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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rybaer" data-source="post: 321190" data-attributes="member: 118">This next little bit I'd originally planned to just drop into one of the next  few posts, summed up in just a paragraph or two.  However, as it sheds some light on Amill's character as expands Lohna's place in the world a bit, I decided to give it a full-blown treatment.Session #12.15b – Lohna and Amill’s DiscoveryThe Countess Lohna Goldenoak Graeble of Vineyard Pass and her friend Amill Jaggitt, a psychic warrior from lands far removed, traveled throughout the night in pursuit of the riders who had gone through town earlier that morning.  Lohna was convinced that they could only be trouble for her friends and she intended to do what she could to keep them from harm.  While she moved quickly in her wolf form, relying heavily on her keen sense of smell to follow the path of the horses, her thoughts turned occasionally to one of the Selmarian Seekers in particular.  She had found a certain fondness for the archer Nigel since the first moment she’d spotted him skulking in the shadows at a party two months earlier.  Part of her attraction was no doubt due to the fact that he was elvish like her – a bit of a rarity in this part of the world.  There was something more, though.  He had an innate strength, not unlike her lost husband.  Nigel was an elvish archer and Rondel had been a human paladin.  On the surface, quite different, but they both shared a certain grit and inner fire.For hours Lohna pursued her quarry up the coast, navigating the terrain by the sliver of moonlight and sense of smell.  Amill did his best to keep up on his horse.  Eventually, the predawn gray in the sky warned Lohna of the impending dawn.  They had still not caught up with the riders.Lohna pushed a little further, but eventually had to give up.  “We’ve got to find shelter,” Lohna said.  “I can’t get caught out here when the sun comes up or I’ll be done for.”The pair was in a rocky and broken terrain, high on the cliffs over the Thunder Bay.  Deep crevasses were common and they soon found a wide crack in the side of one that led far enough back to provide Lohna with the shelter she needed.  She returned to human form and crawled as far back as she comfortably could, using a blanket from Amill’s saddlebags to pad her back against the sharp rock.Both slept fitfully through a good portion of the day.  Amill eventually left to scout around the area a bit, mostly to alleviate boredom while waiting for the sun to set.  Lohna was even more impatient, trapped in an uncomfortable crack.  The longer the day dragged on, the deeper her sense that something bad was happening to her friends.When the sun finally set, she again assumed the form of a wolf and set a furious pace.  She scarcely bothered to follow what little scent trails remained because she knew they’d only continue along the cliffs northward.  Amill was grateful for the remaining twilight for it helped him avoid a few shallow pits and rock falls.Less than two hours later, they came upon a couple horses tethered to one of the few scrubby trees in the area.  The horses seemed a bit agitated, but Lohna chalked it up to her wolf form.  She immediately set about sniffing the area while Amill dismounted and joined the search on foot.In the area around the horses, Lohna picked up a couple scents.  The faintest were those of humans – probably two different ones, but they were similar enough that she could not be certain.  Another scent, this one much fresher, was one that made her hackles rise:  drow elf.  That the scent was so fresh suggested that he was either still in the area, or had recently left.  Lohna knew that her friends had made enemies of the notorious drow bandit the Shadow, and the coincidence was too much to pass off.The Shadow was known to rely heavily upon a ring of invisibility.  Lohna knew that would give him an advantage over many foes, but not her.  While she could not see those invisible, her senses of hearing and scent were beyond most any mortal – elf or wolf.  The Shadow would be hard pressed to catch her unaware.Amill called out to her from a short distance away, his voice barely carrying over the wind and the crashing of the waves on the cliffs below.  She hurried over to him and found the cave entrance he was pointing toward.  She sniffed around the entrance and found the human and drow scents, as well an older stale scent of ogre.Lohna turned back to Amill and bared her teeth a bit.  Amill took the hint and drew his sword, a brutish falcion sword made of the exotic psychoreactive metal called ferroplasm.  