We go to funerals. The soluxes get buried near to the 2nd sun (we don’t attend). Ashgar, Iriega and Kirkus are buried with objects that are dear to them during the burial. There is also a lighting ceremony, which are a surprise to us. They use gemstones to create a constellations with starstones (Jacinth); Iriega’s constellation ends up on this plane — the other two have constellations placed in the sky at their true home.
The gods spend 5 days cleaning up.
After they leave, we hang about and check out the area around where the Vssgon is.
There are two structures:
- The Shrine of the First Light, east of the Vssgon cave.
- Mausoleum of the Cloaked Ones, cloaked giants that walk around and attack cities that don’t give them a sacrifice.
- Plus there is the big holy symbol of the maker
We show up pre-dawn at the shrine of first light. At the shrine, there is a depiction/map of the world. Very good map, with lots of differences from today. Ray marks on his map settlements that are no longer there. As the sun rises; bat shaped shadows swirl over the map. The thorn areas were much fewer, and seem to have migrated. Some of the old settlements seem to be human. Efrim finds old coins in weird stacks. There are two entrances that are pictured on this map, only one of which we have on our map, there is one directly under the maker’s holy symbol.
[Clay offline]
As we pass over the volcano, we see lava, which as it cools has flecks of sky green emerald.
We get to the symbol of the maker and using earth elementals we find the entrance. We clear out the ~100’ of rock on top of the
We end up in a cone/dome like room with writings on all the walls, and depictions of circles. Lots of circles. Lakshmi reads two names: Sken and Tres. Also see lots of numbers and algorithms. There is a depiction of the heavenly bodies in the domed ceiling above (don’t correspond to the stars that you see on this plane at all). The chamber is devoted to a dispute between Tres and Sken — they had a dispute about the behavior of celestial bodies.
We find two secret doors; the other is right at floor level. We go through the upper door — we enter something that might be a storage space. Its completely empty. We go through the lower door, go down a long tunnel. We go through a series of chambers that have been completely cleaned out. Leads to more rooms about prediction of celestial bodies and astronomy. The stars don’t match up at all; the way they represent these phenomena suggests they were from solar system sized planes. Only three planes we know that is that size. We record down constellations; there are two astronomer nagpa on catalon. We think that these caves predate the maker.
We then explore the known door below the maker symbol. These are a network of natural caves. We find a dead Vssgon worker without any sky green emerald, but with two magic items. A Spear +2, Short Sword +1.
The Vssgon entrance has a bunch of tunnels, some of which are sealed with a warning to mortals. The main chamber looks like it was covered in silver thread, going up 50’; it has since been burnt. A little bit of it is still left. The thread is fascinating — incredibly strong, can holds hundreds of pounds. Longest threads are feet long.
Lakshmi uses secret doors on spectacle for first time. Three of the doors have bigger tunnels; Al uses his immortal eye power to explore down the tunnel. After ~5 miles he follows a glow and finds a massive chamber of flowing sky green emerald. Ray explores out the other tunnel and this tunnel keeps going and going for miles. Eventually Ray explores up a human sized tunnel, finds some chambers with some sky green emerald statues, and then up to a town that has moss covering it. There are sky green emerald threads suspended from the ceiling. We go back down through the human sized tunnels and find an entrance. Now we actually go there, and we visit the statues who speak: one says, “Welcome to the Human Domain” another says “I’m a chieftain and also a slave”, the back one says “Never forget who your masters are.” These are magic objects enchanted with magic mouth. We then explore the city: there is a jagged crater at the center of this city — hundreds of feet across. This seems recent. We do find tiny fragments of sky green emerald. Carrock speaks to a tree to find out what happened. A great green sun used to hang here. The green sun grew and grew over the whole lifetime of the Sun. “Spiders” Vssgon workers put it there and it was cut down by some people. The shards lore as Gemstone of venom light.