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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PHDungeon" data-source="post: 5042007" data-attributes="member: 86320">A journal from Darren Androsax regarding game session #6 and the party's escapades in Grimsburg.Dear Corvin,Grimsburg, at last! I am writing you on the eve of a great battle – who knows if I will ever put quill to parchment again. It was good seeing you, and mother and father, too. Please keep Deryl safe here while my friends and I confront the odious and possessed Flagg. There are a few things I wanted you to know for our work in the Vale. It is a place of great dangers and even greater opportunities. Destiny calls us there, and if I should fall, ever I hope to have made the road more hospitable to you and our descendants, older brother. Why this talk of doom and gloom? Has my soul been infused with a holier purpose than wine, women and song? Perhaps. But it may also be a basic fear. To defeat Flagg, our irksome benefactor Starke has suggested we confront him in his new inventions – clockwork suits of armour that belch gouts of alchemical fire. It is hard at times to tell genius from madness.And Starke is both – I am afraid. He displayed his wife like a sculpture and artefact – her nude flesh was beautiful, but marred by the strange arm he had grafted to her. It left me longing for simpler times, and magics connected to the gods and primal spirits. There is some deep foulness behind his easy manner – but we still owe him gold by the thousands – actually 2,250 pieces to be exact. And he is the lesser of two evils, for now.  I was able to tell you of our adventures in Bryne Keep, but let me update you on the rest. Starke had revealed a casual interest in the skulls, and was given one by a mysterious stranger – some old man with an obscure message for our friend Torfinn, something about his exile on earth and being a herald of Ragnarok. Nonsense, or so I thought. Torfinn is a dreamy lad, full of good intentions. The skull was given over to Starke’s arcanist Flagg, who presumably became possessed and followed his demon heart to the temple with the elemental eye upon it. There he liberated the remaining skulls and distributed them gleefully to followers and victims on the road. As I said, we face him tomorrow.Other research proved more beguiling. I made my way to the great Library of Skaldsholme to research the symbol of the eye wreathed in flames. Good old Betelbriar the archivist lead me to an inner sanctum. You know how much time I spent in the library, pleading for access to the more forbidden records. Well, there i was, in marbled domes amongst red velour and noble book-cases. It had that intoxicating smell of parchment and glue, wood polish and incense. And then, in deep robes and all the grandeur of the Sturglesons, my eyes lay upon her ... chief librarian Brianna. I nearly gave up the life of adventuring then and there. She seemed excited, too. Perhaps it was the symbol of the eye, or the way she drew out the thick, bony scroll case, slowly, wrapping her delicate hands around the shaft before procuring its forbidden contents. We examined its milk white pages greedily, quickly, with the hushed urgency of badly behaved children. Two texts appeared in our hands– the first is a poem about the end of the world, the second a description of how to create the skulls. Sacrifices, exposure to the stars, and the whole damned malign purpose of them: to release the great beast of end times upon the world with each death of the skull-bearer.  Once a skull has possessed a person, and that person is slaughtered, the dark cloud of evil is awakened, freed and released by an ever increasing degree. How then to ensure that the last few skulls remain unused? Will Starke prove the stronger than his henchman Flagg?I had a dream the other night of Starke holding a great golden apple, riddled with black worms, plunging it into my chest. When I looked down, my torso had been replaced with a clock. Then Bjorn came and threw a hammer atop me. The last thing I remember is the hammer catching fire.Let us hope, brother, that I am no more gifted with prophecy than you are gifted with smooth-talking the maidens.Your Brother,DerrenFrom the Codex Hereticum of Rao... thus did the precepts of Rao uncover the Malletus Infernum, a sect of sun-god worshippers who blended ideas of justice and wrath from one of the northern smith-gods. The thirty members were easy to discover as they had used the inks of the Shallam-razar to decorate their bodies with sun and hammer motifs. Twenty-one members repented and seven zealots were burned at the dais of the god. Two escaped in the year 548 CE, but the cult is presumed lost to time.</blockquote>

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