Misgivings, part 3 (Friday, Neth (XI) 2 4707 AR)

The heroes continued their exploration of Foxglove Manor.

Loft. The ceiling of this room angled down steeply, leaving only four feet of headroom to the southeast. A low cot and a dresser were the room's only furnishings.

As the heroes rounded the corner in the hallway beyond the entrance to this door, a sudden and unmistakable shriek of pain echoed through the attic. The sound obviously came from the door to the revenant prison.

Revenant Prison. The door to this room was locked, but the unmistakable sound of a sobbing woman could be heard beyond it. Fen picked the lock.

This room was cold and damp; an old armoire stood near the east wall. The ceiling sloped down to only four feet high to the northeast, leaving little room for a small window. A full-size mirror in a dark wooden frame of coiling roses leaned against these bricks, angled toward the tiny window.

Inside this room was a woman who had risen as an undead creature known as a revenant. Driven by a powerful desire for vengeance against Aldern Foxglove, she was not without her weaknesses in her new, undead incarnation - for one, the sight of her own reflection had rendered her helpless with self-loathing. When Tsela moved the mirror she instantly recovered - she stood up and unleashed a baleful shriek, then cried out, "Aldern! I can smell your fear! You'll be in my arms soon!"

The woman then begun to unerringly seek out her murderer using her ability to locate creatures - and the heroes kept up with her.

The heroes allowed the revenant to pass uncontested, and she worked her way downstairs to the basement, taking the most direct route. As an undead, she was immune to the effects of the haunts, but the heroes following her found their attempts delayed as they were forced to deal with haunts she simply ignored and passed by.

When she reached the ground floor, she paused over the moldy spiral stain for several moments, staring transfixed at it. After a few minutes, she unleashed a baleful shriek and begun smashing and clawing at the stained floorboards with her claws - it took her only about a minute to smash through the floor with her savage claws, at which point she clambered through the hole and dropped down into the pit below.

Once through the spiral stain, the revenant continued her journey, descending the stairs and moving with unerring obsession through the caverns to the door partway down the ledge in the vent. The ghouls in the caverns did not contest the revenant's passage through the caverns and she did not stop to attack them - the same could not be said of the heroes, whom the ghouls quickly moved to attack when they noticed them following the revenant.

The door posed a barrier to the revenant. She scrambled and smashed against this door when the heroes caught up with her.

The Spiral Stain. A rather gruesome antique - what appeared to be a mummified monkey head - hung on the northern wall here, its tiny mouth gaping. A bellpull extended from the monkey's gaping mouth. A ratty throw rug partially obscured a foul stain of dark-colored mold on the floor.

The stain under the rug was about 10 feet across, a swirling pattern of dark blue, sickly green, and black mold that grew in a spiral. When examined closely, it looked almost like a bird's-eye view of a spiraling staircase descending downward, with each step littered with skulls and bones. The stain itself was a clue to the entrance to the caverns below. When Tsela pulled the rope attached to the monkey head, the head gave out a shrill simian shriek akin to an alarm spell.

The Pit. Piles of broken stone, dirt, and a few ruined pickaxes lined the edges of this room. The floor in the middle of the room had been torn up to reveal an ancient set of stone spiral stairs, obviously of much older construction than the surrounding basement, winding deep into the bedrock below. A foul stink, like that of rotten meat, wafted up on a cold breeze from the darkness. The stairs descended 80 feet to the landing.

When Bruthien first set foot on the stairs, he experienced a sudden vision of Aldern, sweaty, filthy, and wild-eyed, digging away at the stone floor of this room with a pickaxe. With each swing, he grunted out two words: "For you". Bruthien knew that Aldern was speaking of him. As the vision ended, Aldern broke through into the room beyond, and a horde of shrieking ghouls rose up to pull him into the darkness below before they turned their lambent eyes to Bruthien. As the ghouls reached for Bruthien, he shook off the vision and regained his senses.

Landing. The stairs ended in a limestone cavern. The walls dripped with moisture, and swaths of black and dark blue mold grew in spiraling, tangled patterns on the floor, ceiling, and walls. Rubble and broken bones cluttered the floor, and a rhythmic sound - like the breathing of some immense creature - echoed through the cave from three tunnels, one to the north and two to the west. Of the two western tunnels, the southernmost one seemed to be a relatively new creation. The breathing sound was nothing more than the sounds of the surf echoing strangely through various other fissures that connected the feeding cave and the vent to the cliffs overlooking the Varisian Gulf.

Feeding Cave. This long cave stunk of rotten meat. The source of the horrific smell was readily apparent - a swath of carcasses was strewn about the floor of this place.

A ghoulish undead bat was one of the cavern's most horrific guardians. Known more properly as a skaveling (such creatures are used as mounts by the foul necromantic denizens of the deepest reaches of the Darklands), the undead bat defended its lair with a single-minded fury against intruders. Nevertheless, it was defeated by the heroes.

Two of the three dead humans among the skaveling's victims were long-dead Varisian nomads with nothing of much value on their remains. The third, however, was the corpse of notorious one-armed bandit Shaz "Redshiv" Bilger, suspected of organizing the robbery of nearly two dozen merchant convoys along the Lost Coast Road over the past decade. Tsela identified his partially eaten remains. Proof of his demise presented to the law at Magnimar is worth a 500 gp reward.

Of more immediate monetary gratification, though, was Shaz's surviving gear, which consisted of a pearl ring worth 300 gp, an adamantine longsword, a hat of disguise, and a scattering of 56 gp.

Ghoulish Guardians. This otherwise nondescript cave was watched over by three ghouls. The ghouls hid in the shadows: one in the nook to the north, one in the shadows of the southeast entrance, and one in the shadows of the western entrance. When they were spotted, they attacked at once. Sounds of combat here drew the attention of four more ghouls; these last ghouls arrived right after the heroes had dealt with the first ones, but the heroes dispatched them as well. When the heroes looked closely, one of these last ghouls had a partially smashed-in skull from which a strangely shaped chunk of stone protruded.

The Vent. The cramped tunnel opened into a vertiginous gulf here, a cathedral-like cavern with a roof arching thirty feet overhead and dropping into a sloshing pool of foamy seawater fifty feet below. A steep stone ledge wound down to these surging depths, its slope glistening with moisture and mold. A stone door stood in the northwestern door about halfway down the slope.

The sloping ledge was difficult to navigate; anyone who didn't climb along its surface had to keep their balance on it. The sound of the water surging and sloshing was the source of the "breathing" sound heard throughout the caves. The pool's waters were rough due to the churning currents. The heroes had come to think that they had seen the last of the Lost Coast's goblins by this point, but they found and are fighting four goblin ghasts in this pool.