“Save the forest? Nothing can do that, but if it dies then in time it will re-grow. As for saving the seela, I will tell you the history of the forest. In the beginning it which just one tree, the First Tree, my tree. Some say the tree was blessed by Arawai. In any event, its first seeds grew into the seela. This is ages ago, before even the elves came to the forest.
“It was the singing of the seela that awakened my spirit from that of the forest. They, like me, are bound to the First Tree.
“Later there came times of crisis. The Shahalesti elves fought with the elves of the forest. Anyariel was the noblest and bravest of the forest elves, and the forest gave her a gift, a sword formed from a branch of the First Tree itself. With it, she was able to drive out the Shahalesti.
“Then came the indomitable fire spirit. It took the form of a stag, and even Anyariel was unable to slay it. Instead, she pinned it with the sword to the bottom of the lake. All revered Anyariel for her great deeds on behalf of the forest, and when she died the shrine was erected.
“We have not seen her like again, and when the Shahalesti returned there were none who could stop them. They set fire to the forest, and it has burned without respite ever since.”
“I thought the Ragesians set fire to the forest,” says Solsus. “Anyway, if the sword came from the tree, won’t the seela be able to survive even if the forest burns down, so long as the sword is intact?”
“It is not as straightforward as that. For this to occur, the sword must be bound to a livings owner. At the moment it is still bound to Anyariel. For the seela to survive, the bond must be broken, and re-formed with one of you.”
“How do we break the bond?” asks Solsus.
Timbre lowers her head, pauses for a moment, then looks up. “It is done. The bond is broken. The sword will now bond with whoever can free it from the stag’s body, and the seela will not perish when the forest burns down.”
“And will you survive as well?” asks Solsus.
“No,” replies Timbre.
Scene 4
The Lake
January 9th, 9 am
Fully rested and prepared, the party sets off to retrieve the sword. They have decided that Solsus will bond with the blade, and his comrades have done their utmost to prepare him for the ordeal ahead. Freeing the sword will not be easy.
Solsus, a frown of concentration on his face, steps into the lake. As he does so, his body swells and grows taller. His wings disappear, and he now resembles an elf with gills. His experiences in the Fire Forest have enabled him to more deeply into the magical heritage of his people.
Time is of the essence, since many of the magics which aid him are of limited duration. He swims swiftly through the murky water, looking for the stag. The seela have been able to show him roughly where it fell, but it has been many decades since the event and their memories are hazy.
Suddenly, Solsus spots movement out of the corner of his eye. Two large shapes are moving through the water towards him. It is the ogres who live in the lake; in the excitement of recent events the party had forgotten about them. Not wasting any time on anything as frivolous as cursing, Solsus heads for the shore as quickly as he can.
The ogres close in behind Solsus as he surfaces and heads up the beach. After years of living on whatever they could catch in the polluted lake, they are not about to let a tasty elf get away.
Unfortunately for them, Solsus’s comrades are sitting on the shore anxiously awaiting his return. They were expecting a stag, not a pair of ogres, but the quickly spring into action. The stupid creatures are cut down before they even manage to recognise their danger.
“That wasn’t in the plan,” says Agatha.
“Most of the magical protections will have worn off now,” says Caryk.
“Not a problem,” says Jonathan. “This fire has been burning for forty years. Another day won’t make any difference. Let’s try again tomorrow. Hopefully there are no more ogres in the lake.”
Scene 5
The Lake
January 10th, 9 am
Once again, Solsus transforms himself into the shape of an aquatic elf, and slips into the lake. It is not long before he spots a large, glowing shape on the lakebed. As he gets closer, he can tell it’s the body of a stag, pinned to the floor but struggling to flee itself. Its body is giving off small clouds of steam.
Solsus swims down to the trapped creature, and spots the wooden greatsword holding it in place. He swims into position, and tries to pull it free – but without success. It is stuck fast.
“Think about this logically,” he says to himself, and studies the scene for a few minutes. Satisfied, he moves in, braces himself against the body of the stag and pulls hard. The sword does not come away at one, but he keeps trying, and eventually he is rewarded and the sword pulls free of the lakebed.
