Game Date: 12/15/07
In-Game Date: Godsday, Disander 12 mid-morning – midafternoon
Grumble, Audric and Badger stroll into the Moneylender’s Guild. Changing their jewels and other treasures into coin, they find they have close to 40,000 in gold coin at their disposal. They agree to pay the 5,000 gold fee to open an account with the guild, take some spending money, and keep the rest on account.
Grumble nearly skips back to the smithy and orders an enchanted adamantine shield, as well as some returning javelins. Quirky changes his mind and buys a sickle of alchemical silver for Nialia.
Leaving Shooma’s, they walk towards the librarium of the Grey University. Badger sees a few gnomish carts touting their wares. One is blathering on about the value and worth of their locks, “guaranteed unpickable or your money back!” They offer a prize to anyone who can pick the lock they have on display.
Narrowing her eyes, Badger strides up to the raised platform on which the gnome speaker and his “unpickable lock” are standing. For two gold pieces, she is allowed three tries. Badger’s first two tries are nearly successful, but the lock is rather clever. She sits back and thinks for a minute. Then, smiling sweetly at the gnome, she proceeds to pop the lock in a matter of a few seconds, kicking the trunk lid open with a flourish.
The crowd, always ready to cheer an underdog (especially an attractive one), erupts into applause. Crestfallen, the gnome hands her the prize: a gnomish motorized lockpick with a silence charm cast on it. The gnome feels a little better after hearing her family name. “Perhaps we can say, ‘Only the finest gnomish locksmiths in the world stand a chance of defeating our locks?’” Receiving a hearty pounding on the back from the dwarf and a kiss from Audric, Badger feels prouder than she has in quite a while. As the trio heads off into the crowd, a female dwarf stares, un-noticed, after them. She gives her shoulders a small shrug, and disappears into the throng as well.
*****
“So what’s a ranger like you doing in a forest like this?” Asks Sellim, the more handsome of the two brothers. Rowan can’t help giggling at the question; Sellim’s brother Grellick just groans. Sellim has been brazenly flirting with Rowan the whole time they’ve been tracking the odd trail left by their mystery creature. His cheerful demeanor and unashamed tongue can’t hide the fact that he (and his brother) both know their stuff. The three rangers track the beast as it wanders, seemingly aimlessly, through the woods near the river. They stop for lunch, briefly, but as soon as they’ve taken just a few bites, Rowan’s fox Gus starts backing away from her and growling, his fur raised.
Rowan realizes that it’s not her, but a smell coming from behind her, the scent drifting on the wind. Blood, and fresh blood at that. There are no jokes as the rangers move stealthily forward, arrows nocked to their bows. Less than a hundred yards away are the savaged remains of a brown bear. The bodies of her two cubs also lay nearby. All three animals were torn apart and disemboweled by some powerful claw or weapon. Bloody tracks lead off into the forest from there. The animals have been dead less than an hour, so the rangers follow this new blood trail as quickly as they dare…
*****
In the grove of Amrauthlin, Nialia helps the elf collect belladonna and other herbs used in creating potions of wolfsbane. These will be administered to those bitten by the were-rats in last night’s attack. The work is pleasant, though the urgency behind it casts a pall over what would be an enjoyable day in a well-tended garden. Nialia and the elf converse casually, Nialia deflecting questions that might lead towards the subject of the Lythari. Amrauthlin asks about the feeling of alien-ness over the city. He says that it’s been growing slowly over the last two fortnights, but the past week it’s gotten markedly worse. He can’t forget that the coming week is the Horfang, the week of ill-fortune on the elven calendar.
The plants gathered, the two druids head for the small shack Amrauthlin uses for a dwelling and a workshop. He glances at a sall leather sack and swears abruptly. He explains to Nialia that the druid in the grove outside of town and across the river needs the herbs in the sack as quickly as is possible, but the pressing need for the wolfsbane drove it from his mind. He asks Nialia if she’d be willing to deliver the supplies for him while he stays and work.
She agrees, and Amrauthlen gives her detailed directions to the grove, then invites her to take her evening meal with him. She agrees, and sets off towards the city gates. She does not get far when Enialis begins hooting softly, nipping at her ear and staring behind them. Nialia notices two tall, lean, rough-looking men who are obviously following her. She tries to act nonchalant, but the two men notice that they’ve been spotted and begin to close the distance between them and the druidess.
Nialia casts fog cloud, and an obscuring mist spills out from an alley and across the street. She ducks into another alley as soon as the fog obscures her view of her followers. Losing them does not take too much effort, and she’s able to leave the city without being accosted by anyone, nor does she see the two thugs again. Following the druid’s directions, she crosses the river and enters the woods.
*****
The Library of the Grey University is a large, sprawling, two-story building. It appears as though it has been much-added to over the years. The library, along with a handful of other buildings, are old buildings that survived the razing of the old city, making it about three hundred years old.
The three adventurers head inside and meet an older woman dressed in the grey robes of the university’s faculty. She greets them and introduces herself as Kartharine, a Loremaster and wizard.
Grumble wastes little time in asking about his axe. Kartharine peers at it through thick, square spectacles.
“Very early dwarven, possibly pre-tri-clan schism,” she says. “It looks somewhat familiar.”
She casts analyze dweomer, which to her surprise, reveals nothing. “Hmm. There may be more to this weapon than meets the eye. What does it do?”
Grumble tells her that it changes shape on command, but only to dwarven weapons. He doesn’t mention what happened the first time he touched the weapon.
“Have you shown the weapon to Shooma? She is very wise in such matters.”
“Uh, yeah, I did. She wasn’t much help, though,” says Grumble.
“What did she tell you, then?”
“She looked at it and started spouting off about the creation story; y’know, the one with the first dwarf, then the first Goldenaxe. That one.”
“Ah yes, the ‘One dwarf to rule them all’ story.” Kartharine smiles. “Let me think.”
She drifts off, and is silent for a few long moments. Grumble starts to say something, and she comes awake and She snaps her fingers. “That’s it! Follow me.”
Kartharine leads them through row after row of dusty bookshelves and case after case of scrolls. Finally, she stops before a series of drawers, all wide, deep, and short. Inside these drawers lie neatly stacked long, leather-bound scrolls that appear to be rolled up canvas. She picks one and carries it to a nearby table, unrolling it with gentle fondness.
“Ah, as I suspected. This is a drawing of a series of bas-reliefs that have since been destroyed by clan warfare. Both the original sculptor and the artist were very skilled, and the detail is incredible. This one shows the story of the last Goldenaxe slaying Corthonodox, last of the great black Nether-drakes. See anything familiar?”
Grumble, Badger and Audric stare at the drawings. The weapon wielded by the Goldenaxe is a dwarven waraxe, and the designs of the blade and handle are identical to Grumble’s axe.
“I assume you know the story of the Goldenaxe’s weapon?” asks the wizard woman. Grumble nods, still staring at the drawing. Neither Audric nor Badger has heard the story, though.
Kartharine explains: “When a new Goldenaxe was crowned, he was to fast for a day, alone in meditation before the final coronation ceremony took place. If the Goldenaxe found favor in the sight of their gods, some say Moradin, others say Kron’nock, the ruler would emerge from his solitary vigil with a weapon that would remain with him all his life. When he died, it would always disappear within the hour of the king’s death. Innumerable stories grew around the legend of these weapons, some are no doubt myth, and others have respectable historical evidence to back them up. There were Goldenaxes whose names are all but forgotten, but whose weapons will be remembered until the end of days.”
“Many wonder if the Goldenaxes had but one weapon throughout the ages, or if each king was bequeathed a different one. Dwarf scholars argue vehemently over this. In any event, the fact remains that some Goldenaxes carried warhammers, some waraxes, some greataxes, some even the Urgosh. All of them had slightly different abilities, according to legend.
“Such was the influence and symbology of these weapons that what finally broke the rule of the Goldenaxe was not so much the royal family being slaughtered in the precursor to the Great Orc War, but when the next Goldenaxe-to-be to be failed to emerge from their fasts with a royal weapon. Three separate dwarves, part of the Goldenaxe’s family through marriage, undertook this vigil in order to be crowned the new Goldenaxe. All failed. These three, of course, were the founders of the three royal clans. The dwarven high council decreed-”
Kartharine smiles at the adventurers. “I’m sorry, I slipped into lecture mode there for a moment. “I suspect someone created this axe to resemble the axe of the last Goldenaxe. Such things are not unheard of, though I have never before heard of dwarves doing so.”
“As I mentioned, most dwarves hold their weapons as to be only slightly less sacred than their kings, and their kings were revered only slightly less than their gods. Yet it’s obviously dwarven make, or the most cunning forgery I’ve ever seen. You have indeed set before me a curiosity, master dwarf. I will search what records I have. Return tomorrow and I may have found something. Or is there anything else about which you wished to enquire?”
Grumble tells Kartharine that they are looking for information on the House of Bel. Kartharine grows pale. She steps back, fingers moving to her hair. She pulls one of the sticks securing her graying brown hair atop her head. It appears to be a wand. She doesn’t point it at them, but her hand shakes visibly as she holds it at her side. Audric steps protectively in front of Badger, holding his arms out in a “hold-on” gesture. “Whoa, wait a minute. We’re all friends here. Let’s calm down, milady.”
After a few tense seconds (where Audric calculates a roughly 65% chance that Grumble and Badger can escape with their lives if he engages Kartharine in a direct magic duel, with a 20% chance of himself getting out alive), Kartharine nods to herself.
“Follow me,” she orders.
She takes them to a small room in one of the corners of the building. Two young students are poring over books spread on a low table.
“Out!” commands Kartharine, and the two scramble to obey. She shuts the doors and tells the three to sit at the table with her. She casts Otiluk’s resilient sphere around them all. Grumble and Badger are alarmed by the translucent sphere that materializes around them all, but Audric remains unperturbed.
“Air can pass through, but sound does not. Nor can we be detected by any scrying. Now, that name you uttered is proscribed. How came you by it?”
Badger and Grumble tell Kartharine about the nightmarish citadel under the earth, and the final, separate battle with the fallen druid Belak and the destruction of the Gulthias tree. They don’t mention the lythari, but then they tell of the apparition that appeared afterwards and savaged the mind of Heidiana. He told them they had earned the wrath of the house of Bel before disappearing.
Kartharine shakes her head. “I cannot believe you, yet why would you make up such a tale?”
Audric murmurs, “There was another name he told us, but it was not his own.”
Grumble perks up. “Hey, that’s right! It was, um… Kordon or something. Kolven, Koran… Kovan! That was it!”
Kartharine, looking grim, leans toward the patry. “I will tell you this once, and it must remain a secret among you. Few now live who can tell this tale, and every book that makes mention of those names, and the names I am about to utter, has been destroyed. We have worked hard to erase them from the world, that none may know who they were or what they did, for they came perilously close to destroying the world.”
She sits back, and fiddles with the rings on her slender fingers as she speaks.
“Do you know of the Demon War?”
“Is that the one with that Oruk-Thrun guy?” asks Grumble. “If it is, then yeah, we’ve all heard it.”
Kartharine nods. “It is indeed. Here is more knowledge than any bard will be able to sing you in the telling of that tale:
“In the year 1032 of the Laisren calendar, the Elfin Necromancer Tanneldwyn (who is called the possessed, the accursed, as well as other titles) attempted to re-open a portal to bring back Oruk-Thrun to this world. Tanneldwyn and his six acolytes labored in secret, unearthing the ancient ruins of the city of Scourge underneath the Old Forest.
“Afterwards, Tanneldwyn and his acolytes were all tracked down and slain, but the acolytes, powerful magic-users themselves, had servants and acolytes as well. Nearly all of these were slain, but three escaped.
“These three were all servants of Kovan, chief lieutenant of Tanneldwyn. Normally, Kovan ritually slew most of his disciples and raised them as undead servants, but these three were living. These most trusted disciples were two brothers and a sister, last remnant of the ancient and accursed house of Bel. Their names were Amroch and Hemen, and their sister was called Rannah.
“We know from reliable sources that they agreed to separate and pursue their own destinies, but each harbored a desire to see the goals of Tanneldwyn the Accursed fulfilled.
“Rannah and Amroch we have not seen since in thirteen hunderd years. About a thousand years ago, Hemen was discovered far to the north in what is now Stelichtz. He built for himself a fortress of black ice on the cliffs of the sea. Karak-vulk-marr, it was called, the tower of the wolf’s shadow. This fortress was destroyed and crumbled into the arctic waters with him still within. To the best of our knowledge, Hemen was slain when it fell, though his body was never found.
“To this day there are clans of elves, progeny of those who fought Tanneldwyn, who still hunt for any sign of these last two evil beings.”
After Kartharine finishes speaking, she waves away the spell of the sphere around them. Even the quiet susurrus of the library is welcome after the still silence with that sphere, listening to such a tale. Grumble and company leave the library, somewhat shaken, and glad to be back underneath the blue sky and bright warm autumn sunshine.
*****
The three rangers hear a quiet thrashing noise from the bushes nearby. The tracks lead to a thick, heavy cluster of brush. Grelleck tells Rowan that a small stream lays just behind it; the creature may be washing or drinking. Grelleck plans to circle around to the other side and then flush the thing towards her and Sellim. The two rangers nod, and Grellick melts, ghost-like, into the woods.
After a tense few minutes, they hear a loud snapping of branches, and ready their weapons. But then there is a horrible scream that cuts off abruptly. Then another scream, coming from farther away.
“Grelleck!” screams Sellim, and charges towards the stream, with Rowan close on his heels.
The rangers find a large bloody patch on the ground just on the other side of the stream. Grelleck’s sword lies beside it. From there, a bloody trail, as if something were being dragged, leads off into the brush. The two rangers charge headlong into the woods after the creature and his prey, Sellim still calling for his brother.
Nialia, nearby, hears faint screams coming from off to her left. They seem less than a mile away, so she shifts into her wolf form and streaks forward towards the sound.
A few minutes of fast travel brings her to a small clearing where a grisly sight awaits her…
Rowan nearly collides with Sellim as he stops short at the edge of a small clearing. The creature has obviously made this its nest; several carcasses in various states of decay lay strewn about the place. The creature, a bizarre cross between a lizard and a bird (look, it’s a Deinonychus. Kind of.), is slashing open Grelleck’s body with powerful, long talons on his hind legs. Sellim charges forward only to be slammed back onto the ground as the creature makes a 25-foot standing jump terminating on the ranger’s chest. Sellim is slashed nearly in half before he even hits the ground.
Rowan yells and charges forward as well, her swords flashing, as Nialia appears, unseen by the creature, across the small glade. Rowan feels the talons ripping into her, and the thing’s foul teeth snap just inches away from her throat. Nialia, still in wolf form, calls a lightning bolt that distracts the creature for a moment, though it seems to confuse it more than hurt it. Rowan presses her own attack, and Nialia charges forward and grabs the thing’s leg, pulling the large lizard to the ground. Rowan whispers the name of her new blade as she slices into the beast, and it shudders into stillness. Helpless, only a few strokes are needed to finish the beast. Dying, the thing seems to melt, it’s limbs going soft, as if putrefying, in a matter of a second. Several new eyes open in it’s mangled head, as well as a second mouth. This nauseating display lasts for a moment, then the creature succumbs to its wounds and perishes.
Nialia saves Sellim from the brink of death with her wand of cure light wounds.
Sellim’s good humor and smiles are gone as he gets to his feet, staring at his brother’s body. He takes Nialia’s package, telling the women that he’ll be taking his brother’s body back to the grove for burial. He thanks them for saving him, but insists he do this alone. They follow him for a while at a careful distance, making sure nothing else in the forest bothers him. Finally they set their feet towards the city once more, their hearts heavy.
At the city gates, Nialia stumbles as she’s overcome for a moment by a wave of vertigo. The feeling of wrongness in the city spikes, and she fights off nausea. A few seconds later, another wave hits her. She can’t pinpoint the location, but she thinks it’s coming from the direction of the West Hill district. Rowan asks, “Wasn’t the library that the guys were going to in that district?”
The two women look at each other for a moment, and then increase their speed as they enter the city.
*****
Walking along the street of shops in the west hills, Grumble, Badger and Audric consider the news they’ve heard. Few people walk the street with them; most of the shops are closed, their owners having displays and carts set up on the main street of the faire. Suddenly the world seems to tilt and twist before their eyes, and a strange, alien landscape seems superimposed over the façades of the stores. Unlikely trees sway above a gray-green swamp, and the sky above is a sickly orange. That image fades quickly, but a pool of slime expands under their feet, and the three have to backpedal hard to avoid it sucking at their footgear. Before they can do more than utter startled cries, a giant creature emerges from the slime. A translucent worm-like thing, it towers over them, seven waving, claw-tipped tentacles wave like cilia around a circular, toothy maw. With a strange, high-pitched cry, it attacks.
As Grumble and Badger wade forward, blades swinging, Audric looks behind him to see a second pool expanding behind them, trapping them. He curses as another worm creature rises from the new slime pool.
It is a grim, desperate fight to slay the creatures while dodging the seething mass of tentacles that seek to drag them into the worms’ mouths. Soon all three are bleeding from a score of claw and bite marks, and all have barely evaded being stuffed into the sickening, pulsating mouths of the worm-creatures. The worm creatures, seemingly oblivious to the gashes in their own thick hides, attack mindlessly. More clear slime spills from their wounds, coating Grumble, Badger and Audric in the viscous goo.
Finally, both worm creatures take so much damage that they can no longer attack, though even as they lay still, tentacles still snap feebly in the direction of the exhausted trio. As the worms finally die (which seems to take forever), the corpses and the slime pools under them fade out of existence. Audric, realizing the creatures must have been summoned via a spell, looks around for a magic user in the gathering crowd of onlookers, but sees no likely suspects. The crowd, believing the spectacle to be some manner of show, applauds enthusiastically. Some even throw a few coins at their feet. Muttering darkly, the three of them are just getting their breath back when Nialia and Rowan show up. They overheard people talking about a dwarf and two gnomes putting on a show of fighting monsters as they passed through the city, and came as quickly as they could.
Nialia and Rowan tell their comrades what has occurred in the forest. A suggestion to retire to the inn and discuss the rest of the day’s events is lauded by all, and the tired adventurers head towards the center of town, to the Shield and Shingle.
