Struggle and Strife- A scarred lands storyhour

A little Praise

I just wanted to chime in and say how much I like this story. I have been reading it almost from the beginning (being a huge fan of the SL), and just thought it might be encouraging to you to know how much I've been enjoying it.

Thanks much Lars!

LR
 

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Thanks a lot. This encouragement really does mean a lot to me. :)

I hope that I will be able to write another update untill wednesday- today I was at the dentist, and I still feel a bit weak on my knees.
 



Chapter 13: A new Hope- part 1

The Ghostmaid was rocking gently in the river delta and the sun was rising into the clear blue sky as the heroes went ashore. Since the eastern bank of the river went over into mangroove swamps, making it hardly passable, they landed on the other bank, hoping to find a ford further upriver.

The only steeds they took along were Donnangar’s dire wolf and Ben’s horserat, since they weren’t sure whether their horses could manage the terrain they were about to cross. For hours, they walked through marshland, and the sun burned down on them while the ponds and swamps around them were stinking of decomposing plants and animals.

The climate around them was much warmer than they expected this far up north. It seemed that Kadum’s blood was warming up the water and the air of the blood sea, so that the toe islands had mangrove swamps and other features one would only expect in tropic areas.

Around noon, the stench around them was almost unbearable. At some point, the marsh gas made them gag and they wondered whether they would have to go back and circle around this particular part of the swamp, as a tentacle shot from out of the reeds around them and wrapped itself around Jan. Before he could react, the tentacle pulled Niklas towards the reeds, and now the heroes saw their attackers: They were being attacked by three headed horse-sized toads, and the tentacle was actually a tongue…

Immediately, four more got out of the swamps, attacking the heroes with their tongues, which they shot at them in order to wrap them up and swallow them. Jan was able to rip himself free, but Trepat was less lucky. Just after he cast a spell, he was swallowed by one of the toads. At that time, all of his friends were busy with toads that had engaged them.

It was dark within the huge toad and the elf felt the beast’s digestive acid burning into his flesh as he was mangled as the internal muscles around him were contracting. Fighting down the feeling of claustrophobia, Trepat remembered that the spell he had cast enabled him to transmit negative energy with his hand.

He forcefully moved his hand so that he touched the stomach wall with the palm of his right hand, and as he felt the dark energy streaming through him, the toad’s flesh close to his palm started to wither away. He kept on pressing against the spot as he felt the acid burning ever deeper into him until the toad’s muscles and skin tore apart and there was an opening through which he was able to press himself.

It was like a parody of a birth, as he exited the toad’s body, and like a newborn, he was covered in blood. Bile and blood gushed out of the wound which shortly afterwards closed again.

By now, his friends had gained the upper hand, and Donnangar came to Trepat’s aid. After he killed the toad with his falchion, he healed the elf.

The stench toads were all killed, stinking even worse than before (if such a thing is possible), and they all agreed to leave the swamp as quickly as possible, and a few hours later, they had finally left the swamps and were now in knee-high grassland. They walked along the river’s bank for a few more hours, but since they didn’t find a ford before sunset, they set up camp, intending to look further on the next day.
 

A new hope- part 2

The night was warm and damp just like the day had been, and bugs and mosquitos were feasting on the adventurers' blood.

In the morning, they marched on, and after a few hours, they discovered a shallow and calm part of the river, where it could be crossed easily. Once on the other side of the river, they marched eastwards, and there was a forest to their right and a formation of white rocks to the left. Less than a century ago, there had been quarries and small settlements of workers and craftsmen at the western edge of the rockformation, mining marble for the temples of Mithril. But than, the blood monsoon and the growing threat of pirates had made it almost impossible to maintain an outpost in the middle of the blood sea, and so it had been abandoned eventually.

All through the day, they could see the formations to their left. The shining white of the marble and basalt was gleaming like pure white snow in the sunlight, and it looked oddly out of place, like giant blocks which had been dropped into the plain. When they got tired of looking into the light to their left, they could rest their eyes by turning their head to the wood to their right. Even though it was still warm, the trees felt the coming of autumm and were getting ready to shed their leafy skirts. Everywhere the friends looked, they saw beautiful autumm colors, and the leaves were covering the wood in every shade of orange and red.

The mosquitos were left behind with the river and the marsh, and the day was so pleasant, that they were able to forget their worries for a while. When the sun set, they were all in a rather cheerful mood, and they settled down for a peaceful night.

