Mimir’s Thunder: Part 2
July 26, 3022 cont’d
Fleeing an onslaught of giants into secret passes beneath an ancient city, the Honest Coin assault team of Fergus, Dogface, and Heavy Metal found themselves staring down a long-dry skeleton fallen over a book of unknown providence. Ever cautious, they analyzed the scene carefully before interacting but found no magics or traps laid upon the corpse.
The text that survived revealed the skeleton to be that of an ancient explorer and scholar come to unearth the mysteries of this city. From the text, they learned that the city utilized a network of Codex Stones, primeval objects of incredible power tied to the metaphysical roots of reality. Codex Stones can be bent to any number of purposes, but a number of the stones were scattered throughout the city, serving as hubs in a conduit of magical power, all connecting back to a tower. The tower, the party believed, was the same one in which Fergus spied the largest giant, likely Mimir.
In his search for enchantments on the corpse and book, Fergus noted a faint aura emanating from a mosaic pattern on the floor. These mosaic patterns seemed to be the lines connecting the Codex Stones.
The party rested in the quiet dark, and as they were preparing to set out again, they spied a figure at the edge of their vision. The silhouette was humanoid but the body seemed to be made up of moths and butterflies. Whether it was a fey or some other entity, the party could not discern, but as soon as they took notice of it, it vanished.
Readying themselves for ambush, the infiltrators pursued the figure through the Underworks. Though they found no sign of it, they did encounter a duo of fey bounty hunters. The fey, a displacer called Sir Vorpalion and his huldra disciple Farrago, claimed to have been dispatched by the Queen of Countless Refractions to destroy an entity called Nightsade, and they insisted the party leave their hunting grounds.
Parting ways with the bounty hunters peacefully, the group came to an access hatch to the surface and face-to-face with a rebel patrol. The rebels were no match for the Honest Coin. The bodies safely dropped into the Underworks, the group sprinted across a wide city street and into the cover of an overgrown park, but there was more at play within the park than they expected.
A wave of confusion came over them, and they could no longer find the arches that marked the entrances to the park. Before them there was a pavilion, and like all the structures of the city, it was carved directly from the stone of the mountain. All around them were gentle slopes covered in verdant grasses and flowers and beyond the pavilion was a rolling stream. Thickets of trees, dark and wild, waited beyond the flowers.
Investigating the pavilion, the party found it untouched by the magics that made the rest of the park a mental haze. From within the pavilion, they could see the way in and out of the park and gather their bearings. Stepping outside of it, though, they were once more lost. The party decided to seek out the source of magic that sought to trap them in the park, and set out into the fields of flowers, making for the woods.
Dogface peered above and beyond the tree line and felt clarity. Staring at the towers beyond, he could sense their orientation within the city, but as he brought his vision back down, this clarity left him. Fergus turned to his primal magics, harmonizing with the natural world within the park. Whispered on the breeze was a warning. Three potent fey laired within this park.
Once they crossed beneath the shade of the trees, they could not see the sky, and the forest began its attack. The Honest Coin persevered ensnaring vines, hails of thorns, and clouds of noxious spores, emerging into a clearing surrounding a pond, and at the ponds center was a pavilion of crumbling stone. Thick vines wrapped themselves through the shallow pond and around the pavilion. At the heart of the tangle was a massive, vaguely humanoid mound and embedded in the ceiling of the pavilion was a Codex Stone.
As the party began its investigations, the tangle of vines came to life and three nymphs appeared in the clearing. The nymphs and their monster attacked the party, and the situation quickly became perilous for both parties. Fergus learned the hard way that lightning invigorated the plant monster, and Dogface left a nymph with honeysuckle hair at death’s door.
Seeing her sister imperiled, the nymph leader Dandelion called for a truce. The sisters Dandelion, Honeysuckle, and Bluebell considered the park their personal garden and had been threatened by Mimir and the mysterious Nightshade. They were growing their shambling mound to protect the park and tapped into the power of the Codex Stone to make the park inhospitable to the invading giants. The nymphs agreed to ally with the party and remove their Codex Stone from the grid when the Honest Coin was ready to attack Mimir. As a sign of their allegiance, Dandelion gifted Fergus a ring she had used to tend the shambling mound. The wearer was granted resistance to lightning and was capable of sending forth balls of lightning. The nymphs also lifted the enchantment from the minds of the mercenaries, allowing them to explore the park unhindered, and the party decided to recuperate from their battles in the central pavilion, protected by the Codex Stone’s power.
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