Mountain Monastery

A small stone chapel and warren of corridors built into the flank of a mountain north of the Great Tree, well past the wizards' tower. The facade is carved with the symbols of the Order of the Long Death — a defunct death-cult monastic line that served Jergul and his kind, and is said in dwarven oral history to have died out after one of its houses made contact with something from the Underdark. The construction itself matches what was once the work of the Monks of the Vale.

Ahmed Noke discovered the building during the months he spent in the Wildermarch before N.O.D.E. arrived. He never went inside. He reported a wailing sound near the structure that seemed to come from inside his own head, and the presence of animals he was certain had been dead.

The party has now confirmed why. The order built the monastery here as a deliberate cage over something that came up through the well in the basement — the entity that would later call itself the Gestalt. The cage failed.

Approach: The forest around the monastery has been infested. Creatures that should be dead walk in jerky, aimless patterns — eye sockets hollow, with fine pale fibers feathering out around the orbits and threading through any old wounds. The animals are puppeted by a mycelium that re-knits their hides and resists fire only weakly. At range, with torches held to the ground, the growth is endurable.

The Sanctuary: A single chamber inside the doorway, glossy with mycelium that lies across stone in a thin oil-slick film. A stag the party tracked here sat in the center of the room, watching a stone door at the far end of a hallway and waiting.

The Star Door: A carved stone door at the end of the sanctuary's hallway. Twenty-three stars are cut into its face, eight drilled all the way through. The inscription reads: "We who kept the darkness below looked always to the light above. What cannot be held in the hand, only in the eye." The door opens when the three star-holes through which light passes — a hidden triangle — are simultaneously covered. The party solved this and the door has remained open.

The Iron Corridor: Beyond the star door, the hallway narrows to six feet and the mycelium thickens from a sheen to a fibrous gray mat. The air grows heavy. The corridor takes from anyone who lingers — a familiar voice screaming in the mind, a name forgotten, a song's final bar lost, a slowly rising white-noise static. The Gestalt's first attempt at bargaining happens here, by way of theft: it strips something small from each person and offers it back in trade later. The corridor ends at an unlocked iron door.

The Inner Chamber (cleared): A library — long since overgrown, but still bearing the bones of a meticulous monastic archive on its shelves. The party fought two mycelium husks here — a monk and a woman in leather armor — along with two spore blobs that peeled themselves off the walls and a trap door in the floor that began to burn during the fight. The husks were destroyed; the blobs were burst. Religious texts on the central lectern confirmed Jergul as the order's patron. A founding charter, plans for a prison-cage of six pylons, and the journals of both Day Monks and Night Monks survived.

It was in this chamber that the Gestalt first spoke to the party in clear Common, through a mouth that puckered up from the mycelium on the wall. It bargained with Gryph here and took the memory of why he had come to the Wildermarch, in exchange for returning a song it had stripped from him in the corridor and a set of bone Pipes of Haunting as a sweetener.

The floor of the library collapsed during the negotiation.

The Pylon Chamber (cleared): The chamber beneath the library, accessed by the collapse or by the burning trap door from above. A wide circular space, six tall stone pylons arrayed in a ring around a central biomass — the Gestalt itself, grown into a horse-sized fruiting body shot through with small purple dots. Tentacles from the biomass lashed at each pylon as the party arrived, turning each one a sickly green where they struck.

The cage was designed to be activated by symbols of fist, palm, knife, fire, and two others the party did not identify. In practice the party charged the pylons back to full activation with whatever damage type they had on hand — bludgeoning, piercing, fire-via-torch, thunder. With all six pylons lit, the cage closed; the Gestalt's head burst, ejecting ten to fifteen perfectly preserved bodies — monks of the order and pirates of a Brakamite settler expedition — and the main body of the Gestalt withdrew back through the floor and down the gaping hole beneath, the long way down into the Underdark.

The hole is still there.

Loot Recovered from the Cocoon:

• Deck of Illusions — from a pirate body. Now with Helena.
• Robe of Useful Items — from a monk body. Now with Nu.
• Thayan Spell Tattoo — lifted from the ink of a half-orc sailor, transferred to Werrin's arm. Currently loaded with Silence.
• Two memory mushrooms — one for the monks, one for the pirates. Eaten by Gryph and Helena respectively, transferring borrowed memory and a small piece of craft from Brother Keef and Septavia.

The Hole: A gaping endless shaft to the Underdark, exposed in the floor of the pylon chamber after the Gestalt withdrew. The cage above it is broken. Nothing is currently watching it.