Characters
Garazi, a young witch
Aria, a strange paladin
Heck, an affable revenant
Panthalassa, a necromancer with a missing arm
Daytona, a dhampir gunslinger fresh from Hell
Genevieve, an alchemist
Rudolpho and Beebo, an organ grinder and his monkey
Events
When we last left our heroes, they were descending to the second level of the tomb complex. In an eastern chamber, they discovered a room that held a strange fire that shot upward through a hole in the ceiling. There was a brass wheel mounted onto the wall. When Heck spun the wheel, it caused the flames die down; when the wheel could be spun no more, the fire died entirely.
The stones lining the circle that contained the fire began to glow with strange runes; Daytona was able to determine that the flame was part of some sort of magical ward. The characters who leaned over the ring of stone recognized that cracks in the earth were emitting a potentially poisonous gas. They decided to turn the wheel in the opposite direction to relight the flame and burn off the gas to keep it from accumulating in the chamber.
In a nearby room, they found a stone lectern. On top of the lectern was an ancient tome that was fastened to a staple driven into the floor by a length of chain. Genevieve was able to roughly translate the book: it contained a ritual for enacting a magical ward against demons and powerful witches. An illustration in the book showed the island at the center of the lake surrounded by a halo of protective energy; the halo extended to where the town of Vostok was located. The group correctly surmised that the yearly "witch burning" on Walpurgis Night in Vostok was a ruse to use a witch as the "fuel" that kept the protective ward in place.
Crossing a chamber littered with broken pottery caused the shards to levitate and begin to swirl around the room in a dangerous storm of jagged edges. The group had to hustle through to avoid being cut to ribbons. The next room held several old oil paintings: an alien landscape, a pure black canvas, a Vlaak family, and a Vlaakish queen. When Panthalassa move to examine the painting of the queen, the queen stepped from the frame, drew a dagger from her belt, and attacked!
The ghostly alien queen stabbed Panthalassa, grievously wounding her and draining her lifeforce. The party had trouble wounding the specter; their attacks often passed through her form as it flickered in and out of existence. They attempted attacking the painting, lighting it on fire, and damaging the wraith directly. The battle was fraught, but when they managed to banish the specter the painting fell from the wall, revealing a hidden passage to the south.
After Aria healed Panthalassa's wounds, she stuck her head into the passage beyond and saw a light source fleeing their intrusion. Panthalassa immediately gave chase. Unfortunately, their pursuit of the fleeing figures was in vain as they chose the wrong corridor to traverse. Moreover, they wasted too much time in a chamber that held three rune-marked Vlaak skulls on pedestrals as objects of veneration. Both Panthalassa and Garazi smashed skulls.
In a further chamber, they opened a trapped sarcophagus and many of the group were enervated by a poisonous gas. However, they did find an object dropped by the people who had fled from them: one had been carrying a glass container capped with metal. Genevieve determined that the fluid inside the cylinder was meant to preserve organs.
Having fully explored the lower level of the burial complex, the group returned to the first level to get another look at the massive iron maiden they had found earlier. Panthalassa figured out that the iron maiden held some sort of transportational magic, but Genevieve determined that the key they had obtained was just made of plain iron. However, because the key was mundane, Heck realized that this meant they could have the blacksmith in Vostok make them three more copies so they could use all four keyholes in the iron maiden at the same time.
Panthalassa was insistent that they retrieve Viktoria's corpse and row it back to Vostok. Nightsong was waiting for them, sitting on the dock, her legs dangling over the water, cranking the handle on a hurdy-gurdy. They explained to her that the steel casket held Viktoria's body, but Nightsong demanded to see it for herself. She was bewildered by the way Viktoria's head had been cut open and her brains removed; as Nightsong noted, there are much easier ways to kill someone.
However, these speculations were interrupted by the arrival of six young Graymalk witches. Their leader, Lorelei, had Garazi's finch familiar trapped in a birdcage; she explained that they had intercepted the bird and come to rescue Garazi from the witchfinders--though that was obviously no longer necessary. Frankly, these witches were the worst; they used a combination of cutting remarks and subtle (and not so subtle) threats to unsettle the group. One of them taunted Panthalassa over her skull helmet, which caused Nightsong to put her hand on Panthalassa's shoulder and fire back at the witch by saying, "Are you kidding me? Her skull helmet is a whole aesthetic. Were you born without a sense of style, Dagny, or is it something you have to work at every day?"
(This may have been the moment where the attitudes of several members of the party toward Nightsong shifted. The woman was self-centered, maybe even self-obsessed, and often obnoxious, but she was clearly happy to be a cutting bitch on their behalf.)
With the bullshit now cut through, it became apparent that the witches were here to cajole Garazi and her new friends into running an "errand" for them: they want the group to find a way into Kholograt prison to obtain a single word of an incantation from their sister who is imprisoned there. Garazi, afraid for her family's safety should she say no to their request, was relieved when the rest of the party pledged to aid her. Before they left, the Graymalks also intimated that the "War in Hell" is soon to spill over to the Mortal Realm. (This is something that Daytona already knows about, but for now would prefer not to contemplate.)
Once the Graymalks had departed, Nightsong cast a spell on Viktoria's body: both the corpse and the steel casket were revealed to be magical. Moreover, Nightsong could tell them what kind of magic was threaded through the corpse--the body was not natural at all, it was a construct created through alchemy and occult science. As for the strange steel casket...well, no one asked her about it, but she may know something about that too.
The plan is that they will get copies of their key made in the morning and then head to Chancel.