![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Otherwise known as: Gaaaa-minnnnng.
Adosar asked me if I'd come help him with a magical ritual. He was worried about being bothered by animals when he was having it, because it was a really, really long ritual and he wouldn't really be able to interrupt it well. He said that the magic might upset Shae, so I asked Renn if she'd look after him for a while, and we went out. He asked me to help him pick some particularly varied terrain -- he said he was looking for an animal, and I guess he wanted the animals to be able to come from lots of different sorts of places, so we found a place.
I don't think I'm supposed to talk too much about the magics, but it was interesting to watch. He talked about who he was and what he'd done and what he was like, and I actually understood most of it because my Dwarvish is much, much better than it used to be. And then time passed for a while, there weren't even normal animal noises. When the sun was going down, something started coming closer -- a grey lizard, Renn called him a rock mite, with purply highlights. He walked up to Adosar, looked at him for a moment, and then magic wove around them like threads making a pattern, a shuttle rattling back and forth. The lizard climbed up onto Adosar's shoulder.
Adosar looked really, really happy, and . . . a little more Adosar than he was before, even. He introduced me to the lizard, who told him to tell me that I smelled of animals bigger than he could kill. I told Adosar that I wouldn't mind if he mentioned that sometimes I can talk to animals, if he wanted someone else to talk to other than Adosar sometimes; after that he swarmed down and then climbed up me and sniffed at me a little, and then jumped back to Adosar. He says they eat magic, except they don't, they sort of breathe it. And that nobody's ever had one as a familiar before that he knows of.
I think he's being smug.
We went back to Lord Kynnan's keep. Renn seemed really, really amused by Adosar's new friend. He introduced everyone around, and explained that his friend didn't understand our language yet, but he expected him to pick it up quickly.
We went to bed eventually, and . . . there were dreams again. Cold shadows sweeping in from everywhere on an empty plain, the feeling that something was coming. I woke up and pulled the sword out, but it wasn't glowing or anything. Just a dream. Renn woke up with a yell and ran out down the hall, and I followed her to make sure she was all right. She went and buried her hands in the dirt outside where she could smell the grass.
A little bit later, Karas and Adosar came out. I'd figured Renn was all right and there wasn't something immediately there to jump out at us, so I was poking at the sword some. They made sure we were all right, and then tugged at me to point out there was noise and people scrambling about. Renn said that Hethian said there were people in the stables making noise and things, so we went to go see.
Lord Kynnan said it was good we were awake, he'd wanted to talk to us; Adosar told him that whatever it was had woken us up, so we'd like to know what it was. He was a little nonplussed, but he had the scout who was there -- and who looked really, really out of breath -- tell his story, I'm guessing again from all the times we've had to tell our stories five or six times depending on how efficiently people show up.
The scout had been off towards the mountains side of the territory with his patrol, and they'd seen something moving. It was a mob of little creatures -- he wasn't sure what they looked like, he hadn't been able to see them clear, and there were hundreds of them -- with maybe a dozen or two dozen ogres or something driving them on, and a shadowy figure leading them or in the middle of them or something. Vanguard of an army, or a scouting force, or . . .
So we were going to have to do something about it, and everyone was a little frantic. He was sending out messengers to get as many of his people there as he could, and they were planning to pick out a battleground and everything. I spent the next day working with my pots and making healing salves. I'm getting better at this.
We didn't have as many people as Lord Kynnan had hoped we would. We went out to where we were going to try to fight them and set up. There was a bit of flat land between two tangly bits of trees and hills, and it was more or less the way they were going, but the scouting people who'd found them originally were going to be sure to lead them to us. They were travelling mostly at night, and we expected them around midnight. So people built big bonfires.
I took out the sword and put it in a clear space, so people would see it if it started glowing, and told Lord Kynnan that if it started glowing we'd know they were close. Renn made a bunch of magic healing berries and gave them to us and some to the lord, and some of us went to sleep. Renn went out and let her hawk go and got an owl, so she could try to borrow its eyes and see better.
