Unspeakable
Your characters are old adventuring friends who've decided against retirement and left Faerun for Union, that is until you're all visited by a very disturbing dream that warns of a threat to your old home. You adventurer types can never seem to leave well enough alone, so it's time to get hip deep in serious trouble!
Your characters will have known each other for a long time, they've been adventuring together for years, you all have different skills, different contacts, different ways of doing things, but you all enjoy the hunt.Footsteps ring out in the darkness as soft feet touch hard stone. A torch was struck, and a short stocky figure descended down the decrepid old stairway. Just outside of the torch's light, the short man was followed by a much taller, much slimmer figure, heavily cloaked in tattered grey robes.
A step gave way under the short one's feet, and he cursed "Damn, what could you possibly want with this old heap? It's more likely to drop down on top of us than it is to hold treasure, why did you even want me to bring you to this deathtrap?,"
"My purpose is none of your concern, your reward comes only when we reach our destination, those were my terms," Hissed the robed figure. His words were dead and cold, each one slid off his tongue without emotion or passion. The shorter man winced, he had forgotten how unsettling it was to speak to this stranger.
He grumbled on regardless, quietly talking to himself "I knew this was too good to be true.. a hundred thousand gold? Everyone must think old Agger Venn a fool's fool... I should've just left that bastard back in Targos, gold be damned"
They continued on into the icy darkness, it was all around them, even the torchlight started to shrink. Then, without warning the stairs came to an end, opening into a large cavern. Agger Venn started inward, but was pulled back by the stranger's icy grip. Agger fought the urge to vomit, something about this creature's touch made him feel weak and sickly, chills surged up and down his spine.
"Watch your step, fool" the stranger pointed a long, slender finger towards the floor "what does that look like to you?,"
Agger looked and saw only a sleek black stone finish, a bit odd in a cave made of unworked stone, but not impossible "What in the hells are you getting on a-," he took a second look, and the floor began to slither, then bubbled up and rose into a thick blob.
"I see it now, an ooze, black pudding if I'm not mistaken,"
"You are not," Agger flinched again at the cold hiss.
The stranger held out his hand and muttered something under his breath, and then the ooze dropped out of sight. Fear took hold of Agger, he had been bothered by the stranger's behavior before but the ease in which he dispatched the creature had was absolutely horrifying. The aging bounty hunter knew that it would be no trouble for his client to do the same to him.
"Keep moving," the stranger said as he took the lead. Agger hesitated, but he held his torch aloft and followed the odd grey robed man. The cavern closed in on Agger, turning into a twisting maze of tunnels that smelled strongly of mildew and another, sickly sweet smell Agger recognized immediately as rotting flesh.
"This place is thousands upon thousands of years old, no one's been here in at least fifty or sixty years, how can there be rotten corpses here?,"
The stranger kept silent, and beckoned Agger into another room, this one was a dead end. In the center of the small stone room, was a rune-laden sarcophagus, glowing with divine power of the foulest order. Runes were carved into the stone floors and walls, but Agger wasn't looking at them. There were twenty or thirty corpses strewn about the room, torn apart at the chest and laid spread eagled, all of them, Agger noted, missing their hearts.
"Enkghreshk Oghser Khzadg!" Shouted the stranger, the words hit Agger's ears like a hammer to the chest. He doubled over in pain, he could feel warm blood pouring from his aching ears. Agger looked up at his client, the grey man was chanting, but Agger couldn't hear the words. He saw the stranger's outstretched hand, he felt the raging agony boiling in his chest, but he could not move, could not act to stop it, and the last thing he saw was his still beating heart in the stranger's hand.
The stranger watched the old man fall to the ground, watched him slip into oblivion. The grey man acted quickly, he withdrew a large bowl covered in strange crimson markings and placed the heart within, then placed the bowl itself on the sarcophagus. He pulled out a vial full of strange black fluid and poured it into the bowl, then chanted in an unknown language.
The words were so heavy with corruption the very air turned stale, the room was saturated in intense waves energy so foul it seemed to resonate with the sarcophagus. The chanting ended with a flash of light that filled the room with crimson fire, and when the smoke cleared, the glowing runes that had been laid into the sarcophagus, the walls and the ceiling were gone, and an unholy radiance took hold of the area.
With a flick of his finger and quick word, the grey man sent the impossibly heavy lid of the sarcophagus crashing through the opposite wall. Inside the tomb was a slender female with grey skin and silver hair, wrapped in a tattered grey robe just as the stranger. Her heavy eyelids fluttered open.
"I've finally done it... welcome back to the world of the living, elder sister" The stranger's voice seemed to find passion, his tone different than before. The emotion seemed somehow disturbing, as if there was something sinister behind it. The small woman rose from her place of slumber, a dark smile on her face "It is good to be back K-" the name seemed to stick in her throat, as if she were unable to speak it "... I had almost forgotten, all those years of tormenting clarity nearly drove me to madness,"
"As it would anyone dear sister, come, we have much work to do and the others will wish to join us,"
"We are to raise the other Unspeakables?"
"Yes, we will return our brothers to their former strength and pass judgment on this miserable world and it's bastard god!"
The words cut like poisoned knives carving into your flesh, you awaken sitting bolt upright in your bed, drenched in icy sweat. Your skin crawled of it's own volition, a horrid chill stuck to your spine and the dream pricked like needles into your mind. The dream could not have been just a dream, it felt like something so much more.
Something in the world was very, very wrong...
