The vampire's corpse cracked as it decomposed before their eyes. Its regalia and belongings clinked as they hit the stone.
Mouse crouched beside it, rummaging though its remains with the practical confidence of someone who believed all enemies should, at the very least, leave behind valuables. Gold ornaments, jangling bracelets, decorative pieces half stuck with old grime and fresh gore. Enough to be worth something, if not especially tasteful.
"Around three hundred and twenty five gold pieces' worth of art objects." came the verdict.
Mouse held up a handful of glittering trinkets. "So. Rich vampire."
"Rich dead vampire." Alona corrected.
"Still counts."
It was, however, not what any of them would consider 'treasure' treasure. Something ancient, dramatic, deeply cursed and worth carrying out of a collapsing temple. They scavenged around, treading carefully, managing to find several hidden bottles of potions. Snuffles gave them a quick sniff then dipping his finger into the bottle declared them as hill giant strength.
Alona grabs a bottle lightly shaking it "Mouse, fancy an arm wrestle?"
Before mouse could reply an excited Morgul intervened carrying a mummified heart "For you seen as you don't have one".
The adventurers erupted into a brief moment of chaos before Alona came to her senses "How is everyone actually doing?" Morgul, somewhat miraculously, was fine. Mouse and Snuffles however were not.
Alona was, in her own estimations, "A little bit stabbed, a little bit drowned and spiritually tired"
There was immediate discussions of resting because by now that had become the party's preferred reaction to nearly everything. Unfortunately, the universe having watched them survive a murderous fountain, a mummy centaur, a vampire thing in the wall and the world's most hostile diorama, was not about to reward them with eight uninterrupted hours.
They settled for what little time they dared to spare before venturing on. Patching wounds, taking stock and a little magical recovery. Mouse discovered she could bolster herself with a little borrowed necromantic vitality, which she treated with the enthusiasm of someone finding an extra biscuit in the tin.
Snuffles, after much muttering and item checking, found something considerably more interesting: a wand like rod that seemed almost made for his hands as though the temple itself had finally decided to apologise. "Rod of the pack keeper" he said, staring at it with reverence. "Well this should be useful."
They gathered themselves and prepared to leave when something passed through a wall in front of them. Not burst through. Not crawled out. Simply…passed through.
A figure, ash grey and ghost thin, moved as though following a corridor that no longer existed. It wore a feathered headdress and a pelt slung across a broad chest. In one hand it carried a short club edged with sharpened edges. It didn't seem to notice them at first, as though it were caught in some shelf memory of its own death.
Mouse to her credit did not attack it immediately. Instead, she tried to speak.
The ghost did not understand the words but something in her tone, the posture, the intent, the plain and universal emotional message of - hello, please don't murder us- seemed to reach it.
The figure stopped. Slowly it turned its head and really looked at them.
Morgul, who for once was paying close attention to something other than loot or imminent injury, read the expression first.
Alarm. Sorrow. Pity.
The ghost's mouth moved. No real words came out, only the whisper of ash. But the meaning was clear enough in the gestures that followed: broad motions backwards, urgent motion away, a warning as old as the ruins.
Go back. Leave. Do not continue.
Then confusion crossed its face as though the effort of noticing them had already begun to unravel. The spirit faltered, drifted sideways through another wall and vanished.
Snuffles, ever practical "well. That was ominous"
"On the bright side," said Mouse "at least it didn't try to eat us"
"That is an astonishingly low bar." Alona replied.
Morgul chimed in "guess we're not going down that corridor"
Following one of the safe footpaths through the diorama chamber they made their way to the double doors at the far end. Unlike nearly every other threshold in the temple, these opened with disconcerting ease. Swinging inwards without making a sound.
Beyond lay a dark corridor.
Alona renewed her light spell, its pale glow spilling across worked stone and revealing a left hand bend some distance ahead. Mouse peering carefully as they advanced, noticed something first: one of the floor tiles sat slightly higher than the others. Just enough to cast a faint shadow in the magical light.