In the morninglight of the next day, the heroes discovered a breach in the forest to the south. Looking into it, they saw that there was a corridor leading southpark with wheel-tracks visible in the grass covered ground. Since there were no new trees or bushes there, it was clear that this path had been used until not too long ago.

Trepat took a closer look and found boot imprints as well. He told the others and Jan said:" Well, maybe some pirates were pulling marble here... After all, they are supposed to hide somewhere here in the toe islands."

Niklas pulled out the map:" The strange thing is that it looks like the breach leads down to the ruins of Hor'Kung... I wonder what that could mean..."

"If there are really pirates at the end of this corridor, I wonder how they will welcome visitors", said Trepat.

Niklas shrugged:" We want nothing from them. So, if they ask us, we can tell the truth. In any case, I think it would be best if we would avoid them. Especially since they wouldn't be too happy to see a Paladin around...".

They turned into the breach, Donanngar and Ben on their steeds and the rest of them on foot. The corridor was about twenty feet wide and over it, the branches of the flanking trees were meeting, making the path feel like a wooden tunnel. The sound of their steps were muffled by the leaves and grass on the ground and they only talked in whispers with each other, so that their own noises were drowned by the sound of the leaves in the winds.

In the afternoon, Trepat was the first to hear it: In the distance, the sound of axes hitting wood was echoing through the forest. He signalled his companions to stop, and now they all heard the sound of a tree crashing to the ground, accompanied by a shout.

When the last echo of the crash had gone, Trepat said:" I think that was Ledean for "Timber"".

Ledean was the language of an empire that had once, before the divine war, covered almost all of Ghelspad. The empire was long gone, but their language still served as a lingua france.

"Makes sense," Niklas said,"if those are really pirates, they probably come from all kinds of different countries..."

"But we are in the middle of the island here. It doesn't make much sense for pirates to stay so far away from the coast...", Ben added.

Niklas nodded in agreement:"Who knows. Anyway, I will go and take a look now".

And with that, he left into the woods. The monk moved swiftly southward, gingerly avoiding twigs, branches and other things that might give him away, if they would break under his feet. As he scouted ahead, the sounds of the axes chopping down trees grew ever louder, until he reached a clearing.

He hid low in the bushes and peeked through branches and leaves and with a shudder, he now saw the "woodworkers" for the first time.

They were dead.

There were a dozen of them. All of them were moving and except for two, they were all chopping wood or preparing a log for transportation, but each of them was in a shape that shouldn't allow him to live on. Some of them had open skulls, or bones that were showing through rotting flesh, while others looked like they had been immolated or smashed. Furthermore, each of them looked like their flesh had decayed for a while until the process of decay had stopped and they were conserved in this state.

Each of them seemed to have been a soldier in life: they were wearing a uniform-armor, which was oldfashioned and worn but in good fighting shape. And even though they looked like the zombies the friends had encountered back in the blood steppes, those undead didn't seem as clumsy and mindless as those brainless living dead at all.

These undead behaved every bit like professional soldiers, and from the looks, the two who weren't doing the physical labor were their officers. And now that Nikas took a closer look, he saw that the ones he considered to be officers were actually wearing different badges on their shoulderpads than the other ones.

Niklas watched them preparing two logs for a little while. When the undead soldiers talked, or when the officers gave orders, they spoke a strange form of Ledean, the likes of which Niklas had never heard before. Once he had seen enough, he crawled away as silently as he had come and returned to his friends to report to them what he had seen.
 


A new hope- part 3 of 5

His friends were stunned. They would have been ready to deal with any pirates if they would have run into them, but undead soldiers who were acting like a troop of pioneers, now that was something completely different.

Jan was agitated:” What are we waiting for then? We should attack these abberations right now!”

“Are you insane? There are a dozen of them, and we don’t know anything about their strength! Attacking them could turn out to be suicide!”, Trepat exclaimed.

The heroes debated heatedly under their breath whether to attack the undead or not, until Donnangar interrupted them, his deep and calm, yet strong voice silencing them for the moment:” I think the elf is right. It is unwise to attack an enemy about which you know nothing. You see, right now, we are at an advantage: We know they exist, but they don’t know we do.

