Kull's 11th Report - Part 1
Saltmarsh
Eleventh Moon
To: Bishop-General Kartrak Visehart
Report from Kull Redfist
Sir,
I am pleased to report that the militia of Saltmarsh won its first battle with the humanoids while I was in the Windholm Peninsula. I returned to the town a week ago to find twenty goblin heads on stakes outside the village. It is true they faced only a small raiding force, but even this task would have been beyond them, mere months ago.
The next attack – should it come – will be no raiding force, of that I am sure. Much has happened since my last report, and the state of the war is vastly different than it was before. The humanoid forces no longer threaten Mellin's gates: instead they stream back toward the north, seeking to flee along the coastal road, attacking small villages for loot, supplies and slaves. The mountain passes have been sealed, and the duchy's forces are on the advance.
It must stick in the throat of the Duke that he owes all this to a servant of Our Lord.
After departing Kleim, from where I made my last report, I travelled to the village of Cillau, in the centre of the peninsula. There I made enquiries about the presence of quoitine - which were fruitless - and of the local lands. It seemed that, other than Cillau, there were four places of note: Penrhys and Gwebli castles, a settlement known only as 'the Village by the Sea', and an ancient monument called the Hero's Marker, about which many local legends were told.
Of these, it seemed that Penrhys Castle might offer the best chance of the information we sought. The castle itself was said to partly in ruins, but inhabited still by old Lady Penrhys, and it was my thought that she might have knowledge of the substance we sought. I thus resolved to travel there in the morning. As events would unfold, it would be several days before this visit actually occurred, and when it did, the Lady would prove to have fallen into undeath. We destroyed her and told the local authorities of this, but the matter is of little consequence, and certainly had no bearing on my search for the quoitine.
The next morning, I began the journey to Penrhys Castle. However, the route ran past a track leading to the Hero's Marker, and I resolved to investigate this site while the opportunity was there. After all, my search was for a magical variety of stone, and this was a stone monument about which many legends had been told. There was always the possibility that it was built from the very material I sought.
Arriving at the Hero's Marker, I found it to be a boulder some eight feet in height, beside a small cairn of stones. The corpse of a large wolf lay next to the cairn, the creature seemingly destroyed by a blow from a massive blunt object - almost like the Hero's Marker had fallen upon it.
Although there was no quoitine here, there was obviously something unusual about the place, and if nothing else it offered a good vantage point to survey the area. I instructed Ulfgar to climb atop the stone and report what he saw. The dwarf did so, but as he jumped down, the stone turned beneath him, then began to rise, suddenly revealing itself to be some kind of large, boulder-like creature.
Staring down at us, it spoke in a voice like stones grinding together:
"Who has woken me?"