The Ariaki delegation and the bridge to Ariaki from Miselea

Hugo Tuya’s guards, having vanquished the Redcap of the great forest and absorbed the evil secrets of its magic, moved quickly to the nearby town of Miselea. They needed to rest and recuperate, and had four weakened guards from the southern kingdom of Ariaki to return to their home nation after a year of hideous enslavement to the spider-fey. Miselea stood at the border between Hadun and Ariaki, on the northern side of the river that skirted the great forest, and it had a small Ariaki delegation continuously present to which they hoped to hand over their weakened and traumatized charges.

The Spider-slaves’ promise

On the journey to Miselea they spoke with the men and women they had rescued from the spiders’ nest, and though there was little they could do to ease their trauma after a year as brood-hosts and cleaning servitors for the giant spiders, they were able to learn a little more of the circumstances of their capture. The four had been bodyguards for an Astrologer, Salam of the Silver Eyes, from Alpon in northern Ariaki, not so far from its border with Hadun. He had been researching ancient beasts in a large and largely forgotten library in its crumbling Academy when he had stumbled on stories of an ancient spider lord in the forest. Perhaps under-estimating the side and evil of the spiders they would meet, and knowing nothing of the existence of Redcaps, he had hired six guards and set off into the forest to learn its secrets. They had been ambushed almost as soon as they arrived in the nest area, and had been so overwhelmed by the spiders that the entire squad had been webbed and dragged back to the lair before they could do any harm to the spiders. At the lair they had been surely destined for food – and one of them had been consumed, horribly, in front of them – before the Redcap appeared and saved them, using its magic to force four to be servitors and taking Salam and a single member of their team away for its own use. Conscious during the year of their captivity but unable to resist the Redcap’s magic, only the exhaustion, cold and the constant poisoning by the spiders had helped to obliterate their memories of what had happened to them.

They vowed to the guards that they would do all they could to help them destroy the spiders. Though they were terrified of them they also knew their ways, and had a deep and urgent desire to destroy them all. They would vouch for the information the guards passed on to the elves, and after their return to Alpon would be ready to assist the guards in a strike on the spider god – and whatever Redcap monarch lived with it – in the depths of the forest. The guards simply had to visit Alpon and call upon them, and they would come.

Rest and Research in Miselea

Miselea was a town of about 3000 people on the southern border of Hadun, on the northern bank of the river that separates Hadun and Ariaki. This small river has its source at the southern hills of the Valley of Gon and flows east to Miselea before turning north and flowing along the edge of Ariaki’s great forest – it was this river that Hugo Tuya’s caravan had followed from Inorat at the beginning of their travels. Here at Miselea the river was youthful and bold, not especially deep but fast flowing and active, splashing over rocks and sparkling in the Autumn sun under gentle weeping willows as the group entered the town from its eastern, relatively unguarded gate. Miselea’s Bailey is on the western edge of the town, looking west from stern palisades over the farmlands of the last Hadun farms before the land begins to rise to the foothills on the eastern edge of the Valley of Gon, where lawless folk live. Most of the town of Miselea sprawls across the lowlands north of the river, outside the Bailey, but there is a small rise on the northern bank where a smaller palisade separates the Ariaki delegation from the rest of the town. Between the delegation and the Bailey is a stretch of shops, restaurants and hotels, where the group stopped to rest for the evening before they attended to their errands in the town.

The following morning they went about their business. They sold some of the material they had stolen from the bandits, Itzel visited an elven legate in the town to sell the spidersilk they had taken from the spiders, and they returned the weary Ariaki survivors to their delegation. At the Ariaki delegation Kyansei asked the Ariaki elder if he knew anything of a strange blight afflicting her land, and he promised to have the Academy at Alpon look into it. They then visited the local Rimewarden for healing, and while they were there Calim described to the Rimewarden the strange standing stones they had found outside of Ibara, and the Deepfolk bones and iron buried beneath it. The Rimewarden pulled out an old travel book, and pointed Calim to the discovery of other such standing stones along the eastern edge of the Spine mountains. For years scholars had pondered the reason for the existence of these standing stones, and wondered who made them, but seeing this finding of Calim’s he considered renewing research into the stones. He would send a letter to the Abbey in Rokun, and perhaps by the following Sun season they would mount an expedition to dig under other stone circles to see what they could find.

Thus it was that in Miselea the group set in train several strands of investigation that might see them wish to return here in future:

  • The Astrologers in Alpon would investigate the possible meaning of blight affecting Kyansei’s lands
  • The four soldiers they had rescued from the spiders would aid them in agitating for, and join, a quest against the spider god: they could be found in Alpon when the characters were ready
  • The Abbey in Rokun would be requested to begin an expedition next year to investigate the standing stone ruins on the eastern edge of the Spine – perhaps the characters could join it.

With these actions set in motion, the guards returned to their hotel, and prepared to set off the following day for Estala, on the next stage of their journey.

Raiders

They set off the following day, 16th of the Storm, heading northwest towards Estala. This journey would take them three days, with the first night spent camping in the wilderness, the second in a small town called Ell’s Hamlet, and the third in Estala if the roads and weather treated them well. The road now took them east of the headlands of the Valley of Gon, so they needed to begin showing care.

The borders of Ariaki and Hadun had been settled for some 200 years now, with little dispute over them. The Great Forest of was acknowledged as Ariaki possession, though it only nominally belonged to that nation since it was largely wild and the elves held dominion in its eastern edges. The small river that ran between the great forest and the hills to the west, marked on its eastern edge by the town of Miselea, was a commonly-accepted defining line between the two kingdoms; but at its source this river sprung from the foothills that marked out the southern edge of the Valley of Gon, Hadun and Ariaki’s Big Problem. The Valley was a fertile sweep of land bordered on its southern side by a great river, and on the north by a line of sharp peaks. At its north-eastern end it rose to highlands nestled in an arc of lesser mountains, and once its highlands had been dotted with villages, its lowlands peaceful farmland. However, Ariaki and Hadun’s ancient border disputes had never been able to settle this land as they had the great forest and the lowlands around it. To Hadun the border of Ariaki lay at the southern side of the Valley, where the river ran; to Ariaki the border was on the northern side, where the peaks rose up sharp from the fertile ground. Over time wars had been fought here, and much blood spilled, until eventually both nations fought to a stalemate and the land became, essentially, independent. Now it lay between the two nations, claimed by both but controlled by neither and instead occupied by a motley collection of farming towns and ruins ruled over by warlords, champions and thieves. At its north-eastern end these warlords would sometimes send raiders into Hadun, seeking prisoners to ransom or harvest spoils; at its southern edge pirates still worked their evil trade, and occasionally raiders splashed across the fords of the river to take wood from Ariaki forests, or attack peaceful villages for iron and coin.

So it was that on the second day of their journey, in the morning, after a restful night’s sleep in the open, Hugo Tuya’s caravan entered a pass between two shallow hills and they were attacked by raiders. Four men and a leader on horseback confronted them on the road, but before they could properly negotiate they were fired at by archers hidden in nearby woods. They attacked the soldiers and slaughtered them but could not find the archers. Finally the leader, fearing for his life, fled down the road on his horse, and the archers withdrew unharmed. Hugo Tuya’s guards realized that these raiders must be the advance guard of a larger party, and that this party might have or be preparing to take prisoners from Ell’s Hamlet. They picked up their weapons, took a breath, and prepared to follow the horse to whatever bloody end it led them …