Adosar woke me up a little bit before midnight and made a magic on me that he said would give me the protection of stone. It felt . . . interesting. He also gave me a few magic-maps, and told me to protect Renn and myself with them, and to make Renn's bow magic.
The plan was that the lord and his guard would hold the middle, his footmen would hold the edges, and there were a few archers in between on both sides. And a bard with each group of archers, so they could sing and keep everyone strong and all.
After a little bit, some people came running up to the lines and told the lord they were coming, and went to the back. And a little after that, we could see the mob of them. Renn made one of her arrows glow and shot it up high in a big arc so it landed in the middle of them, and the little ones scattered away from it. One of the bards made a space in front of the archers glow, too.
They started to charge. I pointed at the grass in front of our archers on the left and told it what to do, and it got ready to grab them if they came charging in, protecting the archers and holding them ready to be shot at. I could hear Renn doing the same thing from the other side. I used the maps like Adosar had said I should, and then followed Karas into the fight when the little creatures hit the line.
We couldn't find the shadow for a long time, but we knew it had to be there; there were dark bolts of energy shooting out of the darkness, and every time one hit someone, he fell down. Renn made another glow, and we still couldn't find him, and Karas was getting ahead of me in the fight so I had to stop and lay about a lot to stop the goblins getting at me, and then Renn saw him and made a magic and the shadow figure started glowing purple for a moment and then shimmering like the mountain-lights. (Session quote: "Aurora faeriealis!" --![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
keshwyn) And it shot a bolt at Renn, and it shot a bolt at Karas, and Karas fell down. And Adosar stopped and gave Karas a potion, and I got loose of the little goblins and shot at the shadow, and Renn was shooting at it, and it made little beams of shadow come out of a rock in its hand and we heard a voice that said, "Now I know you", and Adosar put a lightning bolt through it and it blew up, and we could hear people cheering.
We helped everyone deal with the rest of the fight. The ogre-things were most of it -- the little things were running away a lot. They wound up identified as "trolls". (Session quote: "They have a cave troll." --jikharra) They looked sort of like they were stony, but Adosar didn't know anything about them. I was disappointed. But we went to look at where the captain had exploded, and found his rock. It seemed unpleasant and sort of icky, but not evil, so Adosar picked it up. Karas wanted to try to use it, but Adosar made sure to put it back in his bag.
Renn went off to take a break from everything after she was done healing as many people as she could -- I gave her the berries I had left. She and Karas went to talk and came back later. (Session quote: "It's a bad habit. And breaking bad habits like chewing your nails or charging headlong into battle isn't an easy thing to do." --Renn)
Eventually we started back to the keep, after people were better rested. Lord Kynnan had sent for wagons to come and bring back some of the troll bodies, so the people he was trying to convince would have them to look at and realise that there was actually a problem they should pay attention to. We were going back and we met another lord coming the other way, who wanted to know what was going on, so Karas told him the whole story of what we know about what's going on.
The new lord said "Mm" a lot and didn't seem quite convinced, but what can we do? We kept going back to the keep. Renn wanted to send a message to the elves to point out to them that if armies were going to come out through their forest they might want to try doing something maybe. Or at least should know. So she had Adosar write it down for her and had a bird carry the message away.
We got back. There was a lot of bustling about and people talking and explaining things to each other. The people who'd been fighting were telling stories about what happened, and the bards were telling stories about what happened, and the bards had more right but much bigger explosions. Renn spent a lot of time with Hethian. I made more tonics, these to help against poisons.
We'd been back for a little bit when one night Renn woke me up and ran out into the hallway. I grabbed the sword and followed her, and saw her going one way down the hall and Adosar going the other way. Karas and I looked at each other, looked at them, shrugged, and went and followed (he followed Adosar, I followed Renn). Adosar's friend was also following Renn, climbing on the walls mostly.
