GM: | Please keep thinking about positioning. Mostly I need to know who's in front of the carts and who's elsewhere. Since it doesn't have immediate bearing, let's move on. | |
The first day's ride is through cultivated fields, with a few little villages dotting the landscape. By the end of the day, though, the last village has passed, and early on the morning of the second day, the party enters a path through the woods. The road is an old one, straight, wide, and paved with what were once well-fitted stones. In the years since the fall of the old Allarian Empire, weathering, overgrowth, and the occasional local on the lookout for free masonry has reduced the quality of the road somewhat, but it still runs straight, and is more even than the land around it. The trees were once cut back away from the road, and though the forest has advanced into the cleared area, it is only rarely that the trees overhang the road itself. The caravan encounters no danger on this part of the trip. The wild beasts of the forest leave well enough alone, and any bandits are apparently wary of the array of weaponry the party carries.
A few days in, the caravan comes upon the Bramble Scar. Though it has been bridged here, by an arched bridge of stout timbers, the Scar still encourages a sense of unease. Straight as an arrow's flight--even straighter than the road, it cuts across this part of the continent like an unhealed gash, its bottom a tangle of blood red stiff vines with ominous looking barbs on them. From the bridge, though, the caravan is safe, and the oxen and carts are gotten across with little difficulty.
Beyond the scar, the land rises. It is here that the party enters the area on Lord Mallaby's map. The road is less straight here, curving to the right and left, dodging hills. As the carts trundle through a gap cut out long ago between two hills, a woman steps awkwardly out from the trees on the right of the road, and stares at the party with distant eyes, as if looking through them.
"You must come no further," she says in a hollow voice.
"Do not trespass on the queen's land."
She stands there, swaying slightly for a second, then blinks a few times, and then steadies herself as her eyes focus. She looks at the warriors before her as if she did not see them a moment before.
"I..." she says, then her eyes roll up in her head and she collapses into a heap in the middle of the road.