Our “night” was pretty restless. Demons kept stomping by, telling us not to loiter, and though they never pressed the issue, it kept all of us on edge. Mikael and Lydia look especially disheveled and crabby.

The good news is, Ezekiel finally came to…so we can finally follow the strand that leads down, and hope none of us fall off.

**

The slope led to a level strand, and at the first junction after that, we found another three-footed pillar. This one was made of black stone with orange veins, and also had an engraved map of some kind on top…but Lydia said it’s a different design than the first one we found. There are also six gems arranged at intersections of the carving, but if the placement was significant, I didn’t know enough to recognize it.

[Brief sketch]

Shortly after that, we finally found a drow lady willing to give us directions. Well, first she called us loiterers, but Ezekiel said we were just lost, so she pointed out one of the strands radiating from her platform. We left her to babysit her undead monster things (they looked kinda like ghouls, but I’m not sure), and followed the path she indicated.

That led us to yet another pedestal with three legs and a web-pattern carved on top. But this one was different because a glowing arch stood to one side…and through it we saw what looked like a human city, seen from several hundred feet above. Master Oaklock said it looked like Loftwick, the capital of the Yeomanry… Three of the six gems set out on the “map” were glowing: a yellow, a blue, and a green-

[Sketch]

The other three gems were red, orange, and purple. When Lydia poked the red gem, the gems stopped glowing, and the archway disappeared entirely. She tried poking the green one to turn it back on, but she said the pedestal gave her a jolt that made her hand numb for a couple minutes.

Ezekiel tried poking the gems, and found that if he did them in order, the right colors would light, and the portal reappeared. We hadn’t heard of a black sphere over the Yeomanry…perhaps that’s what the message Ez received was about. We haven’t found an archway for Istivin, and we don’t know if messing with the pedestals actually affects what’s going on for the other side, so we still have some investigating to do.

**

[The following handwriting is a little messier than normal]

We finally found it. The nest.

A huge, white sphere sits on a strand, stretching so tall that our lights could barely make out the edge in the mists. It resembles the sphere in Istivin in some ways, but that one more resembled a ball of cords. This is more like the egg sack of a spider, where the threads are so tiny and interwoven they appear as a united fabric.

Two drow ladies stood on the strand, controlling the approach, along with a snake demon with six arms and the head of a woman, like we saw before in the city. The snake-demon sat behind a small, cluttered desk, and asked for our names. After fussing around the desk for a minute, she slithered off across the surface of the sphere to get “the ledger”…a big wad of paper barely held together with a leather cover.

Ez took the chance while she was gone to give brief, quiet instructions to each of us…in the event that things fell apart. Heiron and I were responsible for the drow, since they don’t require magic arrows to hit.

At last, the ledger was found, Ezekiel signed us in, and we were let through the hole in the webbing…through the thickness of the sphere…into the heart of the nest.

To say all the darkness and malice of this place emenates from the nest is simplistic. The truth is more tangled and dangerous…but I will say the air seemed full of an oppression I have never felt before or since. We could see everything inside, but I’m not sure where the light came from. It showed drow – crowds of drow, milling together around the floor, and some of the sides, of the sphere. Indeed, we had to pick our way down the slope as we left the entrance.

Worse than drow are the demons…one tall, horned one with a whip, others in shapes I’ve never seen before, and over them all sat the giant spider…a look of such pride and hatred and scorn in her eyes that I dared not look at her face. Is it possible such tiny, unassuming garden creatures share her nature?

Aliana, of course, never lost her posture as she and Ezekiel crossed the floor, passed an old man dealing himself cards at a desk, and approached the center of the nest.

A snake-demon-lady slithered forward, two of her arms holding swords, and met us halfway. She introduced herself as Morag, and said she was here to “intimidate” us, we who dared seek an audience with Her Eight-Legged Excellence. She shook her swords, and spoke very low…those of us in the back of the group could barely hear her.

…Wisdom is known by her children. Means do not justify their ends, however when a God calls his servants to a task, he provides the means to accomplish it. And surely a master strategist arranges supplies from the most un-looked-for of places? If we ever leave this place, perhaps I can say more.

Finally, the snake-lady led us toward the center of the web, and the creature who sat enthroned on it and within it.

Ezekiel spoke. They agreed the EEG was an enemy to us both, and confirmed our previous information: he can be sealed through a ritual using the “surprise” we brought with us, by placing what was in the egg. She said that was a gift from her – four “stones of power”: an iron pyramid, a bronze star, a silver orb, and a blue crystal. With these, we could imprison the Elder…or House Alserv could release him on the world, into the world. And I think there would not be a world for very long after that.

However, the Alserv have a ritual site that we could use for our own purposes, within their estate. And this web contains a portal to that estate.

We asked for such directions as we could get. She told us the gate we sought was on this same level of the web. Ez seemed more inclined to chit-chat than I was eager for, but at last he directed us out of that dark, smothering place, and we returned to the dark but spacious place of the giant web.

From there we continued along the strand. We passed a platform with a gate-portal that had no three-footed pedestal to control it. Two demons guarded it, so I suppose they were in place of the pedestal.

We picked one of the threads that radiated from that platform, and continued until we came on an egg sack, taller than I am, with a great hole rent in its side and its vacant silks fluttering in the odd breezes of this place. Not far ahead, a dozen or so huge spiders swarmed a platform at the next junction of strands, hanging eery and nightmarish in the gloom. With the odd harp noises always whispering at the edges of our senses, one could imagine the spiders wailing like newborns just on the edge of human hearing.

Perhaps it was that, or perhaps it was some other logic, but we all turned around and started to retrace our steps. We passed the gate with demons, passed the snake-lady still fussing at her desk, and headed up the steep ramp to the level above us.

When we came to the woman with two chimera pets, she said she couldn’t let us past her twice for nothing. So she asked for Clatrial (or to bite Clatriel’s hand)…and it’s a good thing Ezekiel reacted first for once, and ordered her to leave with a wave of his holy symbol. The lady grimaced, and vanished in a puff of smoke that blew away. Otherwise, Aliana and I were about to body-slam her…which would get awkward quickly, because Clatrial would have landed on top of us, trying to bodyguard Aliana, and if we didn’t fall off the platform by that point, who knows what would happen next.

Anyway, we just had to kill the unnatural hybrid chimera monsters, and then we could continue retracing our steps.

Not too long after that, we met a small party of male drow and asked them about the three-footed pillars. Specifically, Ez asked for directions to one that supposedly “didn’t work” (we all know he’s a super-nerd, but it still sounds suspicious to me every time he asks).

The drow said they just knew that every pillar was a different color, and worked to a different sequence, but that we might be able to get directions from the gate that leads to and from the Fane.

So we back-tracked some more, and found the portal we entered by. The party of drow followed us, as they said they got lost. The guards by the portal asked why they weren’t relieved, and the male drow said they escorted us here on their way to relieve them. That was a lie to start with, since we showed them the way…but the gate drow shouldn’t know that. So I’m not sure what made them suspicious, since presumably they asked the others about their replacements because they thought they knew. Anyway, the two groups started arguing, but since we had no dog in that fight, we left them to it. Specifically, this junction of threads contained a strand wider than most – probably thirty feet wide – so plenty big to support the instant fortress. Lydia especially had no pep in her movements, but I think the rest of us could feel it was past midnight in the time that ruled our bodies. After pushing along on a minimum of rest and straining our nerves to breaking point, by common consent we set up the fortress just beyond hearing of the portal guards, and assigned watches.

The fortress gives a tremendous psychological support. Everyone is resting much more easily, though we can still hear the whining and scraping of the winds outside.

I wonder what it will come to…?