In his hands, he could channel psionic energy through the blade, giving it unusual sharpness and a faint violet glow.  He relied on the blade’s own light to guide him through the dark cave.Just as the pair was about to enter the cave, a flapping sound from behind caused them to spin about.  A large owl landed not twenty feet away on a large boulder.  It appeared to be agitated in a very un-owl like manner.Lohna abruptly returned to her elvish form and approached the bird.  “Hooty,” she said.  “What brings you out here on your own?  Shouldn’t you be with Zalman?”  Hooty called back to her, but neither Lohna nor Amill could speak owl.  “This is Zalman’s familiar,” Lohna explained to Amill.“Hooty,” Lohna said.  “Is Zalman still alive?”  The owl tilted its head in a side-to-side motion.  Lohna wasn’t entirely sure of what to make of that, but believed that the owl didn’t know for certain.  “Why don’t you come in with us, then?”  Hooty flew to a rock next to Lohna and bobbed its head up and down.The threesome then ventured into the cave.  It ran a short distance back along a well-worn track and came to a collapsed section.  Through the hole, an area of worked stone could be seen, along with the horrid stench of decaying flesh.  Breathing as little as possible, they pushed on.The cave opened into a small room that, in turn, exited into a long hallway.  An ogre’s body in a room across the hall, several days dead, was but one of the sources of the smell of decay.  Several other ogre corpses littered the hallway along with bloodstains, scorch marks, and broken arrows. It took only a couple minutes of searching before they found the room in which Nigel’s body lay cold upon the floor.  Lohna let out and involuntary cry as she raced to his side, kneeling in her lover’s congealed blood.  She gasped when she saw that his right hand had been severed.Amill stood back respectfully.  He warily eyed the two large, perfectly mirrored spheres sitting in the room.  There was something very unnatural about them.  Hooty, the wizard’s familiar, was pecking and flapping at both of them.Lohna knew in her mind that Nigel had to be dead.  She reflexively searched for a pulse on his neck anyway.  His skin was cool, but not entirely stiff.  Had her senses not been so highly tuned, she might have missed the slightest flutter of a heartbeat.  When she felt it, her own heart skipped a beat.“He’s alive!” she said.Amill raised an eyebrow.  “He’s made of tougher stuff than your typical elf, then.”“Please tell me you have some curative magic with you,” Lohna said.  “I didn’t grab any in my haste to leave and that sort of thing is not within my limited magical repertoire.”“Actually,” he said, digging through his belt pouch, “I think I actually have a potion.”  He withdrew a small vial of a milky pink liquid.  “It’s about as weak as they come, but it might help stabilize him.”Lohna carefully propped Nigel’s head up and drained every last drop of the potion down his throat.  In a few moments, Nigel’s color lost a few shades of blue and his severed stump scabbed over.  He did not, however, regain consciousness.“We’ve got to get him back to my place as quickly as possible,” Lohna said.  “I’m still not sure he’ll survive, but without magic he surely won’t have a chance.”“And the others?” Amill said.Lohna finally took a moment to look about the room.  Like Amill, she was drawn to the two large mirrored spheres.  From the back of her mind, a story came back to the forefront of her memory.  She recalled the telling of tales that these friends, the Selmarian Seekers, had told her over dinner the night they met.  One of those tales included how they rescued a powerful wizard from twenty year’s entrapment.  That wizard, Shadykin, had been trapped inside a mirrored sphere, just like the ones before her.  Lohna was not an authority on magic, but she knew in the pit of her stomach that these spheres were the same thing – a stasis bubble.  What was worse, she feared that the very same wizard might have cast them:  Gils Dralon, infamous member of the Black Hand.“I think the others are beyond our ability to help,” Lohna said.  She figured that at least a couple of the others were stuck in the stasis bubbles.  At least in there they would be safe, if anyone could ever rescue them.  Lohna thought it best to wait until they were well clear of this place before explaining her suspicions to Amill.The psychic warrior carefully carried Nigel out of the cave and back to the horses.  Hooty gave one last forlorn look at the spheres and decided to follow Lohna and the others.  Without having to follow a trail, they were able to push hard and make it back to Lohna’s just minutes before dawn broke.</blockquote>

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