Welcome to the Halmae (updated 2/27/07)

[spyscribe]

(And the new readers keep on coming. Hello to The Grackle!)

Part the One-Hundred Fifty-Third
In which: the party once again departs for Pesshetaup, and Reyu reaches out to an old acquaintance.

At nightfall, Wadiah comes to see the party again. They have gathered their things, and wait for the guide that Bahati has promised them. In return, Thatch has used the pitcher to fill every water-carrying vessel in the settlement. The party has also made arrangements to leave all but six of their camels with the tribe.

Anvil, over Thatch’s objections, offered to leave the pitcher itself, but Wadiah turned it down, not wishing her people to become dependent on the object.

The party members wonder, as she approaches, if she will be guiding them to Pesshataup, but instead, Wadiah has come with a request.

“I believe you when you say that you are not affiliated with the military, and I do not think you would consciously do us harm,” she begins. “But please, I must ask you. Do not tell anyone about us. A stray word might be all the military needs to learn of our existence, and if they do, they will come and hunt us down.”

Anvil nods. “What if we meet those who might wish to join you?” he asks.

Wadiah allows the point. “If you can, let us know. We will seek them out ourselves.”

Solemnly, the party pledges to keep the Khartshma’s secret. Kiara is especially adamant. “I’d rather eat my foot than tell anyone about you.”

It is full dark now, and a shadowy form approaches them through the settlement. The party soon sees that it is one of the Khartmsha camels. Wadiah makes the introductions. “This is Onika. She will lead you where you need to go.”

“Can she talk?” Eva asks.

“That is not one of her gifts,” Wadiah allows, “but she knows your destination. All you need do is follow her.”

The party makes their final good-byes and thanks Wadiah once again.

She smiles. “May you keep your eyes to the stars.”

Onika does, and starts to walk out into the desert.

Quickly gathering the last of their bags and mounting their own camels, the party follows.

Reyu cannot help noting that Onika is leading them in an entirely different direction than Djamal had been. It would seem that if their guide had ever truly known the location of Peshetaup, he had not been leading them towards it. She pulls her cloak a little tighter.

**********

Each night in the desert is cold. The stars twinkle overhead and the party members bundle themselves up in their winter cloaks and heavy blankets as they ride.

Each day in the desert is blisteringly hot, and the adventurers try to sleep beneath their makeshift shelters, glad for endure elements and the relief from the searing sun that it provides.

Every night, just before dawn, Onika stops, sinks to her knees and settles in for the day. A few days into this routine, Reyu prepares speak with animals.

“Why are we stoping?”

Onika says simply, “The stars are gone.” and then falls silent again, content to wait for nightfall with only the company of her own thoughts.

Without the camel for conversation, Reyu seeks out Anvil.

“Anvil, do you have need of the headband Professor Alexandra gave us?”

The Justicar shakes his head. “Not at the moment. I will report to her when we have met this Manaal, but—since we have been sworn to secrecy as to the matter of the Khartshma—there seems no need to contact her before then.”

“Might I borrow it then?”

Anvil knits his brow. “To what purpose?”

“When we were last in Dar Pykos I received word from my grandmother. There has been no sign of [post=1484903]Amelia[/i] at her village. The more time passes, the more this troubles me.”

Anvil hands over the headband. “Amelia was sentenced only to exile,” Anvil reminds her. “We cannot dictate where she goes as long as it is outside the bounds of the Confederacy.”

“I know,” Reyu replies as she dons the headband. “I merely wish her to know that she has friends.”

Reyu’s message is short and simple.

Amelia, this is Reyu. Where are you? I am concerned. Please respond, 25 words or less.

The response comes back, equally clear and succinct.

Leave me alone.

**********

It’s the twentieth day of March, just after midnight by Anvil’s reckoning, when the party reaches the first sign of human habitation in the desert: an obelisk, half buried in the sand.

Soon the party sees more evidence of a buried city: half-buried spires, walls crumbled into the sand. Onika leads them until they come to the last set of shadowy ruins visible in the dark. She stops there for a few moments, as if to make sure that the party understands that they have arrived, then turns around and walks back into the desert.

The party watches her go.

“Good-bye.” Kiara calls after her. “Thank you.”

Onika makes no response, and Kiara’s words are quickly swallowed by the silence of the desert night. It is as though they are the last beings in the world.

 

[147]

Spyscribe, thanks for the update. Am very much appreciating Fajitas use of non-humanoid character classes. Will definitely incorporate this into my own game.
I do hope we get to see more snippets of the party's attempt to "save" Amelie from herself - much fun there!

