Session #17: Green Creek Mines

Session #17 – Green Creek Mines

20 Memun 530

Drawn by strange lights and eerie sounds from the old Green Creek workings, the Deputies approached cautiously and descended into the mine. The tunnels were abandoned but not silent, and every step down into the dark seemed to pull them further from the safety of town.

Deeper inside, as they explored twisting corridors and dead-end shafts, they began to hear what sounded like a woman somewhere ahead, sometimes weeping, sometimes cursing, and sometimes laughing with unhinged delight. The voice echoed through the stone, making it hard to tell where she truly was.

At the lowest level, the worked tunnels opened into a vast, multi-tiered cavern, dimly lit by great braziers of unnatural flame. All around the chamber stood motionless figures: a crowd of petrified townsfolk and travelers, arranged like a grotesque audience to whatever horrors had taken place here.

As the Deputies advanced, Thaktira appeared on the uppermost tier overlooking the cavern. She bore the tall, graceful body of a striking woman, but her face was a warped mockery of human beauty, framed by a writhing mane of venomous serpents in place of hair. Instinctively trying to avert their eyes, the Deputies saw her lift a long staff and speak words of chilling sorcery; a wave of killing cold ripped through the group, dropping Imaranger into unconsciousness in a single, breath-stealing instant.

Thaktira then withdrew from sight, and the cavern erupted into chaos. A massive scorpion burst from the sandy gravel beneath Kruk’s boots, lashing out with claws and stinger as it tried to drag him down. Grimlocks rushed from side passages behind Suffering Succotash as he tried to circle toward Thaktira’s last position, and a winged gargoyle swooped and strafed the Deputies from the darkness above.

The Deputies met the onslaught with steel and spell, striking at whatever they could glimpse in the flickering braziers’ light. A thick bank of fog suddenly rolled across the cavern, cutting off their view of the northern end, and somewhere within it a woman’s voice shrieked in pain and surprise before falling silent.

Once the lesser creatures were slain, the unnatural fog slowly thinned and then vanished. The Deputies searched the cavern among the stone forms and discovered that some “statues” were not fully petrified; a few trapped souls could still speak, though all they could manage was a single plea: “Return the Celestial Ewer to Urdon’s Shrine.”

In the aftermath, the Deputies also found Thaktira’s severed head, though her body was nowhere to be found. Horrifically, the head still lived and could speak, revealing that Thaktira had survived the battle. She offered the Deputies a dark bargain: in exchange for their help recovering her missing body, she would aid them by turning their enemies to stone.

The session ended with the Deputies standing in a cavern full of half-living statues, negotiating with the talking head of a medusa-like sorceress, and weighing whether to accept Thaktira’s tempting, monstrous proposal.