pages/acl.cool/site/draft/umbral2.dj

# Umbral Gaze 2: The Witness

Earlier this morning, Almuth, Carmal, Gottlob, and Warren met Laeral Silverhand in her courtyard as Clementine set out to retrieve the party's missing[^waylaid] wizard. The Open Lord teleported our heroes onto the slopes of Fourthpeak Mountain, a hulking vertebra of the world's frozen Spine lying at Faerûn's northernmost extent. Deposited among cliffs and gulleys, Gottlob felt his mountain-goat instincts kick in, right home, and Warren too breathed a contented sigh at what were, to him, familiar surroundings. From those stony slopes, the group hiked a mere half-hour to the proud and ancient mining city of Mithril Hall deep under the mountain, where they kept a _rendezvous_ with the dwarven Harper "Brugrock"--- or "Toolshed, as Warren calls him and which he seems to prefer. Following their Harper guide's briefing, and after breakfasting on some local cuisine, the group struck out from civilization _en route_ to the Underdark, intent to find and quell the Witness in its lair.

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***

Adventurers trudge at midday under a forest canopy like a blanket of night, through tangled brambles that tug at boots and armour and urge their wearers to turn back, to leave their quarry scheming in its corners and save themselves from its designs. They pay the thicket no heed, for the import of their quest numbs them to such puny pokes and scratches. As they pass through a narrow clearing, Toolshed makes a brief expression of satisfaction. He pauses to point at an old tree that, upon close inspection, has something of the inorganic about it. He turns to Almuth, instructing him with a self-amused grin to punch its trunk. The cleric is puzzled, but obliges. As soon as his fist meets bark, the dwarf calls "timber" and the tree topples, a "doink" of incongruous insubstantiality issuing from the bole, and bounces as it lands. Where gnarled roots pretended to anchor in the dirt, stiles of a ladder are barely visible, peeking up from a plummeting tunnel of gloom. With nowhere to go but downward, the party piles in, Gottlob careful on his hooves as he thinks that perhaps it was good their four-legged friends were otherwise engaged for such nonsense as ladder climbing. Toolshed clambers in last and replaces the tree-door as he does, leaving the party utterly blind.

Warren enchants a fork with ghostly light, and as the adventurers reach the bottom of the shaft, they survey their surroundings. To the left, they discover a river set flush against battered cliffs of basalt and a winding path alongside it over which the party might walk five-abreast. To the right is a forest of even floration denser even than that above; its vegetation is alien to the surface dwellers. A depressed strip of shore nestles a mossy platform of rails bearing a longboat safe for eight or ten, oars propped in a ramshackle enclosure behind. Toolshed collects the party's attention, explaining their options.

Before them flows the Lethe[^lethe]. Any creature so unfortunate as to wade those ponderous waters is granted the sweetest bliss, their memories excised and neuroses suppressed to find the peace of living--- as a matter of course, at the edge of their intellectual abilities--- entirely in the muted, singular moment.
Our heroes must decide if they will brave its gentle eddies in the longboat, an expeditious but risky manoeuvre, or hike the path alongside, a slower but surer proposition. Warren and Toolshed inspect the boat and, as it's sound, the party votes to travel the river, hauling their vessel off its rails to settle in the clement swells. Grabbing some extra oars, they shove off.

Within an hour, strange and oppressive darkness encroaches overhead, cavern ceilings closing in to mere feet above the figurehead that juts at the longboat's prow. Gottlob takes notice, and with intent gaze recognizes the qualities of magic on the stones above. He warns his companions, but even as he speaks, an inky glob hangs in covert silence, biding its time for the perfect moment to strike. It levers itself from the shadows to drop with startling precision straight onto Warren's head--- a damp slap and the gurgle of the cleric's muffled curses are an unmistakable alarm. Springing into action, the party slings spells and swings swords as a hail of mollusks, in Stygian arcane shrouds, issues from the umplumbed gloom, and defeat their attackers with relative ease. The attack leaves them on edge, but unscathed, and the boat glides smoothly onward.

An interval of whitewater threatens to pitch our heroes overboard, in which they spare themselves the Lethe's obliterating embrace only by the coordinated exercise of sheer athletic prowess, but their rowing is otherwise uneventful until Carmal, eyes wandering about the shore and its skirted trials, notices a misshapen head that rests tenuously above lapping wavelets of the bankside shallows. He calls to halt the boat, piloting it toward his discovery and holding fast with oars dug into silt when the riverbed grows near enough to reach. Unwilling to risk himself in the ankle deep waters that lie between the boat and the barely-surviving creature he means to approach, Carmal reaches for the power of his *magic item*, vanishing in a swirl of silver mist to reappear by the head on the river's bank. From so close, the creature's nature is plain--- the party has stumbled upon a _mindflayer_, dead or near death.

Almuth and Gottlob are immediately on edge. Each knows the horrors that an illithid unchecked will visit upon those so weak or careless as to permit it purchase; the cleric's study and paladin's experience have cemented this in their minds. Almuth, though, is hopeful; the river has no doubt wiped the usual illithid convictions from this woebegone monstrosity's head, and a tame, pliant mindflayer--- even one temporarily so--- represents an intriguing breadth of possibility. He confers with Eldath, aiming to determine whether the creature knows about the Witness' activities and if it would be willing to aid the party's cause. An answer comes only to the former: affirmative! He and Gottlob make their way over, braving the Lethe to their ankles for lack of a teleportation spell, and as Almuth, acting on instinctual concern, tries to jostle the mindflayer awake, such close observation confirms a bare shred of vitality to which it clings desperately in witless torpor. Gottlob makes as if to intervene, but the cleric, taking only a moment to come to his senses, steps away before the satyr has a chance. Party members convene to consider their situation.