I got up to the kitchen door when Renn came charging out of it and told me to look at other doors in the hall. I opened the door to the dining room and heard a great big banging crashing noise behind me. Renn came out of the other kitchen door, and I felt a weird tingly pressure feeling that sort of faded away. I told the lizard to tell Adosar. Then a big hand -- two big hands -- folded around the edges of the doorway that Renn had scrambled out of. They were big hands, sort of curled half into fists, with long spikes coming out well past them, maybe made out of bone. I hacked at the hand with the sword, I guess I figured if I could cut it off it would help, but I didn't hurt it badly, and where I hit it it all healed up a moment later.
It pulled and stretched at the doorway, and eventually broke it down and got through, and swung its bone-spurs at me. It was so big it could hardly turn in the corridor, and furred sort of blue and purple. And it hit really hard. I took a half-step back and spoke to the amulet Adosar gave me, to help protect me. I could hear Renn on the other side of it, but not see her. I could hear Adosar and Karas coming running up behind me, and they went into the kitchen to attack it through the door I guess, and Renn was hitting it on the other side. I hit it a few times, too, being careful about it, and eventually it sort of slumped over, blocking most of the hallway.
And then it started to fade away into nothingness, like a shadow might. I cut off a piece or two of it to see if I could get the pieces to stay, but they didn't. Adosar and I studied it as best we could while it disappeared. People milled around and stared and everything, and then it was gone.
It had been going along right towards where we were sleeping. If we stayed, they'd send another one, and more people would be hurt or killed, and more walls, too. I tracked it back through the kitchen and it looked like it had walked through the wall of the keep. But there were tracks on the other side, going in a perfectly straight line.
Lord Kynnan allowed as how we had a point when we said that we should go deal with this, but he worried about us. But anyway, we started following the tracks. They hadn't come from where the army came from, but rather south, from the area we tried to go before. We followed them. Renn's been asking me about tracking, so I was showing her things. This one was pretty easy, it was so straight, and the creature was so big and wasn't being sneaky.
We followed the trail. It rained a little, but I could still follow it. Eventually we got to the border of Lord Krunden's territory, the one who's supporting Dass in this war thing that we want stopped. We followed the trail through a copse of trees (which was easy enough, since it had just knocked down the trees in its way) and saw a patrol. I suggested to Karas that we might point out we were tracking a creature that had attacked our village, rather than any of the usual stories.
They got very grumpy at us when they figured we had to have come from Lord Kynnan's territory, and said they'd have to take us prisoner. We said we didn't want them to. They said there were twelve of them and four of us, and Karas said, "So?" They were about to do something, so Adosar threw lightning right through the middle of them, and Karas told them to get off their horses, and said we weren't going to be captured, we just wanted to track the stupid creature.
I kept tracking the stupid creature. ("I matter of factly continue tracking.") Eventually they gave us their horses and ran away. Then I stopped and went to see if any of the people were going to be able to survive, and Renn healed the one that could. And Karas had a long talk with him, and convinced him that he didn't want to be doing this anymore, and sent him back to Lord Kynnan's territory with a rock that would deliver a message from us and the extra horses. I just didn't want to leave him to die, is all, but that was useful. Karas is really impressive when he does that sort of thing. (Session Quote: "You are . . . unbelievable, and I mean that in many ways." --Adosar)
(Session Quote: Sometimes more is better. Sometimes less is more. Therefore, sometimes less is better. --teinedreugan)
We made camp in a little knot of trees so we could hide better and not have to explode any more patrols. Adosar was on watch when the dreams went all weird, and we were all in a place that was full of shadow, like it wasn't real. Shae wasn't there, and Adosar couldn't find his friend, and Renn couldn't find Hethian. And then the voice from the battle said that we were interesting, but in the way, and so we'd have to be dead, and he blew a blizzard at us. Renn managed to get all the way out of the way, but Adosar fell over. We could see a sort of pillar of shadows, where the spells came from. I hit it with the sword, which was glowing, and there was a flash and when my hands went into the darkness it was cold. I didn't think my magics against cold would help it much -- though I should write maps of better protection with Adosar's help, since he can help me write maps, if we're going to have to fight him again -- so I kept hitting into the darkness.
