*Late at night, weapons cleaned and food eaten, you can finally get to rest. The children are finally chivveyed out by their mothers and aunts, grateful to Elexia for tending to them. In the morning, you are plied with warm oatmeal thick with honey, bacon, eggs, ham, potatoes, milk, bread, and jam. The farmers seem determined to fortify you in their own way, within if not without. The mothers drop a few words that their children had far less nightmares last night, and they themselves felt safer with adventurers in the house. Plied with food for your quest, you leave shortly after dawn.*
*It's an unusually chilly morning, overcast with leaden gray clouds hanging overhead. Drax leads everyone back to the site of the attack. Most of the rat bodies have been eaten by scavengers. It seems the rats came off to finish off their brethern. Picking up the broad trail, Drax trails it into the western woods, slightly south of the road. It takes about an hour of careful tracking, but finally he finds where the rats emerged from. It appears to be sinkhole, but closer examination proves it to be a collapsed ceiling to a stone corridor below. Many years ago, some of the lords had remote outposts in these regions, before they moved their manors further north, Gaoi recalls. This could be an old dungeon or bunker of some sort.*
*The sinkhole is about three feet wide, and lowers down into a corridor about seven feet tall, and choked with debris. Rat tracks and many bones of small animals are evident just inside the sinkhole. The stench rising up is terrible, rotting meat and vegetation.*
