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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Damon Griffin" data-source="post: 2645713" data-attributes="member: 3568">Paladin's Jpurnal - entry 5Well, I had thought it might be a while before anything happened again that would warrant writing down, but I had barely finished that last entry when I got called into the abbot's office.  Him and the provost marshal had been meeting with some folks from Blasingdell, a city about three days slow ride north from the monastery, about a problem they was having out there.  That was six days ago and this has been my first chance to set it all down, so I might be misremembering some of it.A dwarf woman the abbot called Lady Athlese Mountainhome had come on behalf of a group of dwarves that got run out of their home in the Dragon Mountains by a bunch of orcs.  They got whipped pretty soundly, and can't think of retaking their home just yet, so meanwhile they got to have someplace to live, and went down to Blasingdell below the mountain pass where Mountainhome was.  Blasingdell is five or six times the size of Oakhurst, but even so they ain't got the resources to see that many extra mouths through the winter, and Sir Miles Barrick came with Lady Athlese to ask for help from the monastery.  Sir Miles has the title because his father and grandfather were knights, and that title passes on to the heir so long as they have land or property to go with it.  Some folks think a man doesn't deserve a title for something his pa or grandpa did, but I never met anyone would say it to Sir Miles's face, and I doubt I'd want anyone talking about my son that way, either, should I have one, though I'd impress upon him the expectation to live up to the title.  Dwarfs is proud, and don't like being anyone's charity case, and they had a scheme for maybe relocating to another dwarf place until they could reclaim their own.  Seems a hundred or so years ago, a small dwarfen cult set up shop in the foothills of the Dragon Mountains, about three days east of Blasingdell. They were an odd bunch who thought how you were remembered in death was more important than how you lived your life, but they picked out some nice limestone caves for their headquarters, and called them Khundrukar, which is dwarf for Glittery Home.  Anyway, it got overrun by orcs within 50 years -- dwarfs just don't have no luck at all with orcs, it seems like -- and it wasn't even really finished.  The orcs had tunneled in from the side, took the dwarfs by surprise, looted the place, killed or captured everybody, and moved on and left the place empty.   It ain't certain who or what might have moved in there since.  The law in Blasingdell caught and questioned one orc bandit and found out Khundrukar is being used as the hideout for a small band of outlaws.  Some folks think these orcs are spies for the bunch that just overrun Mountainhome, but other folks think the orcs ain't that smart.  Seems to be about thirty of them, with one leader who might be an ogre, or a hill giant, or just a big orc depending on who you ask.  Someone needs to go up there and clear those bandits out, and see what else might be lurking inside, so they Mountainhome dwarfs can move in.  Blasingdell's own militia, plus whatever help they can get from nearby towns and the monastery, will have to hold the mountain pass until winter sets in, to keep the orcs from coming any farther down the mountain.   This is just the sort of thing that the monastery trains us paladins to do, and the abbot said he thought me and my friends would fit the bill just fine, seeing as how we just showed we could think on our feet and didn't think we just had to go kill everything in sight to get the job done.   The provost marshal suggested we go in two sorties: one raid, traveling light, to clear out the entrance level  --  killed or captured won't make much never mind, but if we do bring back some prisoners we might find out if their group is spying for the others up in Mountainhome -- and then another exploration trip to check out the rest of the place and see if it can be made safe for a couple hundred old people, children and adult civilians to live in.  He said I could pick my own team from among whoever volunteered, and Sir Miles said Blasingdell would pay for supplies and so forth as long as we didn't get greedy about it.I said I'd take on the job and went straight out and had an assembly called to see about volunteers.  I think I gave a fair speech about the problem, but what with the need to hold the mountain pass and the clerics going to assist the city, and other things going on, there wasn't many available to go with me.  Lance was spoiling for another fight and wanted to come, and I had Wulfgrim at the word 'orc', but Winter didn't seem too keen on it at first.  Gerik barely paid any attention to the speech; as soon as he heard the first part he started watching the audience for spies.  Sharwyn and Braford both wanted to come.  I was worried about Sharwyn, but she convinced me she needed to do it.  She said she wanted some victory to point to, and also told me that her brother Talgen had mouthed off and got himself killed only after Sharwyn was offered considerable insult, so she felt responsible for that and didn't think she could just go back home like nothing happened.    