Green Pass Campaign IV: Yet Another Interlude

I assume this applies to April Dawnbow as well as anyone else who elects to scout the surface with a side tunnel.

You emerge just north of the city square. To the south you can see the rain of lightning from above as before, but it seems less frequent as the green bolts have vanished. Only the orange bolts fall, and where each strikes, you can hear a wail rise like the sudden opening of a torture chamber. There seem to be a number of sharpened stakes around the perimeter of the square, some of them bearing impaled bodies, and not all the bodies are entirely lifeless. The roiling purple clouds above seem to have grown paler and now have a peculiar neon tint to them, as if they are struggling to smother light from the sun above.

To the east you can see a great throng. Even hundreds of yards away, you can easily make out several figures rising high above the crowd. The first is a shaggy winged monstrosity with curled horns, waving what looks like an enormous maul (though it seems but a small scepter in his hands). Its girth must be around 50 times that of a man, with wings up to 25 feet in the air.

What appears to be a wave of stretching rippling arches of shadow stretch out of the ground all around him, large enough to frame his body, constantly fading and reforming in new locations as if drawn by an artist's charcoal and smudged away. With extended observation, you realize that the "arches" are actually portions of the serpentine bodies of some great subterranean creature of shadow. No more than two new arches appear at any one time, so you surmise there must be two of them. A host of smaller human-sized figures surround the tremendous shadow worms, cheering in excitement.

They are all standing in front of the old barracks building, the evident location of the orange beam, and seem rather determined to protect it.