From the Dark
Twenty First Day of the Fourth Month 293 AC
Taking the chest well away from the temple and the twisted arcane currents that flow through that damned structure you present it to Lya, who shapes the lead into a form that can be opened before all six of you move a good fifty feet away. From there Lya sends forth an ephemeral spirit of air to open it. At the last moment you conjure an unbreakable shell around the chest and servitor both, to ensnare whatever may lie within.
Darkness billows from the chest, so thick even your eyes can not pierce it, nor can you feel anything in the earth or smell in the air. Only then do you realize that the very sphere you can conjured was blocking off all senses save sight, itself obscured by whatever was emerging.
"Take it from someone who knows the dark. I don't think it's friendly," Garin says, eyes fixes upon the hemisphere of swirling night you could now see a few feet away.
Like an egg cracking open from within, it bursts beneath your horrified gazes to reveal a spider-like monstrosity besides which the monsters you trapped before would seem almost natural. Composed of cruel barbed points and scything blades of steel-hard shell and ancient malice it was, its eyes pools of inky black upon a head just human-like to raise a feeling of disgust and dread in equal measure. A thousand wispy tendrils of hair, antennae, or some twisted combination of the two trail behind it.
Though you had never seen its like before and no ancient memory rises to the forefront of your mind, you know this thing to be a demon even before it speaks in the tongue of the Pit, its words defiling the very air: "Little insects, you have done well in freeing me after these many aeons. For that I grant you the boon of conversing with you before your likely
inevitable demise."
"Thinks much of itself, doesn't it?" Waymar snorts, though he does not draw his sword yet lest its radiance drive the thing to attack immediately.
"What are you?" you ask curtly in the same accursed tongue, taking the time to assess the monster for the battle ahead. It seems to have some dominion over darkness, and as a demon of some power it might be able to whisk itself away should it feel the battle is going poorly. It has some ability to counter and unravel magic, and the bitter miasma that still hangs around it hints that it might be dangerous to approach too close.
"Know, oh fire wyrm young and untested, that I am Ik'chol the Ravener, favored champion of the Queen of the Demonweb Pits, called here in ages past to protect the temple from any foes cunning enough to strike it directly. However, it seems that whatever calamity befell my binders it must have come too swiftly to call on me for aid, or perhaps the cowards feared to do so. Regardless, I now have the chance to fulfill my purpose, for none of you belong in this place save perhaps as slaves to my Lady. Tell me, mortals, are there some among you who would rather be slaves than food?"
That the demon is willing to give its name after an ages-long binding speaks rather worryingly of its power. Then again, it has already mistaken you for a young dragon, and while you may in truth be even younger than your draconic form indicates, your sorcery is far stronger by virtue of the path you walked.
"The flies must need conquer the spider's web," Lya softly quotes an old Braavosi play about a conspirator brought low by his would-be victims.
How do you attack?
[] Write in plan of battle
OOC: Sorry this took so long. I needed some time to stat out the monster. I do not often make new monsters, but this felt like it deserved it.