She pointed at it immediately. "Avoid that one."
No one argued.
It was one of the clearest signs of growth they had shown all expedition.
The corridor widened at its far end, where the light caught on something golden.
A pile of coins lay heaped on the floor. On top of the gold rested a skull missing it lower jaw. A spider; large, glossy and painted with brilliant dark colours, had made its home in the empty eye socket and shrank back from the light.
Mouse's entire posture softened. "A spider" she breathed.
Alona, still trying to remain focused on whether they were about to die, "Please don't adopt that thing."
Mouse crouched carefully, moving in with surprising gentleness. "Hello, tiny friend."
By some miracle the spider did not flee in panic. It skittered from the skull and vanished through a dark seam in the wall nearby.
Mouse's eyes widened. "Theres something there."
And there was
A hidden panel, almost invisible but not quite. Hinged. Build to move.
Now thoroughly convinced they had at last found something useful, they approached the treasure pile with what they believed was caution.
It was not caution but greed in shiny armour. They all moved in on the gold hands reached out for coins. Once disturbed a thick burst of spores exploded from the treasure heap in a choking cloud, covering all of them before anyone had time to react. Their eyes burned. Their throats seized. Poison sank into their lungs with cheerful efficiency.
Everyone started coughing at once. Mouse gagged. "Oh, come on."
Morgul, who had perhaps the least remaining health and certainly the least patience, looked moments away from falling over on principle.
The gold was abandoned instantly. Priorities shifted
Morgul investigated the hidden panel through watering eyes and discovered it did, indeed, open. He pushed it up and crawled through into a narrow passage beyond, apparently deciding that if he was going to die of poison, he might as well do it while exploring something new.
The others followed as best they could.
Beyond the hidden panel stretched a cramped corridor leading to a strange dead end: an ornate mirror mounted at the far wall, with a stone door set nearby. The mirror gleamed in Alona's light with the kind of deliberate menace that only magical mirrors ever seemed to possess.
Morgul went towards it.
Alona and Mouse, both still half choking from the spores, failed to stop him in time.
The moment Morgul drew close, something about his posture changed. He went still. Tilted his head. Stared into the mirror as though it had just shown him something devastating or beautiful or both.
"Morgul?" Alona asked.
No response.
He remained standing there, glassy eyed and unmoving, poison still working its way through his body while whatever spell the mirror had cast wrapped itself tighter around his mind.
"That…is not ideal."
Alona did the most direct thing she could think of. She blasted the mirror with her sacred flame. The glass shattered in a spray of radiant lit fragments.
Morgul did not recover. The spell clung.
Mouse stepped forward, raging, poisoned and very much out of patience. She slapped him. Hard.
It was a perfectly respectable hit. Enough to make his head snap to one side. Enough to leave a mark. Enough, unfortunately, to prove that sometimes the solution is not -hit friend until fixed-.
Morgul remained unhelpfully enchanted.
He was now visibly low on health and the group were now alternating the beatings for what they thought was his own good.
This, somehow, was not the lowest point in their adventure so far.
Mouse, realising anymore slaps might simply kill him, changed tactics. She grabbed him instead and shook him by the shoulders with barbarian intensity.
That finally worked.
Morgul blinked back into himself just in time to cough poison directly into Mouse's face.
"Rude" Mouse spat.
Morgul swayed, barely conscious, then immediately did the smartest thing he had done in some time; he drank a healing potion.
Colour returned to his face. Not much but enough.
Attention turned to the nearby door.
Carved into its surface was a grim scene: an eagle killing a serpent and stone warriors wearing panther masks standing guard in the frame. Morgul, squinting through the last of his dizziness and the remains of the poison, gathered enough from the religious imagery to feel what the place was trying to say. Not a riddle, a waring, a hero's journey ending badly. None of which made the door more appealing but neither did it make it less likely to be the way forward.
