Chapter 82
Beyond the fallen warforged, the passage opens into what must be Landro’s upper chest. The metal here is torn and peeled back, edges bent outward as though something exploded from within rather than struck it from without.
Grindlefoot crouches over the wiry warforged, the lean, scarred one they’d first crossed at the colossus’s foot, and searches it for anything useful. There are no pockets. Warforged, it turns out, do not carry much.
Mond considers the bodies and has an idea. “The gray pool, back where we found the twisted armor. What if we put one of them in it?” Dolor declines to have any part of this tomfoolery. Bilwin, however, is game, and drags a warforged over to a nearby trickle of the gray fluid, careful not to touch it himself, and lowers a foot of the body into the stream.
Nothing happens.
The chest cavity is larger than the one they climbed through below, roughly fifteen feet by thirty, and colder than the caves they were recently traversing. Debris covers the floor thickly enough to make the footing treacherous, and the same outward-blasted ruin marks the walls here as well, the signs of an explosion long since gone cold. Ahead and to the left an opening reveals a familiar shape, a vertical cylinder, the continuation of the spinal shaft they’d been ascending from below.
Dolor and Gven investigate the room, sifting through the dirt and rubble for anything hidden beneath. They find nothing. The companions move forward toward the northeast, Gven leading the others, with Bilwin, Mond, and Grindlefoot following, leaving Dolor at the rear.
As expected, they find the spinal shaft column is blocked here, the top side of the section below where they’d been forced to abandon the shaft and detour through the workshop. To their right, another chamber. This one is different from the others they’ve passed through. It’s steel, deliberate, built rather than tunneled. A chair of steel and wood sits in the center, facing a crystalline viewport, and slumped in the chair is a skeletal corpse in Cyran armor, the kind worn before the catastrophe.
Mond studies the viewport. It isn’t glass but crystal, worked into a broad pane, and what it shows is the Mournland landscape outside, the view from the colossus looking out across the mist. The chair faces it directly. Whoever sat here was steering. This is the captain’s chair, or the pilot’s, for whoever once drove the massive form of Landro across the land.
Dolor is drawn to the skeleton. He approaches carefully, first making sure it isn’t going to animate and lunge at him, then examining it closely. Whoever this was died at their post. The helmet is dented, a deep crease where something struck it hard, and the story isn’t difficult to assemble: debris fell when everything went wrong, and one piece found the pilot’s head.
In the skeleton’s right hand, resting in the loosened bones of the palm, is a small gemstone. Dolor eases it free and holds it up to the light. It’s about the size of a large marble, and he recognizes it, because it’s the same kind of gemstone his parents used in their watch shop when he was a child, the ones that went into clockwork. But this one is wrong. It isn’t dusty, and it isn’t dull. It’s empty. When light hits it, the stone doesn’t catch or reflect, it simply ignores it, as though there’s nothing inside to illuminate.
As Dolor inspects the gem, the skeleton slumps a little further forward, as if it had been holding something of great weight that could finally be set down. Nothing else happens.
He turns his attention to the helmet. It’s silver, round, and bears a faded insignia. He’s seen it before. It takes a moment of thought, and then it lands: his parents’ workshop. The same mark. The evidence is stacking up now, in ways he can’t dismiss, that his mother and father had a hand in building the thing they’re standing inside. He lifts the helmet closer to his own head, and just at the edge of hearing, faint as a shell held to the ear, there’s a soft metallic clanking somewhere within it. The tiefling keeps his findings to himself, at least for now.
Grindlefoot suggests Bilwin speak with the pilot, since the dwarf can, on occasion, talk to the dead. But Bilwin has never quite managed the trick on purpose, and doesn’t understand what Grindlefoot is asking of him well enough to attempt it. The pilot keeps its silence.
Mond runs an arcane eye over the chamber and confirms what the ruined walls already suggested: something went badly wrong in this room, and whatever it was set off the explosion that broke everything.
Bilwin, meanwhile, sits down with the helmet and takes the time to properly Identify it. The magic resolves into understanding: this is a control interface. Worn by a pilot in this room, it connects the wearer directly to the mechanism that moves the colossus, letting a single person drive Landro’s enormous body the way one might steer a ship. It only functions here, in this chamber. Bilwin explains it to the others with the enthusiasm of a man describing his favorite tavern.
“If it weren’t stuck in a cliff, we could walk it out of here,” Mond observes.
The notion of piloting the colossus home has obvious appeal and equally obvious problems. They settle on a better plan: take the helmet and the crystal with them, and give them to the warforged pilgrims on the way out, a fitting repayment for all the help the collectors had given them. First, though, they still need the piece of the Rod, and that means going up.
Gven leads the others out of the pilot’s chamber and into the next room, just past the blocked spinal column. It runs about fifteen feet deep and twenty-five wide, and the walls are set with tall, narrow slits, the kind built for archers to loose arrows through. A little daylight actually filters in here, thin and gray, because this part of the colossus juts out from the mountainside rather than sitting buried in it. Through the slits, a sliver of the Mournland is visible beyond.
Standing at the arrow slits, one beside each, are three Cyran soldiers in full regalia, heads bowed. As Gven steps into the room, their faces rise. Where there should be faces, there are only screaming skulls, the ghostly rictus of the undead. At the same moment, three faint, ephemeral orbs of light wink into being in the air around them.
