Thus re-drenched in blood and after searching through all the dead demon body parts, we took our moment to recover. I worry sometimes. I worry that I have a pocketful of teeth and adding a demon tooth to it seems perfectly normal. I worry about what drug-addled Neil is going to do with the demon eyeball he took. I worry about why Fitz saw fit to create and then start wearing a cloak made of demonskin (He did it quite a while ago and somehow it escaped comment). And I think everyone is worrying about why Splug seems to think of urine as a cleaning product.

But time spent reflecting on such things is only slightly more sensible than time spent bathing between bloodbaths, so we pressed on. Rested and fortified with a bit of wine, we found ourselves in an old jail, with some lovely private cells off to the side and a lot of skeletons shackled tastefully to the floor. Further ahead, Distress had already pressed on and found a room with an evil-looking altar in it next to a big puddle of blood. If we hadn’t spent the better part of the last week drenched in blood she might have been more interested in the blood, but it’s just as well. After only a short inspection of the altar she found a secret button in the altar which opened a secret compartment within which was a book. The book? Can it be so easy? Did Distress just show Splug up? Oh is that how it’s done? No fancy footwork and charging through enemy lines waving one’s clapper about?
Actually it was so anticlimactic that we had a really hard time believing that it could be *the* book. We used the time we saved to pontificate on the identity of the fourth ghost, whether he was still alive, what relation he or any of this had to Paldemar. Whether the book was in fact a dastardly trick, and so on and so forth.

But we had all four items, the items we needed to place on the runes, thus to summon the dragon, to open the inner sanctum, so as to get the hell out of here and back to the all-important part where people buy us many rounds of drinks. We snapped out of it and arranged ourselves around the proving grounds so we could place all four items on the runes simultaneously. Distress had the mask, Carn had the blade, Splug had the bell and I had the book. Splug and Fitz meanwhile were standing bravely by the enormous pit at the center of the complex. At a predetermined shriek we placed the items in the runes! The runes flared and all four items dissappeared. There was a loud roar – a roar so loud that it sounded like it was coming from inside your head. All the doors slammed closed and then open again and distantly you could hear a rumbling sound like that of a huge stone door opening.

At that point many things occurred. The dragon dutifully flew up and out of the pit in a great roar and rush of wind and wings and flew right over Fitz and Klajdu and out of the room. Fitz and Klajdu responded appropriately by dropping their weapons and offering no discernible resistance. Splug over in the jail, noticed that the shackled skeletons had begun to move so he cast a convoluted piece of divine magic that only served to set one of them on fire. Carn meanwhile noticed something stirring in the pools in his room so he booked out of his room and into Splug’s, only to be attacked and grabbed by a skeleton. I saw some evil-looking carvings climbing out of the woodwork on the altar so I panicked, blasted a few pieces of altar off the altar, stumbled mostly backwards towards the door and was nearly crushed by a great black shiny spiky ball that chose that moment to rumble past outside. (There but by the luck of Ioun goes my corpse impaled on a spiky black ball). And last but not least, Distress noticed some things crawling out of the ceiling, and then a few moments later a green dragon flying around the corner and coming right at her. She also ran. It was NOT an auspicious beginning but we were only saving our strength and awaiting the proper moments!

Although to be fair, it got worse before it got better. The dragon caught up with Distress, attacked her and stunned her. Klajdu and Fitz recovered their weapons and ran like hell. The animated carvings possessed me briefly and made me run like hell down the corridor *towards* the ball of death. I was at least able to scream “This is a Splug-style bad idea!!!” Pretty much everyone seemed to be running in different directions, yelling at eachother why we were running that way and not some other way. Many proposals were yelled. For instance Fitz proposed getting the dragon to go back down the well, perhaps by throwing a bone down it, or perhaps by throwing Splug. The dragon having abandoned Distress, caught up with Splug and attacked him, poisoning him in the process.
It was ugly, but that was when things got awesome.

Carn called out a away for Splug to leap and jump onto the dragon’s back, and damn him if it didn’t work. Splug sunk an axe into the dragon and ended up clinging to the dragon’s back as it flew down the hall. The carven idols glared at Splug though and somehow made him lose his balance and then he fell off, hurt himself in the fall and then got mauled by the dragon, and oh yea he got poisoned again. so OK it wasn’t quite awesome yet, but it was a start. We were on our way to awesome!

With several of us somewhat luckily gathered in more or less the same place, with the dragon right there, I managed to land a dark dream curse on the dragon, and double it up with the ice scepter’s freezing blast. Between the two curses I was able to both move the dragon into the path of the spiky ball and freeze it in place once there. Klajdu and Splug both then laid into the dragon with their axes, each doing a great deal of damage, just before the great spiky ball rolled over the dragon. It was the greatest plan that never was and there was much rejoicing.

Although a moment later we saw that the fearsome black ball didn’t actually do that much damage and our work was not yet done. A little of the cursed fire (-of-which-we-cannot-speak-the-name), and a massive axe strike, then another blurry axe-buried-in-flesh thingy from Klajdu and the dragon expired its last poisonous breath:

Splug: Who wants dragon steaks!?

and one last quote before I put this account away again:

Fitz, trying to blithely walk past one of the animated skeletons, right as he gets critically hit by same: “MotherF……”