Kafkonia
First Post
It's been a week since the minarets and steeples of Mandala were visible, and three days since the party entered the mountain range to the East of the Kingdom, retracing the route that was to be followed by the caravan that never arrived. The horses and riding dogs Dactyl Fakim provided to his hired adventurers have held up well to the travel, picking their way along the moderately well-travelled pass, and it seems like today will be yet another uneventful day of travel.
As the party crests a particularly steep rise, however, the halfling Carolina notices something unusual -- the animals in the area all seem perturbed. Birds are taking to the skies en masse, small mammals are hurrying down the slopes of the mountain, and the insects are buzzing about her head with an alarming insistency. Before she can mention any of this to her compatriots, however, the ground is rocked by a small tremor -- and then a larger, and a larger.
Without warning, the mountainside gives way beneath their mounts, and the five men and women find themselves tumbling downward, along with their animals and a sizeable amount of the terrain around them. Everything is a chaotic jumble of stones as they fall downward, and yet when they reach the bottom they find that, while they are scratched and bruised, they seem miraculously to have escaped without injury. Unfortunately, their mounts haven't been so lucky, as all have perished in the landslide.
The shock of the fall is soon overshadowed by a larger shock, quite literally -- a man the size a galleon lies before them, partly covered by the rubble. A natural death apparently claimed him long before their arrival, and yet he seems not to have decayed in all that time. A single cave winds down into the earth beyond the fallen behemoth, seeming quite inviting as the sky begins to darken.
As the party crests a particularly steep rise, however, the halfling Carolina notices something unusual -- the animals in the area all seem perturbed. Birds are taking to the skies en masse, small mammals are hurrying down the slopes of the mountain, and the insects are buzzing about her head with an alarming insistency. Before she can mention any of this to her compatriots, however, the ground is rocked by a small tremor -- and then a larger, and a larger.
Without warning, the mountainside gives way beneath their mounts, and the five men and women find themselves tumbling downward, along with their animals and a sizeable amount of the terrain around them. Everything is a chaotic jumble of stones as they fall downward, and yet when they reach the bottom they find that, while they are scratched and bruised, they seem miraculously to have escaped without injury. Unfortunately, their mounts haven't been so lucky, as all have perished in the landslide.
The shock of the fall is soon overshadowed by a larger shock, quite literally -- a man the size a galleon lies before them, partly covered by the rubble. A natural death apparently claimed him long before their arrival, and yet he seems not to have decayed in all that time. A single cave winds down into the earth beyond the fallen behemoth, seeming quite inviting as the sky begins to darken.