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Message: <blockquote data-quote="arwink" data-source="post: 1156373" data-attributes="member: 2292">The first beast-man attack comes an hour after they start following the river, the wolf-faced humanoids swarming over the bluff of a hill to charge down on the travelers.  They are tall, lean creatures, their fur white and pale as the snow they’re running over.  All carry gleaming battleaxes, and none get within thirty feet of the travelers before Blarth lets loose with the sonic whistle.  The shrill tone of his instrument rings through the air, a flurry of snow rising in the blasts wake.  When he takes the crystaline whistle from his lips, the beast-man warriors lie dead on the groud, their ears bleeding.Gunnar stares.“There were over a dozen of them,” he says, slightly awe struck.“Beast-man puny,” Blarth says knowingly."But there were...""Beast-man puny!" Blarth repeats slowly, putting emphasis on every word."Right."Everyone jogs up the hill to study the scattered bodies, quickly pulling free small sacks of gold and a few silver armbands.  “No archers,” Geoffrey says.  “That’s fortunate.  Bows could have made this ambush a lot more effective. “Halgo is kneeling by one of the bodies, slowly examining the creature’s features.  He raises one furry paw and looks at it for a few moments.“They look like gnolls,” he says eventually.  “Although I’ve never heard of them this far north.  Mostly they seem to lurk near Thilt, or Sulrathi.  Hyena-spawned, normally, but these are more like wolves.  Interesting.”“ Does it tell you anything that could help us fight them?” Geoffrey demands.“They’re probably capable of crafting bows?” Halgo offers.  “Not much else.  But it’s still interesting.”“It can be interesting later,” Geoffrey says firmly.  “Right now, we’ve got a mission.  Blarth, you and Yip gather together the weapons.  We can’t take them with us, but we can store them to pick up on the return trip.  Should net us a few coins back in Borr, if war really is on the horizon.  Halgo, you’ve got till they’re done to prod and poke the corpses, then we’re moving.”Yip and Blarth gather the weapons, quickly tying them together with the gnolls belts and storing them up a tree.  Yip scampers back to Geoffrey’s side as Blarth uses a dagger to mark the tree.“Why in hell up a tree?” Geoffrey asks, staring up into the battle-axes that hang from the branches.“Cold ground,” Yip explains.  “Yip no dig.  Easy to find later, after snow fall.”“Ah,” Geoffrey says.  “Good plan.”“Yip think so.”“Thirteen gnolls,” Gunnar mutters as they set off once more.  “Arezz!  We may survive this yet.”They march on for a few more hours, settling in to camp at the very foot of Borr’s mountain range.  Everyone stays quiet as they stare up at the dark-stone peaks to the north, listening to the howling wind as it rattles through the narrow valleys.“Think the other missions made it this far?” Halgo asks Gunnar as the hunter cooks dinner.  Gunnar just shrugs.“Hard to say,” he says.  “Normally the traveling isn’t to bad to this point, but those beat-men were waiting for someone to come along.  It’s possible they wiped out any travelers who came through this way.”“You know any of the people in the other missions?”Gunnar shrugs again.“Some,” he says simply.  “Borr’s a small place, you can’t help but know people.  Nobody I was real close to though.”“So why are you doing this?”“Someone has to,” Gunnar says.  “And the king asked.  Hard to say no in those circumstances.”Over dinner, Gunnar explains their route for the following day.  He names paths and landmarks, drilling the information into everyone’s heads in case he should fall in a sudden ambush.  Slowly the information sinks in, and Halgo and Yip are both able to list the various paths and their landmarks without too much difficulty.  Everyone sits around the camp, listlessly preparing for sleep.  Only Gunnar slumbers easily, having volunteered to take last watch, but it is still light and many of the Copperheads have difficulty getting to sleep before darkness.  It is only after the sun sinks below the horizon that rest comes, leaving Yip on first watch.Morning comes earlier than anyone would like, and travel becomes difficult within hours of setting off into the mountains. The river banks along the Streel start to drop away, becoming shear cliffs carved between the cold stone of the mountains.  Gunnar proves as adequate a mountaineer as he is a hunter, quickly finding a safe path and advising the heavily armored Blarth and Geoffrey as the days climbing wears on.  Blarth accepts the rigors of the journey with stoic acceptance, but every now and then the soft grumbling of the Cuthbertite Justicar can be heard as his mailed legs sink into another drift of snow.It takes Gunnar the better part of an hour to find the ridge he’s searching for, a ten-foot wide ledge that he claims follows the river deep into the heart of the mountains.  In the distance, the sign of steady smoke rising up from volcanoes in the heart of the mountain range only serves as a cruel taunt to the cold travelers.  Everyone walks along the ridge in single file, clinging close to the cliff edge that rises up to the mountain peaks above.  At times the falling snow has banked thick against the cliff wall, forcing everyone to march closer to the ledge than they’d like.  Only Gunnar and Yip, agile and unencumbered, seem at ease as their feet come close to the downward drop.“How far is it,” Geoffrey asks after one particularly tricky part of the climb, the cleric trying to work some feeling into gauntlet-clad hands that have been plunged into snow for balance for the past few minutes.  Yip just shrugs.“Long fall,” he chirps cheerfully.  “Long way down.  Yip not fall, be very bad.”“At this point, nearly a hundred feet,” Gunnar says softly.  “By the time we reach the end of the path, we should nearly be seven hundred feet above the river bank.”“Great,” Geoffrey says flatly.  It is just after lunch when one of the small snowdrifts suddenly erupts in movement, long pale arms bursting out to grab Halgo as he’s walking by.  Everyone is tired and cold, bored from the endless drudgery of climbing the mountainside, so it takes a few moments for them to realize that they’re under attack.  In that time, one of the clawed arms has opened a gash in the dwarven Wizard’s chest, staining his robes with blood.  Halgo staggers back, watching a snow-white form emerge out of the snowdrift.  It stands nearly a dozen feet tall, lithe and long-limbed with a tangled mass of hair and eyes that glow with a cold blue flame.“Troll,” Halgo gasps, breath pluming in the cold air.  “Snow troll.”The creature simply roars and reaches forward with its claws again.</blockquote>

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