Melchior’s Grand Tour: the lady in the tower [9]

The group wakes up in the shipwreck among the trees.
They are eager to find what was in the black tower and hasten to be ready.
They all decided that the tower was the key to everything, but whose idea it was remained unclear.
The Chief and the guard are taken aback by the coordination of the others: the alchemist, the interpreter, the ranger, the noble, and the strange girl are all in synch, moving like a flock of birds or a shoal of fishes. They pick up their stuff and fill the backpack with elegance, never bumping on each other or stepping on each other toes.
Melchior explains to the baffled Chief that Trina’s people can create this connection of minds, usually in a group of three. “Ideas’ weaving” is a practice that needs some time and practice: Priestess of the Horizon, like Trina, forge this connection during their service in the temples. She doesn’t know how and why a link was created so quickly and between so many people. They all think now is not the time to speculate. The Chief and the guard accept to take a back seat, overwhelmed by the group’s one-mindedness.
They approach the tower in choreographed formation, able to sneak near the flesh building without snapping a stick. The group has weapons loaded and ready. The alchemist had even prepared many different explosive vials: some can create smoke as cover, others can carve a small crater.

At the tower’s gate, there is one monster similar to the one that hunted Trina’s friend and killed the Artificer. A wave of rage swells in the minds of the party. Even the Chief and the guard are feeling it. They are disconcerted by those intrusive feelings, those foreign emotions. Then they become worried, scared, terrified when another mind seems to join the weave of thoughts.
There is someone in the tower, someone calling for them, inviting them with vague mental images. The monster “greets” them by rising the tentacles, like putting up its arm in the air as a sign of harmlessness and surrender. The woman the creature has for a head points to the gate, without ever looking at them.
The group passes a corridor made of unnatural pulsing flesh. Some deers, birds, fishes, and other animals are embedded in the wall, fading into the amorphous pink. Here and there, polygons of black stone emerge from the living tissues, like opaque crystals.
At the end of the hallway, a woman or something resembling one stands waiting. She moves like she has no bones, her body and clothes made of the same materials as the tower, the meat and the dark.
She doesn’t speak, but everybody understands: her glances and moves carry so much more meaning than it should be possible.
The lady says she is from the Onyx Moon. She is a Nyxnaut, a traveler of the night. She ended here a long time ago, months maybe. A year? She is not sure. The tower is her ship, her home, her body. She has to repair it and heal it before returning back home.
All the group knows about the inhabitant of the Dark Moon, the Nightmares, is that they are mischievous, evil, and cruel. There are a lot of stories about them: they are the boogeymen of many, if not all, cultures of the two continents. They kidnap and torture people who wander alone, just for their pleasure.
Everybody believes they exist, after all, they are mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures as is their jailing in the night sky. But very few people think they can reach the world and walk onto it. All the tall tales of self-proclaimed survivors were considered ramblings of fools. Not anymore.
What to do?
BE STRONG AND MENACING: that creature is responsible for the death of Trina’s friends. Her presence has clearly opened the portals, and who knows how she affected this frail environment. She has to explain herself!
BE CALM AND FRIENDLY: that horrifying lady is clearly powerful, gifted with some kind of magical talents or weird abilities. And maybe she is not evil as it would seem at first glance. Better treat her kindly and know more, perhaps helping her she will go away.