We last left our party across the street from a tenement
building in a Ravenstone neighborhood where a cultist they were following had
just entered. After a minute of discussion, the group stakes out in an alley
while Pater crosses the road and enters the apartment building. Pater hears a
voice from the door on the right. It’s a man gruffly speaking in a tone of
command. The door begins to open and Pater ducks back into the shadows under
the stairs. The cultist exits followed by a chain of very pregnant women. Pater
dives and backstabs the cultist who falls under the lethal strike of his blade.
The women, dressed in rags and bound together at the
wrists, are shocked, but looked somewhat numb to the violence. Pater asks who
they are. A young, dark-haired woman says they are known as The Mothers. They
are slaves whose lives are dedicated to breeding slave stock. The unfortunate
brother was collecting them to bring them back to the pits from their physician
visit. Pater brings them outside and across the street where their bonds are
cut. Pater goes back inside to hide the body inside the apartment. He gets the
body back inside, but leaves quickly when he hears a voice from the back room
ask, “Br. Woodward, is that you,” identifying him as the son of the widow from
the night before.
Two men come out of the building just as Pater makes it
to the alley after having discovered Woodward. The noon bell tolls and the
streets begin filling with townspeople making their way to the chapel. The
group find a (for now) empty house where they hole up while they decide what to
do next. The household is a middle-class home unremarkable except for the
oil-painted picture of the demon lord, Shah Gzerohn, in multiple rooms. The
townspeople are apparently true believers. Nyphus and Mel head to the chapel
while Pater and Renic head northeast towards the industrial warehouse section
of town. They find an abandoned storeroom on the edge of town.
Pater leaves Renic in charge of the Mothers while he
leaves to watch the chapel. He meets two men on the street on his way there.
Renic leaves the Mothers alone to keep from being left on guard duty. Nyphus
and Mel make their way in to the chapel from near back of a long line. The
middle of the chapel contains a giant green crystal coming up from the floor. Both make their way
downstairs to the sacristy where a line of worshippers are entering a portal
through the crystal. Nyphus enters the portal, Mel does not until later under
pressure from the evil brotherhood after she tries to make her way down into
the slave pits. They find themselves in front of a giant stronghold on an
enormous cloud bank over Ravenstone.
They are given an audience with Archbishop Nemesine in a
throne room full of Ravenstone worshippers/townspeople. In the gallery leading
to the throne room are large oil works depicting brutal scenes of worship of
Shah Gzerohn as well as Nemesine’s personal history. At the end are recent
works of the party themselves, saving the early barbarian tribe from the mural
in the dungeon of the Island Fortress. Nemesine is a Sidhe, a faerie being from
another world. He and his lover are exiles from their home world and were cursed
by clerics of Tah shortly after their arrival in this one. He cannot walk the
earth in his true form and may not leave this one for another. Here on the
cloud demi-plane he at least may cover his hideous new form, a mass of writhing
maggots. His lover, similarly disfigured, committed suicide.
Nemesine fails to Geas both Nyphus and Mel. Instead he
offers them a deal. He seeks the Miter of Tah which was stolen by the Duvan’Ku,
the original worshippers of Shah Gzerohn before the barbarians. The cult was
vanquished 700 years ago in their last shrine in the Demonfrost Mountains on a
peak called Deathfrost by a group of Tah’s disciples attempting to take back
the magical Miter. The clerics never returned, but the cult was also never seen
again. It is said Deathfrost’s shrine is filled with gold and ancient artifacts
of wonder. Nemesine’s acolytes cannot climb the peak. Their green marks begin
to burn and their minds fray approaching the peak. The Miter will let Nemesine remove
his curse and leave this plane for good. If the party returns with the item,
Nemesine vows to let the freed Mothers go, disband the Green Mark, put an end to
the slave pits of Ravenstone, and leave this plane. Mel draws up a contract between
them, sealed with the mark of Persephone and Demeter.
In the meantime, Renic leaves the Mothers in their warehouse
hideout for the chapel. Pater sees him approach from his hiding place. Renic
quickly escalates into a conflict with the acolytes and chops one in two. The
fight flushes out Pater as well. They are pursued by cultists, eventually lose
them, and meet back at the warehouse. Nyphus and Mel return later with the
terms of their agreement, planning to return back to the chapel the next morning.
