hafrogman said:
Tristan stamps his feet to keep them warm and nods at Kiera's instructions.
"Right then, off we go."
With Raak secure on his pack, and PC secured to a horse, Tristan sets off, leading the group. He skirts the high ground around the battlefield, until they reach the 'northern' edge of the dune valley. Once there he turns away from the carnage, and sets purposely off into the night once again.
You rise up out of the death-filled valley as the blue moon slowly rises above the horizon to your right. It seems with each passing moment, the air around you gets colder, the black vaccum of the night sky above you literally sucking the heat from the ground and the air all around you. By the time you make it to the top of the steep sand ridge that forms the northermost border of the valley, your breath comes in great bouts of steam-like vapor. Only a span of a few moments have passed since you started walking and each of you knows, without the shadow of a doubt, that if the temperature continues to drop in this manner, that you will soon learn a new meaning of cold...
Your heightened senses here make painful distinctions within the usually numbing sensation of getting cold. You begin to have tiny pinpricks of pain all along your extremeties, like thousands of pixies stabbing you with tiny, icy spears. Then, a gradual spreading sensation of wave after wave of numbing, yet burning cold radiates inward from your arms and legs. It is almost as if the cold itself is trying to race to your torso, in the hopes of freezing your heart solid within your chest.
Looking out from your perch upon the dune, you see, to what you determine as "north" a wide swath of tracks, all moving in your direction. This is undoubtedly the route by which the invading army came, slipping down upon those camped within the valley at unawares. The tracks wind around the dunes and you can tell that the army was well trained - they rejoined their ranks as they skirted the dunes, formations breaking over the massive hills of red sand like waves around rocks and then reforming. They used the natural terrain well, making sure that they always kept out of the line of sight from any possible sentries; ever using the dunes as ample cover. It is impossible to make out any distrinct footprints in the mass of sandy holes, but there is little doubt that the army was fair-sized and formidible.
You follow these tracks for what you think is an hour or so and then you come upon something strange. The tracks come to a wide, flat expanse of sand and there they end - or rather, that is where they begun - and yet there is no sign of how they came to "start" here, the the middle of a vast, open desert...
OOC: If you want to explore, post the appropriate Spot, Listen, Search, etc., checks, if not, let me know and we'll continue onward in which ever direction you'd like to go.