NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr Midnight" data-source="post: 3765620" data-attributes="member: 69">Session 8 - Chapter 2 THE DENDrizzle fell as they continued walking. The moisture collected on the branches and large cold droplets fell down the backs of their cloaks, making them even more miserable than they’d been, trudging through a werewolf-infested black forest as they were.Arianna had picked out a definite path. She stayed twenty feet ahead of the group and watched the ground for signs of pawprints. “The trails are all converging,” she called back. “We’re getting closer to some kind of hub for them.”“It’s been an hour and a half since we were attacked by that elf,” Ashlyn said to Gerrit. “But Arianna says we’re deep in their territory. What do you make of that?”“It’s curious.  Maybe we’ve just gotten lucky.” “I don’t like it. It feels like a trap.”Arianna held up a fist: I see something, everyone halt. She crouched and was still for almost three whole minutes, then motioned for the group to follow her. She drew her bow and stepped out into a clearing from which the trees seem to lean away. A rocky outcropping was at the far end of the clearing, and a cave opened there like a screaming mouth. The group stepped quietly across the clearing to the cave, watching for traps and watchful of any movement in the treeline.The reached the cave’s opening. The ground here was hard-packed and heavily traveled by wolfs’ prints, Arianna  saw. The humid air coming from the cave smelled like damp animal fur. Only the sound of dripping water was heard from within. They entered. They hid in the darkness for a bit and waited to see if anything approached the cave from outside or came up from within. When nothing happened, Ashlyn used her hat of disguise to take the appearance of a bipedal werewolf. She stood twenty feet to the group’s front and led them slowly down, holding a torch up.The tunnel was a well-worn one. It was about six feet wide and seven feet high and its girth was fairly consistent as they traveled steadily downward on its slick stone slope. Small rivulets of rainwater moved with them over the lichen-stained rock. A passageway opened on the left-hand side. They explored it briefly only to find that it branched out geometrically into smaller passages that not even Gerrit could pass through. “This area isn’t even used,” Arianna said. “It’s useless to them. Let’s keep moving downward.”The air was growing more and more stale. It seemed there was no circulation in this cave, and what little air there was stank of fur and hot breath. It was cloying and almost suffocating, adding to the claustrophobic dread of the thin passageway as it moved deeper. “We must be at least a hundred and twenty feet below the ground at this point,” Toufghar whispered. “This is… I gotta get out of here.” He tugged at the neckline of his hide armor and his eyes bugged. “Easy,” Thendrick said. “We’ll kill something soon. That always makes you feel better.” The half-orc nodded and kept walking. The tunnel finally opened into a small cavern. Ashlyn stepped towards it carefully and looked inside. Here, the dank animal air was almost unbreathable. The cavern was perhaps forty feet long and twenty-five wide, and lit with dancing shadows from Ashlyn’s torch. The last ten feet of floor weren’t visible, as the floor dipped there into some kind of pit.There were no werewolves.A young woman was crouching on the ground, facing away from them, wearing the remains of tattered purple robes. Her ribs stood out from her skin in the torchlight and her lank hair hung like seaweed from her head. She was trembling. Ashlyn was at once relieved and troubled to have found no werewolves. She let the wolf illusion slip from her and replaced it with the one of her human self. “Ma’am? You’re safe now, we’re…” her speech caught in her throat as she saw that the woman wasn’t trembling after all- she was gnawing on something. The woman ripped something free with a squelching sound and tossed a legbone off into the darkness of the pit, where it landed with a clatter.Ashlyn concentrated and then spoke over her shoulder to the group. “I detect evil.”Thendrick shot the woman through with a ray of bright white light. She screamed and the sound echoed a hundredfold through the stone of the cavern. The sudden light and sound dazed everyone, and when their vision returned, the woman was lying, shuddering, on the stone. A blackened hole was burned entirely through her midsection. “You shot her in the back,” Gerrit said. “We weren’t even fighting.”Thendrick shrugged. “Better her than us.” Ashlyn went to the woman and knelt by her. The woman turned her face upward and she was just a girl, maybe seventeen years old, beautiful and innocent. The eyes were crinkled in pain and despair. Her tormented splendor was so heartwrenching that Ashlyn’s eyes failed her even as they welled up in tears. She was blind. “Easy,” Ashlyn said. “Just relax.”“So… you came to destroy us,” the girl choked. “Not thinking we were… clever enough to…”There was a loud thud and the girl stopped talking altogether. Ashlyn heard the others gasp behind her. “What just happened?” Ashlyn asked with some alarm. “What just happened, someone answer me!”Toufghar spoke from nearby with a proud smile in his voice. “Not good. Dangerous.”He had casually walked up and crushed the girl’s head with a boulder. <img src="http://a132.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/74/l_8cb59b0bf1f8084d97818e3453a2be0b.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />“You’re an ass, Toufghar.” Ashlyn sat nearby with Gerrit attending her blindness. She was still steaming over his killing the young woman, but in her time with the Lightbringers she’d seen many such instances. For Thendrick and Toufghar, shooting first and questioning the corpse was a common occurrence no matter how often she pleaded for reason. Arianna and Gerrit, however, were aghast at the blatant disregard for adventuring protocol. “That was horrible,” Arianna said in disbelief.“She had it coming,” Toufghar said with a dismissive shrug. “She was going to get dead one way or the other.”“At the very least we could have listened to what she was saying,” Ashlyn grumbled. “She said something about how we didn’t think they were clever enough to… splat. Clever enough to what?”“We’ll never know, so let’s not worry about it,” Thendrick said. He stepped to the edge of the pit and looked into it with the help of the torch. It was filled almost to the top with the mouldering bones of the eaten. Skulls, ribcages, legbones, spines, armbones and pelvises of dozens of different kinds of creatures lay in a flat heap. Rotting chunks of brown-black meat still clung to the sickly greenish bones in the nooks where werewolf teeth couldn’t reach. Scattered with the bones were scraps of cloth, bits of belts, a few rings and necklaces. It seemed the bodies weren’t used for anything other than food, and then the corpses were tossed into the pit along with all their belongings. Thendrick put a hand to his mouth, closed his eyes and leaned on a wall to help ease the rising nausea.“This doesn’t make sense,” Arianna said. “This is clearly the werewolves’ den. Number one, no werewolves. Number two, no Tome. We’ve wasted our time here. There’s no damned Tome!”Toufghar kept his eye up the tunnel and said “The night’s not over. We can be sure that the werewolves are out there somewhere.”Miles to the northeast, beneath the light of the moon, over a dozen pairs of yellow eyes shone from the bushes surrounding Barovia. The howling began.Coming up THOSE LEFT BEHIND .</blockquote>

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