Nialia remembers the offer of Amrauthlen for a meal together. She tells them that she must tell the other druid that their dinner will have to wait until a later date, and then she’ll meet them at the inn. She walks away in the direction of the grove, passing a troupe of actors performing on a hastily erected stage. The play is a poor rendering of an old elven story, and Nialia doesn’t even look up as she threads her way through the dozen or so people gathered to watch (or jeer).
As the hero onstage proclaims his intent to go and slay the trolls that have abducted his love, a hulking figure emerges from behind the curtain on the stage. Tall, gray-skinned, and muscular, it wears only a loincloth and wields an axe made of crudely carved stone. Where the things eyes should be, only blank stretches of skin exist. It sniffs the air for a moment, then turns toward the actor on the stage.
“Oh, hells below,” whispers Audric, “that thing’s real. Shoot it!” and takes off at a dead run, yelling warnings at the actor.
The actor turns and sees the monster and gives his first convincing performance of the afternoon as he screams in terror. The monster cuts him with his axe, and the actor collapses to the stage, bleeding. Before the monster can finish the job, Rowan’s arrow takes him through the back of the head, killing him instantly. But while that happens, four more of the creatures have leaped out from behind the stage and have jumped down to the stunned crowd below, attacking indiscriminately. The party wades in, weapons swinging, but not before several more bystanders have fallen.
Grumble had started towards the action along with everyone else when he stops as if pole-axed. Just beyond the panicking crowd is a small knot of dwarves hurrying away from the action. One of them, a female dwarf, turns and looks straight at Gumble. Their eyes meet for a moment, and Grumble feels his blood turn to ice in his veins. The face... it can’t be. She’s dead. But the likeness is exact, down to the last metal band used to fasten the end of her braids.
“Glorwyn!!” comes the tortured cry from his lips. She turns away as one of the dwarfs takes her arm and they hustle away.
Grumble chops through the monsters before him without even really seeing them. The last creature hasn’t even finished collapsing to the ground when Grumble takes off after the dwarves at a dead run.
Pushing through the crowd, he finally catches up with the dwarves he saw, but there is no girl with them. Panting, he accosts them, and they draw back, hissing through their beards at the sigh of him.
“Yeah, yeah, no beard. Deal with it!” he snarls into their faces. “Where’s the girl who was just with you?”
The dwarves look confused now as well as offended. “We have no female with us, fool,” spits the closest to Grumble.
“I just saw her with you when you ran away from those things on that stage, now where the hell is she?!?”
Again the dwarves insist that they have no female companion with them, and tell Grumble that he should learn to handle his liquor better. They turn from him and walk away. Grumble stares after them, his face suffused with rage and frustration. He picks up a loose broken cobble from the street and hurls it into the back of the helmet of one of the dwarves. “DON’T YOU TURN YOUR BACK ON ME YOU BASTARDS!”
The struck dwarf turns and tries to charge at Grumble, fumbling with the peace-bond leather covering on his own axe. “Kil-mar’nock FILTH!” the dwarf spits. “I’ll gut you like a-”
But his companions tackle him from behind, shouting that he should not sully his blade with the blood of an outcast. They carry their struggling companion away as Grumble watches, motionless, gripping his axe so tightly that his hands ache.
Grumble says nothing as he returns to the rest of the party. Audric and Nialia have healed who they could. The actor, upon waking up, takes one look at the blood-and mud-spattered adventurers and takes off into the crowd with yet another scream.
Looking behind the curtain of the makeshift stage, Nialia and Audric find the rest of the acting troupe slaughtered. A door leads out of the back of the wagon the stage is erected upon, and leads down a narrow alleyway.
“Nialia,” asks Audric, “can you track the trail of these things back to wherever their lair is? There may be more of them.”
Nialia becomes a wolf and goes sniffing around while Audric goes back out to the stage and informs everyone else of their dark discovery. Healing themselves, the party prepares to follow Nialia’s lead through the maze of back alleys. All the while, Rowan feels like there’s something she’s forgetting about the foes they faced. Something her father said. Something very important…
Monday, December 17, 2007
Monday, December 10, 2007
Session 21: All’s Faire (part two)
Game Date: 12/08/2007
In-Game Dates: Disander 11th, evening – Disander 12, mid-morning
The panicked faire-goers make it difficult for the party to reach the were-rats. By the time they push, intimidate or slip their way through the people, the pair of were-rats have slain another guard. Not only that, but a cluster of fiendish dire rats are racing around, biting everyone they can and causing havoc.
Audric morphs into a much taller (about 6’3”) version of himself, carrying Badger on his back as he begins casting as many buffing spells as he’s able on the party. Nialia calls lightning on one of the were-rats as Grumble attacks the other. Dire rats swarm all over the rest of the party, spitting and biting. As Badger slides off Audric’s back, a third wererat changes from his unremarkable (but ugly) human form into a hybrid form, attacking Badger from behind. Seeing Badger both bitten and stabbed, Audric momentarily wigs out and casts wrack on the third were-rat, who collapses in helpless agony. Badger recovers a moment later and gives her assailant a merciful coup de grace.
Grumble demonstrates that one doesn’t necessarily need silver to kill a lycanthrope, as cutting one completely in half seems to also do the job, albeit very messily. Grumble turns his attention to the other were-rat while fending off a pack of dire rats that swarm around and over him. Badger gets in behind the were-rat, slicing away at the hybrid’s legs and other vulnerable points, keeping the were-rat from pressing his advantage over Grumble. Nialia and Rowan spot a human in the process of killing yet another guard amidst the still retreating crowd, about sixty feet from the combat. Nialia calls down the thunder (er, lightning) on this man as he changes from man to hybrid were-rat. Snarling and brandishing his rapier, he charges towards the druid. Rowan steps between the two and engages this were-rat, who seems to be in command. Both sides hold their own for a minute, give or take a few dire rats. Finally, after taking enough blows and cuts to drop four normal creatures their size, the were-rats take off in opposite directions. Rowan and Grumble streak after their respective opponents, but soon lose them in the warren of side-streets and alleyways.
By the time they return, the remaining dire rats have either been killed or have likewise fled, and the guards of Brindinsford have arrived on the scene. The guards obviously do not believe the outlandish account given by the party, all they see are dead guards, merchants, and faire-goers (the were-rats having reverted to human form upon dying) lying strewn about the street, with the party standing over them with bloodied weapons. However, Audric has managed to stabilize one of the guards, who vouches for the truth of the party’s tale. Then the crowds, returning to the scene, also clamor that the party are heroes, not villains. Lieutenant Shella is sent for, who arrives moments later. She asks them to accompany her to the barracks. As they walk back up the main street of the faire, they see another spot of similar devastation, with the guards working quickly to clear the bodies from the area.
Reaching the barracks, Shella asks them for an official account of what happened. The party faithfully relays the events to the grim-faced Lieutenant. She tells them that two other groups of lycanthropic assailants struck the faire, and while the guards drove them off, the guards took heavy casualties, and none of the guards succeeded in killing any of the were-rats. The lieutenant thanks the party once more for services rendered, and by way of reward tells them that they are no longer subject to the peace-bonding laws; they may keep their weapons ready at all times. The tone of Shella’s voice suggests that having their weapons ready at all times would be a prudent thing to do. After that, the party is free to go.
Tired, the party heads for the Shield and Shingle. Grumble almost immediately heads upstairs and is asleep almost before his head hits the pillow. The rest of the party is recognized by the crowd as being the slayers of the were-rats and are plied with compliments, questions, and all the free drinks they can swallow. Nialia ducks out of this and makes her way to the grove of the druid said to be within the walls of the city. The streets are dark, but she eventually finds herself before a large, walled enclosure taking up an entire city block. Above the 20-foot walls she can see the tops of trees silhouetted against the star-strewn night sky. A male elf druid greets her at the simple wooden gate and bids her welcome. He is Amrauthlen, and his familiar, a fierce-looking hawk, is named Kerrit. He gives her a tour of the well tended gardens, at the center of which stands a might ancient oak, grown, says he, from a seedling brought out of the Old Forest. Nialia could tell this, drawn to the tree like a faun to its mother. She feels the tree, the soil around it, even the air that the leaves enrich, as though it were a part of her own self.
Rowan eventually heads off to bed, as do Badger and Audric. In the privacy of their room, Badger asks if Audric thinks it would be worth looking at the locksmith booths to see if perhaps any of her brothers are here showing their wares.
Audric, as gently as possible, reminds her that she saw them all in their home far to the north just a scant week ago, and they could not possibly have traveled all this distance in that time. Badger sighs; listening to Bruge and Chlyra reminisce about Rowan as a young girl has made her terribly homesick. Saddened, she goes to sleep, Audric providing what support he can.
Back in the grove, Amrauthlen bids Nialia good-night and leaves her to her meditations. Nialia falls into a trance, and as if in a dream, she and Anealus enter the old oak, only to emerge in a forest. She walks among the trees as if she knew them all by name, and comes to realize that there are wolves everywhere, watching her. They call her to join them, and as she becomes a wolf, she realizes that these are her kin, the Wolf Clan. They run, they hunt, and finally, they sleep under the boughs of a tree very similar to the one Nialia fell asleep under. Nestled in close to Nialia is a Lythari who smells very familiar.
“Araven?” asks Nialia.
“Shhh,” comes a whisper in her mind, “Now it is time for resting. Sleep, my young one.”
The next thing Nialia knows, it is just past dawn, and she feels more refreshed than she’s ever felt in her life. She realizes, however, that she is in wolf form, and there are wolf prints all around her. She cannot possibly have made them all, for they vary in shape and size, but none of the tracks leave the area just under the tree.
Amrauthlen does not comment on the tracks when he comes to greet her. He does tell her that he had a strange dream: he saw Nialia sleeping under the tree, and an elf lady of great beauty and power came from the tree and commanded Amrauthlen to render Nialia any aid she may require.
Amrauthlen asks Nialia who this elf lady might be, but Nialia merely repeats, “as you say, she is a druid of great beauty, age and power,” and does not elaborate.
Nialia is invited back to the grove whenever she wishes, which pleases her immensely, she has not been able to work in an elven garden for too long. She promises that she will return later in the day and will help him tend the grove.
Meanwhile, Grumble is woken once more by the mysterious Auger. Auger leads Grumble to an abandoned warehouse, where once again they practice the axe kata. Grumble asks Auger if he knows any dwarf matching the description of the one Grumble encountered the last night of his drunkenness. Auger responds that he knows of no such dwarf.
“Well then,” says Grumble,” what do you know of my axe?”
Auger smiles, “I know many things about your weapon.”
Grumble’s momentary excitement turns to frustration as all Auger gives are vague hints and cryptic responses to specific questions. The most often repeated answer he gets is that he will have to find the answers for himself. When they finish, Auger walks out the door, but is nowhere to be seen when Grumble exits a second later.
Back at the Shield and Shingle, the party awakens and reassembles. The fair is even bigger the second day as more people have arrived this morning. The events of last night do not seem to have much dampened the mood of either the merchants or faire-goers. Even so, today the party goes out in full armor and with all their weapons. Grumble, Badger and Audric want to go see the famous Librarium of Brindinsford. Grumble hopes there may be found some information about his axe, while Audric wonders if someone there may know something about the House of Bel. The trio’s first stop is Shooma’s smithy, where they pick up a weapon of alchemical silver for each member of the party (except Nialia).
Rowan heads out of town and tracks down (literally) the party of rangers she met several nights ago. The two rangers, both half-elven, greet her. They are brothers, one is Simmin, the other is Grellick. They are tracking a strange creature they have only found the tracks of, and never seen. The Halfling encampment outside the walls of Brindinsford has been having disappearances and other unpleasantness in the past several days, and the rangers wonder if this creature could be the cause.
At the smithy, Shooma tells Grumble, Audric and Badger that thugs have been running protection rackets and extorting and robbing the merchants in the Chatterstreet Market area for three months now. None have ever been caught by the city guard, but Shooma muses that if these thugs were were-rats, that would explain much. She does not know where such fiends would lair, but it is common knowledge there has always been a rat problem in the town’s central bell tower.
Nialia returns to the inner city grove. Today the feeling of wrongness seems to have cleared in her mind. She feels an alienness about the city, as if two worlds were trying to coexist in the same place. However, the wrongness of the city bothers her less in the grove, and she turns her mind to more pleasant things, like tending the plants with Amrauthlin, with Anealis and Kerrit looking down at their masters from the branches above.
In-Game Dates: Disander 11th, evening – Disander 12, mid-morning
The panicked faire-goers make it difficult for the party to reach the were-rats. By the time they push, intimidate or slip their way through the people, the pair of were-rats have slain another guard. Not only that, but a cluster of fiendish dire rats are racing around, biting everyone they can and causing havoc.
Audric morphs into a much taller (about 6’3”) version of himself, carrying Badger on his back as he begins casting as many buffing spells as he’s able on the party. Nialia calls lightning on one of the were-rats as Grumble attacks the other. Dire rats swarm all over the rest of the party, spitting and biting. As Badger slides off Audric’s back, a third wererat changes from his unremarkable (but ugly) human form into a hybrid form, attacking Badger from behind. Seeing Badger both bitten and stabbed, Audric momentarily wigs out and casts wrack on the third were-rat, who collapses in helpless agony. Badger recovers a moment later and gives her assailant a merciful coup de grace.
Grumble demonstrates that one doesn’t necessarily need silver to kill a lycanthrope, as cutting one completely in half seems to also do the job, albeit very messily. Grumble turns his attention to the other were-rat while fending off a pack of dire rats that swarm around and over him. Badger gets in behind the were-rat, slicing away at the hybrid’s legs and other vulnerable points, keeping the were-rat from pressing his advantage over Grumble. Nialia and Rowan spot a human in the process of killing yet another guard amidst the still retreating crowd, about sixty feet from the combat. Nialia calls down the thunder (er, lightning) on this man as he changes from man to hybrid were-rat. Snarling and brandishing his rapier, he charges towards the druid. Rowan steps between the two and engages this were-rat, who seems to be in command. Both sides hold their own for a minute, give or take a few dire rats. Finally, after taking enough blows and cuts to drop four normal creatures their size, the were-rats take off in opposite directions. Rowan and Grumble streak after their respective opponents, but soon lose them in the warren of side-streets and alleyways.
By the time they return, the remaining dire rats have either been killed or have likewise fled, and the guards of Brindinsford have arrived on the scene. The guards obviously do not believe the outlandish account given by the party, all they see are dead guards, merchants, and faire-goers (the were-rats having reverted to human form upon dying) lying strewn about the street, with the party standing over them with bloodied weapons. However, Audric has managed to stabilize one of the guards, who vouches for the truth of the party’s tale. Then the crowds, returning to the scene, also clamor that the party are heroes, not villains. Lieutenant Shella is sent for, who arrives moments later. She asks them to accompany her to the barracks. As they walk back up the main street of the faire, they see another spot of similar devastation, with the guards working quickly to clear the bodies from the area.
Reaching the barracks, Shella asks them for an official account of what happened. The party faithfully relays the events to the grim-faced Lieutenant. She tells them that two other groups of lycanthropic assailants struck the faire, and while the guards drove them off, the guards took heavy casualties, and none of the guards succeeded in killing any of the were-rats. The lieutenant thanks the party once more for services rendered, and by way of reward tells them that they are no longer subject to the peace-bonding laws; they may keep their weapons ready at all times. The tone of Shella’s voice suggests that having their weapons ready at all times would be a prudent thing to do. After that, the party is free to go.
Tired, the party heads for the Shield and Shingle. Grumble almost immediately heads upstairs and is asleep almost before his head hits the pillow. The rest of the party is recognized by the crowd as being the slayers of the were-rats and are plied with compliments, questions, and all the free drinks they can swallow. Nialia ducks out of this and makes her way to the grove of the druid said to be within the walls of the city. The streets are dark, but she eventually finds herself before a large, walled enclosure taking up an entire city block. Above the 20-foot walls she can see the tops of trees silhouetted against the star-strewn night sky. A male elf druid greets her at the simple wooden gate and bids her welcome. He is Amrauthlen, and his familiar, a fierce-looking hawk, is named Kerrit. He gives her a tour of the well tended gardens, at the center of which stands a might ancient oak, grown, says he, from a seedling brought out of the Old Forest. Nialia could tell this, drawn to the tree like a faun to its mother. She feels the tree, the soil around it, even the air that the leaves enrich, as though it were a part of her own self.
Rowan eventually heads off to bed, as do Badger and Audric. In the privacy of their room, Badger asks if Audric thinks it would be worth looking at the locksmith booths to see if perhaps any of her brothers are here showing their wares.
Audric, as gently as possible, reminds her that she saw them all in their home far to the north just a scant week ago, and they could not possibly have traveled all this distance in that time. Badger sighs; listening to Bruge and Chlyra reminisce about Rowan as a young girl has made her terribly homesick. Saddened, she goes to sleep, Audric providing what support he can.
Back in the grove, Amrauthlen bids Nialia good-night and leaves her to her meditations. Nialia falls into a trance, and as if in a dream, she and Anealus enter the old oak, only to emerge in a forest. She walks among the trees as if she knew them all by name, and comes to realize that there are wolves everywhere, watching her. They call her to join them, and as she becomes a wolf, she realizes that these are her kin, the Wolf Clan. They run, they hunt, and finally, they sleep under the boughs of a tree very similar to the one Nialia fell asleep under. Nestled in close to Nialia is a Lythari who smells very familiar.
“Araven?” asks Nialia.
“Shhh,” comes a whisper in her mind, “Now it is time for resting. Sleep, my young one.”
The next thing Nialia knows, it is just past dawn, and she feels more refreshed than she’s ever felt in her life. She realizes, however, that she is in wolf form, and there are wolf prints all around her. She cannot possibly have made them all, for they vary in shape and size, but none of the tracks leave the area just under the tree.
Amrauthlen does not comment on the tracks when he comes to greet her. He does tell her that he had a strange dream: he saw Nialia sleeping under the tree, and an elf lady of great beauty and power came from the tree and commanded Amrauthlen to render Nialia any aid she may require.
Amrauthlen asks Nialia who this elf lady might be, but Nialia merely repeats, “as you say, she is a druid of great beauty, age and power,” and does not elaborate.
Nialia is invited back to the grove whenever she wishes, which pleases her immensely, she has not been able to work in an elven garden for too long. She promises that she will return later in the day and will help him tend the grove.
