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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lars Frehse" data-source="post: 558462" data-attributes="member: 1674">The witch is back- part 3 of 4The mountain loomed before them. It's peak was covered in clouds, and at the uppermost edge that they could see, there was snow. There were stories among the villagers that the keep lay just over where the snow started, but everything they could tell them was vague, since none of them had been so far up there in their lifetime. Every piece of information hailed back to someone's grandfather or greatgrandmother, so each story was different from the next one.There was one thing all villagers agreed upon, though: There was Titanspawn in the mountains. This meant that no one in the village could tell them anything about any part of the way that was further away then an hour's march.So, they took out on their own. Soon they left all signs of the divine races behind and entered an untouched light pineforest. The fresh smell of pineneedles and moss and the soft ground made them feel grateful after all those days on the riverboat and the ill-fated Dojann Ahklain, and they only encountered Denev's creatures of the wild and there was no sign of Titanspawn to be seen.Around noon, the wood got replaced by some steep rises and occasional green meadows. Up here, Denev had healed many of the scars of the divine war already, and the land was still unspoiled by civilization, so that they were witnesses of a beautiful scenery in which they could drink from clear, untainted mountainsprings. They marchen on well uinto the evening, without having to scale up any sheer drops. Then, they spent the night in a cave which seemed to be uninhabited, and then they continued to hike further up.On the second day, getting up the mountain got harder. The farther they got up, the less vegetation there was and even though the air was fresh and cool, the exhaustion of scaling the sheer rock walls and hiking up steep slopes had them drenched in sweat. In the evening, they were high enough to be marching through snow, but fortunately, Ben's and Trepat's experience in the wild enabled them to find a wide crevice where they were protected from the elements as they settled in for the night. When they got up the next morning, they fixed a cold breakfast, since they didn't dare to attract Mormo's servants, who had to be close by somewhere or any other titanspawn, and then scaled the last part of the mountain's steep rock-face. They estimated that once they had climbed up this rock-strewn part, they should arrive at the plateau on which Skykeep had crashed.Everything went smoothly, until there were only a few hundred yards left to climb. Torn, Trepat and Niklas were roped to each other, and Ben was tied to the back of his rat, as Ben felt how the hairs on Swift Jane's back stood up and she cocked her head slightly as she raised her snout and her ears. Then, Ben felt and heard it too, as his horserat darted behind a big rock to his right: there was a rumble in the distance and a tremor in the earth.With a surpressed shout, he told his friends: "It's an avalanche!", and already, first stones came rolling down. Frantically, each of them sought what little cover they could find behind jutting-out rock formations and boulders which were wedged into crevaices, as more and more stones and rocks came tumbling down, ranging in size from mere pebbles to mansized rocks. As they held on with grim determination, their hands dug like claws into any opening they could find while the avalanche thundered by, louder even than the storm on the bloodbasin had been, and they all got hit by those stones from which their shielding rocks didn't protect them, and each of them received several bleeding slashes and bruises.Then, just as it seemed that they had made it through the worst of it, Trepat got hit by a sharp rock on the head, and momentarily dazed, he lost his grip and started to tumble down, just one more mansized object in the middle of the tumbling chaos all around them. After a few feet, however, he felt the rope around him tear into his body. He was still connected to Torn and Niklas, and the Halforc and the Human had held fast even when Trepat fell down and his weight suddenly jerked at them, trying to pull them down along with his friend.As quickly as the avalanche had started, it ended again, and after they had pulled Trepat up to them, they saw that he was badly cut and bruised, but none of his injuries seemed to be too serious for Ben to heal with his wand of healing. The halfling took care of his horserat, his friends and himself, and after he had commented on how they were running out of charges of their wands, they scaled up the rest of the steep slope.Torn was the first who pulled himself onto the plateau, and thus he was the first to see that they had indeed reached their goal. He stood on an enormous ledge, a plateau that occupied much of the width of the mountain, except for a hill-like spur that continued upwards from this open space.But Torn was oblivious of the spur- his eyes were feasting on the ruins of Sky Keep. Random heaps of stone, cracked masonry, shattered sculptures and other parts of the keep were lying all over the landscape, like playthings of an untidy gigantic child, and the central structure even seemed to have survived the fall of the fortress from the heavens. It was leaning on the central spur, tilted, but from what he saw, still partially intact. From what he could see, he could imagine just how vast the fortress must have been and how great the magic, that kept it afloat.He was disturbed in his reverie when Trepat called for him. He and the others had by now reached the plateau as well. The elf sat on his heels over what looked like charred bodies of thin, leathery eight-foot tall humanoids. Among them, he now saw what Trepat was pointing at: There was a handful of badly mangled Slitheren.Looking up to him, Trepat said:" The bodies are not stiff yet. Looks like they won the race up here by a margin."."Still", Ben added:" That doesn't mean that they got to the vault already. Let's go!".</blockquote>

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