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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jeffwik" data-source="post: 4603219" data-attributes="member: 9739">DAY TWO, darkest predawn night. As we feel fully invigorated after only an hour's rest in the shadow of the monolith, we have decided to press on towards the supposed location of Yang's camp. First, however, is the issue of what to do with the two shadar-kai corpses. Given the hostility between us and these foes, we feel little desire to honor their spirits with a formal burial -- far from it, in fact. Our greater concern is that these villains' compatriots, these Planet cultists, will find their comrades slain and their holy site defiled, and track down Valley.We have removed all traces of our presence from the monolith save two: the crossbow-traps we had to deactivate to enable us to clean our other traces, and the stone-and-mortared wall barricading the monolith's doorway, which Throg smashed, and which we lack the resources to repair. With luck any search party will only examine the chamber beneath the monolith, the sanctum with the blood of Planet; if they do not venture up into the monolith then they would have to notice the trap is off to realize that there was misadventure here. I tell myself this is unlikely, but in my heart I fear that there is no way we can truly remove all traces of our defilement.The corpses I burned, using my scorching burst magic, and the charred remains we buried in Planet beneath a layer of xenofungus, a ways from the monolith itself -- even if cultist searchers do scour this place, they will not be certain that their fellows died and died here. Or so I tell myself.DAY TWO, predawn. We continue on foot through the night. In the starlight, the fungal stalks seem to sway of their own accord -- at times I think I can see them growing, moving, extending towards us as we hike over the hills. I start at shadows -- twice we have panicked, and I cast and re-cast a light cantrip, hoping to catch some enemy in the dark. At times the ground rumbles beneath us, and we are sore afraid, but there is nothing we can do.As I write this: far to the north, faint in the distance, I hear something go >pop!< Many somethings, in fact -- the sounds of distant explosions, perhaps some foreign weather event or battle between Yang's people and the fungus? Throg and Rhogash claimed to hear nothing, though Grog agreed he could hear the strange distant thunderclaps. Rhogash lit a sunrod, one of only four we brought on our expedition, and I think he was irritated either at me or himself or both for wasting it on what proved to be nothing, or at least, nothing we could immediately affect. The red sun will rise soon, and with luck this night will have passed without further incident.DAY TWO, gloaming. Alas, I spoke too soon, for even now we sit, recuperating from an ambush. Fortunately none of us were seriously wounded, but nevertheless the event has us all rattled. As we trod across a field of fungus (the stalks springing back where we stepped on them, released tiny clouds of earthy-smelling spores which clings to our pants and boots) hands suddenly rose from the dark, and hauled us down while lifting themselves up. It was a half-dozen poor souls we presume must have strayed from Yang's camp, for they were the burly jackal-men called "sibeccai" which rumor places as a sizable fraction of his followers. Sibeccai are far more burly than the anatomical drawings I have seen led me to expect, or perhaps it is some strange effect of the fungus which infested their organ systems (centered, as we saw yesterday, in a mother-of-pearl deposit at the base of the skull). For indeed they were in the thrall of whatever evil intelligence controls the bizarre fungal monsters that have assaulted us, and coordinated their ambush with yet another species.These worm-spitters were large spheroid masses of tubelike growth, coated with a slime mold: thoroughly disgusting. They belched forth slimy missiles composed of a layer of resin hardened around a payload of a swarm of the dreadful mindworms -- similiar to those which attacked Valley before the outset of our expedition, but more mobile. The only blessing when faced with such aberrations is the knowledge that it seems fully half of these mindworm payloads are not viable and expire immediately upon bursting open. The other half, sadly, does remain a viable boil, which attacks without remorse.We retrieved the Planetpearls from the poor sibeccai and the worm-spitters (the two from the spitters were odd rod-shaped things), and debated salvaging their armor (they fought unarmed, but we found a number of battle-axes in the fungus) but decided the appropriate action was to bear their bodies back to Yang's camp. In Valley we take care of our own; surely Yang's people are the same, and once we explain about the ambush and the fungus which robbed these good men of their reason, our gesture will be appreciated.DAY TWO, midmorning. After hours of arduous labor dragging the six huge bodies home to their families and community (we ended up making a sort of sled from their armor and some oddments; I have a new appreciation for the considerable brute strength of Throg, Grog, and Rhogash) we have arrived at what must surely be Yang's camp. Though camp is perhaps the wrong word: we have followed a trail up the side of a tall hill (one free of the fungus) and found a pair of heavy steel doors set into the cliffside. Rhogash, whom we agreed should speak for our group, knocked on the doors, and they have opened.Within, a contingent of massive sibeccai serving as guards are led by a single dragonborn, who seemed distracted as he asked who we were and what we wanted. He told us he would send for "Advisor Shion," and we were to wait outside. Then he closed the door on us.DAY TWO, noonish. We continue to wait for word from within. I imagine our arrival has caused some excitement; perhaps Yang and this Shion are debating with their comrades how best to greet us. Although, having paced outside for at least an hour, I begin to wonder whether there might be some more sinister reason for this delay. In particular I note the massive size of those sibeccai guards. The people of Valley are hard-working, and while I am a savant, and one of the puniest race to boot (humans being smaller than dragonborn or bugbears) I nevertheless can recognize the signs of a hard-working laborer. What we saw (Rhogash, Throg, and Grog all agree with me) on those sibeccai was nothing of that sort. They were larger even than the poor souls whose bodies we recovered (which bodies, I note, Yang's people still have not accepted from us); surely such a swelling of musculature can only be unnatural.DAY TWO, night. Just twenty hours ago I wrote that nothing I saw of Yang's camp could shock me after that eldritch monolith. I now know that was a lie, for I have seen Yang's paradise. I have seen hell. They call their... He calls his settlement Mountain, but I name it the Hive. The walls have ears; I fear to write more now. Soon.</blockquote>

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