S07E02 – The Ziggurat

[flashback starts] Screams and the smell of burning thatch jolts Don Diego out of his dreams. His fiancee, María, also sleeping until a second ago, is looking at him in terror. After a second of hesitation Don Diego grabs his trusty sword, María grabs a trinket and they both leave the bedroom. When they reach the stairs they see a disgusting creature with no eyes, a grimlock, bludgeoning Don Diego’s mom and kicking her corpse down the stairs. Don Diego, with fury in his eyes, jumps at the monster and kills it.

Outside of the villa it’s mayhem. In the hamlet’s main square large jail carts tethered to ogres are filled with cowering townsfolk. The few people still free are running away from the grimlocks who pursue them. Commanding the monsters is a humanoid creature with purple skin and tentacles instead of a mouth, a mind flayer. Don Diego, after processing this scene, charges at the mind flayer but the creature casts a lightning spell that blasts him several meters back. Before losing consciousness Don Diego learns the name of this mind flayer: Wrath.

After a spiritual experience involving a female hand touching him, Don Diego wakes up the next day to find himself on his villa’s rooftop. Around him his hamlet is quiet, razed and deserted. His wedding, scheduled for that day, will have to be cancelled.[flashback ends]

At the end of the long underwater cavern the heroes find a large pentagonal room with a dance floor and roman couches. On the adjacent interconnected bedroom suites they find scrolls describing the demise of the dungeon’s inhabitants after a mind flayer arrived. Among the ruins they also found a dragon egg containing a baby dragon that just hatched making Morgun very happy. Miriel, always eager to help, feeds the dragon with the dead rat she grabbed earlier. After looting the place the group moves on to the next area of the dungeon.

In the next large cavern they find a four stories ziggurat and, outside of it, a sacrificial altar, bones and skulls and a walking brain the size of a large chair that the group decides to kill. On the southern wall they find a mirror on the wall that turns out to be a teleportation device to a storage room somewhere else. Inside the storage room they see two lizardfolk kids playing. However, after a large battery of tests involving arrows, heads and arms the group determines that the teleportation gate has a one in six chance, according to Miriel, of sending you instead to a room full of sleeping grimlocks. After Don Quinn’s insistence the group decides to enter the black stone ziggurat through its main entrance on the fourth floor. Once inside they wake up a flesh golem. Morgun tries to soothe it with her flute and singing a lullaby in deep speech. The golem slams her in return. Meanwhile Miriel forgets to search for traps this one time while trying to open a trap door and triggers a spell that turns her against her companions (Crown of Madness). The group, after suffering heavy damage from the golem and Miriel, lures the golem outside of the ziggurat and coaxes it to run after Moncho, Don Diego’s esquire, who was a track runner back in Maradona. While the poor boy is trying to outrun the savage golem the rest of the heroes manage to bring it down safely from the distance.