 

[Trahnesi]

Amelia? The girl with the creepy "undead are my friends" thing going on? Oh boy. If I was any of the people who messed with her in Dar Aego, I'd be worried (even though she already wiped most of them out.) Actually, If I was anybody in Dar Aego, I'd be worried. I can just see her getting together with the Crossers and unleashing a horde of undead on that city.

I could see that as a tough call for party. "On the one hand, it's an unspeakable horde of undead abominations. On the other hand, they are currently wiping Dar Aego from the face of the earth. Hm... Maybe we'll come back when they're done."

 

[spyscribe]

Amelia? The girl with the creepy "undead are my friends" thing going on? Oh boy. If I was any of the people who messed with her in Dar Aego, I'd be worried (even though she already wiped most of them out.) Actually, If I was anybody in Dar Aego, I'd be worried. I can just see her getting together with the Crossers and unleashing a horde of undead on that city...

Psst. Trahnesi. Keep it down over there.

I mean, glad you're involved with the story, but that there is a classic rule one violation if I ever saw one. Fajitas has enough nasty ideas of his own without help. Have a heart.

 

[Capellan]

there is a classic rule one violation if I ever saw one. Fajitas has enough nasty ideas of his own without help. Have a heart.

Or do away with that pesky heart thing and post in the "Secrets of the Halmae" thread instead, where the PCs won't be forewarned of any nasty ideas you give Fajitas.

Hey spyscribe! *waves cheerfully*

 

[brellin]

where is the ¨Sercets of the Halmae¨ thread?

 

[spyscribe]

*waves back* Hi Capellan!

where is the ¨Sercets of the Halmae¨ thread?

Not that I know anything about such things, but if you click on a link somewhere in this post it might take you to a thread of that name. It's in the Rogue's Gallery.

Planning to update sometime tomorrow.

 

[spyscribe]

Part the One-Hundred Fifty-Fourth
In which: Pesshetaup… it’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Not far from where the party has stopped is another half buried-obelisk. Thatch decides to try to climb it that night and look for any signs of campfires.

Overhead, the sky shimmers, thick with stars. As Thatch reaches the top of the obelisk, the chill wind of the desert night pelts him tiny grains of sand. He squints, shielding his face from the constant minor abrasion working inexorably to return Pessetaup to the earth from which it came.

Aside from the party’s own lights, the darkness of the desert night is complete.

“So, I guess we wait here, and then see if we can find any sign of Manaal in the morning?” Eva suggests.

The others look around helplessly. Here they are, finally in the mysterious city of Pesshetaup, and they seem no closer to finding the archmage of Ebis than they were in Dar Pykos.

The party sets their watches, and settles in to sleep for the rest of the night.

###

Thatch falls asleep quickly and soon finds himself dreaming. He’s walking through tall grass on a vast plain. The sky is blue and the air is cool. He can almost feel the grasses moving against his legs as he walks…

Thatch sits up with a start.

Something is moving against his leg.

He kicks off his bedroll as quickly as possible and in the dim light of the campfire he just catches a glimpse of a snake slithering away across the sand.

“Umm… Guys?”

“What is it?” asks Reyu already awake and on watch.

“Does anyone else have a snake in their bedroll?”

That is enough to have the rest of the party scrambling, especially city girls Lira, Eva, and Annika.

“Don’t move!” Reyu tells them, “If there’s a snake you’re just going to scare it.”

Although that directive is enough to make Lira freeze, she’s not going to lie there waiting for any snakes that might be lurking in her blankets. Euro? she asks.

Yeah Boss?

Anything in this bedroll that isn’t me and isn’t you?

Let me check… (There is a brief interlude while Euro burrows down into the bedroll to investigate any interlopers.) Nope, all clear.

Lira gets up. As it turns out, no one else has a snake in their bedroll, and Thatch is certainly none the worse for wear for his reptilian visitor.

Although Reyu and Kiara steadfastly insist they have no idea what all the fuss is about, some of the other members of the party are concerned that the snake might come back. Eva scoots her bedroll over beside Lira’s and the two women sleep back to back, just in case.

Everyone has just settled down again for the night when:

Hey Boss… There’s something here and it’s not me and it’s not you!

This is followed almost immediately by Eva’s cry of, “Ack! A snake!”

Lira abruptly finds herself in the middle of a rogue/weasel tussle. Euro, it’s Eva! “Eva! It’s Euro!”

“Oh.”

Sorry ‘bout that.

