Into the Singing Stones
18 September. Agatha, Kvothe, Dravona, Sylvara, Caldris. Ubo held the camp.
The party have been trying to reach the Singing Stones since long before the Underdark. They set out for it once and the whole campaign happened instead. Tonight they walked in.
The last two rounds
The fight that ate all of last session ended in about forty minutes.
Agatha caught the last fireball-throwing savant with Hold Person, and then — because he was held and she could take her time — turned him into a frog, picked him up by the legs, and carried him around for the rest of the battle. Sylvara put the last derro standing on the floor. Agatha broke the final barricade with her warhammer from the back of a rhinoceros.
Then the passage went quiet, and they looked through the gap: a faint bluish-purple glow from a cave mouth up ahead, and the soft sound of chimes.
The rule finally broke
They fought two sessions without killing anybody. It ended, and not on anyone's decision.
A rhino killed one. Ubo ordered it to attack without killing, and a rhinoceros is not a precision instrument; it needed to check itself and failed.
Caldris froze one. He grappled a derro who was busy stabbing Sylvara, and the cold that comes off a wight did the rest. He had no say in it, and was annoyed about it — he'd been trying to raise the man as a zombie.
The discovery that followed was worse in a quiet way. Caldris cannot help carry prisoners at all. Anything that starts its turn near him takes cold damage. So the corpse-cold swordsman who had spent two sessions being told not to kill anyone spent the end of the fight standing by the fire, deliberately out of everyone's way, because there was nothing else he could safely do.
Five derro are dead across the whole engagement. Asked how many, Agatha's answer was:
"None. Those don't exist. We hid them."
They are walking back to a man who counts.
Nine freed
The plan they'd assembled at the end of last session worked exactly as designed.
Agatha struck the ground with the Chain Breaker. Five woke up. The four who shrugged it off were tied with Dravona's rope — she was the only person in the party carrying any. They camped, and in the morning she swung it again, and all but one of the rest came out of it.
The last one they intend to blindfold and deafen, on the theory that a thrall is a pair of eyes for something much further down.
The freed derro rebuilt the barricade, posted their own guards, and fed everyone — they had supplies enough to spare, and the party refilled completely for the first time in a long while.
What the garrison was actually for
Dravona questioned one of the freed savants in Undercommon. He remembered everything.
"There were voices in my head telling me what to do. I remember everything, though."
Then the part that changed the shape of the whole place:
"Our mission was to keep people out of the crystal cave — and to keep anything in the crystal cave from getting out."
"We did not go in. We were forbidden to go in."
The barricades were not protecting a treasure. They were a quarantine, and they faced the wrong way. The men holding them were expendable and were not permitted to know what they were holding.
The party got that for free, and only because they'd spent two sessions refusing to kill anyone.
The cavern
A small outer chamber of faintly glowing crystals, and past it a much larger one with pools of still water and formations the size of buildings.
The song is audible — pleasant, in tune — and also not audible: you hear it inside your head at the same time, a soft hum that gets stronger the further in you go. It isn't unpleasant. The party described it as relaxing.
At the centre of the larger chamber sits a very large egg-shaped geode. Dravona couldn't decide whether it was a formation, an egg, or a cocoon. Kvothe was certain it was no dragon's. Whatever it is, it grows in a way crystal is not supposed to grow — almost like a plant.
Nobody opened it. Nobody has been back to it.
It hurts Caldris
Agatha noticed first, and only because she was watching him. Caldris has one expression, and it had changed.
"I hear the noise. I do not like it. It is uncomfortable."
A while later there was smoke coming off his skin. Kvothe threw a handful of pool water at him and it sizzled.
"Because it is hurting me. I am going to leave."
He was still saying it when the ceiling moved.
What was in there
Dravona had asked the spirits whether it was safe. The answer was honest and useless in equal measure:
"This place is safer than most. But no place is safe here in the Underdark."
A cloaker dropped on Kvothe from the roof. He hit it, then dove into a seven-foot pool to get out of its reach and took a poisoned tail across the back on the way in. Its moan went through everyone's bones and left most of the party frightened where they stood. Caldris — who the cloakers pointedly would not go near — killed it with his longsword while the rest were still shaking.
Kvothe's real contribution came a moment earlier. He looked around and noticed that every pool in the chamber was glass-still except one, which was rippling, and that a dark patch on the ceiling was moving. He called both out before either did anything.
Out of the rippling pool came a gibbering mouther — a slug-shaped tower of flesh covered in eyes and mouths, dragging a noise like ten thousand people talking at once. It ate turns: Agatha, Dravona and Sylvara all lost some of theirs simply standing near it.
The second cloaker wrapped Sylvara up and began eating her face, and hurting it hurt her — half of everything the party dealt went straight through to her. Dravona answered with Careful Spell, which exists for exactly that, and spent the rest of the fight doing genuinely elegant work: a chromatic beam that couldn't touch Sylvara, a scorching ray that set the mouther on fire for three rounds, and a wall of fire bent around Agatha so it burned everything except her.
Agatha burned two of her best spell slots on failed attempts to Polymorph the thing, then cast Stoneskin on herself specifically to make herself the most appealing target in the room. It worked. The cloaker came for her.
Sylvara shot the mouther dead with the Oathbow.
The hammer knew
And then the best moment of the night, which nobody planned.
Agatha, wrapped up inside a cloaker and being chewed on, noticed that the Chain Breaker was humming in her hand. Not because she'd done anything. Because the thing eating her was an aberration, and the hammer had opinions about that.
She hit it. It was a critical.
Thirty-two points of bludgeoning, doubled, and the radiant on top of it doubled as well — and the cloaker came apart, and the cavern went quiet.
Where it stopped
They are standing in the Singing Stones with three bodies at their feet and the place they came for entirely unexplored. The geode is still sealed. Caldris is still steaming. Nine freed derro are camped outside waiting to be taken to Muranekk, along with one who is still not himself.
And Ubo, who has wanted to see this cavern longer than anyone, missed the whole thing holding the door.
The last thing anybody said:
"Ubo's exploring this cave when we get back."