AviLazar said:
In shils campaign putting on horse blinders and running straight by "distractions" is the best course of action. I wouldn't be surprised if that was an encounter Shil planned for us at level 1 - just in case we found a way to go ethereal
Not at 1st level, but only because you weren't in the Mournland then. Now if you had gone in there, I would have been happy to oblige
* * * * * * * * * *
Luna promptly grabs up the cat and begins to play with her, while the others look around the village. Small but sturdy houses surround them, and a fair-sized main street leads through the place, with smaller streets winding off between the buildings. The place looks like just another prosperous village in Breland or Aundair, except for the fact that it is deserted and the brooding presence of the Dead-Gray Mist above it. The only sound in the area besides that made by the Guardian Angels is the soft ringing of many bells coming from the far end of the village. They sound like hand-bells and ring constantly, though not in any coordinated manner.
“Which way is the seal?” asks Six. Nameless points in the same direction as the source of the bells.
“Fine,” says Gareth, “Let’s just get out of this place. It can’t be any worse than that damn forest.”
Korm looks at the
phantom stag that has been waiting for him. “Should Luna and I summon a few more so we can ride through?”
Six says, “No. We don’t know what’s in here and we need the stags to make sure we catch up to the expedition group. Let’s get through the place first and then you can summon them.”
The Angels pass on through the village. As they walk along, they notice a few unusual things, though naturally by this point they expect something or other of the kind. The wall of every building they pass has the word “
Why?” written on it in blood, all in the same handwriting.
“I’m tempted to write ‘Because’ beneath one,” Nameless says dryly, “But not tempted enough.”
“Shouldn’t we check a couple of the houses?” asks Luna. “There might be interesting things in them. Like this!” She happily paws at the pearl necklace around her neck.
“What part of ‘Mess with as little of the Mournland as you can’ don’t you understand?” asks Six.
“Listen, I know what you wussies think!” growls Luna. “But look at all the houses! There’s nobody here!” She waves a paw at a nearby building. “That’s a nice big house and it probably has…”
As she is speaking, large sections of the various walls facing the Angels simply fade away and become transparent, allowing them to see what lies within. All of the rooms look like as if their inhabitants just stepped out, with food lying half-eaten on plates, discarded clothes left in the process of dressing, and furniture appearing as if it had just been moved by someone rising from a seat.
One of the rooms the Angels can look into is a sitting room, with a painting over the mantelpiece of several young men, obviously related, happy and smiling as they pose in their Cyran uniforms around an elderly lady. An old rocking chair sits facing the picture, rocking slowly. In another house, a folded wedding dress lies on a bed, ready to be worn. Scattered around the room are various accoutrements that a woman would use while preparing for a wedding. A small painting of a handsome man sits on the table, and a dozen red roses sit in a vase, untouched and still apparently fresh. In the house opposite, a child's music box sits inside a playroom, still playing a merry tune which the Angels can now hear.
“Wow!” Luna promptly walks up to the nearest transparent wall and pushes on it. “Yes, the wall’s still there. Come on – let’s go in!”
“What part of magically transparent walls and houses that seem a little alive makes that seem a good idea?” asks Gareth.
“Hey – there’s a self-rocking chair! When the babies come along, that’ll be very nice.” Luna turns and, after resuming her shifter form, heads into the house. The rest of the Angels exchange glances, sigh and head in behind her.
Entering the room with the continuously rocking chair, Luna notices that drops of water fall constantly from two spots above it, like tears from a pair of invisible eyes. She waves a hand through the area and finds nothing, only getting her hand a little wet. “Sorry, whoever you are,” Luna says, “But I’ll take care of your chair. Okay, Nameless – where’s the
portable hole?” After collecting the chair, she proceeds to the room with the wedding garb and collects as much as she can, before finally agreeing to move on. As the group does so, the sound of the child’s music box follows them.
Korm stops suddenly, and so do the others. “Did you feel that?” the Gatekeeper asks. “Movement under our feet, as if something was burrowing under the ground? Something big!”
“Yes,” say the others, readying weapons and spells. When there is no immediate attack, they continue on warily.
