You find shelter during your underground adventure long enough to pause and gather your breath. You have managed to ambush your way through many troglodytes and into the inner troglodyte temple. They worship the god Laogzed, The Great Devourer, Defender of the Hole, Big Stinker and Eater of Souls.
In the idol room you learned that this temple is occupied by an avatar – a living embodiment of Laogzed. The presence of an avatar in the temple grants acolytes the ability to cast certain spells. It perhaps amazes to think, but even these lizard brains can somehow access the arcane well through the mere presence in the temple of an avatar to their beloved god.
“What is this avatar going to be exactly?” Grim asks Rowan, hoping he’ll know.
Rowan gives him a crooked smile before answering. “I’m not sure. A giant toad, I’d suspect, like the idol.” He shrugs.
“That makes sense,” Ryparin offers. “The Great Devourer could easily be a toad-like creature.”
“Toad-like?” Janaar says, catching the breadth of the term.
“It could also be another dragon,” Nyneve says mock cheerfully. “The last one looked pretty devoury to me.”
Zymaan snorts a short laugh. “It could be anything. The Eater of Souls,” he says, repeating another of Laogzed’s many names.
“Ha!” Rowan remarks, snapping his fingers. “That’s it!”
Everyone looks at him like he has gone mad.
“One of the tasks Lord Gilead assigned to me in my role as a Greycloak and Royal Pathfinder* was to figure out why the soul of any pour creature who dies in the Hool Marshes does not find eternal rest but instead gets caught in this foul place to roam in torment.
I think the presence of the avatar might have something to do with that. I’ve been minding these lands for five years and suddenly I think we’ve stumbled upon a great clue!”
He seems excited.
You had forgotten that dying in the swamp means eternal unrest.
“Uhhmmm, suddenly this avatar seems way more scary to me,” Valaria squeaks.
“Ayup,” Grim agrees while Janaar nods.
“Who is Lord Gilead again?” Kildrak asks, not sure anyone ever explained to him who Lord Gilead is and, in fact, who Rowan is.
“You don’t know who Lord Gilead is?” Valaria says in pretend shock while reaching for her lute. “Why, he’s the Lord of Keoland – the land we’re in, unless we’ve wandered too far south and entered the Kingdom of the Sea Princes.” She smiles at Kildrak and his grumbly dwarven heart instantly forgives her teasing.
“Do you know who Alandra de Winter is?” she asks, surveying the group to see if anyone knows.
“Well, she’s about as important a person as you can know about in human lands,” Valaria tells Kildrak as she strums a first chord on her lute.
“She saved the world twenty years or so ago, you know?”
Valaria gets mostly blank stares from her friends.
“Let me tell you the story about the time Alandra de Winter and Norman Gilead first met.”
[Story to be set out in Danger at Dunwater: Story Post – 003]
*Greycloaks are like the police in Keoland where Lord Gilead rules. The Royal Pathfinders are like marines within the Greycloak ranks.