The Ancient Library, Part I (Thursday, Abadius (I) 16th, 4708 AR)

The heroes continued their exploration, after they convinced the freed prisoners to guard the exit to the small tunnels.

Tannery. This room reeked of vinegar, rotting hair, and worse. A single large stone basin sat in the middle of the room, about ten-feet square and filled with foul-looking fluid upon which floated patches of wet fur. Around the basin stood a dozen wooden frames over which leather and hides were stretched. At the far end of the cave, a stinking mound of hides and furs awaited tanning.

The wet fur belonged to bear hides being tanned; additional hides were stretched on racks. The liquid in the vat was particularly foul.

A trio of ogres fighters toiled here. They took part in a fight with the heroes with great guffaws and chortles. The heroes killed them.

Pit Guardian Barracks. The tunnel widened into a gallery, the walls of which were streaked with glittering veins of mica. To the north, four large mounds of furs had been arranged - a nimbus of bones and bits of half-eaten food lay strewn around each.

Tyrant Trolls. The walls of this passageway were hung with furs. To the southeast the tunnel constricted and sloped down sharply.

The heroes noticed that behind these hanging furs, the walls were riddled with 1-foot-wide openings that looked into larger caves beyond. When the furs were pulled aside, these gaps were plainly visible.

A pair of rather violent, stupid trolls stood guard. They kept guard in shifts, with one peering through the cracks between the walls and hanging furs while the other one slept. When a troll spotted the heroes, he roared in excitement. The other troll woke and attacked a while later.

The trolls fought with their claws and teeth. They did not coordinate their attacks in any way, simply fighting as long as they could. They fought to the death, even in the face of the heroes, who used acid.

Each disgusting guard carried a bag of filthy, troll-groped treasure at his belt. One bag contained a large collection of colorful, striped, shiny, but ultimately worthless stones weighing 100 pounds in all. The heroes noticed the difference, and didn't mistake the stones for valuable agate, onyx, and mithral ore of various kinds. The other troll carried the real treasure - assorted bits of armor and helmets and a dire bear skull. The armor included a suit of Small half-plate, a masterwork breastplate, six chain shirts, and a +1 ghost touch gauntlet. One of the chain shirts had a hidden pouch in its lining that contained an air elemental gem.

Library Tunnel. The tunnel walls wound deeper into the ground, yet the presence of rough contours along the cave walls seemed to lessen every several paces - the deeper the cave went, the more like worked stone the passageway seemed.

From the tyrant trolls, a 10-foot-wide tunnel wound down through the bedrock in a corkscrew for several hundred feet before the walls changed to regular worked stone and the tunnel arrived at an entrance. This section, hidden within walls warded by the same preservative magic that protected all of Varisia's Thassilonian monuments from erosion and decay, had remained intact for centuries.

The workmanship of these tunnels was distinctly different from that of the tunnels above. The heroes had been in Thassilonian ruins before (such as the Catacombs of Wrath or the lower level of Thistletop) and realized that the style of the architecture in these tunnels was distinctly Thassilonian. A further unusual element of the architecture here was the fact that all corners were curiously rounded off to prevent the formation of hard angles.

Ceiling heights in the library averaged 20 feet in the hallways but rose to vaulted ceilings 30 feet high in the chambers themselves. There was no illumination down here at all. In several places, the ancient preservative magic had faded, causing sections of the library to crumble and cave in.

Entrance. The gradual change from natural cavern to worked stone was finally complete after the long, spiraling descent into the depths. Where the walls met, hard angles had been polished away to smooth but tight arcs that somewhat softened the transitions from wall to floor or to floor or ceiling. With no hard lines defining edges of rooms, the place seemed subtly alien.

Chamber of Reduction. A pair of double doors stood in the southern wall of this room. The floor was made of glossy, polished black-and-gray marble. To the east, what might have once been another exit had long since caved in. Yet nothing in the room compared to the curious effect its walls had - looking into the room, it was bizarrely impossible to judge the chamber's exact dimensions. Any wall looked at directly remained stable, but through peripheral vision the walls everywhere else seemed to stretch away into impossibly infinite gulfs, as if the room itself was somehow "unhooked" from its own physicality. The sheets of pale light that flickered across the walls only added to the disorienting effect.

The energy provided dim illumination in the room, but was disorienting. This chamber was the guardpost of a single obese giant, his body covered with scars in the shape of Thassilonian runes.

The runeslave giant wore a heavy hide breastplate and had a slightly hunched back and pale lanky hair. His arms and legs were twisted and monstrously overdeveloped muscles bulged and strained against his seemingly too-tight skin. The giant remained out of immediate sight from the northern hallway against the north wall and quickly moved to attack Thurden, the first person to notice his presence. The heroes killed him.

The warped dimensions of the chamber were the only warning that something inside wasn't quite right. Bruthien and Thurden, who set foot in the room became disoriented as it became difficult to judge distance - they became nauseated for a while. Worse, they were reduced in size to the next smaller size category down from their actual size, as if by reduce person.