They have taken only a few steps when sheets of paper and parchment float out of various nearby windows and fly to them, floating in front of or fluttering gently around the group like the strangest flock of butterflies. Luna reaches up to grab a few, and when she does so they cease all motion. So do the others, floating gently to the ground around the Angels All of them seem to be letters, many unfinished and every one in a different hand. One is from a young woman to her uncle in Sharn, saying how happy she is that the current peace will let her come to visit him. Another is from a young soldier to his girlfriend, saying that he has been granted leave and will see her in two weeks. One is simply a crude picture, evidently drawn by a child, showing a family and signed, ‘For daddy, with love.’ There is one similarity between them all. Each has the same date, the Day of Mourning.
“That’s sad,” says Luna, “Let’s take them. Maybe at some point we’ll find the people they were addressed to and can hand them over.”
And depress them even more than they probably already are. Despite the thought, Korm doesn’t bother arguing but simply puts the letters away.
Continuing on, the Angels find themselves finally nearing the end of the village. As they do so, they realize that the still present ringing sounds emanate from a small graveyard adjoining the village. Nearing it, they see that many of the graves have been fitted with bells, each attached to a rope leading below the ground. Though rare, this is sometimes done in areas with very limited medical resources, to make sure that people in the coffins can pull them for help in case they are buried by error. All of the bells are ringing.
“No,” says Nameless, before Luna can make any suggestions to the contrary, “We are not opening any graves.” He quickly proceeds around the low stone wall that surrounds the cemetery.
“Look!” says Gareth. Following his pointing finger, the others see small movements around the graveyard. The heads of all the small stone figures on the graves are turning to face them. The Angels have faced many theoretically stranger sights, but there is something significantly eerie about being the focus of the inscrutable gaze of dozens of sightless stone eyes.
And then they again feel a movement beneath them. It is slow but certain, as if some giant snake or worm were crawling through the ground under their feet, and that’s all that the Angels need. “Luna! Korm!” Six says sharply, “We need your stags. Now!” Nameless is already casting, and a semi-solid horse appears beside him. The druids quickly comply, summoning
phantom stags to join the one already present, and less than a minute later, the Angels are soaring away from the village at tremendous speed on the flying mounts. Behind them, the small stone statues turn their heads further to watch them depart.
The magical stags and steed soar a good sixty feet above the surface of the Mournland, high enough to ignore most of the low hills but a safe distance away from the overhanging Dead-Gray Mist. Traveling at the top speed of the slowest mount, Nameless’
phantom steed, the quasi-real creatures race across the terrain, covering in minutes what it would have taken them a day of hard walking to accomplish.
Only a few minutes after leaving the village behind, the Angels spot a figure standing at the top of a hill half a mile directly ahead of them. In seconds, they can recognize the Phiarlan who had met them shortly after they began traveling into the Mournland. As they near him, he raises a hand and says, “Hello again!” But by the time he finishes the words, they are two hundred feet past him, and they keep on going.
“I wonder what he had to say,” comments Korm, looking back at the dwindling figure. Riding near him and looking ahead, Six says shortly, “I don’t.”
A few minutes later, the Angels spot a depression in the ground, nearly a thousand feet across. It is completely bare of all vegetation and dotted with humanoid shapes buried up to their waists with arms raised to the sky. All of them are immobile and seemingly made of glass. The only thing that moves in the area is in the center, where a large monolith, an obelisk that looks like it is made of basalt, points towards the Mist above. In the center of the obelisk is a huge eye the size of a man’s head, which shifts back and forth constantly. It rolls around to watch the Angels, who quickly turn their mounts to give the area a very wide berth.
A couple of times, the Angels spot living spells, which immediately turn and move in their direction even if they are thousands of feet away, but they are left behind in seconds.
