The Blackened Grove is reeling from their loss of a rather significant node, so the current situation between them and the Empire has dwindled back down to "annoying neighbors". The orcish horde from the east has lost a rather decent amount of army and a couple of their champions (another adventuring party behind the lines), so their offensive has been put on hold; that and their prior conquest of thirty miles inward was never actually undone, so they actually have some real land to use and keep themselves busy (the party forgot about this).
Ultimately, things are looking stable enough for the party, so they're taking a bit of a break before jumping on their personal interests. After a couple weeks of rest, they eventually find a riddle pertaining to Azasaraj the Red Saint, the knowledge stored being about the Red Saint's Prison (unclear as to a prison used by or for the Red Saint). This riddle vexes them for a time, but they eventually solve and are presented with a set of blueprints.
Unsure as to what the blueprints do, they dedicate the next month's coffers from Cast's kingdom towards constructing what it states; an elaborate and expensive room deep underground (they add it to the dungeon wing) filled with arcane circles and names of various celestials (Tow failed the Arcana check to figure it out). After this time is completed, they all enter the room and close the door behind them to complete the 'circuit'. This makes the entire place turn dark and one of the circles on the far wall turns into a passage leading down a set of glowing stairs. They head down.
We now enter a dungeon, where they discover magic circles that emblazon symbols in Classic Celestial onto their flesh when touched; remember that their Common is Celestial, so they all recognize them as ultimately gibberish for the time. I'm figuring the language works in a manner not unlike Inuit (?), in that a word consists of multiple 'mini-words' and powerful suffixes/prefixes that change their meaning; a made up example would be 'Ta' has to do with the act of witnessing, but requires additional parts to tell you whether it's the 'ignoring' kind of witnessing, bystander witnessing, participant witnessing, second-hand retelling witnessing (w/confession connotations that need to be specified here), etc.
While travelling, they run into a human who seems mad to the point of insane gibbering, having declared himself, his mother, and his uncle to all be the Red Saint; all the while pacing his room and drawing stick figures with all the subtlety/skill of a child. The party's current theory is that he's the Red Saint and this is his prison. They also run into several semi-sentient constructs made of nails that seem to be designed to attack intruders, as well as signs that a rust monster may be around, which has Cast scared out of his gourd. A couple more tattoing circles are found, the magic seeming to be arcane in design, but detect magic shows the same kind of aura that you'd find coming out of anything done by a cleric (something I've added to the spell), which doesn't make any sense as even the clerics of the Boccob Expy don't use arcane sigils in their work.
What's interesting is that the party wants almost the exact dimensions described to them for each room/hall they enter, but absolutely refuse to draw so much as a list of which turns they took. I warned them several times on this, so I'm letting them get lost on their own by this point.
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