Meanwhile, Grumble is woken once more by the mysterious Auger. Auger leads Grumble to an abandoned warehouse, where once again they practice the axe kata. Grumble asks Auger if he knows any dwarf matching the description of the one Grumble encountered the last night of his drunkenness. Auger responds that he knows of no such dwarf.
“Well then,” says Grumble,” what do you know of my axe?”
Auger smiles, “I know many things about your weapon.”
Grumble’s momentary excitement turns to frustration as all Auger gives are vague hints and cryptic responses to specific questions. The most often repeated answer he gets is that he will have to find the answers for himself. When they finish, Auger walks out the door, but is nowhere to be seen when Grumble exits a second later.
Back at the Shield and Shingle, the party awakens and reassembles. The fair is even bigger the second day as more people have arrived this morning. The events of last night do not seem to have much dampened the mood of either the merchants or faire-goers. Even so, today the party goes out in full armor and with all their weapons. Grumble, Badger and Audric want to go see the famous Librarium of Brindinsford. Grumble hopes there may be found some information about his axe, while Audric wonders if someone there may know something about the House of Bel. The trio’s first stop is Shooma’s smithy, where they pick up a weapon of alchemical silver for each member of the party (except Nialia).
Rowan heads out of town and tracks down (literally) the party of rangers she met several nights ago. The two rangers, both half-elven, greet her. They are brothers, one is Simmin, the other is Grellick. They are tracking a strange creature they have only found the tracks of, and never seen. The Halfling encampment outside the walls of Brindinsford has been having disappearances and other unpleasantness in the past several days, and the rangers wonder if this creature could be the cause.
At the smithy, Shooma tells Grumble, Audric and Badger that thugs have been running protection rackets and extorting and robbing the merchants in the Chatterstreet Market area for three months now. None have ever been caught by the city guard, but Shooma muses that if these thugs were were-rats, that would explain much. She does not know where such fiends would lair, but it is common knowledge there has always been a rat problem in the town’s central bell tower.
Nialia returns to the inner city grove. Today the feeling of wrongness seems to have cleared in her mind. She feels an alienness about the city, as if two worlds were trying to coexist in the same place. However, the wrongness of the city bothers her less in the grove, and she turns her mind to more pleasant things, like tending the plants with Amrauthlin, with Anealis and Kerrit looking down at their masters from the branches above.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Session 20: All’s Faire
Game Dates: 12/01, 12/04
In-Game Dates: Disander 9th – Dis 11th, evening
Grumble awakes from a nightmare where he hears his sister calling his name for help to hearing a gruff voice calling his name in real life. Sitting across from his bed is a dwarf in a simple leather shirt and leggings. His face is old and weathered, though his eyes are bright and shining. In his hands he holds Grumble’s axe.
Grumble demands the stranger to identify himself and state his business. The dwarf calls himself a name that sounds like “Auger,” and informs Grumble that he’s here to help him, though he does not say by whose behest.
“You fight well,” states the stranger, “but as we say, there’s more to mining than just hitting the rock with your pick.” Bidding Grumble to come with him, Auger leads the dwarf into a clearing in the woods, where he begins to teach Grumble a series of stances, or positions, for fighting with his dwarven waraxe. This goes on for an hour or so, then the stranger merely states that they will do this every morning from now on. Afterwards he wanders into the woods and is lost in the morning mist. Confused and somewhat winded, Grumble heads back to the common house as the rest of the party is awakening (except Nialia).
Upon rising from bed, the party is served a lavish breakfast by grateful Halfling farmers. The party, healed now that Quirky has awakened, eats with renewed gusto (while magical healing heals wounds and restores the body, it doesn’t necessarily replace all the blood that has spilled out before said healing. That having been said, it’s a miracle my party isn’t suffering from advanced anemia or constantly passing out from low blood pressure).
Quirky excuses himself from the table as the party discusses their options. The most reasonable choice of action is to collect their fee and wash their hands of the whole affair, continuing southward to their audience with the Grand Duke. Badger goes in search of Quirky, only to hear his voice coming from the closed door to their room, as if conversing with someone. Badger listens to Quirkys side of a conversation, as she cannot hear anyone else speaking, though Quirky is obviously responding to something. She does not hear much, but what she does hear chills her anew. Quirky is still hiding something from her and the rest of the party. She leaps across the hall as he exits the room, then hurriedly searches their room once he’s out of sight. She finds nothing amiss but a curious scratch at the top of the mirror that sits atop their dresser. She can’t be sure, but she doesn’t remember it being there the night before.
Quirky returns to the room, seeking Badger, and she confronts him about what she’s heard. After some dissembling, Quirky confesses that he was indeed trying to keep something from her. He tells her that if she were to die, Quirky could magically restore her soul to her body, using their love as a bond to pull her back from the afterlife. However, were he himself to die, things would not be so simple. Part of the price he pays for stealing magic from the gods is that no priest of any holy order would be willing to restore his soul (how they would tell, he does not say). Another Ur-Priest could do it, but Quirky cannot imagine one of them being willing either, as most members of his order are altogether evil, nor would he ever want Badger to seek any of them out. Therefore, Quirky was attempting to put together a contingency plan that would keep his soul from hell (literally) in the event of his death. He planned to keep it a secret because he did not want to worry Badger, but also because old habits die hard. Badger assures him that she won’t let him die, and hugs him close.
Meanwhile, the party is mending their weapons and armor as best they can. Elder Joram has met with several other village elders, and the loose federation of Halfling villages wishes to throw an impromptu celebration in the party’s honor. The party figures that they’ve earned some rest, so they relax for the remainder of the day, until the start of the feast.
The feast is everything the adventurers have heard about wild Halfling parties. Food and drink fill the tables, streamers and ribbons adorn every tree, and even a few local bards sing the Tale of the Heroic Five that Defeated the Skull Tribe to an embarrassingly receptive and appreciative audience.
The party also finds out about the history of Brindinsford from Elder Joram. Long ago, Brindinsford was called Pythus, and was the capital city of the dukedom. There was a revolt that cost the lives of most of the nobles in the city nearly two hundred years ago, and the city was nearly razed to the ground in the ensuing battle and siege. Afterwards, while the city was being rebuilt, the capital was moved to the southeast, and a different city became Pythus. When the old Pythus was restored, they renamed it Brindinsford. The Grand Duke did not want to rebuild it at all at first, but soon realized that the old city occupied too good of a strategic location for defense and trade to be left to crumble. In addition, many influential mages and religious orders had temples and towers there, and finally the Grand Duke caved in to the pressure. But as a final insult, he gave rule of the city over to a lowly baron out of favor with his court (baron being the lowest level of nobility that could govern a city of that size by Fallo law). For the current baron, Elder Joram has no unkind words.
Throughout most of the feast Badger has her worried eyes on Quirky. He seems not all there, though he nods graciously to each Halfling who thanks him for his efforts. Obviously something still bothers him, and Badger frets at this distance that still seems to lie forever between them both. Nialia and Rowan have noticed that the halfing outrider Cora Thornapple has had her eyes on Grumble the entire feast. Now that evening has fallen, the two of them barely restrain giggles as Cora drags the hapless dwarf off to talk at an empty table.
Cora sees something in Grumble, a kind of kinship with the outcast dwarf. Not just the fact that she herself has dwarf blood in her (explaining her height and some of her personality). She asks Grumble if he wants to join her for a drink. Grumble, who hasn’t exactly bathed recently, excuses himself to quickly “freshen up”. He tears off to the common house as though a host of dragons were chasing him.
In the main room of the common house, Quirky and Badger are sitting before the fire. They stare with their wide eyes even wider (if that were possible) in shock at Grumble’s demeanor and his request…. For soap.
Badger offers the dwarf her lavender soap, but in the end Grumble takes some rough soap Badger uses for Zook. After sluicing the grime and dirt off himself, Grumble gets dressed and heads back into the common room. With as much dignity as he can muster, he asks the two how he should behave. Quirky, his face radiating serious concern, rattles off a list of things not to be forgotten:
“Tell her she’s beautiful, but don’t insincere. Be courteous, but direct; she’s a fighter herself and will appreciate it. Look into her eyes, but don’t stare. She obviously has a special bond with her wolf, so don’t make any cracks about him. Let her do most of the talking, and pay attention when she does. Don’t start any kind of competition with her, drinking game, arm-wrestling or otherwise: if you beat her she’ll resent you, and if she beats you she’ll suspect you let her win, and she’ll resent you.”
Quirky’s list goes on until Grumble’s eyes begin to glaze over. Finally Quirky ends with, “Well? Don’t keep her waiting! Go, go, go!” Grumble runs out the door, and Quirky and Badger both manage to last several seconds before collapsing into fits of laughter that leave them teary-eyed and gasping.
Grumble returns to Cora, and the two of them talk. They speak of loneliness, of the freedom living on the road offers, and the life of a warrior. She speaks of how she became a wandering protector, and Grumble listens with all appropriate attentiveness.
Finally Cora suggests they retire to her home, a small, simple cabin on the outskirts of the village. She pauses at the door.
“Grumble?” she asks.
“Yeah?”
“We’ve shared a bit about ourselves haven’t we? Gotten to know each other a little bit? Talked about things?”
“Yeah.”
Cora opens the door, spilling red-orange light from the fires and torches on the meadow across the bare wooden floor and a straw pallet covered with sleeping furs.
“Can we maybe not talk for the rest of the night?”
“Yeah,” smiles Grumble as Cora pulls him inside and shuts the door.
Back in the common house, Quirky finally tells Badger what’s been troubling him. His name, Quirky Timbers, was just an invention, part of a persona that he adopted for his… assignment. With a tremor in his voice, he asks Badger to choose two names for him, one that he can be known by to the rest of the party (and the world, for that matter), and the other to be a private name, one to mark his passage from living as a shadowy figure to walking in the light.
Badger is obviously not comfortable with such a burden, but Quirky insists, and she agrees. By the time Rowan and Nialia return to the common room, the two gnomes have gone to bed, though it is a long time before Badger can fall asleep.
When Grumble awakes it takes him a moment to recall everything that’s happened. With an uncharacteristic smile of his mustached face, he rolls over to gave into the eyes of –
The same dwarf from yesterday morning. “She left just before false dawn,” says Auger. “Let’s go.”
Again the two dwarves journey to the same clearing, where they practice this axe kata-esque series of exercises. Grumble plies the dwarf with questions, but Auger will only say that he is here to train him.
Afterwards, Grumble walks back into the village and spies a note tacked to the door of Cora’s cabin. It reads simply:
Grumble-
You really are a warrior!
Wolves never look back.
-C.
When everyone is gathered around the breakfast table in the common house, Quirky stands up and makes an announcement to the group. He tells them that Badger has given him a new name, and so asks that he now be known as Audric. He does not tell them the more personal name that Badger gave him. This name she gave was Lunavenn, meaning “beloved companion,” using the same name fragment as her own personal name, Lunhedia.
Feeling much rested, the party sets out towards Brindinsford. Nialia sits uneasily in her saddle, a feeling of wrongness growing in her mind as they get closer to the city. Soon it becomes apparent that they will not reach the city by nightfall, so they make camp off the road.
During the night, Rowan’s watch is interrupted by a patrol of two rangers who are keeping an eye on travelers on the road. The three rangers converse briefly, then the patrol fades back into the night.
In the morning Grumble’s personal trainer comes to him once more and drags him away from their campsite. Rowan sees none of this, only looks around a second later to find Grumble’s bedroll empty.
Today Grumble is finding it difficult to perform up to the exacting standards of Auger. Auger sighs and concedes that perhaps a demonstration is in order to show what good the exercises are doing. Auger leaps at Grumble, who automatically finds his body assuming the positions he’s been learning. Grumble parries blow after blow, moving from stroke to stroke in a combat that is more dance than anything else. The tempo increases until Grumble trips over a root and goes sprawling. Auger does not follow, merely stands there. Grumble sees that this may well be beneficial to him. Returning to camp, a confused Rowan asks him where the hell he was. He looks at her and produces a few fat pheasants that he’d caught on the way back to camp. Rowan is confused, but puts it aside as rest of the party awakes.
They reach the city walls well before mid-day, yet already a line has formed outside the Northwestern gate of the city. Three bored but competent guards are checking the wagons that are entering the city for the annual Halfling Street Faire, as well as “peace-bonding” all weapons being brought into the city. This process involves securing a weapon to it’s sheath, or throwing a hood over quivers or axeheads. Also, clerics are asked to secure their holy symbol so it may not easily be brought to bear. Lastly, spellcasters are asked to bind their middle and ring fingers together with a thin leather thong. This is a common pratice throughout many cities, and is meant as a pledge of good faith that weapon-bearers will not cause trouble.
But there are always those who balk at such restrictions. Such are the two half-orc barbarians that wait in line perhaps 30 feet in front of the party. When the guards ask them to bind their weapons, they begin arguing loudly with the guards. The situation turns ugly when one of the barbarians punches one guard and draws his weapon and cuts the leg of another.
The party rushes to the aid of the guards, who are quickly being overpowered by the brutal savagery of the two half-orcs. All three guards are down by the time Grumble attacks the first of the barbarians. Audric rushes to heal the guards, for two of them are dying from their wounds. Nialia stands back, casting while Rowan snipes their foes with her bow as terrified faire-goers run for cover. Grumble and Badger work as an impressive duo, flanking the half-orcs. The guards, before falling, cried that the party not kill the barbarians, but in the heat of battle, Grumble slices one nearly in half. Nialia’s spells manage to drop the other without killing him just as Audric finishes restoring the guards.
The guards, grateful beyond measure to be alive, assure the party that no penalty will be assigned them for the “accidental” death of the one barbarian. One of the guards, to express his gratitude, tells the adventurers that his brother runs an inn, and will put them up free of charge.
Seeing the crowds that throng the streets of the faire, the party decides that this invitation is quite the windfall. Securing their lodgings at the Shield and Shingle Inn (a place that looks much more refined than it’s name would imply), they travel the crowded streets to the barracks to collect their pay.
They wait for a while to see Lieutenant Shella, but when she arrives, it is with the Baron’s sister, Baroness Eriana Euphemes. The baroness apologizes that her brother could not reward them in person, but that they have the gratitude of the house of Euphemes. She doubles the reward money promised to the party, thanks them again, and leaves. Shella, seeing that the party has gathered the head of the orc chieftain and over thirty ears besides, grudgingly cuts the party some slack. She even salutes them as she leaves, though she does collect the tabards and badges given the party now that they are no longer representing the city. The party leaves the barracks with peace-bonded weapons and heavy pockets.
Splitting up, the party decides to spend a day or two enjoying the faire. Audric and Badger run off to find how many things on sticks they can find to eat. Grumble goes in search of a blacksmith, and Rowan and Nialia look at magic items and weapons.
Rowan, hoping perhaps that Potter is here at the fair, checks stall after stall, but does not see him. Someone else sees her, however, and Rowan finds herself being embraced by a strange older man who claims not to have seen her since she was very little. She remembers him after some thought as a bard who was a good friend of her father. The bard, named Bruge Corbett, invites Rowan and her companions to dinner at his estate later that evening, and Rowan agrees.
Grumble, meanwhile, finds himself off the path of the faire, at a large dwarven weapons shop and smithy. Everyone in town has recommended this place as being not only the best in the city, but possibly the best in the kingdom of Fall. It is a place known only as “the smithy” run by an ancient dwarven lady named Shooma and her son.
Grumble asks Shooma, who is sitting in a sturdy wooden rocking chair smoking her pipe, if she knows anything about his axe. Taking it, she is silent for many moments. Then, in the clear, strange cadence of Court Dwarfish, she tells the tale of creation, the making of the first dwarf, and the first Goldenaxe. After that, she hands the axe back to a confused Grumble, saying that this is all she can say about his weapon.
Other than a few purchases, and a pickpocket attempt on Badger that Audric deftly foils, the party has an enjoyable day. Meeting back at the Shield and Shingle, Rowan informs the party of the offer for supper. She phrses it in a way that makes Gurmble uninterested in attending until Audric unwittingly makes Rowan inform everyone that this is a man who knew her as a wee elfling. At this point Grumble gets a huge grin on his face and states that nothing would please him more than to attend the dinner.
Badger, with some help from Rowan, finally gets the chance to wear the kirtle she’s kept at the bottom of her pack. Given as a going-away present from a close friend, it looks stunning on her. Rowan assists with tying the gnome’s hair in ribbons and the two head back downstairs. Badger is pleased at Audric’s reaction (fortunately the boy was not holding anything he could have dropped on his foot), and the group heads off to Bruge’s house.
Bruge and his wife Chlyra (also a bard retired from adventuring) have settled here and run a successful theatre in one of the better districts in town. They prepare a lovely feast for the party. When asked about the Baron, Bruge says that the man is a stern but competent ruler; much more attentive to the aristocracy than to the merchants, but he’s a proud man. The city has prospered under his rule, and that’s pretty much the best one can hope for.
Before the party leaves, Bruge gives a gift to Rowan. Once, Bruge and Chlyra had a daughter, born around the same time as Rowan. The two girls played together as toddlers and young children. But when their daughter was eight, she contracted a fatal illness and died. Rowan’s father Larredon had given the Corbett’s a present for their daughter when she became of age: an exquisite elven rapier. Bruge now gives the sword to Rowan with his blessing. Rowan is stunned, and graciously accepts the finely crafted enchanted elven blade.
Walking back towards their inn, the faire is about to end for the night, as the sun has just finished setting in the west. Suddenly they realize that the shouts of revelry have turned to screams of terror. Nialia looks over the heads of the crowd and sees, in the flickering torchlight, two stringy-haired men turning into wererats in their hybrid form. She watches in horror as they rip the throat out of one hapless city guard, and set upon another. The party struggles forward against the surging mass of faire-goers stampeding in the other directions. Most of the party has left their primary weapons and armor back at the inn. But they cannot just stand idly by, so they begin shouldering their way to the center of the carnage…
In-Game Dates: Disander 9th – Dis 11th, evening
Grumble awakes from a nightmare where he hears his sister calling his name for help to hearing a gruff voice calling his name in real life. Sitting across from his bed is a dwarf in a simple leather shirt and leggings. His face is old and weathered, though his eyes are bright and shining. In his hands he holds Grumble’s axe.
Grumble demands the stranger to identify himself and state his business. The dwarf calls himself a name that sounds like “Auger,” and informs Grumble that he’s here to help him, though he does not say by whose behest.