He made black shadowy things come out of the ground to try to grab at things, but we got out of their way. Karas hit into the shadow, but it was like he couldn't see. Renn hit into the shadow, and it made her run away. Karas sort of backed off and kept blowing his horn into the shadow, as best as he could figure where it was, and Adosar yelled at me to get out of the way and threw lightning bolts at it. He'd made my shadow turn into a monster, and I hit that after Adosar threw lightning at it, because with it there I couldn't get my magics to work right, I kept having to jump out of the way when I had to get the magic flowing.
One of the lightning bolts went through the shadow, and it was gone afterwards, and . . . then I was asleep again. When Adosar woke me up he mentioned it, and we'd had the same thing happen, only his friend hadn't noticed us go, and they can talk without talking at all, just thinking at each other. That was really irritating. But we know more about him. He knows more about us, too, but I know to write maps. (Session quote: "What, you don't object to being killed, so long as it's not in your sleep?" --Adosar)
When we got up, we were all right, without all the hurt from the magics he'd made or anything. And it took me a while to find the trail again, but I found it. It led past what I guess was the town that was the capital for Lord Krunden, but not to it. It went to a house all on its own, with no yard or anything. We went to a copse nearby, and I got Shae to go fly around the house and Renn threw her sight into his eyes so she could see where people were. They saw someone through one of the windows.
Karas and Adosar went up to the front door and knocked on it while Renn and I slipped around and broke in through one of the windows. We couldn't hear anything, so Renn jimmied the window open with a dagger and climbed in. It was a bedroom. (Session quote: "We break in through the bedroom window, protected by. . ." --me, to the tune of "She came in through the bathroom window")
Renn made her flaming sword, and gestured for me to open the door, so I did. Adosar immediately ran up to me -- there were these two rabid-looking leopard things that were in there, and they jumped at him but couldn't seem to hit him -- and he told me not to hit them and made a magic on me. The man in the room was blinking and flickering like he was lit up with lightning. He ran away from Karas and made a spell, and the whole side of the room I was in was full of spiderwebs, which started right at my feet. I was pretty badly stuck. I knew that this magic makes something that burns easily, so I tried to make my magic that would set things on fire, but it was too tangled up. Frustrating.
Adosar burned away the stuff catching him with a lightning bolt, and Karas sort of roared and pulled loose from the webs and charged at the man with his spear. He was really, really mad. The man did another spell, and these wiggly dark things started coming out of the floor, like Fingul's shadow had done. (And I hope we gave Fingul a headache killing his shadow like that. Hah.) A bunch of them grabbed me because I was still tangled up in the webbing, but they also grabbed the leopard-things and started squeezing them. Karas smashed the summoner dead and then sort of sat down outside, and Renn came back in through the window and helped cut me loose while Adosar made lightning to burn away the rest of the tentacles and webs and everything. Then we sat outside and rested for a while, and searched the parts of the house that weren't full of wiggly black things.
When we were done searching, we threw rocks at the tentacles until they melted away, and searched that room too. It was a magical workroom, and we found some things useful for potions and making magic things, three spell maps, and a magic cloak and a magic ring. (Renn got the ring. Karas looked at the cloak, and asked me if I'd like his; they were both mostly the same, but the new one was red and the old one was blue.) After a bit of exploring and studying things, we went to another bit of trees to sleep so we could start back the next day. There weren't any papers or anything, but he won't summon any more monsters to hurt us or Lord Kynnan, at least.
I'm tired, and slightly squozen.
- Session 1: The wind and the dust go 'round and 'round
- Session 2: Oh no. . . I just realised I named my horse 'Charlie'. . .
- Session 3: Look, you got beaten up by a RICH ogre.
- Session 4: Chief.
- Session 5: Roight, Brain, but next time you're wearing the dress.
- Session 6: Today was a very ranger day.
- Session 7: God is dead. Long live God.
- Session 8: More gaming.
- Session 9: Stick 'em up! Put all your arithmetical operators in the bag!
- Session 10: An Interlude Full of Irritating Cats
Adosar asked me if I'd come help him with a magical ritual. He was worried about being bothered by animals when he was having it, because it was a really, really long ritual and he wouldn't really be able to interrupt it well. He said that the magic might upset Shae, so I asked Renn if she'd look after him for a while, and we went out. He asked me to help him pick some particularly varied terrain -- he said he was looking for an animal, and I guess he wanted the animals to be able to come from lots of different sorts of places, so we found a place.