The mindflayer knows about the Witness, but what is the cost to obtain that information? Hours will be wasted waiting for it to recover the memories of that information if an interrogation is to be carried out. Once it regains the facility of language, the monster's evil nature will surely also return; perhaps even it will attack as soon as it awakes, base nature driving its actions in the absence of cognizant maliciousness. With the Witness on the loose and untold threats wandering this part of the Underdark, the potential value of knowledge gained fails to outweigh the risks; Almuth kills the mindflayer with a single blow, and the adventurers forge onward down the Lethe.

*strategy discussions*

Some time later, low ceilings and ever-narrowing banks open dramatically on a vast caldera; like a buried pocket of ocean, the open water and sudden recession of the walls give brief impressions of the surface. A smattering of structures, faintly visible on the far shore, culminates with a stubby tower that juts ceremoniously from a large, squarish, half-ruined building amidst the trappings of a shabby compound. Nothing moves in the cavern save the longboat and her occupants.

Crossing the lake to moor their vessel, party members disembark and make their way--- around scattered detritus and sparsely clustered shacks--- toward the compound and its main structure. Gouged walls, broken windows, stray arrowheads, and smears of blood decorate their path. As they come upon their destination, their eyes sweep over tight rows of bedrolls and piles of personal belongings, an uncovered barracks. The bodies of the items' owners lie with them in haphazard tangles, killed in whatever conflict laid waste to this encampment. Three mindflayer corpses are also among the dead, battered beyond reason, half buried in beams and chunks of masonry fallen from the tower. Investigating, Carmal makes a cutting observation: beside the structure--- though disguised by debris and lying in shadow--- a crater marks the dirt. Extending away from the point of impact and vanishing through the structure's nearby door is the deep furrow of something heavy and spherical, perhaps 6 feet around, dragged in rope or chains over the earth.

Carmal knows what the gash implies: the Witness fought here, and lost. Almuth interjects. If the beholder was defeated by mindflayers--- a reasonable inference in the circumstances--- its conquerors will have infected it with a tadpole; the Witness may well have become just one more thrall to an elder brain[^elder-brain]. The cleric wracks his brain, recalling that if the party does indeed face a mindwitness, and if they can sever its connection to its master, they would do well to find a [flumph](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Flumph), an amiable psychic creature, to which the aimlessly unbeholden beholder might be bound and, thusly, set on the joint paths of _law_ and _good_. Our heroes decide that some reconnoitering is in order, and after a brief back and forth about clanking armor and quiet feet, the bard presents an ideal solution. Carmal casts "greater invisibility" on himself as he proceeds to walk along the gash left by the beholder's capture and through the dor, from which he carries several-hundred feet onward. His path leads him deeper underground as architecture blends with natural rock. Columns become polished stalagnates; walls turn to rough stone from which were scoured only the most obtrusive speleogens.

Noises arrest his progress, and he steps behind a pillar, around which he peeks to snoop on proceedings to the fore. The Witness hangs in chains before an elder brain, its eyestalks limp and face twitching. A mindflayer labors in the ritual of its kind to bind the beholder to its master and salvage some remnant of victory from its colony's ruin at the aberration's proverbial hands. Before Carmal can act, before he can even decide on an action, the ritual is complete; the beholder awakens; a mindwitness[^mind-witness] is born. As it rotates in its shackles, chains slackening as the strength to fly comes flooding back, the beholder's central eye seems to fix the spying human in its sight. Whether the Witness can really see him or not is unclear, but there can be no doubt that he is detected. Carmal loses no time, making like an arrow for the door where, just beyond, the rest of the party waits patiently for his report. Bursting forth, he gasps the message in frantic bursts: a mindflayer, a mindwitness, and an elder brain.
A quickly revised strategy, a frank exchange of views; our heroes will storm the illithid congregation, defeat the perpetrators of the Witness' conversion, free the victim of its psychic bonds, and use Almuth's sending stone to contact Tasha in hopes of obtaining a flumph.

As they rush in and downward, the object of their mission meets them halfway, an illithid handler at its side. Almuth and Gottlob use magic[^bless-bond] to quicken the party's reflexes and strengthen their wills and their bodies, before Carmal plays his ace, casting "polymorph" to replace the party's harengon with the scaly, towering form of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The mindflayer attacks, manoeuvering to place itself on a line along which stand also Carmal, Almuth, and the tyrant lizard Warren. It looses a mind-blast at full power, 

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***

*This summary is incomplete. Details of the resolution will be known 13, July.*


{% What's the deal with the teleporter gate and the tower? We do not know... %}

[^waylaid]: Louisa and Clementine's players couldn't make it today.

[^lethe]: Yes, [that one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe).

[^elder-brain]: [Elder brains](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Elder_brain) represent the ultimate stage of the illithid lifecycle, possessing immense psychic ability.

[^mind-witness]: [Mindwitnesses](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Mindwitness) are beholders or other beholderkin enslaved to a mindflayer and having undergone the process of [ceremorphosis](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Ceremorphosis).

[^bless-bond]: Gottlob casts "bless" and Almuth uses his "emboldening bond".