Unfortunately, it does not pull free of the stag. All Solsus has managed to do is free the stag from its captivity, and he hangs onto the sword for dear life as the stag leaps to an upright position and swims furiously towards the shore. It occasionally pauses to attempt to dislodge the irritation from its back, but it is far more concerned with reaching dry land as quickly as possible.
The party see the stag bearing down on them, with murder in its eyes. B’Roos directs the seela, Haddin and Cristin back to the caves, then follows them in as a last line of defence. The rest of the group ready themselves for combat as best they can. They aim to engage the creature on the shoreline, in order to keep it as far away as possible from the seela.
Gribron creates an illusion of some seela panicking by the edge of the lake. Agatha blasts the creature with her bolts of eldritch energy. Jonathan attempts to fry the creature’s brains but it shrugs off his attack. Caryk and Ambar close with the creature. Caryk tries to distract it while Ambar makes a grab for the sword.
Solsus, guessing he lacks the strength to free the sword from the irate stag, returns to his normal form and vanishes from view.
It is six against one, and the party have been preparing for this encounter for a long time. However, the stag is a formidable opponent, and there is one aspect the party hadn’t counted on – the stag’s boon was protecting them from the heat of the forest, but since they began trying to kill it the boon has been withdrawn. It is starting to get uncomfortably hot, even here on the side of the lake.
Caryk, fighting defensively, is able to evade the stag’s furious thrusts with its mighty rack of antlers, but Ambar is unable to get a purchase on the sword. Worse, she is taking damage from the heat of the creature’s body, now that it is no longer in the water.
The stag finally catches Caryk with its horns, and contemptuously tosses him aside. Solsus, who had previously trying to distract the creature with shots from his sling, swoops down and sees to Caryk’s wounds.
Gribron, worried that the party are losing the fight, spots the devil watching the fight from a safe distance, a big grin on its face.
“Help us out here!” yells Gribron to the devil. “Grab that sword.”
The devil’s grin gets even wider. “As you wish,” he says, and disappears in a puff of flame. A split second later he reappears next to Ambar, and the two of them start competing to draw Anyariel’s sword from the stag’s back.
This spurs on the party to greater efforts. Caryk, the worst of his wounds healed but by no means in peak condition, clambers back to his feet and strikes the creature a mighty blow with his quarterstaff. This seems to stagger the beast where half a dozen solid hits with his fists had not. “It must be vulnerable to wood,” he thinks. “Bizarre, but I suppose the clue is right in front of us.”
The fight has turned against the stag, but retreat is the last thing on its mind. It redoubles its efforts to gore Caryk, but his martial arts skills, his magical protections and his tough shell all combine to keep him out of trouble.
Suddenly everything happens at once.
The stag finally falls to its knees, and keels over under a flurry of blows, magic and arrows.
Solsus, realising that if the stag dies before someone has bonded with the sword then the seela will die with it, uses a small portion of his powers to keep it from expiring.
Ambar, with a mighty effort, fends off the devil and pulls the greatsword free of the stag’s body. The large sword shrinks in her hand, until it is the same length as the longsword she normally uses.
Jonathan, realising that with the sword now bonded to Ambar the stag is surplus to requirements, undoes Solsus’s work with a well aimed blow to the creature’s head.
The devil, looking piqued that the catfolk has out muscled him, draws his glaive. “Now the stag is dead, its time to renegotiate our agreement.”
As the stag dies, the forest explodes into an inferno of fire, as the flames rise higher than ever before. However, it lasts only for an instant, and then the flames start to gutter and die.
To the party’s amazement, they can once more feel the benefits of Indomitability’s boon. Killing the stag has restored it to them.
No one is in any doubt as to what sort of “negotiation” the devil has in mind. They turn their attentions to the new enemy.
The devil is a master of the glaive, and sets about striking as many of the party as it can. Caryk, Ambar and Jonathan all feel the bite of his blade. However, much to the devil’s surprise, the wounds do not continue to gush with blood after the devil moves on to a new target. Something is protecting them from the curse of the devil’s glaive. It seems there is more to Indomitability’s boon than they first suspected.