“You fight well,” states the stranger, “but as we say, there’s more to mining than just hitting the rock with your pick.” Bidding Grumble to come with him, Auger leads the dwarf into a clearing in the woods, where he begins to teach Grumble a series of stances, or positions, for fighting with his dwarven waraxe. This goes on for an hour or so, then the stranger merely states that they will do this every morning from now on. Afterwards he wanders into the woods and is lost in the morning mist. Confused and somewhat winded, Grumble heads back to the common house as the rest of the party is awakening (except Nialia).
Upon rising from bed, the party is served a lavish breakfast by grateful Halfling farmers. The party, healed now that Quirky has awakened, eats with renewed gusto (while magical healing heals wounds and restores the body, it doesn’t necessarily replace all the blood that has spilled out before said healing. That having been said, it’s a miracle my party isn’t suffering from advanced anemia or constantly passing out from low blood pressure).
Quirky excuses himself from the table as the party discusses their options. The most reasonable choice of action is to collect their fee and wash their hands of the whole affair, continuing southward to their audience with the Grand Duke. Badger goes in search of Quirky, only to hear his voice coming from the closed door to their room, as if conversing with someone. Badger listens to Quirkys side of a conversation, as she cannot hear anyone else speaking, though Quirky is obviously responding to something. She does not hear much, but what she does hear chills her anew. Quirky is still hiding something from her and the rest of the party. She leaps across the hall as he exits the room, then hurriedly searches their room once he’s out of sight. She finds nothing amiss but a curious scratch at the top of the mirror that sits atop their dresser. She can’t be sure, but she doesn’t remember it being there the night before.
Quirky returns to the room, seeking Badger, and she confronts him about what she’s heard. After some dissembling, Quirky confesses that he was indeed trying to keep something from her. He tells her that if she were to die, Quirky could magically restore her soul to her body, using their love as a bond to pull her back from the afterlife. However, were he himself to die, things would not be so simple. Part of the price he pays for stealing magic from the gods is that no priest of any holy order would be willing to restore his soul (how they would tell, he does not say). Another Ur-Priest could do it, but Quirky cannot imagine one of them being willing either, as most members of his order are altogether evil, nor would he ever want Badger to seek any of them out. Therefore, Quirky was attempting to put together a contingency plan that would keep his soul from hell (literally) in the event of his death. He planned to keep it a secret because he did not want to worry Badger, but also because old habits die hard. Badger assures him that she won’t let him die, and hugs him close.
Meanwhile, the party is mending their weapons and armor as best they can. Elder Joram has met with several other village elders, and the loose federation of Halfling villages wishes to throw an impromptu celebration in the party’s honor. The party figures that they’ve earned some rest, so they relax for the remainder of the day, until the start of the feast.
The feast is everything the adventurers have heard about wild Halfling parties. Food and drink fill the tables, streamers and ribbons adorn every tree, and even a few local bards sing the Tale of the Heroic Five that Defeated the Skull Tribe to an embarrassingly receptive and appreciative audience.
The party also finds out about the history of Brindinsford from Elder Joram. Long ago, Brindinsford was called Pythus, and was the capital city of the dukedom. There was a revolt that cost the lives of most of the nobles in the city nearly two hundred years ago, and the city was nearly razed to the ground in the ensuing battle and siege. Afterwards, while the city was being rebuilt, the capital was moved to the southeast, and a different city became Pythus. When the old Pythus was restored, they renamed it Brindinsford. The Grand Duke did not want to rebuild it at all at first, but soon realized that the old city occupied too good of a strategic location for defense and trade to be left to crumble. In addition, many influential mages and religious orders had temples and towers there, and finally the Grand Duke caved in to the pressure. But as a final insult, he gave rule of the city over to a lowly baron out of favor with his court (baron being the lowest level of nobility that could govern a city of that size by Fallo law). For the current baron, Elder Joram has no unkind words.
Throughout most of the feast Badger has her worried eyes on Quirky. He seems not all there, though he nods graciously to each Halfling who thanks him for his efforts. Obviously something still bothers him, and Badger frets at this distance that still seems to lie forever between them both. Nialia and Rowan have noticed that the halfing outrider Cora Thornapple has had her eyes on Grumble the entire feast. Now that evening has fallen, the two of them barely restrain giggles as Cora drags the hapless dwarf off to talk at an empty table.
Cora sees something in Grumble, a kind of kinship with the outcast dwarf. Not just the fact that she herself has dwarf blood in her (explaining her height and some of her personality). She asks Grumble if he wants to join her for a drink. Grumble, who hasn’t exactly bathed recently, excuses himself to quickly “freshen up”. He tears off to the common house as though a host of dragons were chasing him.
In the main room of the common house, Quirky and Badger are sitting before the fire. They stare with their wide eyes even wider (if that were possible) in shock at Grumble’s demeanor and his request…. For soap.
Badger offers the dwarf her lavender soap, but in the end Grumble takes some rough soap Badger uses for Zook. After sluicing the grime and dirt off himself, Grumble gets dressed and heads back into the common room. With as much dignity as he can muster, he asks the two how he should behave. Quirky, his face radiating serious concern, rattles off a list of things not to be forgotten:
“Tell her she’s beautiful, but don’t insincere. Be courteous, but direct; she’s a fighter herself and will appreciate it. Look into her eyes, but don’t stare. She obviously has a special bond with her wolf, so don’t make any cracks about him. Let her do most of the talking, and pay attention when she does. Don’t start any kind of competition with her, drinking game, arm-wrestling or otherwise: if you beat her she’ll resent you, and if she beats you she’ll suspect you let her win, and she’ll resent you.”
Quirky’s list goes on until Grumble’s eyes begin to glaze over. Finally Quirky ends with, “Well? Don’t keep her waiting! Go, go, go!” Grumble runs out the door, and Quirky and Badger both manage to last several seconds before collapsing into fits of laughter that leave them teary-eyed and gasping.
Grumble returns to Cora, and the two of them talk. They speak of loneliness, of the freedom living on the road offers, and the life of a warrior. She speaks of how she became a wandering protector, and Grumble listens with all appropriate attentiveness.
Finally Cora suggests they retire to her home, a small, simple cabin on the outskirts of the village. She pauses at the door.
“Grumble?” she asks.
“Yeah?”
“We’ve shared a bit about ourselves haven’t we? Gotten to know each other a little bit? Talked about things?”
“Yeah.”
Cora opens the door, spilling red-orange light from the fires and torches on the meadow across the bare wooden floor and a straw pallet covered with sleeping furs.
“Can we maybe not talk for the rest of the night?”
“Yeah,” smiles Grumble as Cora pulls him inside and shuts the door.
Back in the common house, Quirky finally tells Badger what’s been troubling him. His name, Quirky Timbers, was just an invention, part of a persona that he adopted for his… assignment. With a tremor in his voice, he asks Badger to choose two names for him, one that he can be known by to the rest of the party (and the world, for that matter), and the other to be a private name, one to mark his passage from living as a shadowy figure to walking in the light.
Badger is obviously not comfortable with such a burden, but Quirky insists, and she agrees. By the time Rowan and Nialia return to the common room, the two gnomes have gone to bed, though it is a long time before Badger can fall asleep.
When Grumble awakes it takes him a moment to recall everything that’s happened. With an uncharacteristic smile of his mustached face, he rolls over to gave into the eyes of –
The same dwarf from yesterday morning. “She left just before false dawn,” says Auger. “Let’s go.”
Again the two dwarves journey to the same clearing, where they practice this axe kata-esque series of exercises. Grumble plies the dwarf with questions, but Auger will only say that he is here to train him.
Afterwards, Grumble walks back into the village and spies a note tacked to the door of Cora’s cabin. It reads simply:
Grumble-
You really are a warrior!
Wolves never look back.
-C.
When everyone is gathered around the breakfast table in the common house, Quirky stands up and makes an announcement to the group. He tells them that Badger has given him a new name, and so asks that he now be known as Audric. He does not tell them the more personal name that Badger gave him. This name she gave was Lunavenn, meaning “beloved companion,” using the same name fragment as her own personal name, Lunhedia.
Feeling much rested, the party sets out towards Brindinsford. Nialia sits uneasily in her saddle, a feeling of wrongness growing in her mind as they get closer to the city. Soon it becomes apparent that they will not reach the city by nightfall, so they make camp off the road.
During the night, Rowan’s watch is interrupted by a patrol of two rangers who are keeping an eye on travelers on the road. The three rangers converse briefly, then the patrol fades back into the night.
In the morning Grumble’s personal trainer comes to him once more and drags him away from their campsite. Rowan sees none of this, only looks around a second later to find Grumble’s bedroll empty.
Today Grumble is finding it difficult to perform up to the exacting standards of Auger. Auger sighs and concedes that perhaps a demonstration is in order to show what good the exercises are doing. Auger leaps at Grumble, who automatically finds his body assuming the positions he’s been learning. Grumble parries blow after blow, moving from stroke to stroke in a combat that is more dance than anything else. The tempo increases until Grumble trips over a root and goes sprawling. Auger does not follow, merely stands there. Grumble sees that this may well be beneficial to him. Returning to camp, a confused Rowan asks him where the hell he was. He looks at her and produces a few fat pheasants that he’d caught on the way back to camp. Rowan is confused, but puts it aside as rest of the party awakes.
They reach the city walls well before mid-day, yet already a line has formed outside the Northwestern gate of the city. Three bored but competent guards are checking the wagons that are entering the city for the annual Halfling Street Faire, as well as “peace-bonding” all weapons being brought into the city. This process involves securing a weapon to it’s sheath, or throwing a hood over quivers or axeheads. Also, clerics are asked to secure their holy symbol so it may not easily be brought to bear. Lastly, spellcasters are asked to bind their middle and ring fingers together with a thin leather thong. This is a common pratice throughout many cities, and is meant as a pledge of good faith that weapon-bearers will not cause trouble.
But there are always those who balk at such restrictions. Such are the two half-orc barbarians that wait in line perhaps 30 feet in front of the party. When the guards ask them to bind their weapons, they begin arguing loudly with the guards. The situation turns ugly when one of the barbarians punches one guard and draws his weapon and cuts the leg of another.
The party rushes to the aid of the guards, who are quickly being overpowered by the brutal savagery of the two half-orcs. All three guards are down by the time Grumble attacks the first of the barbarians. Audric rushes to heal the guards, for two of them are dying from their wounds. Nialia stands back, casting while Rowan snipes their foes with her bow as terrified faire-goers run for cover. Grumble and Badger work as an impressive duo, flanking the half-orcs. The guards, before falling, cried that the party not kill the barbarians, but in the heat of battle, Grumble slices one nearly in half. Nialia’s spells manage to drop the other without killing him just as Audric finishes restoring the guards.
The guards, grateful beyond measure to be alive, assure the party that no penalty will be assigned them for the “accidental” death of the one barbarian. One of the guards, to express his gratitude, tells the adventurers that his brother runs an inn, and will put them up free of charge.
Seeing the crowds that throng the streets of the faire, the party decides that this invitation is quite the windfall. Securing their lodgings at the Shield and Shingle Inn (a place that looks much more refined than it’s name would imply), they travel the crowded streets to the barracks to collect their pay.
They wait for a while to see Lieutenant Shella, but when she arrives, it is with the Baron’s sister, Baroness Eriana Euphemes. The baroness apologizes that her brother could not reward them in person, but that they have the gratitude of the house of Euphemes. She doubles the reward money promised to the party, thanks them again, and leaves. Shella, seeing that the party has gathered the head of the orc chieftain and over thirty ears besides, grudgingly cuts the party some slack. She even salutes them as she leaves, though she does collect the tabards and badges given the party now that they are no longer representing the city. The party leaves the barracks with peace-bonded weapons and heavy pockets.
Splitting up, the party decides to spend a day or two enjoying the faire. Audric and Badger run off to find how many things on sticks they can find to eat. Grumble goes in search of a blacksmith, and Rowan and Nialia look at magic items and weapons.
Rowan, hoping perhaps that Potter is here at the fair, checks stall after stall, but does not see him. Someone else sees her, however, and Rowan finds herself being embraced by a strange older man who claims not to have seen her since she was very little. She remembers him after some thought as a bard who was a good friend of her father. The bard, named Bruge Corbett, invites Rowan and her companions to dinner at his estate later that evening, and Rowan agrees.
Grumble, meanwhile, finds himself off the path of the faire, at a large dwarven weapons shop and smithy. Everyone in town has recommended this place as being not only the best in the city, but possibly the best in the kingdom of Fall. It is a place known only as “the smithy” run by an ancient dwarven lady named Shooma and her son.
Grumble asks Shooma, who is sitting in a sturdy wooden rocking chair smoking her pipe, if she knows anything about his axe. Taking it, she is silent for many moments. Then, in the clear, strange cadence of Court Dwarfish, she tells the tale of creation, the making of the first dwarf, and the first Goldenaxe. After that, she hands the axe back to a confused Grumble, saying that this is all she can say about his weapon.
Other than a few purchases, and a pickpocket attempt on Badger that Audric deftly foils, the party has an enjoyable day. Meeting back at the Shield and Shingle, Rowan informs the party of the offer for supper. She phrses it in a way that makes Gurmble uninterested in attending until Audric unwittingly makes Rowan inform everyone that this is a man who knew her as a wee elfling. At this point Grumble gets a huge grin on his face and states that nothing would please him more than to attend the dinner.
Badger, with some help from Rowan, finally gets the chance to wear the kirtle she’s kept at the bottom of her pack. Given as a going-away present from a close friend, it looks stunning on her. Rowan assists with tying the gnome’s hair in ribbons and the two head back downstairs. Badger is pleased at Audric’s reaction (fortunately the boy was not holding anything he could have dropped on his foot), and the group heads off to Bruge’s house.
Bruge and his wife Chlyra (also a bard retired from adventuring) have settled here and run a successful theatre in one of the better districts in town. They prepare a lovely feast for the party. When asked about the Baron, Bruge says that the man is a stern but competent ruler; much more attentive to the aristocracy than to the merchants, but he’s a proud man. The city has prospered under his rule, and that’s pretty much the best one can hope for.
Before the party leaves, Bruge gives a gift to Rowan. Once, Bruge and Chlyra had a daughter, born around the same time as Rowan. The two girls played together as toddlers and young children. But when their daughter was eight, she contracted a fatal illness and died. Rowan’s father Larredon had given the Corbett’s a present for their daughter when she became of age: an exquisite elven rapier. Bruge now gives the sword to Rowan with his blessing. Rowan is stunned, and graciously accepts the finely crafted enchanted elven blade.
Walking back towards their inn, the faire is about to end for the night, as the sun has just finished setting in the west. Suddenly they realize that the shouts of revelry have turned to screams of terror. Nialia looks over the heads of the crowd and sees, in the flickering torchlight, two stringy-haired men turning into wererats in their hybrid form. She watches in horror as they rip the throat out of one hapless city guard, and set upon another. The party struggles forward against the surging mass of faire-goers stampeding in the other directions. Most of the party has left their primary weapons and armor back at the inn. But they cannot just stand idly by, so they begin shouldering their way to the center of the carnage…
Monday, November 26, 2007
Session 19: Protection
Game Date: 11/23/07, 11/24/07
In-Game Dates: Disander 5th, night – Dis 8, night
After Quirky leaves, Rowan and Nialia convince Grumble to give Quirky the benefit of the doubt. Grumble mutters that while he doesn’t trust the “gnome,” he won’t do anything rash unless Quirky gets out of line.
Eventually the party hears the faint, clear, tenor voice of Quirky singing an elven lament, “Ard hi Ethenialle”. Rowan remembers her father singing it once when he found that a former companion of his had died. A while after the song ends, Badger gets up and heads in the direction Quirky had gone. Though she tells everyone not to follow her, Grumble heads off after them about five minutes later.
Badger finds Quirky, who has carved a rough headstone in front of a grave. He must have used magic, for etched into the rough stone surface is the inscription:
Badger pleads for Quirky to tell her everything, right now. Anything else he’s been hiding, Badger wants it out in the open. She thinks she can forgive him whatever he tells her, but she wants to hear it all now; after this she’s not sure her heart could take any further betrayal.
Quirky is silent for half a minute, but instead of an answer, he greets Grumble, who has done a fair job of sneaking up on the two. Badger screams at Grumble to leave, even throwing her kukri at him in her rage. Quirky gets Grumble to leave them in peace for a while, asking “I just killed my only friend and the only family I’ve ever known to save Badger’s life. Do you honestly think I’m going to hurt her?”
Quirky asks Badger what she loves about him, wondering if Grayle wasn’t right about Badger not being able to love him for what he truly is. Sighing at Badger’s confusion, Quirky admits to Badger that he’s a shape-shifter, a doppelganger, a changeling. To his amazement, Badger finds this fascinating. After saying she forgives him, Quirky comes out and, naming all her names (Roywyn Ellybelle Badger Goodlock Turen), tells her that he loves her. She is much more shocked by finding out that Quirky was a near-mythic assassin known only as “Shadowspawn.” Quirky explains that Shadowspawn was actually a title conferred upon him, that he adopted the name from another to keep the legend going (a la the “Dread Pirate Roberts”). Badger exclaims: “I’ve woken my parents up thinking you were under my bed!” Despite himself, Quirky laughs. He quickly sobers as he realizes that Badger is still bleeding from Grayle’s claws. He presses his hand to her wounded stomach and heals her. Eventually Badger taked the hand on her stomach in her own, and the two sit, hand-in hand, by the grave in silence. Quirky stays by the grave for a while longer after Badger reluctantly heads back to camp, but not before she tells him the name given to her upon her becoming an adult gnome: Lunhedia, which means “beloved mystery.”
The next morning, Quirky not only tells the rest of the party what he truly is, but reveals his true form to them, a thin, hairless gray creature. He does not, however, tell them about being Shadowspawn.
The party sets off down the road, passing a crossroads. They should reach Brindinsford, a city between them and Pythia, by mid-day tomorrow. As they make camp, Badger drags Grumble off to gather firewood while Rowan hunts. Badger tells Grumble that she’s forgiven Quirky for everything, and that they love each other, and would he please cut Quirky some slack. Grumble says that he’s just trying to look out for her, and he’ll try.
The next day, the party passes a gnome-run caravan heading north along the road. The party warns them of possible bandits, and the gnome wagon-master warns them that Brindinsford is a bit off, from what it has been in the past, though it’s hard to say exactly how.