Alona, after a brief glance at Mouse and a longer one at the increasingly fragile Morgul, pushed it open.
Beyond was a large circular chamber.
Directly ahead rose a cross shaped dais, each arm reached by its own short flight of steps. In the center stood a cylindrical crystal structure surrounding a strangely carved stone pillar. On the wall nearby hung a jade death mask at chest height, polished and expressionless. It was immediately clear that every part of the room meant something.
It was less clear what.
Mouse entered first, doing a wide loop around the dias with the caution of someone who had now personally been betrayed by grass, treasure, wells, statues, mirrors and decorative architecture.
She spotted that the northern steps were stained with old blood. At the top stood the statue of a warrior. Other stairways shimmered or vanished partly into shadow. Offerings sat tucked into low shelves where the arms of the cross met; silver jewelry, coral beads, jade figures. Small votive objects, carefully placed.
Mouse hesitated. Then, perhaps because nearly everything else they had touched in the temple had tried to kill them, she did something genuinely reverent.
She placed one of the gold ornaments taken from the vampire onto the offering shelf and bowed her head slightly.
The room answered.
A voice, soft and bodiless filled the chamber.
"Thank you for your piety and humility," it said "I had feared you came only to disturb this temple."
All three of them froze.
The voice continued. "I must ask a favor. If you are among the faithful… free me. I am trapped within this crystal. I have guarded this place for so long, but my soul is weary. "
Mouse looked at the crystal cylinder in the center of the dais. Alona narrowed her eyes. "That is either a celestial being in distress… or the most polite trap we've met so far."
Mouse, undeterred, addressed the air. "How do we free you?"
The voice gave a name, Quetzalcoatl. It explained the first step was simple. All they had to do was defeat the guardian on the northern stairs.
Mouse looked immediately at the bloodstained steps and the stone warrior standing atop them.
"Do you perhaps happen to know how? Or possibly how difficult the guardian is?"
The voice, without any trace of irony, said it might prove too much for them alone.
"That's not reassuring," Mouse said.
The voice also explained that the other stairways had been trapped to mislead looters. Only the north path was true.
This did not improve matters.
Mouse tried one final gambit. "Do you have… blessings? Healing? Something useful for poison?"
"I am a celestial being," the voice replied. "I can cure many of the world's ills"
Then the voice added, with devastating fairness, that from within the crystal it could not reach them.
"Of course you can't"
Behind them, morgul was still slowly dying of poison.
By this point the party had entered a state of advanced dungeon logic, where impossible things happened regularly enough that they could be discussed almost calmly. Morgul studied the symbols, took another potion, failed to recover from the poison yet again and continued looking alarmingly mortal.
Alona, now down to difficult choices and diminishing spells, decided they could not afford to wait. The guardian had to fall. The warrior statue stood still and imposing it didn't bear any resemblance of life.
That illusion lasted only until Alona stepped onto the first step. The construct woke immediately.
Stone shifted. Dust shook loose. It came to life stone grinding against stone reawakened. Before Alona could change her mind about anything, it was moving towards her with a brutal force imbued club.
She reacted on instinct, calling divine power but nothing worked.
The statue came down the steps with horrifying speed. Its club came crashing down, slamming into her hard enough to rattle teeth and faith alike. Stone met armour. Force followed impact. Alona reeled but remained standing through what could only be described as clerical stubbornness.
Morgul, with a flash of tactical inspiration, had already pulled out a rope and called out. Mouse saw it, understood and charged. She hit the statue like a tavern brawl, catching it in a grapple before it could properly recover. One locked around its frame, the other drove a vicious punch up into its stone body with enough force to make the whole thing stagger.
Morgul darted in immediately after, looping the rope around its legs and pinning it fast. For one beautiful moment, they had it. Restrained, off-balance, vulnerable. The plan was absurd but it worked.