I don't think I'm supposed to talk too much about the magics, but it was interesting to watch. He talked about who he was and what he'd done and what he was like, and I actually understood most of it because my Dwarvish is much, much better than it used to be. And then time passed for a while, there weren't even normal animal noises. When the sun was going down, something started coming closer -- a grey lizard, Renn called him a rock mite, with purply highlights. He walked up to Adosar, looked at him for a moment, and then magic wove around them like threads making a pattern, a shuttle rattling back and forth. The lizard climbed up onto Adosar's shoulder.
Adosar looked really, really happy, and . . . a little more Adosar than he was before, even. He introduced me to the lizard, who told him to tell me that I smelled of animals bigger than he could kill. I told Adosar that I wouldn't mind if he mentioned that sometimes I can talk to animals, if he wanted someone else to talk to other than Adosar sometimes; after that he swarmed down and then climbed up me and sniffed at me a little, and then jumped back to Adosar. He says they eat magic, except they don't, they sort of breathe it. And that nobody's ever had one as a familiar before that he knows of.
I think he's being smug.
We went back to Lord Kynnan's keep. Renn seemed really, really amused by Adosar's new friend. He introduced everyone around, and explained that his friend didn't understand our language yet, but he expected him to pick it up quickly.
"Doing running translation. He doesn't understand common yet."
"What does he understand?"
"Me."
"I would just like to say, it's good that someone finally does."
- - Adosar, Karas
We went to bed eventually, and . . . there were dreams again. Cold shadows sweeping in from everywhere on an empty plain, the feeling that something was coming. I woke up and pulled the sword out, but it wasn't glowing or anything. Just a dream. Renn woke up with a yell and ran out down the hall, and I followed her to make sure she was all right. She went and buried her hands in the dirt outside where she could smell the grass.
A little bit later, Karas and Adosar came out. I'd figured Renn was all right and there wasn't something immediately there to jump out at us, so I was poking at the sword some. They made sure we were all right, and then tugged at me to point out there was noise and people scrambling about. Renn said that Hethian said there were people in the stables making noise and things, so we went to go see.
Lord Kynnan said it was good we were awake, he'd wanted to talk to us; Adosar told him that whatever it was had woken us up, so we'd like to know what it was. He was a little nonplussed, but he had the scout who was there -- and who looked really, really out of breath -- tell his story, I'm guessing again from all the times we've had to tell our stories five or six times depending on how efficiently people show up.
The scout had been off towards the mountains side of the territory with his patrol, and they'd seen something moving. It was a mob of little creatures -- he wasn't sure what they looked like, he hadn't been able to see them clear, and there were hundreds of them -- with maybe a dozen or two dozen ogres or something driving them on, and a shadowy figure leading them or in the middle of them or something. Vanguard of an army, or a scouting force, or . . .
So we were going to have to do something about it, and everyone was a little frantic. He was sending out messengers to get as many of his people there as he could, and they were planning to pick out a battleground and everything. I spent the next day working with my pots and making healing salves. I'm getting better at this.
We didn't have as many people as Lord Kynnan had hoped we would. We went out to where we were going to try to fight them and set up. There was a bit of flat land between two tangly bits of trees and hills, and it was more or less the way they were going, but the scouting people who'd found them originally were going to be sure to lead them to us. They were travelling mostly at night, and we expected them around midnight. So people built big bonfires.
I took out the sword and put it in a clear space, so people would see it if it started glowing, and told Lord Kynnan that if it started glowing we'd know they were close. Renn made a bunch of magic healing berries and gave them to us and some to the lord, and some of us went to sleep. Renn went out and let her hawk go and got an owl, so she could try to borrow its eyes and see better.
Adosar woke me up a little bit before midnight and made a magic on me that he said would give me the protection of stone. It felt . . . interesting. He also gave me a few magic-maps, and told me to protect Renn and myself with them, and to make Renn's bow magic.