“So far, we don’t even know anything about their numbers or their organization, if there is any. But from what you describe, the ones you saw behave like pioneers. Were they alive, this would mean that they would merely be specialists within a much larger organization. In any case, we should watch them, and maybe find a better opportunity to destroy them this way.

“Ultimately, though, the mission Gortak assigned to us is more important than ridding an uninhabitated part of the world of undead. If possible, I would like to make sure we get the cure and get it back to my people. Everything else is secondary to that.”.

Even Jan aknowledged that the orc was right, and they agreed that he had a good point. They left the path for good now and went deeper into the wood, where they settled down for the night. Time went by without much happening, until around midnight, when Trepat and Donnangar were on watch, they saw torchlight on the path.

Trepat sneaked up back to the path, and now he saw more of the undead himself. There was a nightpatrol of what appeared to be six regular soldiers and one officer. Two of the soldiers were carrying torches and they were marching with the routine of men who were very familiar with their surrounding terrain. He pressed his body low to the ground, and when he was sure that he was out of earshot, he crawled back to the camp.

On the next morning, they walked southwards through the woods. They found several clearings which were in different states of regrowing. There was the new clearing, where Niklas had seen the undead working the other day but also other ones where no trees had been chopped in years. It appeared that the soldiers had already spent at least decades on the island, carefully using it’s resources.

They reached the edge of the forest around noon. Peeking out of it, they saw a plain and about two miles away were the remnants of Hor’Kung. The once proud city that had been a home for a hundredthousand orcs once, was now nothing more than a gian field of rubble, with vines and other plants growing over it’s tumbled stones. From their vantage point, the heroes also saw two wooden forts with marble foundation just outside of the city-ruins, about three miles from each other.

All in all it looked, as if the plain was not grown with trees by now, because the vegetation was burned down every few years- the trees behind which they were hiding were slightly charred, and the earth was definetly mixed with ashes.

Donanngar, however, didn’t pay heed to those details at the moment. He was speechless and stared at the ruins. Ever since he had heard the legends of the old Orcish culture for the first time when he was a kid, he had dismissed them as nice legends without much truth in it. After all, raiding and herding was all there was to an Orc’s life, while the nicer aspects of it, like a hearth and a solid home were reserved to the winners of the divine war: humans and their allies.

Here, however, he saw the proof that Orcs were in fact capable of much more. While the adventurers saw nothing but rubble, Donanngar was able to imagine what this city must have looked like once... Were it still standing, it would be equal to Mithril in both size and splendour…

Donnangar was unaware of his surroundings as Trepat shook his shoulders:” Donnangar, you see that there?”

He followed the elf’s pointed finger and saw a patrol in the plain. After a while, he saw a second one.

“It would be best if we go at night, I think” Niklas said,”After all, they are human corpses, and they were carrying torches. So it is likely that their eyes are not any better at night than Jan’s or mine.”

Ben nodded in agreement:” Makes sense.”

The adventurers waited at the edge of the forest until nightfall, and once the sun’s last afterglow had vanished, they walked out on the plain, slowly calculating the movements of the two patrols that they could see. When the patrols were the farest from each other, they fell into a slow run, covering the two miles between the wood and the ruins with their bodies bent forward in order to be less visible.

Fivehundredyards before they reached the ruins, however, one of the patrols sounded a horn. The adventurers saw the torches of the two patrols bopping up and down- clearly they were now running towards them. Now, the heroes ran as fast as they could in the dark towards the ruins, which were about as far from them as the patrols.

As they reached them, they climbed over the rubble of the former city walls, until they found some roads which were still intact enough to run on them, and for an hour, they zig-zagged into the city until they found the ruin of an old house into which they crawled and hid for the night. Outside, every now and then, they could hear several distinct horn signals echoing through the ruined streets.

The undead soldiers had sent several patrols into the city, searching for them.
 


Before I post the next update, I just wanted to give a little explanation as to why it took so long.

As you probably know by now, I like to keep up with my campaign in my storyhour, and so a week without updates is highly unusual. My honeymoon was an exception to the rule obviously.

However, last week, I got an inner ear infection which had been torturing me for over a week- in spite of medication it spread to both ears, so that at one point, I was both in pain and almost deaf to boot.

By now, my ears are almost back to normal, and so I can resume my regular schedule. And since I won't DM this weekend, I am optimistic that my story hour will be up-to-date again by the next session.

So, thanks to all my faithfull readers for waiting on me. :)
 

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