Soon after parting ways, Nialia smells smoke on the air. Topping a rise, the party can see a column of smoke rising out of the forest into the cloud-laden sky. Rowan takes them into the forest to investigate, and they eventually arrive at the remains of a village. The village has been destroyed, not a building remains standing. A mass grave has been freshly dug just south, and there are fresh tracks leading down a road that heads back towards the main road towards the city. Following the road, the party soon meets a work party of perhaps a dozen men and a squad of mounted militia led by a dwarven sergeant.
The sergeant, Boxar, tells them the gruesome story: that this is the second village to be attacked this week. No one has survived to see who’s responsible, but orcs are suspected, even though they haven’t attacked the area in nearly a hundred years, and mainly keep to the plains to the west. The annual Brindinsford festival is coming up in a few days, and with all the bustle from that, the militia has no manpower to spare to protect all of the independent Halfling farm communities scattered around the area.
Curiously, the sergeant seems to have been given orders regarding the party, he was told adventurers matching their description would likely be on the road coming south, and the Baron wants a word with them. Boxar doesn’t know what for, only that it can’t be too bad, or Boxar would have orders to apprehend them.
Upon reaching the city, Boxar leads the party to the Baron’s manor estate within the city walls. After waiting awhile, they are instead met by a human knight, Lieutenant Eve Shella. She is terse with the party (Boxar warned them that the Lieutenant is none too fond of adventurer-types), informing that the Baron cannot see them tonight, but she has authority to act in his stead. She tells them that the Baron will hire them to find and eliminate the force or forces attacking the villages. The party agrees (Rowan feels a funny vibe about the whole thing, but agrees that protecting innocent farmers is worth the weirdness). Shella provides them with a map of the area showing the independent Halfling villages. Shella seems to also have a low opinion of these villages, as they have had the opportunity to be protected by the Baron, but declined, clinging to their tradition of independence.
The party leaves the barracks next to the Baron’s enclosure and is accosted by a slightly deranged Beggar woman who, when they give her a few coins and some food, whispers fiercely: “Beware those who hear whispers in their dreams! They sleep fitfully, now, awaiting the Speaker’s plans!” After than she ambles off as if nothing had happened, and begins begging for coin again from other passersby, ignoring the party.
Creeped out, the party heads to the nearest inn. Tired and road-weary, Grumble, Rowan and Nialia head up to their rooms after eating. Badger and Quirky share an awkward drink or two, then head upstairs, with plans to spend the night in the same room. Ish. Kind of. They couldn’t be more nervous.
Quirky, ducking into his own room to change, finds Grumble waiting for him. Grumble gives a small and obviously rehearsed speech about the painful things he’ll do to Quirky if he breaks Badger’s heart. Quirky takes it in stride. As he leaves, Grumble asks Quirky a curious question. Just after Grayle’s attack, Quirky mentioned something about “just because Grumble failed to protect something precious in the past,” and Grumble wants to know how the shifter knew anything about Grumble’s past. Not wanting to tell the dwarf that he can read thoughts, Quirky tells Grumble that he was talking in his sleep. Grumble asks Quirky to stop him if he does so again. Quirky offers the suggestion that it can be beneficial, even therapeutic, to let your past out, and to not let it haunt you. Grumble glowers at the gnome* and Quirky backs off the subject. With a last warning of grievous bodily harm in the event of gnomish heartbreak, Grumble heads for his room.
Finally Quirky knocks on Badger’s door, and she opens it, wearing a flowing sleeping gown that makes Quirky weak in the knees. The gnome and the changeling talk for a while, trying to get the nerve up for a kiss. As Badger is about to give up and climb into bed alone, Quirky, panicking, pulls Badger to him, only to have her slam her jaw painfully into his shoulder. Rubbing her jaw while Quirky apologizes, aghast, Badger informs him that he’s allowed to try again. Quirky smiles and leans toward the beautiful young gnome once more. For tonight, at least, death-marks, assassins and the perils of the world are forgotten, and nothing exists for the two fumbling lovers except each other.
At dawn, Rowan heads out to post a letter to Potter. She gets back to the inn as Grumble and Nialia are starting to eat. Badger comes downstairs, greeting everyone with a bright cheerfulness. Rowan and Nialia share a knowing “oh, really” look over the head of the dwarf. Quirky comes down a few minutes later, and the party sets out onto the road towards the nearest village on the map.
All too soon they notice yet another column of smoke rising out of the woods, and hasten to the scene. Near the village they find a beaten pat leading off into the woods. Nialia shifts into wolf form and investigates, finding a recently used orc encampment that now stands deserted. The rest of the party gathers to investigate the remains of the orc camp, but are ambushed by a group of lizardfolk carrying bolas and poisoned arrows. The party makes short work of the reptilian warriors, but several escape, running into the woods in different directions. Disheartened, the group heads to the village to see what clues may be found there.
It is a grim sight: this village has been razed just like the other two. Orc, lizardfolk and other, stranger tracks have trampled the area. Wooden poles topped by hastily stripped skulls are dotted throughout the village, and the ground is littered with the skulls of Halfling men, women and children as well as farm animals. Nothing seems to have been spared. A pair of young Halflings emerges from the mist, having spent most of the day burying the dead. The sole survivors, a brother and sister, tell a chilling tale of sudden fog, and silent orcs that make no sound while they slaughter, and great beasts from hell with glowing eyes that are equally noiseless. The only sound the two heard were the screams of their neighbors and family been slaughtered in their beds.
Giving the Halflings some healing potions, weapons and money and instructing them to get to Brindinsford as soon as they can, the party heads off towards the next village. Nialia changes to wolf form and streaks ahead, taking full advantage of her ability to pass through the woodlands as easily as an open road. Three miles from the next village, she finds another beaten path leading off into the woods. Cautiously investigating, she finds the path closely watched by orc scouts. Moving deeper into the woods, she finds an encampment just like the last, only this one is full of at least 30 orc warriors and beasts that resemble a cross between a cat and a wolf with ram horns and large enough to take an orc rider.
She flees back to the party as they make their way up the road. Everyone decides that they have no time to try and evacuate, fortify or even warn the nearby village, night is coming on fast. They decide to head into the woods, their passing eased by a druid spell. Their attempt to circle around the camp and approach from an unexpected direction does not work as planned, however. Quirky and Grumble both wear heavy armor that is difficult to keep quiet. Upon reaching the camp, they find it empty. Wondering if they are too late, they venture into the center of camp. However, fires still burn within the crude fortifications surrounding the encampment, and tents still stand. Just as the party reaches the center of the camp, a fog rolls in seemingly from out of nowhere. The two gnomes are nearly lost in the 3 feet of fog. Slowly the chilling sight of hulking orc shapes materialize out of the mist, circling outside the camp. They see also the beasts Nialia described earlier, an orc warrior atop each. Finally a deep voice calls to them, asking if the Baron had sent them.
Nialia covers Grumbles response that Hell has sent them to bring the orcs home with a hasty declaration that yes, they were sent by the Baron. Hearing this, an order to stand down is barked, and the orcs lower their bows and crossbows, and begin heading into the camp. A towering orc, obviously the leader of the tribe, demands to know where his gold is. It seems the baron was paying he and his tribe to slaughter the villages. Covering their dismay and confusion, the party is forced to admit that they do not have the gold owed the Skull Tribe for services rendered, nor had the Baron told them about any arrangement.
“Well,” says the tribe leader, “the Baron must have wanted you dead then.” In orcish, he calls for his troops to kill the intruders, drawing a huge greataxe.
Grim-faced, the party pulls together against the onslaught of orcs. Nialia tosses her python rod onto the tribe’s spell-caster, shouting the command word just as it hits him. The savage sorcerer never has a chance as the giant constrictor quickly crushes him into orc-paste. Grumble battles the orc chieftain, trading grievous blows until the chief overbalances, topples backwards and impales himself on the blade of his own axe. Meanwhile, orcs mounted on their brutish mounts have smashed into the party from behind. Rowan and Grumble concentrate on the orcs, as do Quirky and Badger, as Nialia calls lighting down from the stormy skies to strike the beasts. As the ranks of the orcs close around them, the beast-riders drive a wedge into the party’s formation, raking the adventurers with claws and teeth.
Hidden in the low fog, Badger slices up the beasts’ underbellies while Grumble takes down two orc warriors with each measured sweep of his axe. Rowan, weaving a tapestry of death with her whirling longsword and mace, single-handedly holds the party’s right flank together. Nialia summons a pack of wolves to distract and maul the orcs from the rear, and sends her python to attack the beast-riders that haven’t been able to join the fray yet. The snake kills one and wounds a second before being hacked to death by the orcs running to help their beast-rider comrade.
The skull tribe is on the verge of defeat when Grumble goes down on a clod of loose earth and bashes himself in the head with his weapon, momentarily stunning him. Orcs and an adjacent beast-rider swarm over him, but Quirky leaps to the fallen dwarf’s aid, literally standing on Grumble as he metes out a brutal counterattack. He pushes the enemy back with spells and his dagger, having lost his mace earlier in the battle. Despite his deadly magic and tenacity, the orcs and beast nearly rip Quirky to shreds. Only an emergency contingency healing spell saves Quirky from falling senseless across the body of Grumble.
Badger screams with the rage of angels as she leaps to Quirky’s aid, and with a savage thrust of her sword rips the throat out of the beast mauling her love. Nialia heals the gnome enough to keep him on his feet, then the three women mop up the remaining orcs and the last of the beasts.
Grumble regains his feet a few seconds later while Rowan walks over the battlefield, finishing off her wounded foes. Looting the camp, they find the gold given to the skull tribe as a down payment, as well as a magical staff that enabled all the orcs wearing skull charms to remain quiet while they attacked. The exhausted party takes the head of the chief with them and staggers back to their mounts left back on the road.
They make it to the nearby village, where they’re met by the village Elder, an old Halfling man named Joram. He and several young Halflings have been standing watch, armed with the meager weapons available to them. The party insists they have taken care of the menace. Joram, eying their wounds and their gore-spattered clothes and armor, wants to believe them, but remains cautions. Out of the shadows behind the party melts a large but striking Halfling female warrior astride a wolf that escapes being classified as dire only because he would have eaten anyone who got close enough to measure him.
She goes off down the trail to verify the party’s tale while Joram allows the party to relax in a barn. He promises them the best accommodations and food the village can provide when Cora Thornapple (the Halfling warrior woman) returns.
Thornapple returns soon after, and with grudging respect for the adventurers, informs Elder Joram that the orc tribe has indeed been wiped out completely. Nialia amazes Cora further when her ferocious mount pads up to the druidess and licks her hand. Joram and the other Halflings, too tired and afraid for the truth to sink in quite yet, usher the party to a common house in the village with “big-sized” rooms. The party is bathed and fed, and discuss what action to follow next. Was this all just a brutal protection scam, or is something else going on? Realizing they have only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence against the Baron, they decide that all they can do is collect their pay from Lieutenant Shella and move on. They resolve to speak to Elder Joram the next morning; perhaps the Halfling can shed some light on this mystery.
While most of them head off to bed (or out into the woods); Rowan has a question on her mind for Quirky. After she cleans herself up, she seeks him out.
She finds Quirky by the fire in the main room of the common house, stoically stitching shut some of his wounds. Rowan asks about the device Quirky used in the sunless citadel to give them all foul dreams. She asks how it could cause Heidiana’s reflection to disappear after her reflection’s throat was slit in her dream. Quirky does not know, only knowing that the device was full of foul and evil magic, designed to bring madness as well as nightmares. He reiterates that he’s certain he destroyed it before leaving it in the citadel. Seemingly satisfied, Rowan bids him good-night and leaves him as Badger emerges from her own room. She’s obviously been shaken by seeing Quirky come so close to being slain. She helps him clean his wounds, bathes him, and then helps him to bed.
The adventurers sleep uneasily, knowing that while they have saved hundreds of innocent lives, they may have played right into the hands of the one who endangered those same lives in the first place...
* Yes, Quirky is technically a doppelganger, not a gnome. But he stays in his gnome form almost exclusively, for Badger’s sake. I refer to him as a gnome for ease of writing, unless he’s in the guise of someone else.
In-Game Dates: Disander 5th, night – Dis 8, night
After Quirky leaves, Rowan and Nialia convince Grumble to give Quirky the benefit of the doubt. Grumble mutters that while he doesn’t trust the “gnome,” he won’t do anything rash unless Quirky gets out of line.
Eventually the party hears the faint, clear, tenor voice of Quirky singing an elven lament, “Ard hi Ethenialle”. Rowan remembers her father singing it once when he found that a former companion of his had died. A while after the song ends, Badger gets up and heads in the direction Quirky had gone. Though she tells everyone not to follow her, Grumble heads off after them about five minutes later.
Badger finds Quirky, who has carved a rough headstone in front of a grave. He must have used magic, for etched into the rough stone surface is the inscription:
“Here Lies Grayle, loyal companion and friend. Ill-used in this life, may the gods grant her peace in the next.”
Badger apologizes; wishing she’d died, or done anything rather than to have forced Quirky to choose between her and Grayle. Quirky takes her by the shoulders and tells her that Grayle was trying to save the person she knew from making a mistake. However, says Quirky, he is no longer that person anymore. Sadly, Grayle didn’t give him time to explain. Quirky did what he had to do, and while he regrets more than anything having to kill Grayle, would make the same decision again if he had to.Badger pleads for Quirky to tell her everything, right now. Anything else he’s been hiding, Badger wants it out in the open. She thinks she can forgive him whatever he tells her, but she wants to hear it all now; after this she’s not sure her heart could take any further betrayal.
Quirky is silent for half a minute, but instead of an answer, he greets Grumble, who has done a fair job of sneaking up on the two. Badger screams at Grumble to leave, even throwing her kukri at him in her rage. Quirky gets Grumble to leave them in peace for a while, asking “I just killed my only friend and the only family I’ve ever known to save Badger’s life. Do you honestly think I’m going to hurt her?”
Quirky asks Badger what she loves about him, wondering if Grayle wasn’t right about Badger not being able to love him for what he truly is. Sighing at Badger’s confusion, Quirky admits to Badger that he’s a shape-shifter, a doppelganger, a changeling. To his amazement, Badger finds this fascinating. After saying she forgives him, Quirky comes out and, naming all her names (Roywyn Ellybelle Badger Goodlock Turen), tells her that he loves her. She is much more shocked by finding out that Quirky was a near-mythic assassin known only as “Shadowspawn.” Quirky explains that Shadowspawn was actually a title conferred upon him, that he adopted the name from another to keep the legend going (a la the “Dread Pirate Roberts”). Badger exclaims: “I’ve woken my parents up thinking you were under my bed!” Despite himself, Quirky laughs. He quickly sobers as he realizes that Badger is still bleeding from Grayle’s claws. He presses his hand to her wounded stomach and heals her. Eventually Badger taked the hand on her stomach in her own, and the two sit, hand-in hand, by the grave in silence. Quirky stays by the grave for a while longer after Badger reluctantly heads back to camp, but not before she tells him the name given to her upon her becoming an adult gnome: Lunhedia, which means “beloved mystery.”
The next morning, Quirky not only tells the rest of the party what he truly is, but reveals his true form to them, a thin, hairless gray creature. He does not, however, tell them about being Shadowspawn.
The party sets off down the road, passing a crossroads. They should reach Brindinsford, a city between them and Pythia, by mid-day tomorrow. As they make camp, Badger drags Grumble off to gather firewood while Rowan hunts. Badger tells Grumble that she’s forgiven Quirky for everything, and that they love each other, and would he please cut Quirky some slack. Grumble says that he’s just trying to look out for her, and he’ll try.
The next day, the party passes a gnome-run caravan heading north along the road. The party warns them of possible bandits, and the gnome wagon-master warns them that Brindinsford is a bit off, from what it has been in the past, though it’s hard to say exactly how.
Soon after parting ways, Nialia smells smoke on the air. Topping a rise, the party can see a column of smoke rising out of the forest into the cloud-laden sky. Rowan takes them into the forest to investigate, and they eventually arrive at the remains of a village. The village has been destroyed, not a building remains standing. A mass grave has been freshly dug just south, and there are fresh tracks leading down a road that heads back towards the main road towards the city. Following the road, the party soon meets a work party of perhaps a dozen men and a squad of mounted militia led by a dwarven sergeant.
The sergeant, Boxar, tells them the gruesome story: that this is the second village to be attacked this week. No one has survived to see who’s responsible, but orcs are suspected, even though they haven’t attacked the area in nearly a hundred years, and mainly keep to the plains to the west. The annual Brindinsford festival is coming up in a few days, and with all the bustle from that, the militia has no manpower to spare to protect all of the independent Halfling farm communities scattered around the area.
Curiously, the sergeant seems to have been given orders regarding the party, he was told adventurers matching their description would likely be on the road coming south, and the Baron wants a word with them. Boxar doesn’t know what for, only that it can’t be too bad, or Boxar would have orders to apprehend them.
Upon reaching the city, Boxar leads the party to the Baron’s manor estate within the city walls. After waiting awhile, they are instead met by a human knight, Lieutenant Eve Shella. She is terse with the party (Boxar warned them that the Lieutenant is none too fond of adventurer-types), informing that the Baron cannot see them tonight, but she has authority to act in his stead. She tells them that the Baron will hire them to find and eliminate the force or forces attacking the villages. The party agrees (Rowan feels a funny vibe about the whole thing, but agrees that protecting innocent farmers is worth the weirdness). Shella provides them with a map of the area showing the independent Halfling villages. Shella seems to also have a low opinion of these villages, as they have had the opportunity to be protected by the Baron, but declined, clinging to their tradition of independence.
The party leaves the barracks next to the Baron’s enclosure and is accosted by a slightly deranged Beggar woman who, when they give her a few coins and some food, whispers fiercely: “Beware those who hear whispers in their dreams! They sleep fitfully, now, awaiting the Speaker’s plans!” After than she ambles off as if nothing had happened, and begins begging for coin again from other passersby, ignoring the party.
Creeped out, the party heads to the nearest inn. Tired and road-weary, Grumble, Rowan and Nialia head up to their rooms after eating. Badger and Quirky share an awkward drink or two, then head upstairs, with plans to spend the night in the same room. Ish. Kind of. They couldn’t be more nervous.