(“Never have I see a group get more game-play out of a one hit point non-venomous snake,” says the DM)

The rest of the night passes quietly.

###

The following morning, Thatch, Kiara, Eva, and Euro all take turns climbing the obelisk again. In daylight the city seems less tranquil, more obviously ruined.

None of the buildings crumbing into the sand look as though they could be the home of anyone, let alone an archmage.

Looking for a place where they can wait out the heat of the day, Eva finds an open area that appears to have once been the city’s marketplace. No signs of merchants or their wares remain, but she does find the remnants of a campfire, as well as tracks indicating that a large number of people and wagons recently passed this way.

For a city that’s supposedly been abandoned for more than fifty years—that most citizens of the Empire have never even heard of—it’s unusual to say the least.

Eva quickly returns to the others to share her findings.

Reyu confirms that the tracks are only a week or two old at the most, coming from the west and heading north-east.

The party discusses their options for what to do next as they wait for sunset, but in truth their choices are limited. Chi’i only said that Manaal lived near the city of Pesshataup, not within it. And the tracks are the only indication they have found that people have passed this way in the last half-century.

“If we’re going to pick a random direction,” Lira points out, “it might as well be that one.”

The main question for the party is who the travelers might be, and why they are trekking through the deep desert. However, since the party is not burdened by heavy wagons that must be dragged through the sand, they anticipate that they will soon catch up to the caravan and find out.

They depart at sunset, following the tracks through the untouched sand.

###

The party travels deeper into the desert over the next three nights. Every day is hotter than the last, and—most ominously—the nights grow warmer as well.

Anvil theorizes that this is an indication that they are traveling into Chaotic lands where Ehkt rules over his brother, until Lira points out that the Ketkath—surely the most Chaotic lands in the Halmae—were deadly cold.

No one else has enough energy to muster much of an opinion on the issue.

Then, one evening, just at dusk as the party is preparing to move out, Reyu spots a flash on the horizon, directly ahead on their current path. It is followed by another, then another more sustained than the first two, and then yet more in quick succession.

The party watches, rapt, and forges ahead, although Reyu estimates the flashes are at least a day another night’s walk distant. Some minutes after the first flare, the lights on the horizon stop.

Finally, just at sunrise as the party prepares to stop for the day, Kiara spots some sort of structure, a few miles off across the sand.

The trail of the convoy leads straight for it.

 

[coyote6]

And then . . . ?

 

[spyscribe]

Part the One-Hundred Fifty-Fifth
In which: shades of the past return.

Instead of waiting for dusk, the party breaks camp late the next afternoon, hoping to arrive at the tower just before the sunset.

When it is still some ways off, they find the first body.

It’s an Ebisite military officer, lying on the leeward side of a sand dune as though cut down in his tracks, the right side of his body horribly burned. The remains of his face are twisted into an expression of terrible agony.

As the party pauses at this gruesome sight, a hot wind comes over the crest of the dune, carrying with it a horrible, but not unfamiliar stench.

Since the attack on the Mages’ Academy, none of the members of the party could ever mistake the smell of burned human flesh.

The party crests the dune and sees, for the first time, the result of the lights they witnessed the night before.

An enormous tower sits in the middle of a great depression in the endless expanse of sand. It rises, rosy in the twilight, almost as though it has grown out of the field of battle that surrounds it.

The Ebisties sent a battalion out into the desert. Little now remains.

Bodies, pieces of wooden battering rams, and twisted metal rods that once formed some sort of cages litter the ground around the blank walls of the tower. What isn’t charred has melted into slag.

Many of the corpses lie burnt and twisted in scorch marks that were hot enough to melt the sand beneath them into glass.

“But…” Eva begins, looking over at Lira for confirmation, “I thought that wizards couldn’t create fire with magic.”

Lira nods, staring at the remains of what appears to have been a very one-sided encounter. “They can’t.” She shrugs and hazards, “Maybe she created fire through mundane means, and employed some kind of siege engine to attack the Ebisties?” She doesn’t sound terribly confident of her theory.

“Siege engines are usually employed by those besieging, not those besieged,” Anvil points out.

Lira looks at him as if to say: I didn’t say it made a lot of sense, I just said it was possible.

“Umm…” Thatch begins, “how could she do that without any doors or windows?”

A look confirms that Thatch is correct.

The tower is easily one-hundred fifty feet tall, and—at least from this angle—has no visible doors or windows.

“Well, there must be some way in and out,” Reyu points out, ever logical. “Perhaps we just cannot see it from this vantage.”

