29. September 3, 2011

The party speaks to the Trees to learn more about the island's sordid past.

The Ents say they are uncertain if we can remove the taint/curse from the people who are born on the island. They tell us that Good and Evil always existed on the island, back in the days primordial. The Yuan-Ti race wants to bring forth a primordial storm similar to one that raged across the world when it was created. The Yuan-Ti want the storm to destroy everything that is good and bring decay.

Shelby reaches out to Avandra, and experiences a vision. She sees a happy halfling family whose great-grandson is becoming a paladin. The vision verifies a story Gunter told us about how Avandra gave a mystical stone to the halflings to hold for Her, as her guardians, until she needs it again. Reputedly, this stone could be used to forge a magic weapon to rule the world. In Shelby's vision, the new paladin sees a book whose cover has a cypress tree, a coatl, and a rock. The party knows that the coatl is an agent of change, and change is one of Avandra's attributes. The party also knows that not long ago, we stopped the Yuan-Ti from fully empowering a summoned coatl that they planned to let loose to rampage.

Darwynn experiments and discovers that she can use the Stag magic to bestow Grace: She purifies water using a Stag ritual and finds that it removes the shadow from a (potted) blackroot plant. But the effect is temporary, and the shadow overcomes the plant again over time.

We travel to visit the primordial fire creature, who gives us some more history. It reveals that the island was not always in shadow--the shadow came immediately before the island grew. The shadow affects the fire elemental; it eats rock for sustenance, and all rock tastes bad to it now. It says teh land here has become heavy and the rock became horrid. The elemental came to investigate and the part of its consciousness to which we are speaking became trapped here (inland on the island) because some bad rock fell in and cut off this part of the elemental from the rey. of its body. The rest of the elemental is north-west of the island, at the underwater volcano that we have heard rumors about. The elemental has been forced to push away from its body to remain free of the bad rock, and wishes to return to its main body. To avoid eating the tainted rock, the elemental has beeen pulling from "everywhere" to obtain sustenance. We speculate that this is why perhaps 90% of all former land masses have disappeared from the world, and why Mortoros has a huge, spiny mountain range.

The elemental pushes some residiuum to the surface (near the old mines the Gruum worked). We send the New Harat crew a message to mine the residiuum.

The party speculates that the Holy place where we performed Darwynn's vision quest is purified ground, from all of the lightning strikes on it. So lightning purifies, and the Stag magic can cleans the shadow. The party also wonders if we could use Avandra's stone--the chaos stone-- to reinvigorate the Coatl that we nullified and rendered powerless. We further speculate that the stone might be a petrified coatl egg, or is the potential energy left over from when the last primordial storm petered out.