Quirky, ducking into his own room to change, finds Grumble waiting for him. Grumble gives a small and obviously rehearsed speech about the painful things he’ll do to Quirky if he breaks Badger’s heart. Quirky takes it in stride. As he leaves, Grumble asks Quirky a curious question. Just after Grayle’s attack, Quirky mentioned something about “just because Grumble failed to protect something precious in the past,” and Grumble wants to know how the shifter knew anything about Grumble’s past. Not wanting to tell the dwarf that he can read thoughts, Quirky tells Grumble that he was talking in his sleep. Grumble asks Quirky to stop him if he does so again. Quirky offers the suggestion that it can be beneficial, even therapeutic, to let your past out, and to not let it haunt you. Grumble glowers at the gnome* and Quirky backs off the subject. With a last warning of grievous bodily harm in the event of gnomish heartbreak, Grumble heads for his room.
Finally Quirky knocks on Badger’s door, and she opens it, wearing a flowing sleeping gown that makes Quirky weak in the knees. The gnome and the changeling talk for a while, trying to get the nerve up for a kiss. As Badger is about to give up and climb into bed alone, Quirky, panicking, pulls Badger to him, only to have her slam her jaw painfully into his shoulder. Rubbing her jaw while Quirky apologizes, aghast, Badger informs him that he’s allowed to try again. Quirky smiles and leans toward the beautiful young gnome once more. For tonight, at least, death-marks, assassins and the perils of the world are forgotten, and nothing exists for the two fumbling lovers except each other.
At dawn, Rowan heads out to post a letter to Potter. She gets back to the inn as Grumble and Nialia are starting to eat. Badger comes downstairs, greeting everyone with a bright cheerfulness. Rowan and Nialia share a knowing “oh, really” look over the head of the dwarf. Quirky comes down a few minutes later, and the party sets out onto the road towards the nearest village on the map.
All too soon they notice yet another column of smoke rising out of the woods, and hasten to the scene. Near the village they find a beaten pat leading off into the woods. Nialia shifts into wolf form and investigates, finding a recently used orc encampment that now stands deserted. The rest of the party gathers to investigate the remains of the orc camp, but are ambushed by a group of lizardfolk carrying bolas and poisoned arrows. The party makes short work of the reptilian warriors, but several escape, running into the woods in different directions. Disheartened, the group heads to the village to see what clues may be found there.
It is a grim sight: this village has been razed just like the other two. Orc, lizardfolk and other, stranger tracks have trampled the area. Wooden poles topped by hastily stripped skulls are dotted throughout the village, and the ground is littered with the skulls of Halfling men, women and children as well as farm animals. Nothing seems to have been spared. A pair of young Halflings emerges from the mist, having spent most of the day burying the dead. The sole survivors, a brother and sister, tell a chilling tale of sudden fog, and silent orcs that make no sound while they slaughter, and great beasts from hell with glowing eyes that are equally noiseless. The only sound the two heard were the screams of their neighbors and family been slaughtered in their beds.
Giving the Halflings some healing potions, weapons and money and instructing them to get to Brindinsford as soon as they can, the party heads off towards the next village. Nialia changes to wolf form and streaks ahead, taking full advantage of her ability to pass through the woodlands as easily as an open road. Three miles from the next village, she finds another beaten path leading off into the woods. Cautiously investigating, she finds the path closely watched by orc scouts. Moving deeper into the woods, she finds an encampment just like the last, only this one is full of at least 30 orc warriors and beasts that resemble a cross between a cat and a wolf with ram horns and large enough to take an orc rider.
She flees back to the party as they make their way up the road. Everyone decides that they have no time to try and evacuate, fortify or even warn the nearby village, night is coming on fast. They decide to head into the woods, their passing eased by a druid spell. Their attempt to circle around the camp and approach from an unexpected direction does not work as planned, however. Quirky and Grumble both wear heavy armor that is difficult to keep quiet. Upon reaching the camp, they find it empty. Wondering if they are too late, they venture into the center of camp. However, fires still burn within the crude fortifications surrounding the encampment, and tents still stand. Just as the party reaches the center of the camp, a fog rolls in seemingly from out of nowhere. The two gnomes are nearly lost in the 3 feet of fog. Slowly the chilling sight of hulking orc shapes materialize out of the mist, circling outside the camp. They see also the beasts Nialia described earlier, an orc warrior atop each. Finally a deep voice calls to them, asking if the Baron had sent them.
Nialia covers Grumbles response that Hell has sent them to bring the orcs home with a hasty declaration that yes, they were sent by the Baron. Hearing this, an order to stand down is barked, and the orcs lower their bows and crossbows, and begin heading into the camp. A towering orc, obviously the leader of the tribe, demands to know where his gold is. It seems the baron was paying he and his tribe to slaughter the villages. Covering their dismay and confusion, the party is forced to admit that they do not have the gold owed the Skull Tribe for services rendered, nor had the Baron told them about any arrangement.
“Well,” says the tribe leader, “the Baron must have wanted you dead then.” In orcish, he calls for his troops to kill the intruders, drawing a huge greataxe.
Grim-faced, the party pulls together against the onslaught of orcs. Nialia tosses her python rod onto the tribe’s spell-caster, shouting the command word just as it hits him. The savage sorcerer never has a chance as the giant constrictor quickly crushes him into orc-paste. Grumble battles the orc chieftain, trading grievous blows until the chief overbalances, topples backwards and impales himself on the blade of his own axe. Meanwhile, orcs mounted on their brutish mounts have smashed into the party from behind. Rowan and Grumble concentrate on the orcs, as do Quirky and Badger, as Nialia calls lighting down from the stormy skies to strike the beasts. As the ranks of the orcs close around them, the beast-riders drive a wedge into the party’s formation, raking the adventurers with claws and teeth.
Hidden in the low fog, Badger slices up the beasts’ underbellies while Grumble takes down two orc warriors with each measured sweep of his axe. Rowan, weaving a tapestry of death with her whirling longsword and mace, single-handedly holds the party’s right flank together. Nialia summons a pack of wolves to distract and maul the orcs from the rear, and sends her python to attack the beast-riders that haven’t been able to join the fray yet. The snake kills one and wounds a second before being hacked to death by the orcs running to help their beast-rider comrade.
The skull tribe is on the verge of defeat when Grumble goes down on a clod of loose earth and bashes himself in the head with his weapon, momentarily stunning him. Orcs and an adjacent beast-rider swarm over him, but Quirky leaps to the fallen dwarf’s aid, literally standing on Grumble as he metes out a brutal counterattack. He pushes the enemy back with spells and his dagger, having lost his mace earlier in the battle. Despite his deadly magic and tenacity, the orcs and beast nearly rip Quirky to shreds. Only an emergency contingency healing spell saves Quirky from falling senseless across the body of Grumble.
Badger screams with the rage of angels as she leaps to Quirky’s aid, and with a savage thrust of her sword rips the throat out of the beast mauling her love. Nialia heals the gnome enough to keep him on his feet, then the three women mop up the remaining orcs and the last of the beasts.
Grumble regains his feet a few seconds later while Rowan walks over the battlefield, finishing off her wounded foes. Looting the camp, they find the gold given to the skull tribe as a down payment, as well as a magical staff that enabled all the orcs wearing skull charms to remain quiet while they attacked. The exhausted party takes the head of the chief with them and staggers back to their mounts left back on the road.
They make it to the nearby village, where they’re met by the village Elder, an old Halfling man named Joram. He and several young Halflings have been standing watch, armed with the meager weapons available to them. The party insists they have taken care of the menace. Joram, eying their wounds and their gore-spattered clothes and armor, wants to believe them, but remains cautions. Out of the shadows behind the party melts a large but striking Halfling female warrior astride a wolf that escapes being classified as dire only because he would have eaten anyone who got close enough to measure him.
She goes off down the trail to verify the party’s tale while Joram allows the party to relax in a barn. He promises them the best accommodations and food the village can provide when Cora Thornapple (the Halfling warrior woman) returns.
Thornapple returns soon after, and with grudging respect for the adventurers, informs Elder Joram that the orc tribe has indeed been wiped out completely. Nialia amazes Cora further when her ferocious mount pads up to the druidess and licks her hand. Joram and the other Halflings, too tired and afraid for the truth to sink in quite yet, usher the party to a common house in the village with “big-sized” rooms. The party is bathed and fed, and discuss what action to follow next. Was this all just a brutal protection scam, or is something else going on? Realizing they have only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence against the Baron, they decide that all they can do is collect their pay from Lieutenant Shella and move on. They resolve to speak to Elder Joram the next morning; perhaps the Halfling can shed some light on this mystery.
While most of them head off to bed (or out into the woods); Rowan has a question on her mind for Quirky. After she cleans herself up, she seeks him out.
She finds Quirky by the fire in the main room of the common house, stoically stitching shut some of his wounds. Rowan asks about the device Quirky used in the sunless citadel to give them all foul dreams. She asks how it could cause Heidiana’s reflection to disappear after her reflection’s throat was slit in her dream. Quirky does not know, only knowing that the device was full of foul and evil magic, designed to bring madness as well as nightmares. He reiterates that he’s certain he destroyed it before leaving it in the citadel. Seemingly satisfied, Rowan bids him good-night and leaves him as Badger emerges from her own room. She’s obviously been shaken by seeing Quirky come so close to being slain. She helps him clean his wounds, bathes him, and then helps him to bed.
The adventurers sleep uneasily, knowing that while they have saved hundreds of innocent lives, they may have played right into the hands of the one who endangered those same lives in the first place...
* Yes, Quirky is technically a doppelganger, not a gnome. But he stays in his gnome form almost exclusively, for Badger’s sake. I refer to him as a gnome for ease of writing, unless he’s in the guise of someone else.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Session 18: Cost of Living (part three of three)
Game Date: 11/18/07 (later that evening)
In Game Dates: Novander 31st, late – Disander 5th, late
“So,” says Quirky, a brittle smile on his lips, “who wants to get drunk?”
Rowan heads upstairs to check on Badger as the rest of the party orders drinks. Quirky gets up and says he wants to go talk to Morwen. Nialia and Grumble get their drink on while Rowan comforts Badger upstairs. Eventually Rowan convinces Badger to come downstairs and join the rest of the group. Soon after that, Quirky returns, his face unreadable. After drinking several rounds with the group, Rowan excuses herself and heads out towards Potter’s residence.
As Grumble is getting well into his cups, a dwarf behind him nods and lifts his own mug in Grumble’s direction. Grumble is stunned by this; as an outcast, a normal dwarf should shun him like a festering mound of rotting garbage. After giving a cautious greeting, Grumble regards the dwarf. Craggy-featured, the old dwarf’s hair, mustache and beard are snow-white; his armor is ornate and gray as a cliff face at dusk. Nialia feels uneasy, this dwarf smells at once like and unlike a dwarf. The smell has a crisp tang to it, like ice on the rocks at dawn.
Regardless of social convention, the stranger challenges Grumble to a drinking match. As the dwarves begin to drink copious amounts of alcohol, the stranger asks Grumble about himself. “What is a dwarf who cannot hold his dwarven ale?” asks the stranger. “What is a dwarf without a clan?” Grumble responds that his friends, who’ve proven loyal and steadfast in combat, are his new clan; he finds his happiness in them. The stranger grunts and they continue to drink, switching from dwarven ale to Old HelmCleaver’s Fire Brandy. As they start downing the hard stuff, Grumble feels himself losing the drinking contest. The stranger tells (in short form) the tale of the first dwarven spirits, and how a clan of dwarves were killed while they were drunk on this new liquid.
Suddenly the stranger demands Grumble demonstrate his prowess with dwarven weapons. Quirky and Nialia are wary, but don’t interfere. Quirky’s half-mumbled comment “Strange. I can’t get a read on him.” goes unheard in the surrounding din of Morwen’s common room. Nialia follows Grumble and the stranger outside while Quirky stays within with an inebriated and still very upset Badger. The stranger daubs a spot of paint on a hitching post outside Morwen’s and draws a line on the cobbles some twenty feet away. Barely even glancing at the post, the stranger buries a throwing axe into the center of the target. Grumble tries several times, but manages only to hit the target once in his drunken state. Suddenly the small crowd around the two gasps; the stranger is now holding Grumble’s axe against Grumble’s throat. The street darkens as the stranger rumbles like a calving glacier, “Is this how you protect the ones in your care? Is this how you defend the only remaining things in this world you claim bring you happiness?” As the street grows darker, Grumble’s darkvision kicks in, showing that wisps of smoke, like fog off the mountains, are drifting off the stranger into the night air. There is a clap like muffled thunder, and everything goes black for a second. When the darkness lifts, Grumble stands alone, his axe once more secured in it’s normal place. As the stunned onlookers mutter to themselves and drift back indoors to their drinks, Grumble falls to the ground and begins vomiting as only a drunken dwarf can do. Nialia and Orderik (who’d come out to make sure there was no trouble) carry grumble upstairs and dump him face-down on his bed, his head over the side with a basin underneath. The rest of Grumble’s night can be imagined as the aftermath of the worst bender ever.
Alone in the bar now, Quirky stares at Badger, his eyes full of a weary sadness. “Come on,” he says to Badger. “We’re going to go see Morwen.”
They go out across the courtyard to Morwen’s house. Morwen greets them and ushers them inside.
“I thought since it was Rascal who told you about how your parents had relocated, you might want to make sure they’re actually all right,” explains Quirky. “I took the liberty of asking Morwen if she would be willing to perform a scrying spell to have you look and see what your family’s up to.” Morwen greets the two gnomes with a smile, and ushers Badger into her lab, where she sits the gnome in front of a large mirror. While Morwen casts the spell, Badger focuses her mind on her favorite brother. To her relief, she does indeed see her family: her parents and three brothers cleaning up after their own evening meal. She recognizes the home they’re in: it’s their house in the Addun-home! Against all odds, Rascal had told the truth, in this matter, at least. Badger watches her family settle down in the sitting room and watches her father smoke his pipe while fiddling with a piece of something or other. Her mother knits while her three brothers play a board game. Her mother looks up at the mantle, where a picture of a younger Badger stands with lit candles on wither side. Her mother’s sigh brings a tear to the eyes of both Badger and Morwen. But all too soon, the spell ends, and the vision ends.
The two women return to the kitchen, where Quirky sits, waiting. Badger hugs him tight, thanking him in a broken voice. Quirky hesitantly hugs her back, and Morwen shoots Quirky an exasperated look.
The two gnomes return to the inn, standing at the bottom of the stairwell leading up to the sleeping rooms. Badger asks again about Quirky’s past. He tells her that he wasn’t always a priest, and wasn’t always a good person. Quirky would rather Badger just know him as the person he is now. “Someday,” says Badger as she starts up the stairs, “I hope you’ll trust me enough to tell me about it.”
“And I hope that someday never comes,” replies Quirky. He turns to find Nialia nonchalantly drinking the last of her wine, gazing coolly at him. With a heavy sigh, Quirky heads off to bed as well.
Nialia heads outside the city walls and shifts into wolf form as soon as she’s out of eyeshot. Her Lythari senses pinpoint the location of the nearest pack of wolves, and she runs to join them, glad to be trading the complexities of civilization and emotions for the simple, primal directives felt by the wolves around her.
The following morning finds the group slowly assembling in Morwen’s common room over breakfast. Quirky and Badger go to wake Grumble. Quirky gives Grumble a restorative, which Grumble almost manages to keep down.
Badger has written a letter to her family (her brother, to be specific), and asks Nialia if the elf will accompany her to the elven part of town to talk to someone who can send the message. Rowan agrees, and the elf at the Silverpine Inn promises it will go out on the next coach to the Elvenhome.
Rowan takes the horses to be re-shoed for the journey south as the party prepares to leave. Potter begins shoeing the horses with his usual brisk efficiency. “You can do a good job without hurrying, you know,” she points out.”
“True” says Potter, “but I hate long goodbyes.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be back here again,” says the ranger in a small voice.
“I know,” says Potter, studying the horse hooves intently. “Our destinies lie along different paths. I’d no more ask you to stay with me as you would ask me to come with you.”
“I’m sorry,” says Rowan.
Potter looks up at her with a brittle but genuine smile. He walks over to her and holds her close. “Don’t you dare be sorry. I’ve not ever known happiness like these past few weeks. I will always have that.” He releases her and stares deeply into her eyes, as if fixing them in a hallowed hall of memory. “It will take time, but our hearts will come to understand what our heads know to be true.”
Even so, it is with a heavy heart that Rowan leaves Miel with the rest of the party. Her eyes light up when Gus comes running up as they cross the bridge out of town and leaps into her lap. Grumble is trying to hold himself together. Quirky sits behind Rowan for a few miles. He asks her for a flask of her holy water so he can test the seal on his new mace, an aspergillum. Rummaging through the pack, he finds a letter with a “P” stamped into the wax seal. Quirky hands it to Rowan, who opens it to find a poem from Potter. She breaks the seal and reads the words written on the parchment:
"Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
The gods for myself, they hear that name of thine,
And see within my eyes the tears of two."
- Potter
Her eyes brimming, but she tries to hold it in while in front of her comrades. Quirky gives Rowan a hug, and while holding on to her, casts calm emotions on her. Rowan finds the pain lessening, and her heart feels eased.
The party makes little progress that day, not necessarily all the fault of Grumble's hangover, and they decide to stop over at the same farmhouse they visited a few days ago. Knocking on the door, however, it seems disaster has befallen the family: one of the farmer’s sons was kicked by a horse and lies in a bad fever. Quirky examines the lad and grimly determines that there must be severe internal bleeding and perhaps a ruptured appendix. With the aid of Nialia, he tends the boy overnight, trying to keep him alive so he can receive the needed spells for surgery the next morning. The surgery and healing is a success, and Nialia examines the horse that kicked the farmer’s son. The horse had an infection in it’s back leg that was causing it pain, and made it lash out. Nialia heals the animal. Only repeated protestations of the urgency of their mission to the Duke gets the party out from the immeasurable gratitude of the farm family. Right now, if a slot for a saint opened up, the party would elect Quirky in half a heartbeat. Badger comments that Zook could carry them both comfortably. Quirky, blithely ignoring a glare from Grumble, climbs onto the back of the enormous Diunsearch wolfhound and Badger suppresses a squeak of glee. It was probably because Quirky was unused to riding a hound, but Badger keeps his hands firmly planted on the dog’s saddle with her own. Of course Badger has to keep tight against him to make sure the tired gnome didn’t slip or slide unduly.
