We barely escaped with our lives!

I knew crushing this human's feet off would bring trouble...but I didn't know the half of it. Was it a good thing that we had an extra pair of feet to open a portal into another realm? I suppose it was good for Faemora when we rescued her from certain death as she hung helpless from chains in a dank, cold dungeon room. But I admit that we barely escaped with our lives from the fight that lay ahead. We didn't have any idea what was coming...
 
I suppose I should start at the beginning, from when we stepped foot onto the fateful stone platform. It had a sinister purple glow about it, the way all portals do when you read about them in a book. There were five sets of footprints on it, and with our three pairs of feet, Kevin's talons, and the extra pair of feet that Filber collected in his special way, we were able to activate the portal. We were surrounded by a purplish-blue glow and had a dizzy feeling overtake our heads as the world literally changed around us. When we could stand up again, we realized that we were in a dark dungeon-like area. There was a chest ahead of us that Nafaria quickly identified as magical. We used a glowing mage hand spell to open the chest and Kevin gracefully knocked me out of the way (no easy feat!) and saved me from a cursed trap spell. Inside, there was a beautiful silver sword that seemed to glow from within. Filber immediately picked it up and admired it. That small disaster averted, we began exploring the dungeon proper.
 
As I said before, we found poor Faemora hanging from silver worked chains, and brought her down gently, where Filber proudly presented her with the feet. The rest of us shook our heads and continued to explore the dungeon as Filber repaired the chains (for no reason), doing his best to stay out of trouble. In the next room were some guards that we quickly dispatched, sneaking our way through an opportune fog cloud to overtake them. Of course, I decided to repair one of the chains holding Faemora in a friendly dwarf-orc contest that I quickly won. I suppose this is one time the reader must trust me with the truth. But anyhow, mountain dwarves will always win a metal-working contest, so there should be no doubt of the outcome.
 
We quickly lost Kevin when he found evidence of Cawden, his brother, with a puff of yellow feathers and some troublesome blood and ashes. Blood and bloody ashes indeed! If only we had stopped when we encountered the pieces of...something...fresh and bloody. Sigh. We didn't. After Filber oh so helpfully knocked on every door in the dungeon and alerted every single guard and cultist to our presence, we made our way into a large room where Nafaria guarded Faemora at the entrance, the rest of us sneaking closer to an obvious portal painted on the ground. It was then that a monstrous being was called into existence with the inadvertent help of Cawden under the power of dark magic. The demon was disgusting, half ephemeral and squid-like, with darkness swirling about it like a cloak. Kevin was able to rescue a confused and horrified Cawden (alive, nonetheless, which only one of us had held out hope for!) after the summoning was complete.
 
Nafaria did her absolute best to weave her magic and convince the demon to let us go, or to go away itself, and avoid bringing destruction upon our realm. To our dismay, it was incredibly powerful and saw through our feeble attempts, as it sought to destroy us while Nafaria lay paralyzed and helpless. We fought back with all we had, and only magic seemed to hurt the demon. We were all frightened to the core and knew we couldn't defeat it, but by the gods, we were going to die trying. Before it took us to our final resting place, though, it attempted to mind flay us and cause us to forget everything we had seen. We were strong, though, and held on while watching it vanish before our eyes into a pit of bleakness.
 
Believe me, reader, when I say that we barely escaped with our lives! And now there is a loosed demon upon our realm. I can't help feeling like it's our fault and if only we could have rescued Cawden sooner, none of this would have come to pass! I suppose there's nothing to do now but loot the dungeon, and seek to destroy the demon before it destroys us. More adventures lie ahead for us in the days to come...