path and darkvision to lead the escape route, making sure they didn’t get turned around.   As they withdrew, the aboleth’s mind brushed against theirs:   Run, little sparks.
Your minds taste bright in the dark.
You will dream of me when you drink, when you sleep.
All waters remember me.   Whether it chose to let them go as interesting toys for later, or was simply bored by the loss of its priests, remains to be seen.   Either way, The Heretic did not press the fight. They lived to fight another day—and left the aboleth, for now, in its drowned temple beneath the forest.