Impossible Odds - Again!
The Darkwood stretched out below them like a great, green carpet. It's vastness and sameness had lulled them into a thoughtless pattern of wingbeats carrying them eastward for the past three days. Then there was something different.
Out on the horizon was a discoloration. Something was brown. Incapable of speaking to each other, their hawkish heads shrieked back and forth until it seemed obvious that all three of them were aware of the discoloration and they headed for it.
As they drew near, they began to realize how big it was. It hadn't been so obvious when they stood within it, but the "Dead Zone" around the Temple of Bane extended for exactly a mile in every direction. From their altitude, it described a neat circle of dead, black trees clawing skyward with the stone temple sitting in the center. Just north of the circle was a clearing in the forest that was a couple of hundred feet wide. Their enhanced vision immediatly showed them that there was movement in the clearing.
Without need to confer, they circled wide to the east and kept well away from sight of the clearing. A hawk in the summer sky was nothing to question. A trio of them was, especially when those doing the questioning were Dark Druids, familiar with the concept of beings shifting themselves into animal form.
A short while later, the group settled to the ground in a much smaller clearing several miles north of the larger one. Raven and Scar immediately changed back into their dwarven and half-orcish forms respectively. Both agreed with the necessity of their chosen means of transport, but neither enjoyed it. As Raven said, "If Dwarves were meant to fly, Moradin would have given us flying mountains!"
Speaks did not transform back to his human form and instead took off to the south to do a bit more scouting. Leaving the others behind, he glided along just above the treetops, taking joy in the feeling of doing so. His joy was short-lived as his eagle speed quickly covered the distance to the clearing and he got about the serious business of gaining altitude to get a broader view of what lay in the clearing. What he found was increasingly horrifying by stages.
The center of the camp was a group of hide tents, including a rather large pavillion, spaced comfortably apart and surrounded by a thick hedge that looked like it would be difficult or impossible to hack through in any reasonable period of time. At approximately the easternmost and westernmost end of this hedge were openings in the hedge allowing access into the interior. Moving around inside this hedged in compound, Speaks could see a couple of ruddy skinned elves dressed in hides. They seemed to be in conversation near one of the tents.
As he scanned more of the compound, he saw something much more disturbing. Standing in seemingly random places around the inner perimeter of the hedges were large humanoid skeletons. Closer inspection revealed that they were likely skeletons of ogres. These were doubtlessly among those whom Great Root had indicated were captured by the Dark Druids and brought to the Dead Zone to be slain and brought back as undead. While Speaks had little regard for such creatures as Ogres, such a fate seemed a cruel end, even for them.
He widened his field of view even further and that's when he began to understand the enormity of what they faced. Outside the hedge, scattered about the forest, were a hundred, no, hundreds, of other skeletons. The majority of the time, they would stand or lay still. But occasionally one would move totteringly about the woods in a mockery of the life it once had. Most of these skeletons were clearly those of Gnolls but among them were the bones of other forest creatures including wolves, bears, deer and perhaps even an elk.
The Dark Druids didn't have an enclave. They had an army.
What purpose could such an army serve? The answer seemed all too obvious: Revenge. The Dark Druids would have revenge on those who drove them out of their beloved woods so many years ago. The Banites were already believed extinct and the Dark Druids using their own temple as a means of exacting revenge on their co-conspirators was doubtlessly justice in their own twisted view.
Now they would exact punishment on the other parties to their banishment. They would attack and destroy the last remaining vestige of the Imperial occupation of the Northlands: Glynden. When they were through, their army of undead would infest the Darkwood for generations, their corruption of the forest serving as a mocking insult to the Druids who had forced them from their homes after they turned to evil.
In a flash of insight that he desperately hoped was not precient, Speaks saw a series of images. Great Root, burning as he cried out in dispair. Animals of the forest slaughtered in the bony hands of the undead haunting the Darkwood. The guards of Glynden standing atop the walls, uselessly firing arrow after arrow into the ranks of the skeletal army. The children of Glynden huddled in the mines, hoping in vain to hide in a darkness easily pierced by the sightless gaze of empty eye sockets.
And then what? Would the army go as far south as Oar? Would they turn east towards the Novantae lands of the Dwarves? Or would they go west toward the barbarians? West, where Speaks unborn child lay in the womb of another man's wife.
Looking one last time at the almost endless skeletal horde below, Speaks turned and flew north to rejoin his companions. What they could do against such odds, he didn't know. But they had to do something.
NEXT: Hit and RUN!
