Sleeping Giants Game 14

Intro

The First Sighting

We see a rough tunnel, carved into a finished wall. Our side of the wall is illuminated by a violet light, but the tunnel itself trails off into complete darkness. We can just barely make out a humanoid figure, approaching slowly. It walks with a limp, and when it finally emerges into the violet light, we can see its dark skin underneath ragged clothing. It is a young elven man, and his hair is a tangled mess. He is covered head to toe in dirt and ash, it looks as if he hasn’t seen a bath in weeks.

He takes a few steps into the lit room and looks around cautiously. He then approaches the wall and slowly lets himself down, leaning his back against the finished stone and exhaling deeply. It’s not long before he drifts off into a deep slumber that lasts for over a day.

Upon waking, he explores this underground fortress he has stumbled upon. The room in which he entered holds some sort of round chimney, lush with luminescent fungus. He finds a locked door at the end of a straight hallway with a single bend. One room holds a huge marble statue of a rearing red dragon, two large gemstones placed firmly in its eye sockets. No matter how far he explores, however, he doesn’t find a single indication of life. And in fact, most of the fortress is largely mundane, until…

The dark elven man opens the final door in the fortress, and is met with a room that inexplicably opens into a large, barren cavern. The ceiling must be 60 feet tall, which he can just barely make out as the luminescent fungus that is present in other areas of the fortress is absent in this cavern. The cavern itself twists around, and he follows it slowly and cautiously, as though expecting the worst.

And then he sees it. A modestly sized, leafless tree with bark that’s blacker than the surrounding cavern. It is growing straight out of the hard rocky ground, and attached to the side of it as if it were a cyst, is a perfectly round red apple, about the size of a human fist.