Finally, a little over a dozen miles from the spot where they left, the Angels catch up to the expedition and fly down to speak to them. Lamaan is happy to see them and confirms that the expedition has had little trouble since they left the Angels, only having to dispatch a few living spells along the way. “But there is something very strange. We’re well over a day’s travel closer to our destination than we should be,” he says. Lamaan points at the horizon, where a huge rise of land stretches as far as the eye can see in the Mournland’s limited visibility. “See that? It’s the Glass Plateau. The camp of the Lord of Blades is supposed to be a couple of miles inside its borders, and considering it’s only about five miles away, we should reach it easily before nightfall. But we should still be a good thirty miles or so from this spot, considering how much distance we’ve covered. I know time and distance often work differently in the Mournland, but this is really unusual.” He smiles a little and looks at the Angels. “Strange things really do seem to happen around you.”
“Comes with the territory,” says Nameless. “We’ll be heading on then. If we see anything that you need to know about, we’ll be back. Best of luck.”
The Angels mount up and only a few minutes later, are coming up on the Glass Plateau. This area, one of the strangest creations of the Mournland, is a highland plateau of smooth, glasslike formations. The surface is mostly smooth and flat, though jagged spikes and spires jut up from the ground here and there. The ‘glass’ (actually an unusual crystal) is light and translucent near the edges, and is almost white where it forms short jagged cliffs that descend to the lowlands. The Angels spot a large path carved or hammered out of it, the one which supposedly leads towards the Lord of Blades’ camp. It heads into the plateau, winding between the various rises and depressions. Of course, the Angels simply soar in a straight line above it.
Within a quarter of a mile of the spot where the road begins, they find the shattered remnants of what was apparently a watch tower made of wood and metal. Numerous bodies lie nearby. Flying down, the Angels find them to be of multiple species – warforged, humans, half-elves, and hobgoblins. They have been looted, but otherwise treated with respect, being stacked in neat rows.
Continuing onwards, the Angels find that the plateau’s crystal structure darkens as they go on and takes on an almost stony appearance. There are dim flashes of light in its depths, but they have no intention of stopping to investigate. After having traveled nearly three miles into the plateau, some of them spot movement a few hundred feet ahead. It turns out to be two warforged running away from them. As the Angels flash over their heads, Gareth glances questioningly at Six. The warforged shakes his head. “No, I don’t want to stop. I’d rather see their camp first.” He points ahead, at an area which has just appeared behind a rise ahead. “And that must be it.” The words are punctuated by the sound of exploding thunderstones, as the warforged they left behind stop to detonate them, presumably to warn their friends.
The area ahead contains the ruins of what was, according to the maps of pre-Mourning Cyre that the Angels had studied, a small industrial town which had arisen around a Cannith enclave. Now the place is utterly desolate, consisting only of piles of rubble which barely resemble the original buildings. The only real dwellings are within one large section of the area, which has been separated from the rest of the town by a makeshift wall, and even these ones seem to have taken significant damage. The wall is made of mingled wood, stone and metal, evidently taken from the remnants of the original town. Four warforged are visible on the wall and others can be seen moving within the area. They are clearly expecting trouble, and they point and level weapons at the flying interlopers.
“I’ll handle this,” says Six. “Let’s land and the rest of you wait while I go in.”
While following Six down to the ground, Gareth asks, “Are you sure you don’t want us along? I don’t think they’ll be that friendly.”
Not if I take you along, they won’t. “I think I can get them to talk if just I show up. And if they’re hostile, you’re close enough to reach me in a hurry. Seriously, I should do this alone.”
Having left the mounts and his companions on a rise from which they can see the warforged camp and be seen in turn, Six descends to the path leading to the wall and heads for it. As he nears them, he lifts his hands to show that he carries no weapons. One of the warforged on the wall aims a crossbow at him and shouts, “Stop! Who are you? Why are you here?”
“My name is Mithral Six of Six,” Six explains in his most diplomatic* tone. He pauses for a second, but for once, there is no sign of recognition from his interlocutor.
I guess they don’t get the Chronicle here. And that’s probably a good thing. “I wish to speak to your leader. I have important news for him.”
The warforged guards whisper among themselves and then the same one asks, “Who are those people you came with? Why are they waiting there? They are not warforged!” The tone of voice for the last phrase is akin to one saying that someone is a murderer or mentally deficient.