As evening falls, Nialia’s keen nose picks up the scent of blood. Sure enough, there are a few dozen raucously crying crows overhead. Nialia shifts to wolf form as Rowan slides off her mount. The road they ride on now sits atop an embankment some four feet high, with ditches on either side. The woods to either side are thicker and close to the road; there are no farms around for miles. The perfect spot for an ambush. Rowan finds evidence of several men having laid in wait, and a small but abandoned camp a ways into the woods. The tracks are at least two days old, and somewhat obscured by the recent drizzling rain. On the other side of the road, Nialia finds a corpse that was rolled down the embankment and into some brambles. Her nose tells her before her eyes do: the corpse was once a young but foolish gnome named Rascal. His throat has been slit, but aside from being picked at by crows, no other marks are evident. No signs that someone took a body part as proof for a bounty. Likely it was just a plain old bandit attack.
Quirky appears the most shaken by this. “Apparently the gods reserve the right to decide who gets second chances,” he mutters. The sobered party leaves the corpse for the animals to feast on, and they move on.
Speaking of sober, the party notices that Grumble has not touched a drop of his supply of ale or Ha’ak. Grumble has been quieter than usual, thinking over the words of the strange, smoking dwarf. His head pounds, his hands shake, and his skin is chilled from cold sweats, but he says nothing, knowing a true dwarf does not complain of such trifles. Even Rowan senses something deep moving within the dwarf, and for once does not make any jibes. A bit unnerving to Grumble is the frosty cold he feels radiating off his axe, even under the mid-day late summer sun. It’s been like that ever since the night before they left the city; the night he spent turning inside out.
The next three days of travel are uneventful. Wolves have been traveling with the party, and it has become common for a few of them to settle down next to Nialia as he meditates. That night, however, under a night sky cloudy and devoid of stars or moon, Grumble takes out his collection of ale canteens and the filigreed flask containing his precious Ha’ak. One by one he throws the canteens of ale away into the darkness, a strange look on his face. The Ha’ak he looks longingly at for a moment and then tosses the flask into the fire. To his stunned comrades, he says in a clear, strong voice: “I’ve been thinking. It’s time I stopped feeling quite so… Well, I think it’s time to move on.” Quirky and the rest notice that the dwarf’s eyes seem clearer in the dancing flames. Nialia notes he smells slightly different now. Grumble apologizes for behaving the way he has been, and proceeds to take the first watch. His thoughts are awash with the unknown, but now he faces it with a clear head, and the iron determination that only a dwarf can muster.
Badger takes the second watch, but an hour or so into the watch is awakened by Quirky, who has been lying awake. In the firelight his face looks drawn, almost haggard. He does not meet Badger’s soft blue eyes as they speak. Quirky, his heart in his throat, tells Badger that he has feelings for her. More, even. In all his travels, he’s never met someone like her. Not just physically (though Quirky is quick to point out that he finds no flaw in her physical appearance), but that her poise, her heart, and her mind have a rare purity to them that he says has captivated him. He can’t stop thinking about her.
Badger whispers that she has feelings for Quirky as well.
There is another pause, and if Quirky had looked up into Badger’s eyes he would not have been able to go on, such was the dawning joy that was spreading across her face.
As if dragging every word from the blackest pits of the abyss, Quirky asks her if he remembers entering the Sunless Citadel that first day, and encountering him in that orc-held dungeon cell. Confused not so much by the question as the tone of his voice, Badger nods.
“I arrived in that cell scant hours before you found me. I chained myself up in the hopes that you would rescue me.”
Badger’s confusion is quickly turning to alarm, “What? But you-"
“You know the horrible dreams you had that night? I had a device that gave you those evil dreams. I was to use it on you every night until they drove you and Grumble mad. Then I was to kill you both. I was the first assassin sent after you that I spoke of before.”
Badger feels something shrivel and char within her, feels herself turning to ice when just a moment ago she had burned with a never-before felt delight. As if it were someone else, she hears herself ask in a tortured whisper: “Who hired you?”
Now Quirky forces himself to look up, forces himself to gaze into the eyes that now brim and spill over with tears. “I think you know. He told me you and Grumble had murdered his daughter and robbed his estate. I was surprised that someone like me would be hired for such an easy target, but not enough so that I declined the job.”
“It was either kill or be killed by her. We didn’t want to, but she left us no choice!” says Badger hotly.
“I know that now,” nods Quirky. “Your version of events fits much better with what I’ve come to learn about Baron von Hawkmoor. He misrepresented the facts to me, which voids his contract. This may sound odd coming from an assassin, but I won’t be used as that kind of tool. I only killed those I deemed to be worth killing. And once I met you…”
Quirky falters and stops, wishing Badger to scream, to attack him, to call him every foul curse ever uttered by mortal mouths, but she merely gazes at him, tears streaming down her face.
“At any rate, I couldn’t use that device again after that first night. I destroyed it and left it in that forsaken pit. At first I told myself it was because I needed you all to get out of that hell-hole with my skin intact, but afterwards, I couldn’t bring myself to let harm come to you, I cared too much about you. I couldn’t bring myself to touch Grumble either, because he meant so much to you.”
Silence falls, filling the space between the two gnomes like the cold darkness between the stars.
“Look,” says Quirky, “I’m not lying about my feelings. Those are genuine.”
It is the wrong thing to say, and now Badger does lash out. “How could you betray me like this? How could you lead me - lead us all – on like that?”
“If you want me to go, I will go,” says Quirky softly. “You can tell the others whatever you wish.” The words I’m sorry stick in his throat like burrs. Even in his head they sound as hollow as his heart feels.
After a pause, Badger speaks, “Get away from me, Quirky. I need to think. I’ll tell you in the morning.”
The remainder of the night for them both feels like an eternity of torture: Badger alone with her grief, and Quirky alone with his guilt. Dawn comes at last like a tired plow horse and sluggishly brightens the low slate sky in measured levels of gray. Quirky is nowhere to be seen as the rest of the party awakes, but soon returns with a pair of rabbits for breakfast. Everyone sees the red puffy eyes of both gnomes, but say nothing.
Badger strides off into the forest, and once out of eye and earshot, is finally able to let out some of the raw fury in her heart. Badger collapses to the cold earth, pounding her fists into the soil as if demanding answers from a world that she never knew could be so cruel. Eventually she returns, stone-faced, to the camp. She leans over Quirky, who sits holding the rabbits on skewers over the fire.
“Don’t you leave me just yet, Quirky Timbers,” she whispers with a savage fierceness. Quirky’s face doesn’t change, even though his heart leaps at her words.
That day Quirky rides behind Rowan as she scouts ahead of the party. Badger stares down at the swirled patterns of Zook’s thick fur, wrestling both with her feelings and with concealing them from those around her.
Up ahead, Rowan looks back at the blank face of the gnome behind her. “Things not go too well with Badger last night?”
“No,” Quirky says, willing his voice not to crack. Rowan doesn’t press things, and eventually they arrive at a crossroads. A lonely signpost marks the distance to Miel, Pythus, and another town neither adventurer has heard of.
Alert, the gnome and half-elf scan the area for the bandits that they know are out there somewhere. Oh, please, let there be bandits around here Quirky wishes fervently, gripping his mace hard enough that the bones in his hand creak. Rowan notices Quirky scanning the sky more than the ground. “See anything up there?” the ranger asks.
“Nothing,” says the gnome with a troubled look.
They wait for the rest of the party to catch up, and then take the road towards Pythus together. Dusk creeps across the gray sky, and the party settles down once more. Badger volunteers to take a watch once more. When she’s sure everyone else is asleep, she approaches Quirky, who is fairly certain he will never be able to sleep again.
“Are you even a real cleric, or have you lied about that too?” Badger asks finally.
“I don’t serve Pelor, no.” says Quirky with a sigh. “I’m not a cleric as such. I’m part of a very small cabal of magic users who call themselves Ur-priests. We use our power to steal magic from the gods and use it for our own brand of divine magic. It’s not evil per se, but it’s not good either. I wear the emblem of Pelor because he’s the most commonly worshiped. A healer bearing the Peloric sun is welcomed in many more places than would welcome a travel-dirty gnome in armor. It was just another part of the disguise.”
If looks could kill, Quirky and a good many of his ancestors would have been blotted out of existence.
Finally, Quirky's voice cracks. “Oh, gods, Badger, I can’t take seeing you like this,” Quirky bursts. “Please, for pity’s sake, tell me something, ANYTHING I can do, and I will do it. Tell me to walk through fire, tell me to flay the flesh from my bones, just let me do something for you!”
The two gnomes stare at each other. For the first time, Quirky is crying, his hot tears spilling across the stubble on his cheeks and dripping with barely audible pats onto his bedroll. “You can stay up with me,” says Badger softly.
Quirky laughs softly. “You know, it never happens this way in the ballads, but I really have to pee. I’ll be right back.” Badger almost smiles as Quirky heads off into the darkness among the trees. After a few moments, Badger hears a crackling of branches, and turns to greet Quirky.
Her words die on her lips as she sees a much larger form creeping rapidly towards her. For a half-second she thinks it is a wolf, perhaps even Nialia, but then the thing leaps for her, and thick-skinned claws encircle her throat, choking her scream before it can get past her lips.
With a pump of perfectly camouflaged wings, the creature flies across the camp and alights in the upper branches of a tamarack. The thick bough under them bends under their weight, but holds. Badger struggles, only to feel cold claws at her belly.
A soft, female voice like gravel sliding over honey rasps in Badger’s ear. “So thissss is what takes him away from me, yes?”
Badger draws a ragged breath. Where normally she would find terror, she feels only anger. “When I get free I’m going to end you!”
The thing laughs cruelly, tips of her claws just breaking the skin. “Oh, I don’t think so, little one. I’m going to gut you for stealing him from me!” And spitting the word as if it tastes foul, “Or do you think your cleric will save you?”
Below them, Badger hears Quirky calling softly for her. She gets out a squeak before the thing chokes her.
But Quirky hears. With a few muttered words, the fire blazes up, and the clearing fills with a dirty red glow. Quirky sees the creature and her hold on Badger and goes pale as mist. “Grayle, don’t do this. Let her go.”
Nialia awakes to the growling of the wolves around her and quickly takes in the situation. She is readying a spell when Quirky stops her with a desperate look in his eyes. “If she dodges your spell she’ll kill Badger!” Nialia reluctantly subsides as Rowan and Grumble wake up. Grumble calls to Badger in Dwarven, but before she can complete her answer, Grayle hisses “speak Common, or I’ll bite out your tongue!”
“Grayle, please,” pleads Quirky. “don’t hurt her!”
The creature cries, “Why? Look at her! She will never understand you as I do! She will never accept you! She will never love your real self!” Swiveling her head to look into Badger’s eyes from a scant few inches, Grayle asks her, “Do you love him?”
Without hesitating or blinking, Badger says simply and steadily, “Yes.”
Grayle screams like the death of a comet an raises a hand full of claws the length of Badger’s forearm to strike.
Nialia begins casting, Rowan dives for her bow, and Grumble for his javelins, but Quirky is ready for this and strikes as fast as the assassin he is. His scream for a moment drowns out the gargoyle’s cry, but his scream is full of dark speech. It feels like the very life is sucked out of the clearing for a moment, and a huge, smoky black claw that even the non-magic users can feel the evil washing off of streaks from Quirky's outflung hands. With a sickening crunch of snapping sinew and bone, the claw slices into and through Grayle’s body, nearly ripping the gargoyle in half.
Released from a dying Grayle’s clutch, Badger finds herself falling. As Rowan starts running towards her, time slows down for Badger. With dream-like clarity, she realizes the sprinting ranger will never get to her in time. Idly, she notices that something shiny is hurtling towards her, and she snatches it from the air out of reflex. It’s a fancy ring. Badger wonders why she shouldn’t go out looking glamorous, and puts the ring on her finger…
On the ground, Rowan sees Badger’s fall abruptly slow, which gives the ranger the precious second she needs to throw herself the last few inches, and Rowan catches Badger in her strong arms, cradling the gnome to her.
As the corpse of the gargoyle smacks into the dirt a second later, Quirky whispers, “I loved you Grayle. You were my only friend since childhood. I’m sorry I let it come to this; I should have known.”
He’s still muttering when Grumble grab Quirky, throwing the gnome roughly to the ground and puts his axe to Quirky's throat. “What the hell just happened, Quirky? And what the hell was that spell you just cast! Start talking, because if you've hurt Badger, I swear-”
At Rowan and Nialia’s urging, Grumble takes the axe away and let’s the gnome sit up.
Looking at them, Quirky asks, “do you remember entering the Sunless Citadel that first day, and encountering me in that orc-held dungeon cell?”
. . .
After hearing all Quirky had told Badger, Nialia, Rowan and Grumble are dumbfounded. He explains that Grayle was his partner for many of his jobs, and they had worked as a team for many years, though he had no idea of her feelings for him.
Nialia says she trusts him. Rowan thinks that the gnome should be judged by the behavior he’s exhibited since they met him, not by past misdeeds. Grumble remains adamant, though, he most definitely does NOT trust the would-be assassin. Badger is huddled in a small ball, her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Grumble goes to her and puts his arm around her small, shivering form.
“Are you even a gnome,” wonders Grumble, eyes bright with suspicion.
Looking at the still sobbing form of Badger, her hands covering her face, Quirky, agony etched in his face, silently mouths the words, “Please. Not now.” Aloud he says, “Yes.”
Eventually, Rowan suggests that they all try to get some sleep.
Quirky stands up and says grimly, “I’m going to bury my friend. I don’t want help.” He walks off into the darkness, leaving a pensive elf, a concerned half-elf and an angry dwarf holding a weeping gnome girl all staring at his retreating form.
****
DM's Notes:
-This was kind of a Role-laying Season Finale. I do not expect to be writing out a session summary this detailed for a while.
-The poem is not mine. It was written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the sixth of her "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
-My players did some of the best role-playing I've ever seen this session, I'd barely scripted anything for this, so I hope it wasn't too melodramatic. Kudos to you all.
-Lastly, "WAAAAH! I NEED A HUG!"
In Game Dates: Novander 31st, late – Disander 5th, late
“So,” says Quirky, a brittle smile on his lips, “who wants to get drunk?”
Rowan heads upstairs to check on Badger as the rest of the party orders drinks. Quirky gets up and says he wants to go talk to Morwen. Nialia and Grumble get their drink on while Rowan comforts Badger upstairs. Eventually Rowan convinces Badger to come downstairs and join the rest of the group. Soon after that, Quirky returns, his face unreadable. After drinking several rounds with the group, Rowan excuses herself and heads out towards Potter’s residence.
As Grumble is getting well into his cups, a dwarf behind him nods and lifts his own mug in Grumble’s direction. Grumble is stunned by this; as an outcast, a normal dwarf should shun him like a festering mound of rotting garbage. After giving a cautious greeting, Grumble regards the dwarf. Craggy-featured, the old dwarf’s hair, mustache and beard are snow-white; his armor is ornate and gray as a cliff face at dusk. Nialia feels uneasy, this dwarf smells at once like and unlike a dwarf. The smell has a crisp tang to it, like ice on the rocks at dawn.
Regardless of social convention, the stranger challenges Grumble to a drinking match. As the dwarves begin to drink copious amounts of alcohol, the stranger asks Grumble about himself. “What is a dwarf who cannot hold his dwarven ale?” asks the stranger. “What is a dwarf without a clan?” Grumble responds that his friends, who’ve proven loyal and steadfast in combat, are his new clan; he finds his happiness in them. The stranger grunts and they continue to drink, switching from dwarven ale to Old HelmCleaver’s Fire Brandy. As they start downing the hard stuff, Grumble feels himself losing the drinking contest. The stranger tells (in short form) the tale of the first dwarven spirits, and how a clan of dwarves were killed while they were drunk on this new liquid.
Suddenly the stranger demands Grumble demonstrate his prowess with dwarven weapons. Quirky and Nialia are wary, but don’t interfere. Quirky’s half-mumbled comment “Strange. I can’t get a read on him.” goes unheard in the surrounding din of Morwen’s common room. Nialia follows Grumble and the stranger outside while Quirky stays within with an inebriated and still very upset Badger. The stranger daubs a spot of paint on a hitching post outside Morwen’s and draws a line on the cobbles some twenty feet away. Barely even glancing at the post, the stranger buries a throwing axe into the center of the target. Grumble tries several times, but manages only to hit the target once in his drunken state. Suddenly the small crowd around the two gasps; the stranger is now holding Grumble’s axe against Grumble’s throat. The street darkens as the stranger rumbles like a calving glacier, “Is this how you protect the ones in your care? Is this how you defend the only remaining things in this world you claim bring you happiness?” As the street grows darker, Grumble’s darkvision kicks in, showing that wisps of smoke, like fog off the mountains, are drifting off the stranger into the night air. There is a clap like muffled thunder, and everything goes black for a second. When the darkness lifts, Grumble stands alone, his axe once more secured in it’s normal place. As the stunned onlookers mutter to themselves and drift back indoors to their drinks, Grumble falls to the ground and begins vomiting as only a drunken dwarf can do. Nialia and Orderik (who’d come out to make sure there was no trouble) carry grumble upstairs and dump him face-down on his bed, his head over the side with a basin underneath. The rest of Grumble’s night can be imagined as the aftermath of the worst bender ever.
Alone in the bar now, Quirky stares at Badger, his eyes full of a weary sadness. “Come on,” he says to Badger. “We’re going to go see Morwen.”
They go out across the courtyard to Morwen’s house. Morwen greets them and ushers them inside.
“I thought since it was Rascal who told you about how your parents had relocated, you might want to make sure they’re actually all right,” explains Quirky. “I took the liberty of asking Morwen if she would be willing to perform a scrying spell to have you look and see what your family’s up to.” Morwen greets the two gnomes with a smile, and ushers Badger into her lab, where she sits the gnome in front of a large mirror. While Morwen casts the spell, Badger focuses her mind on her favorite brother. To her relief, she does indeed see her family: her parents and three brothers cleaning up after their own evening meal. She recognizes the home they’re in: it’s their house in the Addun-home! Against all odds, Rascal had told the truth, in this matter, at least. Badger watches her family settle down in the sitting room and watches her father smoke his pipe while fiddling with a piece of something or other. Her mother knits while her three brothers play a board game. Her mother looks up at the mantle, where a picture of a younger Badger stands with lit candles on wither side. Her mother’s sigh brings a tear to the eyes of both Badger and Morwen. But all too soon, the spell ends, and the vision ends.