Shrugging, the devil changes his tactics. “Who wants to die first?” it hisses, and sizes up its potential targets.
Ambar is impressed with the grace and balance of her new weapon, and strikes the devil several times. However, its aura of evil somehow seems to be protecting it from mortal weapons.
Caryk is similarly struggling to injure the creature with either staff or fists, and it even seems to be resistant to Agatha’s eldritch blasts. Gribron targets it with bolts of force from his wand. There is a slight blurring as the bolts hit, but they strike home normally. The devil is failing to counter their magic, at least so far.
Jonathan, his mental powers exhausted from the struggle with the stag, has been using the mace he found in the shrine. It bears the mark of Olladra, and is able to batter through the devil’s infernal resistance. The creature howls in pain whenever it is struck by it.
The devil faces Jonathan. “You, I think,” it says, and launches a flurry of attacks. Jonathan crumples under the onslaught, covered in gaping wounds.
Gribron, seeing Jonathan’s plight, moves towards him. He is somehow able to ignore the space between him and his comrade, appearing by Jonathan’s side and pouring a healing draught down his throat.
Solsus, realising his sling is useless against fiends, pulls out a non-descript bag from his backpack and hurls it at the creature. It strikes true, and explodes into a pile of goo which solidifies into a clay like substance. Thus hampered, the devil becomes a much easier target and the party land some solid blows.
Ambar suddenly remembers the shroud they found in the bandit camp, back on the road to Haddin’s farmhouse. It too has the power to bless weapons, and she calls upon its power to imbue her sword with the means to bypass the devil’s protections.
Solsus hurls a second bag of goo, and his aim is even better than the first time. Not only is the devil covered in the stuff, it is also stuck to the ground. For the first time, the devil seems undecided on how to proceed. It considers teleporting back to its master to report another failure. However, the prospect of explaining its shortcomings whilst covered in the contents of two tangle-foot bags is too awful to contemplate.
Instead, it looks for someone to take out its frustrations on. The devil may not be able to move from the spot, but Gribron’s mission of mercy has put him within reach. The devil slashes out, but Gribron’s chain shirt deadens most of the force.
The devil is concentrating too much on hurting Gribron, and it has forgotten about Ambar. She takes full advantage, and drives Anyariel’s sword deep within its flesh. The creature gasps in shock, and dies.
Epilogue
The Fire Forest
January 12th, 11 am
The party spend two days licking their wounds. The seela are only too happy to extend to them the hospitality of the village.
Vuhl, however, is nowhere to be found. On of the seela reported seeing him transform into an oily black mass of writhing tentacles before disappearing from sight.
The party decide to see about putting Timbre out of her misery, but find that she and her tree are already dead. Now that the seela are saved she had no need to carry on living.
They also check on Nelle the unicorn. His patients are recovering well, and Nelle himself is looking much healthier.
Next they visit Gwenvere, to return the lock of Anyariel’s hair. She is pleased to see them, but suffers some sort of mysterious fit and expires. “I guess she had a heart attack,” says Jonathan. “Oh well, we might as well explore her lair, since she’s past caring.”
The exploration is made easier by the fact that on the nymph’s death the lake seems to be draining away, almost as if it was only her presence which had kept it in its current state. In a couple of days, the lake will be gone completely, but
Inside they find a mirror, and a copper clasp which seems perfect for attaching the lock of hair to it. Caryk decides to do so, whilst Jonathan and the rest keep a safe distance. As soon as the hair touched the clasp, Caryk’s reflection in the mirror undergoes a horrifying transformation. His face, never particularly handsome in the first place, squeezes out of proportion, and his skin breaks out in warts and pustules.
“That’s weird,” he says. “The mirror is distorting my reflection somehow.” He glances at his reflection in the lake. “Its hard to tell in the murky water, but I think my reflection might be changed there as well.”
He turns back to the rest of the party, who are looking pretty sick. “Its not just my reflection, is it? I wonder if the eladrin in Anyariel’s shrine is able to break curses?”
