We left the octagonal room down the corridor deeper into the mountain.  The corridor opened out with three small vaults on each side, and then continued, until we reached a cross-roads.  Far up ahead we though we could see some movement and lights, so we turned right down that featureless corridor.  After a while we glanced behind us and saw that the corridor behind us, up which we had just come, was now blocked by a stone wall.  We stopped and examined it, thinking that a panel might have slide soundlessly behind us, but it seemed to be a seamless part of the corridor.  Mere men might have panicked at this point, but as an elf Tanara was familiar with all forms of magic and glamour, and surmised that we had been teleported as we went down the corridor, and were now somewhere completely different in the mountain.  We drew out a new sheet of parchment and started mapping again.

This corridor led to another crossroads, and the corridor on the right ended in a dead end again.  We continued straight on, and there was a door in the left wall.  We peeked this open, and discovered a vast circular temple, with two other doors and a huge statue to the great old one.  In front of this was a altar with a black-robed figure attending to it.  Fortunately he didn’t observe us, and we shut the door and moved on.  The corridor continued and ended in another cross-roads, with two dead ends, and a corridor continuing to the left.  We proceeded up this corridor, but Bryan’s observant eyes discerned something strange up ahead – a sudden lack of clarity in the view.  We probed and realised that a gelatinous cube was advancing towards us.  We turned and ran back down the corridor, checking occasional to see that it was still following us.  We turned right, and then right again, putting a fair distance between the cube and ourselves.  At this point we came to a pair of doors, one on each side of the corridor.  The doors on the right were probably the ones we had seen in the circular temple, so we cracked open the ones on the left.  We realised that they were guarded on the far side by a warrior with a drawn sword, so we closed it rapidly before he saw us, and continued.  At the far end we found another cross roads, with two more dead ends ahead and to the left, so we turned right and proceeded.  Again, we found a door on the right hand side of the corridor, we appeared to line up with the one we had seen in the temple.  We passed on, and came to another crossroads.  The corridor to the left was a dead end, and the one to the right seemed to be the one we had encountered the gelatinous cube, so we continued straight on.  After a while, we glanced back and saw again that the corridor we had come down was a blank wall – we had been teleported again!

We continued and came to another crossroads – as we were examining the directions, a group of people came running out of the blank wall on the left hand side and cannoned into us.  We parried their feeble attacks and called on them to stop attacking us, which they did.  It turned out that they thought we were Siswa, and are adventurers who had got lost inside the temple and had been attacked repeatedly by Siswa, which is why they had attacked us, as we were in Siswa robes.  They asked us if we would help them escape from the temple with some loot that they had picked up from inside the temple.  We agreed to, in return for some of their loot.

Picking ourselves up, we tried the corridor to the right, starting a new piece of parchment once again, as we again had no idea where we were in the mountain.  After a while, the corridor opened out into a series of three niches on each side, holding a total of six statues.  One of them had a metal necklace and amulet.  We went past and Bryan then went back to remove the amulet, but failed. Tanara went to help him, hoping that an elf might be able to remove it, but was also unable to.  We did see that there was some writing on it and a ring-shaped depression in the amulet, but none of our rings would fit it or do anything.  The writing read:

Stone of Power, Stone of Bright
Giving men their rays of light.
Forces dark will thou make small
Weak’ning men of night’s dark call.
Putting ring into the back
Vengeance give to those in black.

This made us think that this might turn out to be quite important or useful later on.

We continued and entered an octagonal room, with a statue of the great old one in it, and a hole in the floor in front of it.  At this point, we guessed that we might be near the front door again, but didn’t want to lead the other adventurers out so quickly, so turned round and retraced our steps.  Turning right at the crossroads, we found a curtain across a doorway on the left hand side of the corridor, and heard the sounds of elven voices behind it, so passed on.  Coming to another crossroads, we turned right again, and confirmed that we were on the first level.  At this point we showed the other adventurers the front door, and took a sack of loot from us in payment.  They confirmed that they had entered the complex through the outer courtyard and the monastic cells below the courtyard, so we resolved to check them out next.

Inside the temple

We crossed the courtyard to the corner tower and descended into the depths.  We crept along the corridor, but found only one cell was occupied, and the occupant was too busy chanting and meditating to hear us.  Turning the corner, we saw that there were two pairs of double doors flanking the corridor.  The inner pair, on the right as we came, opened into a dining hall under the centre of the courtyard, with another pair of doors on the far side, and two niches on each of the side walls.  There seemed to be nothing of any interest in here, so we tried the doors on the far side.  These opened easily into a short corridor ending in another pair of double doors guarded by a pair of Siswa with drawn swords.  These were obviously the doors that we had opened from the other side earlier – the level we had been teleported to was only one level below the level we had been on!  The guards looked confused because we were wearing Siswa robes, but two of us were obviously far too short to be Siswa, and the one who spoke was obviously not a male elf.  They decided to attack us, but a word of power from Tanara caused them to both drop into a deep slumber.  We tied and gagged them, and dragged them into one of the unused side corridors on this level.  We questioned one of them, and discovered that the man in the temple was the Rahib, and that they all served him willingly as acolytes.  He also revealed that Rahasia’s father and her beloved Hasan had probably been thrown down the Well of Lost Souls – the hole we had found in the octagonal chamber.

Under the courtyard

At this point a combination of dysentery and exhaustion finished the session.