Tonight we finished up an adventure in Atlantis. Here we go! (And here's last time.)
Our heroes take a day or two to rest and recover from the life-sucking mummies they fought, and then Aren, the surviving Nemean priest of Shu, offers to show them where he found the bodies of his three Anubim compatriots. He takes them to the hidden forest and shows them the clearing, and Eithne is able to track them back.
The trail emerges into the streets of Haru-Seti, and the heroes spot a temple across the way. The temple is nominally to Khepri, but Akala and Imani recognize subtle variations in the architecture and decor, wavy lines where there should be right angles. The heroes enter the temple and a couple of acolytes approach, but Eithne spots another one - an Ahl-at-Rab - ducking into a back room.
Never one to stand on ceremony, Eithne follows. Akala provides an excuse and engages in the acolytes in a theological discussion. Thanos and his dog Thanatos follow Eithne, and Imani looks around the room. She spots a couple of snakes in the corners, and this confirms her suspicions - this is a temple of Set.
Eithne turns a corner and finds herself at a dead end, but Thanatos whines and sniffs at the ground. Thanos tells him to find the snake, and he starts digging at the floor, so Thanos looks closer and sure enough, there's a trap door opening to a staircase. Eithne conjures a ball of light, and she and Thanos descend, and find themselves in a room full of corpses.
The corpses are dead a few weeks and there's no easy way to tell how they died, but they do notice that they're dressed in rags. These, they figure, would be the slaves from the stone quarry that were sent to Haru-Seti. Thanos sends Thanatos back for the others, and Eithne spots something big moving in the middle of the room. Thanos casts a spell and make it glow, and it turns out to be an immense serpent from the waist down, but human(ish) above. Eithne recognizes it - its name is Sarangerel, a Naga-queen from Mongala. Eithne fought it protecting a tribal chieftain and burned its eyes from its head. And now she intends to finish the job.
Eithne gives a blood-curdling scream and begins casting. Akala and Imani descend the stairs, and Akala quickly surmises the situation and starts saying encouraging things to her friends. Something from an unseen corner of the room hurls a cloud of bone fragments at Akala, but she picks up a discarded shield and reflects them back! Someone hisses in pain, but there are further horrors.
Eithne casts a spell and immobilizes Sarangerel, but the immense Naga pushes through the magic (with some effort, though). Another Ahl-at-Rab grabs Thanos and claws him, but multiple serpents strike from the folds of his robes. Imani hurls her spear at the man and it tears away the robe, revealing multiple orifices in his flesh. Snakes slither in and out of them, sometimes dropping to the floor and slithering away. "Oh, that's gotta die," mutters Imani.
Thanos agrees, and throws magic at the creature, seeking to freeze it to death. He wounds it, but not fatally, and it grabs him again. Thanos feels poison coursing through his body and he collapses, but Akala hurls a chakram at it and distracts it enough for Imani to strike with her mong. Eithne, still focused on the Naga-queen, throws a ward around it to trap it, and it does something really unexpected - it surrenders.
"Eithne," Sarangerel hisses, "we could kill each other, but there are other options. Tell your people to stand down." Eithne does, carefully, and asks what Sarangerel is doing here. She uncoils enough to reveal a strange black obelisk, so black that light just falls into it. Akala has heard of these "vril obelisks"; they appear spontaneously and contain immense power. Thanos, more knowledgeable about Vril in general, knows that they are be entered, and inside are "the levers of the universe." Also, those who enter them don't always return.
The infested Ahl-at-Rab claims to have brought Sarangerel here using the obelisk, "glory to Set." The heroes shift restlessly, and Sarangerel challenges Eithne to a game - Menshu.
Eithne, not familiar with the game, asks if Akala can play for her (Akala's no expert, but she does have the knowledge of Orunmila behind her). Sarangerel agrees, and sets the stakes: if she wins, she will blind Eithne and cast her into slavery, and the other three will be flung from Khem. Eithne agrees, and says that if she wins, she will kill Sarangerel, and Set will leave Khem.
Akala and Sarangerel sit down at the board. Akala chooses the riders, while Sarangerel takes the monsters, and they get stuck in. The game takes several hours - Sarangerel has been playing this game all her life, but Akala has seen the web of fate and sometimes she just knows things. She wins, just barely.
The infested man steps forward and looks at the second Ahl-at-Rab in the room, the one that threw bones at Akala. Now that they can see him clearly, the heroes recognize him as Sutekh, the mage slavemaster they found back here. The infested man thanks Sutekh for his service, and then falls forward to his knees and opens his mouth impossibly wide. A huge black serpent emerges and opens its hood.
"Well done," says Set. "But I think you will still seize defeat from this victory." The infested man collapses, breaking into a million shards of ice, and Thanos spits on the ground.
Eithne draws her kukri and steps forward to claim her due, but Sarangerel coils around the obelisk and then vanishes into it. The characters confer briefly, but then decide to chase her. They step forward into the obelisk, and the surface is permeable, like cold water. They emerge into...?
They stand before an altar, upon which rest several jet-black crystals. But beyond the altar is the immensity of the universe, stars and galaxies. And strangest of all, they see Thanos, but a thin, glimmering, illusory version of him, stepping out into space. Thanos steps towards the void, figuring that perhaps this is how he attains godhood, but Akala stops him and asks him to take a moment. What is really happening here?
They look at the crystals and see that their arrangement means the same as the Void Atman - doom, stagnation, menace, but also slavery and imprisonment. Thanos, with his expertise in Vril tech, see how to rearrange them, but is concerned about where Sarangerel might have gone. "One mystery at a time," says Akala, and slips into a fugue, reciting strange truths that Thanos immediately recognizes as the secrets of the crystals. He rearranges them to reverse their meaning - freedom, liberty, light. And suddenly, all of them are back in the pit!
For Eithne, Akala, and Imani, this was instant, but for Thanos, it's a little different. He sees all of them enter the obelisk, and sees himself step to the void, but this time Akala doesn't succeed in stopping him. He steps out into the void and is lost in time...but comes back to try and prevent the heroes from getting into Khem, and then again to prevent Thanos from creating a device to circumvent the barrier. And then he winds up here again, and steps into the void again, and it all happens over and over until finally, this time, he rearranges the crystals and winds up back in the pit!
But there's someone else here - a Jinn, standing there naked and confused. Eithne, recognizing him as her husband/uncle, walks over and kisses him on the cheeks, giving him back the names he's lost. He blinks, and seems less lost. Thanos says that they're doing the work of freeing people, and the Jinn says he knows how important that is, but he needs to give himself a new name and life. "When you leave here," he says, "burn this place."
The heroes leave and, using some magic, burn the temple of Set to the ground. Over the next few months, with the barrier gone and the Cult of the Ouroboros' power broken, the heroes are able to help Khem transition from a monarchy under the thumb of the Pharaoh to a democracy. The slaves are freed, at least in this country.
The heroes part ways once again, certain that, eventually, fate will bring them back together. And indeed, we'll see them again in a couple of weeks!
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