After an exhausting battle with fire priests and their chimera and their hobgoblins, the party elects to conceal itself in a closet to dress wounds before attempting to move. Theren barricades the room by piling corpses against the doors. Before anyone feels any better, the fire cult returns in force. A fire genasi apprehends Theren despite his impersonation of a distraught fellow cultist. Bromsby et al come out of hiding to rescue Theren from the arresting fire genasi Bastian Thermandar. Eventually.
Meega charges up to Bastian and knocks him on his back, but he steps to the other side of the room and launches a fireball back at the party. Snake Theridan and Lefty whittle away the small force of hobgoblins. Auroch Bromsby pursues a priest and cultist out of the room and down the hall. Snake Theridan bites Theren’s hands free of their bonds. Theren recovers his gear.
Bastian departs abruptly when a tremendous force hits the red cauldron door. A couple of fiery arms reach through the doorway forcing back the blocking pile of corpses. The owner-operator of the fiery arms is plenty ticked at the desecrating invaders of his temple. If Bastian doesn’t want to be here, neither does the party times a hundred. The party cheeses it out of the fire temple.
. . .
After a pleasantly safe and uneventful evening of convalescing, the party makes its way through the underground Besilmer network by way of the iron gate in the air cult area into a compact entry way outside the water cult area. Theridan listens at the door and hears the perfectly unsurprising babble of running water.
Through the door is a badly damaged chamber save for a conspicuously undamaged, engineered fountain of clear water running into a basin. Lefty immediately spots a couple of critters camouflaged against a rocky outcrop. She attempts a friendly greeting and they attempt a telepathic invasion of Theridan’s brain. Lefty approaches them and finds herself staring into the necrotic eye beams of a couple of nothics. Meega charges, Theren shoots, Theridan whips, Lefty punches. The nothics are quickly subdued.
Bromsby and Haerelben check out the fountain situation. The water has some magical healing properties which Meega readily confirms with a practical ingestion test. Theren and Theridan fill their waterskins for later.
The party proceeds through the opposite door into another hallway. A metal plate in the stone door at the far end of the hallway pops open and a challenge for the cult sign is demanded. Helpless shrugging is not the cult sign and the plate slams shut. Meega forces the plate open again and Haerelben commands the occupant to open. The cultist unwisely opens the door for the party and is rewarded with a blue faerie fire painting and thorn whipping from Theridan. A concealing fog fills the room, but Theridan dispels it. Theren leans around the doorway and slays the blue man with a bolt from Diplomacy. Lefty knocks out the other cultist.
Haerelben zones up some truth to question the prisoner. Meega locks the other door into the room. More cultists arrive from the hallway and a paradoxical circle restraining ensues among the cultists and Snake Theridan. Meega, Lefty, Theren, and Snake Theridan quickly defeat the cultists.
Haerelben and Bromsby extract a bit of new information from the prisoner. Gar Shatterkeel is the local boss, possibly prophet, and in fact he does have a favorite weapon called Drown which will be the party’s demise. Gar serves presumed elemental prince Olhydra, all hail.