>>5674500Worse yet, your search turns up another failure, as great or greater: the Appointed Successor yet lives, and is entirely alert.
>5, 18, 20“Dragonborn!” he hisses. “Free me from here this instant! I command it!”
His voice is muffled by his full-body casing, and you can hear the faint chafing of fruitless effort within as he tries to struggle free. You rankle at his impetuous presumption—officially sanctioned though his authority may be—and you lament his survival. You thought you saw him die! But… Well, in actuality, you suppose you only saw him crushed into the ‘mud’ beneath him, just as you were. If you survived, there is really no reason HE couldn’t. It still strikes you as unfair, in some abstract cosmic sense—a treasured friend is lost, and yet yoru target lives!
As if sensing your hesitation (perhaps suspecting your treachery?), the Appointed Successor urgently adds: “You need me! Me and my subordinates! Without our aid, you will die here as well!”
>11, 16Indeed, your meticulously and methodical liberation of your friends and loved ones has drawn undesirable attention. At first you think it is jailers arrived to check upon you—more strange,a rmless rock-things, such as the troll-faced thing which brought you to this place. Instead, you see something similar-yet-different: the eggs around you shifting and wobbling about, confronting and unfurling. You remember some of the eggs in question: empty, dried-out things, sapped of nutrients and left as solid-stone caskets for desiccated bones, yet now they shift and change. Limbs crystallize from them, oblong and seemingly random in position—and crags split to form hollow eyes and gaping, toothless maws.
To you horror, you realize that this place is larder AND rookery. The ‘eggs’ are a food source for SEMTHING, but they are also the GENESIS of the thing (or things?) which attacked your party. The earth-elemental-entities EMERGE from this place, arising to new, twisted life from the remains of these horrible sarcophagi!
“Quickly!” the Appointed Successor demands. “Before it is too late!”
What will you do about him?
>Free him to aid you—you need his help>Kill him—finish the job you started earlier, while he is trapped>Leave him to his fate, and face the waking rock-monsters 