Keeping a respectful distance, the party slowly circles the tower.

They have arrived from the east, and so use the shadow of the tower as their starting point for a deliberate clockwise circuit.

About a third of the way around, Reyu notes an anomaly.

“Look there, it appears there once was a window… but it has been… filled.”

She’s right. Once the party knows what to look for, they spot several more bricked-up windows, each at a different height on the tower. It’s as though the tower has been built, story by story, always with a single window on the top floor, the window on the previous level filled in as the tower grew.

It’s… odd.

The party has almost completed their circuit when two things happen, nearly simultaneously.

The first is Kiara shouting, “Look! There’s an open window—”

The second is Annika screaming in terror as two perfectly black, mist-covered creatures come leaping out of the shadow of the tower, claws out and snarling. The reason for her abject terror is quickly understood. The last time she was face to face with one of these beasts, she was trapped in a burning dormitory at the Mages’ Academy, and the creature had just killed her familiar.

Anvil and Reyu are at the front of the group and immediately take their positions as the first line of defense. Reyu feels the burning of the creature’s claws slicing across her gut and for an instant—between the pain, the shadow beast, and the smell of smoke hanging in the air—it’s as though she’s returned to the site of the Mages’ Academy fire.

For Reyu, the sensation lasts only for an instant. She is quickly back to the present and preparing to fight the creature on its own terms. Behind her, Annika screams and falls to the ground, curled into a fetal ball.

The rest of the party quickly falls into action. Lira immediately steps out of the shadow of the tower and—hoping against hope that it will do her more good than her offensive spells did last time—casts shield on herself before drawing her crossbow.

Thatch draws his sword without hesitation and charges forward on Bob towards the creature attacking Reyu.

As he closes in, one of Eva’s arrows buries itself in the shadow beast’s shoulder. Thatch slashes down with his sword while the creature is still seething at the sudden pain. Bob kicks out at it as he passes, and the shadow beast boils away into the air.

Thatch nods in satisfaction. One down, one to—

Out of the corner of his eye, he spots movement in the tower’s shadow. He turns to watch just in time to see two more shadow beasts coalesce out of the darkness. They sniff the air for just a moment, then lower their heads and lope across the sand towards the party.

Good, Thatch thinks to himself, more to cleave.

But before Thatch can turn Bob to take another pass, the creatures have run past him… and one has launched itself in the air to land right on top of the cowering Annika.

Reyu—despite still being menaced herself and bleeding freely—tries to club the shadowy figure with her quarterstaff before it can get its claws into the young wizard. The creature knocks her arm out of the way and leaves a burning trail of pain from elbow to shoulder.

Lira fares better with her crossbow, planting a bolt deep into the shadow beast’s flank. It turns to look at her and snarls.

Lira snarls back.

The pain and the reality of the shadow creature being on top of her right then, along with Kiara’s frenzied screaming in her mind, helps to bring Annika back to her senses. She reaches for the first thing that feels like it could be a weapon that she can lay hands on, her everburning torch.

She shoves it at the underbelly of the shadow beast that has her pressed to the ground, but to her shock, it passes through the creature as though it wasn’t even there. She gasps and then screams as the claws rake across her again.

And then, just as suddenly as the weight of the creature was upon her, it is gone. One of Eva’s arrows and a bolt from Lira’s crossbow have hit at nearly the same instant, and with a final snarl of protest to the darkening night, the shadow beast is gone.

Annika picks herself up and fumbles for her own crossbow, hoping to still be able to help if needed.

A few feet away, Reyu grits her teeth as she once again fends off the creature’s claws with her own arm. Anvil brings his sword around—ignoring the other remaining shadow beast which is trying to get through his armor. Anvil’s blade strikes true and the creature lets out a snarling howl.

Eva reloads and quickly shoots again, following up on Anvil’s strike. Meanwhile, behind Anvil, Thatch and Bob have teamed-up on the shadow beast attacking the cleric. Thatch unleashes a full attack from horseback, and then allows Bob the honor of trampling the thing into the sand until it melts beneath his hooves.

Free of all distractions, Anvil calls upon his feat of strength. He feels the power of Kettenek surging up from the ground beneath his feet, and he channels all of that force into the abomination between him and Reyu.

The critical hit nearly slices it in half, and it dissolves, snarling.

A quiet falls over the pitched battlefield and the shadows are empty once more.

The sun slides below the horizon, casting the desert into purple twilight. At that precise moment, at the top of the tower—in its only open window—a light flares.