The plan was that the lord and his guard would hold the middle, his footmen would hold the edges, and there were a few archers in between on both sides. And a bard with each group of archers, so they could sing and keep everyone strong and all.
- "So what's our plan?"
"Hit things?"
"Hard?"
"Yeah."
- - Karas, Thiara
After a little bit, some people came running up to the lines and told the lord they were coming, and went to the back. And a little after that, we could see the mob of them. Renn made one of her arrows glow and shot it up high in a big arc so it landed in the middle of them, and the little ones scattered away from it. One of the bards made a space in front of the archers glow, too.
They started to charge. I pointed at the grass in front of our archers on the left and told it what to do, and it got ready to grab them if they came charging in, protecting the archers and holding them ready to be shot at. I could hear Renn doing the same thing from the other side. I used the maps like Adosar had said I should, and then followed Karas into the fight when the little creatures hit the line.
We couldn't find the shadow for a long time, but we knew it had to be there; there were dark bolts of energy shooting out of the darkness, and every time one hit someone, he fell down. Renn made another glow, and we still couldn't find him, and Karas was getting ahead of me in the fight so I had to stop and lay about a lot to stop the goblins getting at me, and then Renn saw him and made a magic and the shadow figure started glowing purple for a moment and then shimmering like the mountain-lights. (Session quote: "Aurora faeriealis!" --
keshwyn) And it shot a bolt at Renn, and it shot a bolt at Karas, and Karas fell down. And Adosar stopped and gave Karas a potion, and I got loose of the little goblins and shot at the shadow, and Renn was shooting at it, and it made little beams of shadow come out of a rock in its hand and we heard a voice that said, "Now I know you", and Adosar put a lightning bolt through it and it blew up, and we could hear people cheering.We helped everyone deal with the rest of the fight. The ogre-things were most of it -- the little things were running away a lot. They wound up identified as "trolls". (Session quote: "They have a cave troll." --
jikharra) They looked sort of like they were stony, but Adosar didn't know anything about them. I was disappointed. But we went to look at where the captain had exploded, and found his rock. It seemed unpleasant and sort of icky, but not evil, so Adosar picked it up. Karas wanted to try to use it, but Adosar made sure to put it back in his bag.Renn went off to take a break from everything after she was done healing as many people as she could -- I gave her the berries I had left. She and Karas went to talk and came back later. (Session quote: "It's a bad habit. And breaking bad habits like chewing your nails or charging headlong into battle isn't an easy thing to do." --Renn)
Eventually we started back to the keep, after people were better rested. Lord Kynnan had sent for wagons to come and bring back some of the troll bodies, so the people he was trying to convince would have them to look at and realise that there was actually a problem they should pay attention to. We were going back and we met another lord coming the other way, who wanted to know what was going on, so Karas told him the whole story of what we know about what's going on.
"I trot out the usual dog and pony show."
"I think we're more of a deer and lizard show at the moment."
- - Shane, me
The new lord said "Mm" a lot and didn't seem quite convinced, but what can we do? We kept going back to the keep. Renn wanted to send a message to the elves to point out to them that if armies were going to come out through their forest they might want to try doing something maybe. Or at least should know. So she had Adosar write it down for her and had a bird carry the message away.
- "I can't write Elvish and I can't write Dwarvish."
"So what can you write?"
"I can't tell you."
". . ."
- - Renn, Adosar
We got back. There was a lot of bustling about and people talking and explaining things to each other. The people who'd been fighting were telling stories about what happened, and the bards were telling stories about what happened, and the bards had more right but much bigger explosions. Renn spent a lot of time with Hethian. I made more tonics, these to help against poisons.
We'd been back for a little bit when one night Renn woke me up and ran out into the hallway. I grabbed the sword and followed her, and saw her going one way down the hall and Adosar going the other way. Karas and I looked at each other, looked at them, shrugged, and went and followed (he followed Adosar, I followed Renn). Adosar's friend was also following Renn, climbing on the walls mostly.