Gerik rolled his eyes and shook his head when I told her she could come.  He thinks she pulled the wool over my eyes and between possible spies and conniving females, he'd better come along to keep me out of trouble, because he don't believe I can look after myself.  Sir Miles's squire, who's also his nephew, volunteered but Sir Miles asked me privately not to take him, so I said I guessed Sir Miles couldn't do without him while all this business was going on in town.  We did get a bard who was visiting the monastery.  I'm not sure what to make of her.  She's got something of an elf look about her, but then again something of the halfling folk too, for all that she's too tall to be one of them.  Didn't seem polite to ask, but maybe she'll tell us more about herself as we go.   We might have got more volunteers if we'd been able to offer more than the possibility of some unknown amount of treasure that the Glittery Home dwarfs might have left behind and the orcs maybe never found.  That wouldn't matter none to the clerics and paladins, but of course we ain't the only ones at the monastery.We drew some extra equipment including a chain shirt for Sharwyn and new gear for Braford.  Sharwyn said she'd wear the shirt once we got to the mountain but I couldn't make her put it on while we were travelling.  She said the road there wasn't the dangerous part and she'd wear the bulky thing when it got time.  Lance decided he'd go ahead and use that magic morningstar after all, so it didn't go to waste, and in that same spirit I told Braford he should carry Shatterspike.  He looked uncomfortable about that, like it might jeopardize his penance, but I said he could use it better than any of us, and I wasn't going to hobble the group just to make him feel better.All this went pretty quick and we borrowed horses to set out for Blasingdell the next morning with Sir Miles and his squire, while Lady Athlese stayed behind to work out more arrangements with the abbot.  The three days slow ride was pretty quiet.  We ran across some charcoalers and asked for news, and found out the twigblights was in the area.  No one knew what they were, of course, but we recognized them from the description, and told the charcoalers to pass the information on to the area farmers.  I think they believed us more out of politeness than anything.  We also got visited by some goblin bandits one night, trying to steal our horses, but Sharwyn was on watch and she threw a colorful spray spell that stunned three of 'em unconscious and run the other one off.  Lance tied them up and took their weapons, and next morning we questioned them about the area, offering to let them go rather than take them into town to be hanged as thieves if they cooperated.  They told us about that group of orc bandits, and what they said tallied pretty well with what I'd been told back at the monastery plus gave us more details, so we let 'em go as agreed, unarmed but otherwise okay.  The second night out Lance spotted a cottonmouth by my foot after we'd stopped to camp, but I just stabbed it with a dagger and flicked it into the fire, and it didn't trouble nobody.We got into Blasingdell around sundown the next day, travelling kind of slow because it had been raining.   We spent that night and the next two days and nights in town, loading up on supplies and securing mules to carry them.  We have Jack along with us again, to keep an eye on the mules.  We asked Sir Miles about prisoners, and he said if we took any the best place to hold them would probably be at his manor outside town.  I was there once before, with daddy, who knows Sir Miles and most of the other landowners around.  That bard, Tayla, asked around and found a dwarf among the Mountain Home folks that had lived in the Glittery Home years ago when she was little, and drew us a rough map of the layout.  Winter collected up live crickets and spiders, I'm not sure what for.  Wulfgrim got some holy water.  We also met a druid named Felix who agreed to guide us out to the Stone Tooth mountain where Glittery Home is, but he won't go into the mountain because he doesn't like being in enclosed spaces.  When we told him about twigblights he said he would need to put off guiding for one day while he ran off and told the ents about them.  I ain't sure if ents are trees that talk, or creatures that look like trees, but I think in some way they are the druid's superiors so he had to report to them.Over these last two days in town, Gerik has been keeping a watchful eye out for spies, and Sharwyn went along with him, mostly I think out of boredom and wanting something to do.  They didn't find any, but did find a half-orc that lives here in town and was a watch captain until they started having trouble with orcs in the area and they fired him and have him under watch.  So far as I can tell he ain't done nothing to deserve that, other than just to have some orc blood in him.   It's late now and we're leaving before dawn, but I've a mind to speak to Sir Miles about that when we get back to town. Tomorrow morning we will set out on foot for the Stone Tooth with Felix, leading our mule train.</blockquote>

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