Into the Chasm - Episode 3

The party kills the shaggy white beast, allowing them to escape Zeyfa’s Labyrinth. Climbing to the surface, they reach a cliffside village called Melusa, and shelter with Kalima’s family there.

Timeline

• Jan 25, 1730 DR, afternoon: The party kills the shaggy white beast, escapes Zeyfa’s Labyrinth, and follows Kalima into Melusa.
• Jan 25, 1730 DR, evening: Kalima’s family, Nura and Khaled, shelter the party and explain Melusa’s strange life of endurance and sacrifice.
• Jan 25, 1730 DR, night: Ekko and Finnan scout the village with shapeshifting and magic, learning the Ice Palace is on guard and finding strange extraplanar gashes in the wall of the chasm.

Cast of Characters

• Kalima (kah-LEE-mah; she/her, the Zimka human): hidden survivor and Zimka woman.
• Rala (RAH-lah; she/her, hawk beast): Jrain’s avian companion.
• Nura (NOO-rah; she/her, the Zimka human): Kalima’s sister and host of the Chasm Explorers in Melusa.
• Khaled (KHAH-let; he/him, the Zimka human): Nura’s husband.
• Samir (sah-MEER; she/her, the Zimka human): Nura and Khaled’s child, a strange too-knowing baby with an old soul.
• Forquarion the Frostbinder (for-KWAH-ree-on; he/him, fey lord): master of the beast and supposed lord of the Ice Palace.

Places

• Zeyfa’s Labyrinth (ZAY-fahz LAB-uh-rinth; labyrinth in Zeyfa’s Realm): Ice-and-stone labyrinth, including the black-stone chamber where the party defeats the beast and opens a passage toward Melusa. Session context includes: Black-stone lair of Zeyfa’s beast…
• Melusa (meh-LOO-sah; village in Zeyfa’s Realm): Fog-bound cliff village with a waterfall-fed pond, ledge houses, guarded planar gashes, and the nearby Ice Palace. Session context includes: lower cliffside paths, ledge village, and Nura and Khaled’s house.

Narrative

Our session begins as the party slides into a chamber, its walls made of black stone, the place Kalima has dreaded, the home of Zeyfa’s beast. The creature, a shaggy white monstrosity, rears large and turns to fight, calling up living snow echoes of the party to defend itself. The living snow punishes the party, drawing attacks and forcing the Chasm Explorers to probe for weaknesses while protecting Kalima, keeping her out of sight. Ekko summons a pack of spirit animals to aid him, Justas summons spiritual protectors, and Finnan summons a fey spirit, all of which leap into battle. With Rala and Jrain’s attacks, and Eolo’s psionic strikes, this is enough to turn the tides, once the party realizes that the snow echoes are vulnerable to each other’s attacks. When the final echoes fall, the exposed beast dies under Eolo’s psionic volley and the chamber shifts around the group.

As the beast dies, the unnatural chamber softens into earth and granite and exposes a way out of Zeyfa’s Labyrinth. The party pauses long enough for Justas to take the creature’s head as a trophy, and to read the changed space for meaning before trusting Kalima’s route forward.

The earthen tunnel carries them out onto a cliffside, with a view of Melusa above, the village Kalima has been trying to reach, as well as a floating ice palace. Finnan sends his trickster fey spirit toward the Ice Palace in search of Forquarion the Frostbinder, the rumored lord of the Ice Palace, who rules and protects Melusa.

Kalima hurries the party up switchbacks as the path climbs through fog and floating stone along the edge of the Great Chasm. The climb leads to Melusa, a cliffside village draped in fog. Walking quietly through the village trying to remain unnoticed, the party sees five unnatural, jagged gashes cut across Melusa’s rear cliff face, roughly shoulder width but much taller than a person, with blurred, smudged edges that seem superimposed upon the stone rather than cut into it. Looking directly at the boundary is difficult: it does not quite register as something real. They are guarded by a massive ice wolf statue.

Kalima leads them quickly past the strange gashes, to Nura, her sister, and Khaled, her brother-in-law. At Nura and Khaled’s house, Kalima’s family receives the party with caution and urgency while the baby Samir sleeps nearby. Kalima, taking out Justas’s light-enchanted stone, tells her family this is proof that the Kestavo are more than stories.

Safe for the moment out of sight, the party talks to Nura, Khaled, and Kalima. The conversation winds through the history and struggles of Melusa, which endures because what other choice is there. The fog cannot be crossed, and people do not leave the village, so all that is left is to endure what the place requires. The land itself seems stuck out of time: the sun rarely sets in Melusa, but when it does, it only rises again after a sacrifice is sent into the labyrinth. Even the souls of the dead seem stuck, somehow. The party also learns about the strangeness of Melusa: the villagers’ ancestors were brought here, rescued from a calamity, by Zeyfa, and now Zeyfa rules, and the Kestavo are nothing more than half-remembered tales. Justas’s appearance and Kestavan magic shake Nura, Khaled, and Kalima, forcing them to wonder about the ancient stories of the gods.

The conversation winds down as a gong rings out across the village, signaling it is time to rest.

After the village settles under the gong, Ekko slips out as a gray cat to scout the strange gashes. Each opens onto a different scene: one into the heart of a swirling maelstrom, with lightning crackling beyond it; one into a strange shimmering world of crisscrossing spikes and passageways of jagged metal, twisting, and continually moving; one into a vision of impossible colors, cycling blue and green light followed by colors that cannot be described; one into an endless burning wasteland filled with swirling, pouring ash; one into a distorted counterpart of Melusa’s ledge, with a similar stream and pond but no village, floating islands, or Ice Palace, only a ruined stone structure rising from the pond as though a tower had been sliced off.

Finnan extends the search with Clairvoyance and sees a circular disk in the Ice Palace covered in dense Sylvan writing, illuminated by a pale light. Below it, soldiers prepare to hunt the fey trickster spirit Finnan sent earlier to investigate the palace. Our session ends as the party hides and tries to rest for the evening.

Combat

Zeyfa’s Beast and the Living Snow Echoes. The party faces the shaggy white beast, Zeyfa’s monster feared by Kalima, who is using living snow echoes of the party to protect itself. The Chasm Explorers keep Kalima hidden, break the Living Snow echoes, and kill the beast.