I got up to the kitchen door when Renn came charging out of it and told me to look at other doors in the hall. I opened the door to the dining room and heard a great big banging crashing noise behind me. Renn came out of the other kitchen door, and I felt a weird tingly pressure feeling that sort of faded away. I told the lizard to tell Adosar. Then a big hand -- two big hands -- folded around the edges of the doorway that Renn had scrambled out of. They were big hands, sort of curled half into fists, with long spikes coming out well past them, maybe made out of bone. I hacked at the hand with the sword, I guess I figured if I could cut it off it would help, but I didn't hurt it badly, and where I hit it it all healed up a moment later.
It pulled and stretched at the doorway, and eventually broke it down and got through, and swung its bone-spurs at me. It was so big it could hardly turn in the corridor, and furred sort of blue and purple. And it hit really hard. I took a half-step back and spoke to the amulet Adosar gave me, to help protect me. I could hear Renn on the other side of it, but not see her. I could hear Adosar and Karas coming running up behind me, and they went into the kitchen to attack it through the door I guess, and Renn was hitting it on the other side. I hit it a few times, too, being careful about it, and eventually it sort of slumped over, blocking most of the hallway.
And then it started to fade away into nothingness, like a shadow might. I cut off a piece or two of it to see if I could get the pieces to stay, but they didn't. Adosar and I studied it as best we could while it disappeared. People milled around and stared and everything, and then it was gone.
It had been going along right towards where we were sleeping. If we stayed, they'd send another one, and more people would be hurt or killed, and more walls, too. I tracked it back through the kitchen and it looked like it had walked through the wall of the keep. But there were tracks on the other side, going in a perfectly straight line.
Lord Kynnan allowed as how we had a point when we said that we should go deal with this, but he worried about us. But anyway, we started following the tracks. They hadn't come from where the army came from, but rather south, from the area we tried to go before. We followed them. Renn's been asking me about tracking, so I was showing her things. This one was pretty easy, it was so straight, and the creature was so big and wasn't being sneaky.
We followed the trail. It rained a little, but I could still follow it. Eventually we got to the border of Lord Krunden's territory, the one who's supporting Dass in this war thing that we want stopped. We followed the trail through a copse of trees (which was easy enough, since it had just knocked down the trees in its way) and saw a patrol. I suggested to Karas that we might point out we were tracking a creature that had attacked our village, rather than any of the usual stories.
They got very grumpy at us when they figured we had to have come from Lord Kynnan's territory, and said they'd have to take us prisoner. We said we didn't want them to. They said there were twelve of them and four of us, and Karas said, "So?" They were about to do something, so Adosar threw lightning right through the middle of them, and Karas told them to get off their horses, and said we weren't going to be captured, we just wanted to track the stupid creature.
I kept tracking the stupid creature. ("I matter of factly continue tracking.") Eventually they gave us their horses and ran away. Then I stopped and went to see if any of the people were going to be able to survive, and Renn healed the one that could. And Karas had a long talk with him, and convinced him that he didn't want to be doing this anymore, and sent him back to Lord Kynnan's territory with a rock that would deliver a message from us and the extra horses. I just didn't want to leave him to die, is all, but that was useful. Karas is really impressive when he does that sort of thing. (Session Quote: "You are . . . unbelievable, and I mean that in many ways." --Adosar)
(Session Quote: Sometimes more is better. Sometimes less is more. Therefore, sometimes less is better. --
teinedreugan)We made camp in a little knot of trees so we could hide better and not have to explode any more patrols. Adosar was on watch when the dreams went all weird, and we were all in a place that was full of shadow, like it wasn't real. Shae wasn't there, and Adosar couldn't find his friend, and Renn couldn't find Hethian. And then the voice from the battle said that we were interesting, but in the way, and so we'd have to be dead, and he blew a blizzard at us. Renn managed to get all the way out of the way, but Adosar fell over. We could see a sort of pillar of shadows, where the spells came from. I hit it with the sword, which was glowing, and there was a flash and when my hands went into the darkness it was cold. I didn't think my magics against cold would help it much -- though I should write maps of better protection with Adosar's help, since he can help me write maps, if we're going to have to fight him again -- so I kept hitting into the darkness.