“No, they are not warforged, but they are my companions. They mean you no harm, which is why I left them there. I will come in alone if you allow me. And I think your leader will want to hear me.”
After a little more discussion, one of the guards descends, while the others still watch Six suspiciously. A few seconds later, a large gate swings open, to reveal half a dozen armed warforged. “Come in,” says the guard. “Don’t make any sudden moves or we will have to kill you.”
You can try. “Of course,” says Six in the same tone, before walking in. The other warforged fall in around him and they head deeper into the area at a brisk pace. Hearing raised voices behind him, Six glances back to see the two warforged the Angels had flown over come running up to the gate, where they begin to talk to the guards. Since nobody asks him to stop, Six turns around and continues to follow his escorts.
The area around him, he quickly notes, is a shambles. The buildings seem to have been constructed from the remnants of the earlier town and many of them have then suffered further damage. Many of them are scorched and some have large sections that were broken and never repaired. At least one battle has taken place here. The inhabitants of the camp are all warforged, Six seeing over two dozen, all of whom stop to watch him and his guards pass by. All are heavily armed but lacking any human clothing except for belts, backpacks and pouches. They also seem shabby and disheveled in comparison to Six’s gleaming state. A couple of them turn and shout a warning that there’s a stranger in the camp.
Six’s escort halts in front of a large, flat structure as an oddly dressed warforged steps out. He carries a staff made of what appears to be roughly carved stone and wears a number of gewgaws around his neck and chest, the largest of them being a stylized warforged head. He studies Six silently for a few seconds and then asks, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Six introduces himself again and then says, “My companions and I are traveling through the Mournland on some important work, but I am interested in the Lord of Blades and this place, so I stopped here along the way. I also wished to warn you that an expedition from House Cannith, with Deneith mercenaries and warforged soldiers, is coming here.”
The staff-wielding warforged growls angrily, and those around them mutter angrily and some raise their weapons. “Traitors!” snarls the warforged speaking to Six. “We will deal with them when they get here. But what is your interest in this?”
“First, if you don’t mind, would you tell me your name?”
“I am Preacher. Now answer my question.”
“Then, Preacher, this is my intention. I am very interested in the situation and position of the warforged in the world. Thanks to my companions, I have traveled further than most people, including to Xen’drik, and I have seen some interesting things about their origins. I want to find a place where our people can go and where we can build new warforged. And I mean warforged created by ourselves, rather than by others. The five nations,” he glances around at the Mournland, “Or rather, now four, have decided how warforged should be created or not, and that is disturbing to me. I know some warforged – you, for example – have made a home here, but even though this place is not as bad for us as it is for other species, I think we can find a better place to live than the Mournland.”
Preacher’s impassive metal face radiates a certain degree of approval. “That is good to hear,” he says slowly, “But what of these people you travel with? What do they think of the warforged?”
Six thinks of a conversation he once had with Luna – or more precisely, listened to Luna – when she informed him how cool it would be to find a lot of warforged in the Mournland and turn them into pirates because nothing is better than pirates who do not need to breathe or sleep and might float because they are partly made of wood.
Yeah! “I do not think they fully understand us and my thoughts about the position of warforged in the world, but they are supportive of me and of the idea that the warforged should be treated as anyone else.”
“Very well,” says Preacher. “What do you wish to do here now?”
“I would have liked to stay and discuss more things with you, but I have some urgent things to do. I also want to keep the expedition away from here if I can.”
Preacher shrugs. “Do so if you can. But if they come here, we will defend ourselves.”
“All right. It was a pleasure to speak to you. I shall return when I can.”
Preacher reaches into a pouch and produces a battered metal badge which looks like the large stylized symbol hanging around his neck. “Bring this with you and you will be allowed in freely.”
Six studies the symbol for a few seconds.
I wonder if this is supposed to be the Lord of Blades. But this is not the time to be asking. He pockets it and says “Thank you.”
* This may be the first place in the campaign where a swashbuckling card providing a +10 to Diplomacy got used with great effect.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
Thank the Silver Flame for all the protection spells we threw up. The bit about Nameless getting affected totally caught us by surprise - otherwise we would have protected him too.
