Imprisonment for unknown months. Torture. An dark mastermind, bent on shadowy evil. Memories lost.
It happened once. Now it has happened again. And, as the saying goes, I’m just about as happy about it all as a rooster in soup.
I remember being in some Silverymoon inn—the Ivory Goat, I think it was—gathered about a table. Horrors beset us until a demon appeared and awoke us all from what now seems to have been a shared dream, plunging us instead into a nightmare world where we were captives to Shadovaar children who were experimenting on humanoids under the tutelage of one called “Zareth.”
I remembered a Zareth from the past—a Shadowvaar agent we found beset by the Shadow-Death. Was he the same? What did that mean?
It seemed we had been in this place for months, if not years.
Having clearly not been fed to halfling standards during my captivity, I managed to free a wrist, then the rest of me, from my shackles. I then released the arrest. We then escaped our gruesome prison where children killed for fun and aberrant abominations were kept as battered and beaten “pets”.
Zareth only narrowly escaped with his shadow-life, as did two of the torturer-children. But with a promise to return…
Escaping through an ancient structure beneath the torture-chamber-classroom, we made their way through traps aplenty (all of which I managed to trip) and encountered a truly strange, out-of-place statue frozen in mineralized formations from eons of water that must have dripped upon it. There we were beset upon by a massive swarm of adamantine wasps, mistakenly hatched when I inadvertantly stepped upon an egg clutch. This was not, it must be said, my lucky day.
Using guile and wit, and a recovered beholder eye, we were able to overcome yet another obstacle in their quest for freedom from this evil place.With but one passage laid out before them, there were but two choices, return from whence we came, or hope that the way ahead would lead to the surface….
The Brandyken Chronicles 