Alona struck while she could, sward flashing against stone. Mouse followed with axe and maul in quick succession, battering pieces off it. Morgul danced in and out where he could, landing cut after cut. Even when the statue tore free of the rope and came stomping after Alona again, the damage had already begun to show. It limped and cracked as its movements grew less certain.
Before it had a chance to take Alona with it to the grave, Mouse leapt, brought her axe down and shattered the statue's head. Its body collapsed where it stood crumbling to dust.
A brief silence echoes through the chamber before the celestial voice returns "Only the cleverest one among you and their best tools can free me from this prison ".
With Mouse and Alona exhausted from battle and Snuffles currently exploring elsewhere all eyes fell on Morgul. "This feels targeted," He said.
With thieves' tools in hand, he approached the crystal. Where others would have seen a seamless wall, he found the weakness. A hidden breach opened. Inside, another barrier shimmered: a wall of pure energy, invisible except for the way it pressed against the air.
The voice urged them to trust the gods.
Alona stepped forward, raised her holy symbol and divine power answered. The barrier vanished. Inside rested a simple stoppered bottle.
Naturally they all stared at it, trying to work out what exactly they were about to unleash. But before anyone could intervene Morgul reached out and opened it.
A radiant serpentine creature burst free in a rush of silvery brilliance, feathered wings unfurling and iridescent scales catching the light. Beautiful, divine and immediately grateful. It bestowed a greeting, " I Quetzalcoatl, ancient guardian of this shrine, but my soul grows weary trapped here for an age beyond memory, I long for the skies once more".
Morgul, who had apparently learned nothing from the past several rooms, then drank what remnants and residues were left in the bottle. To everyone's surprise, this did not kill him.
Colour began to flow back to his pale skin as the millennia old serpent goop heeled his body.
Quetzalcoatl, now at peace and finally freed, offered each of them a simple wish.
Alona stepped forward first and nobly asked for nothing for herself. Instead she requested aid for the trapped porter still pinned by the bat mechanism above.
Mouse asked for more provisions, food and water enough to eat their fill for the day.
Morgul asked the question everyone else was thinking but too polite to say to such a reverent being. Where's the treasure?
The serpent god answered in turn. Bowing to Alona it spoke "it is done". Deep rumbling and clicks bellowed through the room as though old cogs were turning back into place. It emanated a bright aura once their eyes settled in front of them were fresh fruit, meats and vessels of water. Quetzalcoatl rose higher in the room " the wealth you seek lays in the realm above, hidden in a great casket but be warned this once honored temple now become a place of holding for a great evil. Now fare thee well on your adventures". It spreads its wings and with a large flap it takes flight from the shrine at last, escaping through the cracked roof towards the sky.
"Thankyou O'slippery one". Morgul shouts after it.
Alona glances around between the members and the possible loot left yet to be reappropriated, "Well. Since we're here…"
The jade death mask came off the wall first, immediately triggering a trap that dropped iron bars around Mouse. This all of several seconds before she simply bent them apart and stepped out, carrying the mask as if that had been the plan all along.
As if not just meeting the celestial guardian they gathered all offerings of monetary value before returning to the spider invested gold they had to abandon. Swiftly pocketing it all.
Following the instructions of Quetzalcoatl they climbed back to the temple chamber above and after a brief and thoroughly disrespectful discussion found the only option they had was to smash open the altar.
Inside, beneath the shrine to the bat god, they found a pit filled with silver, goblets, jewellery, mother of pearl, a jade placard bearing Zotzilaha's image, a marble statue and two bodies but cleanly in half.
"Well, that seems worth the trauma." Morgul exclaimed before diving in.
It was more wealth than they could reasonably carry without consequence. More than enough to make them targets. More than enough to convince the city they had found something real.
Exhausted, battered and now very nearly rich they made the decision at last to leave the shrine. Not forever but long enough to return to Port Nyanzaru, resupply, secure what they had found and come back with a better chance of surviving whatever darkness still waited below.