The Road Home - Part One
The third of High Sun, 1493
‘No, I won’t write you a ‘letter of commendation’,” growled the wounded Orc, “I acknowledge that you ended this curse, but it could have been done with a damn sight more care and a hell of a lot less bloodshed.”
The words of Hokrun still ringing in your ears, Enid chose to bypass the self-righteous Ranger of the Reach and forge her own letter of commendation: “This is to certify that the young deputies of Devlin’s Dower did a passable job protecting the community and effectively dealt with the wider ramifications of a wicked curse besetting these innocent people. Signed, Hokrun, Ranger of the Reach.” [This forgery can only be spotted with a DC22 investigation or insight check]
The party then ventured below the Mill to deal with Lord Skittering, the curse-warped vermin in the plum waistcoat. However, they found the creature had fled his nest, burrowing out of a hole beneath the Mill. Alarmingly, they found traces of letters scratched into the cellar floor: ‘SKTRNG.’ But they were suddenly distracted from their investigation of Lord Skittering’s escape tunnel and the implications of his growing intellect, as ‘IT’ the sentient masses of filth and detritus that Skittering had wanted them to deal with earlier, descended on the party. Having grown enormously and split into three parts, this oozing mass of corruption attempted to consume the party: Den punched one and felt his flesh sizzle. It then knocked him out and slithered over his unconscious body. Burley and Enid despatched the creatures, but noticed that their corrosive nature had eaten the edge off their weapons [-1 to attack and damage rolls]. Enid roused Den by laying her palms across his brow and suffusing the fallen caperer with holy light.
In the cellar, the party found a skeleton, missing its right hand. They intuited that this was the body of the missing Dunk, slain and dismembered by the Witch Owl, his body stashed below by ensorcelled villagers, and then picked clean by semi-sentient ooze. They collected the bones and returned them to the grieving Abigail, Dunk’s orphaned daughter. They did their best to comfort her, with Enid finding that her white lies were particularly palliative.
As Ilyad fed her adopted pet goat Gertie, the party rested beneath the shade of a tree, and finally had a chance to chat. Featherfew chose to share the riddling treasure map that he had found on the dead body by the roadside, months ago. The party wondered what it might mean, prompting Den to remind his friends that his real last name was Renshaw, as mentioned on the map; Ilyad showed everyone the silver key that she had been left with as an abandoned baby; and Pebbles recalled the names of the ‘Five Founding Families’ - Ashenwood, Devlin, Harrow, Monkton, and Roke - who had first settled this region, noticing that their initials corresponded with letters annotating various holes in the map. For all this, the document remained inscrutable.
Before leaving town, the party spoke once more with Elgin, the miller, who asked them not to tell him what they found in his cursed wife’s journal, worrying that it would be too distressing. Instead, they followed the clues she had left to the town’s well, a covered stone structure, secluded by a copse of trees. Den checked the depth by dropping the bucket, then descended the rope to investigate below. His dancing lights revealed a subterranean cave, its walls laced with pallid white fungus, and small, pale Lillies forming a gently bobbing circle in the water. On a rocky outcropping, he found a small poppet, a doll fashioned from scraps of clothing with a head made from a painted wooden bead. The rest of the party carefully descended the rope to join him. Ilyad reached out to sense the magic of this place, sensing that the poppet was imbued with some form of divinatory enchantment, while the entire well cave was suffused with conjuration magic. Burley dived deep beneath the water, but had to give up, his lungs almost bursting, without finding the bottom; the well was unfathomably, impossibly deep.
On the surface, Enid was all for discarding the doll, fearing it was cursed and likely to attract unhallowed attentions. The party were keen to show it to Ma Marigold however, and seek her advice. Featherfew cast his mind about for what he knew of Fey enchantments and suggested that they enclose the artefact in some iron vessel, which Pebbles promptly provided after scouring his rag and bone cart. The doll now safely ensconced in an old iron coffer with a broken latch, the party set off on the road home. Clarabelle the cat sniffed and hissed at the metal box, seemingly disconcerted by its presence.
Featherfew plotted a route home, one that while longer was likely to be somewhat easier [meaning that the journey will take 7 hours, but the difficulty checks along the route will only be DC14]. They crested a hill and surveyed a rippling wheat field, feeling invigorated and filled with hope [each party member received Heroic Inspiration].
The party then found a gaudily painted caravan, tethered to a nearby tree by a makeshift washing line, hung with dripping polka-dotted pantaloons and various drying undergarments. Their owner, the young wizard, Robard Blandish, was struggling to light a fire, staring into his tinderbox with confusion. The party chatted with Blandish, discovering that he had been named ‘the Canny,’ by his peers. Impressed by the party’s general level of magical aptitude, seemed at once taken with you all. Sensing that his voluble bonhomie was something of a performance, the party were nonetheless charmed by the itinerant wizard; both Pebbles and Ilyad competed to light his fire, inadvertently sending his kettle flying. He repaired the dented vessel with a quick magical rap on its surface, and then, at Burley’s request, did the same to his and Enid’s weapons. He told the party that he was in the region searching for magical relics he felt must be hidden below the soil, the vestiges of an ancient war, fought a thousand years ago, between human settlers and the armies of Fey Lords who wished to keep the land wild. He avoided answering Pebbles’ question as to what scared him the most, instead offering to discuss it over an ale, courtesy of Den, at the Groomsman’s Rest in a few days time. Before they parted, Blandish tossed Pebbles his tinderbox, a small metal tin filled with a tiny bedroom fashioned form flint; the wizard said that its spark had vanished, meaning the mephit that he had bound to it had escaped. He suggested that the party could restore its magic, if they could find and recapture the spirit.
Pleased with their new friend, the party continued along the road…