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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 270159" data-attributes="member: 114">Travelling through the woodland is eerie in the silence. Although the leaves are starting to come out on the trees plenty of light gets through to the forest floor, and they are wading through knee-high bracken. Anne-Marie is slightly more sharp-eyed than Trajan so she takes the lead, although an hour into their trek she feels her shin catch on something in the foliage. “Watch out” cries Trajan - but too late.Two huge logs come crashing together where Anne-Marie stands. She tries to twist out the way, but they catch her full on, and drop her to the ground. Trajan hurriedly kneels down beside her calls upon the name of Asura, and healing power flows through his hands and into her battered body - which breathes with life once more.“****” says Anne-Marie. “Your turn to take point now!”After resting for a couple of hours to enable Anne-Marie to get some of her vitality back, the continue on through the woodland.Trajan notices something shiny and white off to one side, and cautious of an ambush they circle around a pile of humanoid bones, but don’t move close enough to investigate. “Dead villagers, I guess” muses Trajan. They move on.As the afternoon wears on they find their way out of the thick forest and into a more lightly wooded area - on the edge of which is a huge oak with no leaves - evidently it was deliberately killed by someone, since its bark has been stripped off in a ring around its girth. Getting their bearings better, they head off towards the barrow, rising like a low hill in the distance.The barrow itself is huge - several hundred feet in diameter and nearly 80 feet tall. There is an alcove with a stone doorway, and inside they can make out an altar of sorts in an room empty apart from a decrepit old skeleton in the corner.Trajan gets out his grapping hook and drags the body over towards him - it is an armoured skeleton, the parts all still bound together. The armour looks badly hacked up, and quite recently too by the shininess of the scratches. It is of a very, very old design, probably dating back to the late Imperial days when scale armour was popular. Interestingly the skeleton has a scabbard for a bastard sword, but no weapon in evidence. Suspicious, Trajan hunts around in the long grass by the barrow and finds a discarded bastard sword - one well worn, but commonplace. His mind wanders back to the fine blade which Tully displayed to him - and her assertion that she had not been to the Barrow...(last update for a couple of weeks I'm afraid - away on hols<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)</blockquote>

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