He made black shadowy things come out of the ground to try to grab at things, but we got out of their way. Karas hit into the shadow, but it was like he couldn't see. Renn hit into the shadow, and it made her run away. Karas sort of backed off and kept blowing his horn into the shadow, as best as he could figure where it was, and Adosar yelled at me to get out of the way and threw lightning bolts at it. He'd made my shadow turn into a monster, and I hit that after Adosar threw lightning at it, because with it there I couldn't get my magics to work right, I kept having to jump out of the way when I had to get the magic flowing.
One of the lightning bolts went through the shadow, and it was gone afterwards, and . . . then I was asleep again. When Adosar woke me up he mentioned it, and we'd had the same thing happen, only his friend hadn't noticed us go, and they can talk without talking at all, just thinking at each other. That was really irritating. But we know more about him. He knows more about us, too, but I know to write maps. (Session quote: "What, you don't object to being killed, so long as it's not in your sleep?" --Adosar)
When we got up, we were all right, without all the hurt from the magics he'd made or anything. And it took me a while to find the trail again, but I found it. It led past what I guess was the town that was the capital for Lord Krunden, but not to it. It went to a house all on its own, with no yard or anything. We went to a copse nearby, and I got Shae to go fly around the house and Renn threw her sight into his eyes so she could see where people were. They saw someone through one of the windows.
Karas and Adosar went up to the front door and knocked on it while Renn and I slipped around and broke in through one of the windows. We couldn't hear anything, so Renn jimmied the window open with a dagger and climbed in. It was a bedroom. (Session quote: "We break in through the bedroom window, protected by. . ." --me, to the tune of "She came in through the bathroom window")
"You hear a faint voice saying, 'Attack.'"
"They need help."
"Yeah, well, we knew that."
- -
teinedreugan, Renn, ThiaraRenn made her flaming sword, and gestured for me to open the door, so I did. Adosar immediately ran up to me -- there were these two rabid-looking leopard things that were in there, and they jumped at him but couldn't seem to hit him -- and he told me not to hit them and made a magic on me. The man in the room was blinking and flickering like he was lit up with lightning. He ran away from Karas and made a spell, and the whole side of the room I was in was full of spiderwebs, which started right at my feet. I was pretty badly stuck. I knew that this magic makes something that burns easily, so I tried to make my magic that would set things on fire, but it was too tangled up. Frustrating.
Adosar burned away the stuff catching him with a lightning bolt, and Karas sort of roared and pulled loose from the webs and charged at the man with his spear. He was really, really mad. The man did another spell, and these wiggly dark things started coming out of the floor, like Fingul's shadow had done. (And I hope we gave Fingul a headache killing his shadow like that. Hah.) A bunch of them grabbed me because I was still tangled up in the webbing, but they also grabbed the leopard-things and started squeezing them. Karas smashed the summoner dead and then sort of sat down outside, and Renn came back in through the window and helped cut me loose while Adosar made lightning to burn away the rest of the tentacles and webs and everything. Then we sat outside and rested for a while, and searched the parts of the house that weren't full of wiggly black things.
When we were done searching, we threw rocks at the tentacles until they melted away, and searched that room too. It was a magical workroom, and we found some things useful for potions and making magic things, three spell maps, and a magic cloak and a magic ring. (Renn got the ring. Karas looked at the cloak, and asked me if I'd like his; they were both mostly the same, but the new one was red and the old one was blue.) After a bit of exploring and studying things, we went to another bit of trees to sleep so we could start back the next day. There weren't any papers or anything, but he won't summon any more monsters to hurt us or Lord Kynnan, at least.
I'm tired, and slightly squozen.
Tags:
From:
no subject
It does seem that this is going in a very clear pattern of finding nastier and nastier things to fight, though....
From:
no subject
The lizard? He's Adosar's familiar. In more decriptive terms, he's something like a cross between a thaumivoric iguana and a gecko. ;) I forget his name; it'll probaby take me a few sessions to get it right.