In order to avoid freezing to death the Mothers decided to brave another of the archways. They decided that the pitch black one looked too imposing so they went for the arch which had the sparking motes in the mist. When they stepped through, the first thing that they noticed was the heat. Although the sky was dark, apart from a few dim red stars, the temperature in this circle was much higher than in the one they had left. The familiar stone arches surrounded them, but off in the distance they could make out a few rocky mounds that were not the regular structures that they had become used to. Before they could investigate them, however, the mounds, or at least two of them, attacked the group with strange writhing rocky tentacles. When these hit they grasped the unfortunate characters and started pulling them out of the circle towards the waiting rocky 'stalagmites'. Levi got to work early, chopping one of the appendages in two and the rest of the party started to follow suit. Then the whole group were hit by a wave of psionic energy, stunning a number of them and making them unable to act. Guthranka was one of those being pulled helplessly towards the creatures. Fonesca's magic missiles could not sever the appendages but did seem to have an effect whenever targeted against the body of the 'mounds'. Eventually one of the mounds was left as a stump with no appendages but those attacking it thought it wise not to finish it off, rather to get out of the area as quickly as possible. Levi and Gaspode arrived at the other creature just as a new sinister looking appendage was heading directly for Guthranka's skull. It looked as if it was going to suck out her brain. Both Levi and Gaspode managed to sever appendages, one of them being the brain-seeking one. This time the Mothers had no compunction to spare the creature's life. When they finally defeated it a wave of mental force washed over them, momentarily disorienting them. Discretion proving the better part, the Mothers headed back through the arch to lick their wounds.
Fonesca eventually searched through her pack and discovered a scroll of Leomund's Secure Shelter and she quickly cast the spell from the scroll. A small building appeared which looked to all intents and purposes to be a low stone barracks. It resembled a barracks because the door was iron bound and looked unlikely to yield to anything but a battering ram. All of the windows had secure shutters. Once inside, the Mothers took the furniture that they did not need (everything but four beds) and started breaking them up for use as firewood. Fonesca set them ablaze and Gaspode stood first watch. After a comfortable eight hours of rest and re-spelling the Mothers emerged from their shelter more able to face the challenges of the stone circles. Perhaps it was this comfort that made them somewhat over-confident, for they decided to return to the strange dark circle to see what lay beyond the rocky tentacled horrors which nearly de-brained them the day before. This time it was almost worse. Soon half their numbers were stunned by the mental force waves that the creatures sent out and it was all that they could do to retreat and live to fight another day.
This time the Mothers decided on the most forbidding looking of the portals, the pitch black one. When they stepped through, they found themselves in yet another stone circle, this one surrounded by jungle. The more pressing feature was a thirty-foot tall tower in the centre of the circle. One the edge of the jungle to the right of the Mothers was a collection of large tents. The party decided to approach the tower to see whether they could find out what was going on. They did manage to have a conversation with someone who sounded human, who was either within the tower or on top of it, though they did not manage to get to see him. Unfortunately, the Mothers managed to intimate that they might be favourable to Iuz and his followers (in an attempt to find information) and this set the denizens of the tower into a rather violent frame of mind. It became clear to the Mothers that these people were excellent archers as they ran for the exit portal with a few arrows in very tender places.