Temple of the Four Winds

The temple is a collection of roofless stone buildings, many having burned at one time in the past.

Junius looks into one building and is knocked back out by three goblins wielding a siege-spear as a team. Sylvia, Retarius, Pouncequick, and Brother Aquila knock them down, but one flees into a nearby room and drops through a hole in the floor!

Retarius follows, into a basement which leads by a tunnel into an underground stone room. Unlike the buildings above, this has not been wrecked by war - the Romans apparently never found the underground portion of the Temple!

Pouncequick spots a trap - a floor-stone balanced on a stick to fall over when stepped on. The stick has a bell hanging from it, so whoever stepped on it would raise an alarm.

At the end of the hall is a dim room. The torches cannot illuminate it, because as soon as they are brought near the doorway, the torches flutter and go out. Verity determines that some magic has chained a windstorm across the doorway, so that all of the sounds beyond are blown aside.

Pouncequick throws a rope into the whirling storm. He drags it back, hooked into a very dizzy wounded Roman officer. The injured man is healed and taken outside.

Pouncequick leaps into the storm! He tucks and rolls so that he comes out on the far side in a root cellar full of moldy barrels of rations. Apparently the people of the Temple have not needed to break into their food reserves.

He also finds a hallway leading to an intersection of three other halls. Brother Aquila recalls that this is called the Temple of Four Winds -- likely there are three other winds down those three hallways!

If so, says Junius, we'll soon have their match, for we've already solved the problem of navigating around the winds.

Retarius suggests we pace off the distance to the roof of the wind-room, dig down ten feet, and let the wind dissipate upwards. It's earthwork and engineering, a very Roman solution indeed. But he says it quietly, and no one acts on it.