Diary of Captain Nomed Oppenheimer - Entry Number 21
Friday, November 22nd, 907 TA
(From here on out, this shall be known as the journal of Prince Nomed Oppenheimer, Lord of Destruction, and the crew shall henceforth be known as my minions.)
Father is free! He and his covenant have been released from their covenant and are ready to spread across the Inner Sea. The matter was simpler than expected and my dear underlings were quite useful. Hopefully their knowledge that they did the right thing will lift their spirits enough so that we can tackle our next obstacle at Hidden Skerry.
After we fled Havelock’s Keep, we made with all haste towards Tegel Manor. During our voyage, a couple of things of note happened. The first was the annoying little gnome engineer what’s-his-face told us that he had fixed the net launcher recovered from the Monastery of the Mad Monks. Some simple testing showed us that this was false but did show us that all we would need to make it operational were a couple of large compression springs. The second thing of note were the ongoing experiments of Chironomous. He placed the body of the captain of the Overlord in front of our mirror, and when the new man emerged, he was ritualistically tortured and killed while being preached about the Gyre. This cycle repeated itself twice during our voyage, and Chironomous hopes that we can use this to create our very own spy in the circle of the Overlord in the form of an Anti-Paladin, but don’t tell those with “kinder” dispositions.
We finally arrived on the outskirts of Tegel on the 21st. We placed the Wench alongside one of the bluffs and used the dinghies to come in through a small, dilapidated fishing village. The only inhabitant that we saw was a naked man out in the water simply bobbing and waiting. He did not speak but seemed content and so was left there. My inner compass was pointing me inland, but not towards the town itself, and instead towards a temple on a nearby hill. The closer we came to it, the more this drive pushed me towards it, and yet as we approached the hill, Wrane and I both experienced a nausea as if our kind were not welcome here.
As we approached, an old man appeared from some ruins behind the temple and told us that his name was Cogsworth and he was the town gravedigger. He informed us that the place is called the White Temple and that the modern temple is currently inhabited by a group called the Monks of the Briny Deep. Their entire purpose is to wait for the return of an ancient sea god that no one has ever seen, (except for us), and have the honor of getting eaten by the great beast.
Knowing that our prize was inside the temple, I made it known that we must get in, and so Chironomous hammered on the front door, trying to elicit a response from the monks inside. All this got him was quite the electrical shock. We attempted to find another way in, which led us to the ruins of an older temple, whose radiating power was the source of the sickness for Wrane and me. Inside those ruins was a ghostly chest and the room was lined with a magical puzzle that for the life of us we could not solve. We attempted breaking into the temple by destroying one of the stained-glass windows but the glass was magically protected and would not break. That left only the electrically charged front door, whose lock was easier than expected to bypass.
We opened the door and as we entered, I felt this overwhelming sense of light and the last thing I saw before collapsing was my mother beckoning me to the back of the chambers. I awoke a few minutes later, apparently having missed one hell of a battle between the rest of the crew minus Wrane and myself, and the Briny Monks. Our party was mostly unharmed, but the monks were not so lucky, as their bodies now laid strewn about the floor. The room was lined with murals of sea monsters and the monks had been creating a plaster statue of their great beast. My compulsion told me that we needed to get behind that statue, and so we tore it down, looking for the room behind it. We could find no entrance there, so we searched the rest of the temple, finding a way behind through a small room around the corner.
This room looked like it was once a crypt that had been defiled as there were parts of a mummy and excavation equipment across the floor. Where the crypt once lay, now was instead a ladder down into a pit, and that pit radiated the same type of light that was a part of the older temple and that I could not stand to endure. At the back of the room was an ancient set of doors and it was there that I was being drawn, and no sooner had we arrived at the door, it opened and a great demon stood looking at us. He smiled as he looked at me and Wrane and invited us into that back room. I couldn’t refuse the offer and left the mortals behind while I had a little chat.
The demon revealed himself as Borak, a loremaster, and Grandfather of Wrane. He wished to test our heritage, and asked us to step through Hellfire, which I passed with flying colors, while Wrane was only slightly burnt from the ordeal. Having passed his test, he told me that my father, Sineater, and his entire army was bound in a covenant in this very spot. The humans had hidden it here and protected it with an aura that no one of demonic blood could come near. Borak had tried using the monks to open it, but they were idiots. He was quite happy when we told him that our servants would be perfectly capable of opening the covenant. Borak said that the puzzle lay through the pit in the next room and down a tunnel underneath where the ghostly box lay in the ruined temple. If we could solve its riddle, my father would walk the earth once more.
We had just finished our discussion with Borak and left the room to convince our minions to go down the hole, only to discover that they had gotten bored and had gone down there of their own free will! Chironomous was the one to open the chest, having solved the riddle quickly (proving he had worth for not being a pretty face), and with that, Sineater and his army rushed out and away from the place. My father stopped briefly to thank me, his chosen son for saving him, and granted me his favor to use in the time to come. The demons all quickly teleported out and soon there was little trace of them, although I could feel the strong connection between my father and me letting me know that there was still work to do.
With our objective complete here, we went to the town of Tegel to celebrate our great victory. We drank for hours and slept in town overnight, only to go shopping the next morning. While Chironomous proselytized, we had the metal springs for our net launcher commissioned, as well as a new piece of boundary chalk, and both would be ready in a couple of days’ time. We knew that the copper dragon would be here around that same time, so we bought some new magic items to keep Wrane safe, as we would throw him out to be eaten first while we slew it.
We now wait for the items to be made, and the dragon to be slain, before we can finally move over to Hidden Skerry, which still has an ambush waiting for us. Hopefully when Chironomous creates a new zombie dragon, he won’t lose track of it this time. Then all we need to do is break into a fortress, recover the sails, and get out without dying. What could go wrong?