After confronting Chief Klorak along with his four consorts the chamber of the chieftain's den is decorated with furniture taken from the Thrune’s Fang, most of which is in relatively poor shape. A dented footlocker against the east wall contains the 70-year-old payroll from the ship—treasure kept more out of nostalgia by the cannibals than anything else. The chest contains several rotted bags, along with 4,200 sp and 180 gp.
The temple beneath the cannibal village itself is a remarkable find, identifiable as Azlanti in origin although there are hints that this ancient temple may have been built over the site of an even more ancient structure. This same check conf irms that the discovery of an Azlanti ruin this far south is a major one—such ruins are quite rare in the Mwangi and Sargava regions of Garund. A complete map of the temple, not to mention knowledge of its location, would likely be of great value to an organization like the Pathfinder Society. Further examination confirms that many of the wall carvings depict the abhorrent worship of the demon lord Zura, Queen of the Vampires.
Sailors whisper that a curse haunts Smuggler’s Shiv... and in a way, they’re right. Yet what causes the spirits of the dead to haunt the surf of Smuggler’s Shiv is not a curse as much as it is the lingering inf luence of what was once a powerful Azlanti cult of Zura who used both serpentfolk and humans as slaves and livestock—for not all of Azlant’s people were kindly and civilized. Zura, the demon queen of vampires and cannibalism, had long plagued certain parts of ancient Azlant—rumors held that she herself began life as an Azlanti queen before she became the Vampire Queen. These outcast Azlanti who came to Smuggler’s Shiv and defeated the serpentfolk who had already begun to colonize the island were hardly heroic, and in the seven decades that the Zura cultists ruled Smuggler’s Shiv, they brought more horror and depravity to these shores than did the serpentfolk they displaced, until Earthfall finally put their acts to an end.
Since that time, that wrongness has lingered, and the temple under Red Mountain has slowly spread Zura’s influence throughout the stones of the place. It is this malevolence that makes it so common for those who die in shipwrecks off the island’s shores to continue haunting the sites of their doom as undead, and that drove the survivors of the Thrune’s Fang to cannibalism.
Upon exploring the ruins of the Temple of Blood beneath Red Mountain the PCs defeat the minions of Ieana who is revealed to be the serpentfolk priestess responsible for the wreck of the Jenevere. The temple walls are covered with carvings depicting serpent folk rituals while the rest of the writing on the wall seem to mostly be prayers to Zura written in Azlanti. After a deadly prolonged fight with a horde of skeletal serpentfolk the group takes several minutes studying Ieana's notes, who found these runes frustrating to translate because of the missing portions of wall that have cracked and the ancient inscriber’s fondness for awkward metaphor, but four key bits of information can be gleaned from the carvings.
- This chamber was once a scriptorium where books and scrolls sacred to the worship of Zura were transcribed and illuminated.
- This temple was built over an even more ancient temple—one that was dedicated to a deity referred to only as the “Beheaded One,” an entity that was apparently an enemy to the ancient Zura cultists.
- Several prayers seem to indicate that the ancients made use of undead slaves created from both “humans culled from the unbelievers and slaves of the Beheaded One.”
- As much hatred as the Zura cultists had for the “slaves of the Beheaded One,” they also seemed to despise their own kind—especially those they called the “misbegotten of Saventh-Yhi.”
Ieana's notes:
Fortunately for the PCs, by the time they arrive, Ieana has already transcribed the majority of these carvings onto dozens of sheets of parchment (mostly scavenged from the many scrolls she carried and had to use over the course of her journey)—the notes are written in Aklo, but quite complete. In her notes, she seems particularly intrigued by the possibility that Saventh-Yhi might be the exact spot where, so long ago, her god Ydersius was beheaded.
The group recognizes the name “Saventh-Yhi” as a legendary but still undiscovered lost city said to lie hidden somewhere in the depths of the Mwangi Expanse. Knowledge of Saventh-Yhi is rare, and these mentions would be of a great value to a scholar interested in the topic. Accurate transcriptions or rubbings of the runes on these walls that are left behind by Ieana may be worth 600 gp to anyone interested in ancient Azlanti history.
The three large alcoves in the main room once served as meditation chambers—the cultists would enter one, pull a curtain for privacy, and recite the complex prayers and parables carved on the walls here. These carvings, all written in Azlanti, tell the history of this particular Zura cult in three stages. The southern alcove tells of the cult’s genesis in the city of Saventh-Yhi in the jungle, but is frustratingly vague when it comes to exact details on the legendary city apart from confirming that it was built by Azlanti—this section ends with the cult’s exile from Saventh-Yhi and how they made a dangerous overland journey that ended on the shores of a remote island far from their homeland. The northwestern alcove takes up the story at this point, detailing the cult’s exploration of this island (identifiable as Smuggler’s Shiv), their discovery and defeat of a large group of serpentfolk who had gone into hiding after the defeat of their kind many years before at Saventh-Yhi, and the creation of this temple. The northeastern alcove plots the cult’s future plans, focusing on how they had hoped to earn the gift of vampirism from Zura by undertaking extensive and vile rituals, and once this gift was theirs, how they planned on making the journey back to Saventh-Yhi to awaken (infect) that city with Zura’s blessing (vampirism).
All the carvings present a wealth of new information about Azlant’s presence in Garund, particularly all of the references to the lost city of Saventh-Yhi. Saventh-Yhi is one of the most sought-after lost cities of Garund, for legends speak that it was built by the Azlanti. Such a discovery could revolutionize what is known about this ancient empire, and that information alone, properly transcribed and recorded, could be worth thousands. Yet hard evidence about the location of Saventh-Yhi could well be priceless.