The companions ready themselves for a fight.
Mond acts before anyone else can. He casts Chain Lightning, and the bolt leaps from soldier to soldier to one of the floating lights, arcing between them in blinding forks. One soldier is simply incinerated, gone in a flash, and the light beside it winks out of existence in the same instant. The other two soldiers are left reeling, badly burned even for undead, clearly moments from collapse.
Gven takes one look at the smoking ruin Mond has made of the room and decides that, for once, she doesn’t need to be the one hurling herself into the middle of things. Instead of drawing Tempest Edge, she pulls her dagger, lunges in, and opens up both remaining soldiers with two quick strikes. They drop. She strolls back to the wall and leans against it, and turns to Mond.
“Looks like this is your battle.”
The two remaining orbs of light streak away, as fast as they can move, straight through one of the walls and gone.
Whatever those lights were, they don’t come back. The companions do not learn what they were, and something about the way they vanished suggests they never will.
Grindlefoot peers out through the arrow slits and sees very little, only the foggy gray mist of the Mournland stretching away below, the colossus high enough above the ground to make the drop dizzying. Gven investigates the room and turns up nothing but decrepit, useless armor.
The group returns to the spinal shaft and begins climbing again, upward toward the head, where they hope to find the third piece of the Rod of Seven Parts.
Gven leads. About twenty feet up, the shaft opens onto another level. There are exits to the east and west, and in the middle of the chamber stands a massive stone table strewn with maps, some unrolled, some still in their tubes. Bilwin, climbing up behind her, catches sight of the table and stops, transfixed. The dwarf loves maps.
The chamber is roughly twenty feet by twenty, its ceiling climbing thirty feet overhead. Dolor pulls himself up and ambles over to the table, taking in the maps as well, though he can’t make sense of them. They’re almost certainly maps of Cyre from before it became the Mournland, of a landscape that no longer exists. He decides to gather a few. As he lifts the first map, the stone table shudders. It creaks and groans, and then it stands, rising up onto two of its legs while the other two unfold into massive arms.
Recognizing a worthy opponent when one stands up in front of her, Gven invokes her rage and swings Tempest Edge. The first strike bites deep into the stone. The second whistles past as the table shifts its bulk aside.
Grindlefoot backs up and holds his action, watching to see how the fight develops. As the smallest member of the party, he’s in no hurry to fling himself into a brawl with a piece of animated furniture, but he readies himself to Wild Shape into something large enough to smash a table the moment he sees a decisive blow land.
Dolor draws Gleaming Blade, runs Green Flame Blade along its edge until it comes alive with fire, and lands a heavy blow, then follows with a second strike that scores a lesser hit.
Mond, not to be outdone by his own earlier lightning display, casts Fire Bolt, and the cantrip erupts across the stone table with startling force, fire washing over its surface.
The table, closest to Gven, doesn’t do what she expects. She braces for a swing of one of those thick stone arms, or a kick from a leg, but instead the thing simply belly-bumps her, slamming its bulk into her and shoving her back a step. Then it pivots to Dolor and does the same, rushing him and throwing its full weight into him. Dolor answers with Hellish Rebuke, and flames wreath the table in retaliation.
Bilwin, meanwhile, is so absorbed in the maps that he has genuinely failed to notice the battle happening around him. He’s crouched over the ones scattered across the floor in the corner, and when the noise finally intrudes on his concentration, he waves a hand irritably. “Hey. Go away. Be quiet, I’m trying to look at these.”
On the words go away, he accidentally discharges a Banishment at the table. It vanishes.
Seeing how much punishment Gven has absorbed over the last several hours, Grindlefoot casts Heal on her, a flood of restorative magic that brings the half-orc back to full health.
The rest of the party registers, one by one, that Bilwin has just banished their opponent, and that they have exactly one minute before it returns. They snatch up a handful of maps, urge Bilwin to grab as many as he can carry, which he happily does, muttering that this brings him to seventy-eight out of a hoped-for hundred and thirty-seven, and head back to the spinal shaft to continue upward before the table reappears to resume the argument.
Gven goes first. About twenty feet up, she reaches a tangle of dangling metal, a snarl of it hanging down into the shaft like the uvula at the back of a throat. Below her climb the others, with Bilwin bringing up the rear. As the dwarf starts up, he hears a sound from the room they just left, a shuffling, and then a strange grinding noise, like gravel being walked across.
Passing the dangling metal, Gven thinks she can make out the head above her, close now. But as she reaches the tangle and knocks it aside, there’s a click. Jets of water blast down from above, catching her full-on and knocking her off the ladder. As she falls, she and the water sweep into Dolor, Bilwin, and Grindlefoot below her, tearing all four of them off the shaft and dropping them forty feet, past the level of the stone table to the pilot’s room. Only Mond, skinny and agile enough to twist aside from the deluge, manages to hold his place on the ladder and watch the others plummet past him.
The four land hard in the rubble, bruised and scraped. Grindlefoot picks himself up, looks around at his battered companions, and casts Mass Cure Wounds, spreading a measure of relief across everyone within reach.
Somewhere above them, faintly, they can hear the sound of a stone table settling back onto its four legs.
“Well,” Grindlefoot says, “that wasn’t optimal.”