The two women return to the kitchen, where Quirky sits, waiting. Badger hugs him tight, thanking him in a broken voice. Quirky hesitantly hugs her back, and Morwen shoots Quirky an exasperated look.
The two gnomes return to the inn, standing at the bottom of the stairwell leading up to the sleeping rooms. Badger asks again about Quirky’s past. He tells her that he wasn’t always a priest, and wasn’t always a good person. Quirky would rather Badger just know him as the person he is now. “Someday,” says Badger as she starts up the stairs, “I hope you’ll trust me enough to tell me about it.”
“And I hope that someday never comes,” replies Quirky. He turns to find Nialia nonchalantly drinking the last of her wine, gazing coolly at him. With a heavy sigh, Quirky heads off to bed as well.
Nialia heads outside the city walls and shifts into wolf form as soon as she’s out of eyeshot. Her Lythari senses pinpoint the location of the nearest pack of wolves, and she runs to join them, glad to be trading the complexities of civilization and emotions for the simple, primal directives felt by the wolves around her.
The following morning finds the group slowly assembling in Morwen’s common room over breakfast. Quirky and Badger go to wake Grumble. Quirky gives Grumble a restorative, which Grumble almost manages to keep down.
Badger has written a letter to her family (her brother, to be specific), and asks Nialia if the elf will accompany her to the elven part of town to talk to someone who can send the message. Rowan agrees, and the elf at the Silverpine Inn promises it will go out on the next coach to the Elvenhome.
Rowan takes the horses to be re-shoed for the journey south as the party prepares to leave. Potter begins shoeing the horses with his usual brisk efficiency. “You can do a good job without hurrying, you know,” she points out.”
“True” says Potter, “but I hate long goodbyes.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be back here again,” says the ranger in a small voice.
“I know,” says Potter, studying the horse hooves intently. “Our destinies lie along different paths. I’d no more ask you to stay with me as you would ask me to come with you.”
“I’m sorry,” says Rowan.
Potter looks up at her with a brittle but genuine smile. He walks over to her and holds her close. “Don’t you dare be sorry. I’ve not ever known happiness like these past few weeks. I will always have that.” He releases her and stares deeply into her eyes, as if fixing them in a hallowed hall of memory. “It will take time, but our hearts will come to understand what our heads know to be true.”
Even so, it is with a heavy heart that Rowan leaves Miel with the rest of the party. Her eyes light up when Gus comes running up as they cross the bridge out of town and leaps into her lap. Grumble is trying to hold himself together. Quirky sits behind Rowan for a few miles. He asks her for a flask of her holy water so he can test the seal on his new mace, an aspergillum. Rummaging through the pack, he finds a letter with a “P” stamped into the wax seal. Quirky hands it to Rowan, who opens it to find a poem from Potter. She breaks the seal and reads the words written on the parchment:
"Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
The gods for myself, they hear that name of thine,
And see within my eyes the tears of two."
- Potter
Her eyes brimming, but she tries to hold it in while in front of her comrades. Quirky gives Rowan a hug, and while holding on to her, casts calm emotions on her. Rowan finds the pain lessening, and her heart feels eased.
The party makes little progress that day, not necessarily all the fault of Grumble's hangover, and they decide to stop over at the same farmhouse they visited a few days ago. Knocking on the door, however, it seems disaster has befallen the family: one of the farmer’s sons was kicked by a horse and lies in a bad fever. Quirky examines the lad and grimly determines that there must be severe internal bleeding and perhaps a ruptured appendix. With the aid of Nialia, he tends the boy overnight, trying to keep him alive so he can receive the needed spells for surgery the next morning. The surgery and healing is a success, and Nialia examines the horse that kicked the farmer’s son. The horse had an infection in it’s back leg that was causing it pain, and made it lash out. Nialia heals the animal. Only repeated protestations of the urgency of their mission to the Duke gets the party out from the immeasurable gratitude of the farm family. Right now, if a slot for a saint opened up, the party would elect Quirky in half a heartbeat. Badger comments that Zook could carry them both comfortably. Quirky, blithely ignoring a glare from Grumble, climbs onto the back of the enormous Diunsearch wolfhound and Badger suppresses a squeak of glee. It was probably because Quirky was unused to riding a hound, but Badger keeps his hands firmly planted on the dog’s saddle with her own. Of course Badger has to keep tight against him to make sure the tired gnome didn’t slip or slide unduly.
As evening falls, Nialia’s keen nose picks up the scent of blood. Sure enough, there are a few dozen raucously crying crows overhead. Nialia shifts to wolf form as Rowan slides off her mount. The road they ride on now sits atop an embankment some four feet high, with ditches on either side. The woods to either side are thicker and close to the road; there are no farms around for miles. The perfect spot for an ambush. Rowan finds evidence of several men having laid in wait, and a small but abandoned camp a ways into the woods. The tracks are at least two days old, and somewhat obscured by the recent drizzling rain. On the other side of the road, Nialia finds a corpse that was rolled down the embankment and into some brambles. Her nose tells her before her eyes do: the corpse was once a young but foolish gnome named Rascal. His throat has been slit, but aside from being picked at by crows, no other marks are evident. No signs that someone took a body part as proof for a bounty. Likely it was just a plain old bandit attack.
Quirky appears the most shaken by this. “Apparently the gods reserve the right to decide who gets second chances,” he mutters. The sobered party leaves the corpse for the animals to feast on, and they move on.
Speaking of sober, the party notices that Grumble has not touched a drop of his supply of ale or Ha’ak. Grumble has been quieter than usual, thinking over the words of the strange, smoking dwarf. His head pounds, his hands shake, and his skin is chilled from cold sweats, but he says nothing, knowing a true dwarf does not complain of such trifles. Even Rowan senses something deep moving within the dwarf, and for once does not make any jibes. A bit unnerving to Grumble is the frosty cold he feels radiating off his axe, even under the mid-day late summer sun. It’s been like that ever since the night before they left the city; the night he spent turning inside out.
The next three days of travel are uneventful. Wolves have been traveling with the party, and it has become common for a few of them to settle down next to Nialia as he meditates. That night, however, under a night sky cloudy and devoid of stars or moon, Grumble takes out his collection of ale canteens and the filigreed flask containing his precious Ha’ak. One by one he throws the canteens of ale away into the darkness, a strange look on his face. The Ha’ak he looks longingly at for a moment and then tosses the flask into the fire. To his stunned comrades, he says in a clear, strong voice: “I’ve been thinking. It’s time I stopped feeling quite so… Well, I think it’s time to move on.” Quirky and the rest notice that the dwarf’s eyes seem clearer in the dancing flames. Nialia notes he smells slightly different now. Grumble apologizes for behaving the way he has been, and proceeds to take the first watch. His thoughts are awash with the unknown, but now he faces it with a clear head, and the iron determination that only a dwarf can muster.
Badger takes the second watch, but an hour or so into the watch is awakened by Quirky, who has been lying awake. In the firelight his face looks drawn, almost haggard. He does not meet Badger’s soft blue eyes as they speak. Quirky, his heart in his throat, tells Badger that he has feelings for her. More, even. In all his travels, he’s never met someone like her. Not just physically (though Quirky is quick to point out that he finds no flaw in her physical appearance), but that her poise, her heart, and her mind have a rare purity to them that he says has captivated him. He can’t stop thinking about her.
Badger whispers that she has feelings for Quirky as well.
There is another pause, and if Quirky had looked up into Badger’s eyes he would not have been able to go on, such was the dawning joy that was spreading across her face.
As if dragging every word from the blackest pits of the abyss, Quirky asks her if he remembers entering the Sunless Citadel that first day, and encountering him in that orc-held dungeon cell. Confused not so much by the question as the tone of his voice, Badger nods.
“I arrived in that cell scant hours before you found me. I chained myself up in the hopes that you would rescue me.”
Badger’s confusion is quickly turning to alarm, “What? But you-"
“You know the horrible dreams you had that night? I had a device that gave you those evil dreams. I was to use it on you every night until they drove you and Grumble mad. Then I was to kill you both. I was the first assassin sent after you that I spoke of before.”
Badger feels something shrivel and char within her, feels herself turning to ice when just a moment ago she had burned with a never-before felt delight. As if it were someone else, she hears herself ask in a tortured whisper: “Who hired you?”
Now Quirky forces himself to look up, forces himself to gaze into the eyes that now brim and spill over with tears. “I think you know. He told me you and Grumble had murdered his daughter and robbed his estate. I was surprised that someone like me would be hired for such an easy target, but not enough so that I declined the job.”
“It was either kill or be killed by her. We didn’t want to, but she left us no choice!” says Badger hotly.
“I know that now,” nods Quirky. “Your version of events fits much better with what I’ve come to learn about Baron von Hawkmoor. He misrepresented the facts to me, which voids his contract. This may sound odd coming from an assassin, but I won’t be used as that kind of tool. I only killed those I deemed to be worth killing. And once I met you…”
Quirky falters and stops, wishing Badger to scream, to attack him, to call him every foul curse ever uttered by mortal mouths, but she merely gazes at him, tears streaming down her face.
“At any rate, I couldn’t use that device again after that first night. I destroyed it and left it in that forsaken pit. At first I told myself it was because I needed you all to get out of that hell-hole with my skin intact, but afterwards, I couldn’t bring myself to let harm come to you, I cared too much about you. I couldn’t bring myself to touch Grumble either, because he meant so much to you.”
Silence falls, filling the space between the two gnomes like the cold darkness between the stars.
“Look,” says Quirky, “I’m not lying about my feelings. Those are genuine.”
It is the wrong thing to say, and now Badger does lash out. “How could you betray me like this? How could you lead me - lead us all – on like that?”
“If you want me to go, I will go,” says Quirky softly. “You can tell the others whatever you wish.” The words I’m sorry stick in his throat like burrs. Even in his head they sound as hollow as his heart feels.
After a pause, Badger speaks, “Get away from me, Quirky. I need to think. I’ll tell you in the morning.”
The remainder of the night for them both feels like an eternity of torture: Badger alone with her grief, and Quirky alone with his guilt. Dawn comes at last like a tired plow horse and sluggishly brightens the low slate sky in measured levels of gray. Quirky is nowhere to be seen as the rest of the party awakes, but soon returns with a pair of rabbits for breakfast. Everyone sees the red puffy eyes of both gnomes, but say nothing.
Badger strides off into the forest, and once out of eye and earshot, is finally able to let out some of the raw fury in her heart. Badger collapses to the cold earth, pounding her fists into the soil as if demanding answers from a world that she never knew could be so cruel. Eventually she returns, stone-faced, to the camp. She leans over Quirky, who sits holding the rabbits on skewers over the fire.
“Don’t you leave me just yet, Quirky Timbers,” she whispers with a savage fierceness. Quirky’s face doesn’t change, even though his heart leaps at her words.
That day Quirky rides behind Rowan as she scouts ahead of the party. Badger stares down at the swirled patterns of Zook’s thick fur, wrestling both with her feelings and with concealing them from those around her.
Up ahead, Rowan looks back at the blank face of the gnome behind her. “Things not go too well with Badger last night?”
“No,” Quirky says, willing his voice not to crack. Rowan doesn’t press things, and eventually they arrive at a crossroads. A lonely signpost marks the distance to Miel, Pythus, and another town neither adventurer has heard of.
Alert, the gnome and half-elf scan the area for the bandits that they know are out there somewhere. Oh, please, let there be bandits around here Quirky wishes fervently, gripping his mace hard enough that the bones in his hand creak. Rowan notices Quirky scanning the sky more than the ground. “See anything up there?” the ranger asks.
“Nothing,” says the gnome with a troubled look.
They wait for the rest of the party to catch up, and then take the road towards Pythus together. Dusk creeps across the gray sky, and the party settles down once more. Badger volunteers to take a watch once more. When she’s sure everyone else is asleep, she approaches Quirky, who is fairly certain he will never be able to sleep again.
“Are you even a real cleric, or have you lied about that too?” Badger asks finally.
“I don’t serve Pelor, no.” says Quirky with a sigh. “I’m not a cleric as such. I’m part of a very small cabal of magic users who call themselves Ur-priests. We use our power to steal magic from the gods and use it for our own brand of divine magic. It’s not evil per se, but it’s not good either. I wear the emblem of Pelor because he’s the most commonly worshiped. A healer bearing the Peloric sun is welcomed in many more places than would welcome a travel-dirty gnome in armor. It was just another part of the disguise.”
If looks could kill, Quirky and a good many of his ancestors would have been blotted out of existence.
Finally, Quirky's voice cracks. “Oh, gods, Badger, I can’t take seeing you like this,” Quirky bursts. “Please, for pity’s sake, tell me something, ANYTHING I can do, and I will do it. Tell me to walk through fire, tell me to flay the flesh from my bones, just let me do something for you!”
The two gnomes stare at each other. For the first time, Quirky is crying, his hot tears spilling across the stubble on his cheeks and dripping with barely audible pats onto his bedroll. “You can stay up with me,” says Badger softly.
Quirky laughs softly. “You know, it never happens this way in the ballads, but I really have to pee. I’ll be right back.” Badger almost smiles as Quirky heads off into the darkness among the trees. After a few moments, Badger hears a crackling of branches, and turns to greet Quirky.
Her words die on her lips as she sees a much larger form creeping rapidly towards her. For a half-second she thinks it is a wolf, perhaps even Nialia, but then the thing leaps for her, and thick-skinned claws encircle her throat, choking her scream before it can get past her lips.
With a pump of perfectly camouflaged wings, the creature flies across the camp and alights in the upper branches of a tamarack. The thick bough under them bends under their weight, but holds. Badger struggles, only to feel cold claws at her belly.
A soft, female voice like gravel sliding over honey rasps in Badger’s ear. “So thissss is what takes him away from me, yes?”
Badger draws a ragged breath. Where normally she would find terror, she feels only anger. “When I get free I’m going to end you!”
The thing laughs cruelly, tips of her claws just breaking the skin. “Oh, I don’t think so, little one. I’m going to gut you for stealing him from me!” And spitting the word as if it tastes foul, “Or do you think your cleric will save you?”
Below them, Badger hears Quirky calling softly for her. She gets out a squeak before the thing chokes her.
But Quirky hears. With a few muttered words, the fire blazes up, and the clearing fills with a dirty red glow. Quirky sees the creature and her hold on Badger and goes pale as mist. “Grayle, don’t do this. Let her go.”
Nialia awakes to the growling of the wolves around her and quickly takes in the situation. She is readying a spell when Quirky stops her with a desperate look in his eyes. “If she dodges your spell she’ll kill Badger!” Nialia reluctantly subsides as Rowan and Grumble wake up. Grumble calls to Badger in Dwarven, but before she can complete her answer, Grayle hisses “speak Common, or I’ll bite out your tongue!”
“Grayle, please,” pleads Quirky. “don’t hurt her!”
The creature cries, “Why? Look at her! She will never understand you as I do! She will never accept you! She will never love your real self!” Swiveling her head to look into Badger’s eyes from a scant few inches, Grayle asks her, “Do you love him?”
Without hesitating or blinking, Badger says simply and steadily, “Yes.”
Grayle screams like the death of a comet an raises a hand full of claws the length of Badger’s forearm to strike.
Nialia begins casting, Rowan dives for her bow, and Grumble for his javelins, but Quirky is ready for this and strikes as fast as the assassin he is. His scream for a moment drowns out the gargoyle’s cry, but his scream is full of dark speech. It feels like the very life is sucked out of the clearing for a moment, and a huge, smoky black claw that even the non-magic users can feel the evil washing off of streaks from Quirky's outflung hands. With a sickening crunch of snapping sinew and bone, the claw slices into and through Grayle’s body, nearly ripping the gargoyle in half.
Released from a dying Grayle’s clutch, Badger finds herself falling. As Rowan starts running towards her, time slows down for Badger. With dream-like clarity, she realizes the sprinting ranger will never get to her in time. Idly, she notices that something shiny is hurtling towards her, and she snatches it from the air out of reflex. It’s a fancy ring. Badger wonders why she shouldn’t go out looking glamorous, and puts the ring on her finger…
On the ground, Rowan sees Badger’s fall abruptly slow, which gives the ranger the precious second she needs to throw herself the last few inches, and Rowan catches Badger in her strong arms, cradling the gnome to her.
As the corpse of the gargoyle smacks into the dirt a second later, Quirky whispers, “I loved you Grayle. You were my only friend since childhood. I’m sorry I let it come to this; I should have known.”
He’s still muttering when Grumble grab Quirky, throwing the gnome roughly to the ground and puts his axe to Quirky's throat. “What the hell just happened, Quirky? And what the hell was that spell you just cast! Start talking, because if you've hurt Badger, I swear-”
At Rowan and Nialia’s urging, Grumble takes the axe away and let’s the gnome sit up.
Looking at them, Quirky asks, “do you remember entering the Sunless Citadel that first day, and encountering me in that orc-held dungeon cell?”
. . .
After hearing all Quirky had told Badger, Nialia, Rowan and Grumble are dumbfounded. He explains that Grayle was his partner for many of his jobs, and they had worked as a team for many years, though he had no idea of her feelings for him.
Nialia says she trusts him. Rowan thinks that the gnome should be judged by the behavior he’s exhibited since they met him, not by past misdeeds. Grumble remains adamant, though, he most definitely does NOT trust the would-be assassin. Badger is huddled in a small ball, her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Grumble goes to her and puts his arm around her small, shivering form.
“Are you even a gnome,” wonders Grumble, eyes bright with suspicion.
Looking at the still sobbing form of Badger, her hands covering her face, Quirky, agony etched in his face, silently mouths the words, “Please. Not now.” Aloud he says, “Yes.”
Eventually, Rowan suggests that they all try to get some sleep.
Quirky stands up and says grimly, “I’m going to bury my friend. I don’t want help.” He walks off into the darkness, leaving a pensive elf, a concerned half-elf and an angry dwarf holding a weeping gnome girl all staring at his retreating form.
****
DM's Notes:
-This was kind of a Role-laying Season Finale. I do not expect to be writing out a session summary this detailed for a while.
-The poem is not mine. It was written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the sixth of her "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
-My players did some of the best role-playing I've ever seen this session, I'd barely scripted anything for this, so I hope it wasn't too melodramatic. Kudos to you all.
-Lastly, "WAAAAH! I NEED A HUG!"
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