Walking up the Middlemarch after the storm

Hugo Tuya’s guards have entered the Middlemarch, and are now committed to dragging their wagon and charges across the pass to the far side, even though they know this pass is likely guarded by deepfolk. The roster for this session:

  • Bao Tap, human stormcaller
  • Calim “Ambros” Nefari, human rimewarden
  • Itzel, elven astrologer
  • Kyansei of the Eilika Tribe, wildling barbarian
  • Quangbae, wandering blacksmith

They set off from their camp in the scree-scattered entry to the pass into a higher zone of smooth ground, the path winding easily through a kind of scrubby moorland interspsersed with streams, geysers, and broken ground. Around midday they realized they were being followed by a deepfolk scouting party, and in the early afternoon they set an ambush. They parked the wagon in the lee of a jumbled pile of rocks, and Kyansei and Calim pretended to be repairing it while the others hid in the rocks. The deepfolk seemed to fall for the trap and, rounding the curve of the rockpile, rushed to attack the wagon. There were four goblins and their captain, the captain standing back and firing crossbows, but soon after the guards sprung their trap a squad of Grig archers appeared from ahead – the deepfolk had also been attempting to set a trap around these rocks. The battle was short and easy, with the scouting party reduced to nothing in a very short time. Sadly, though, one of the Grig managed to escape. They did not risk leaving the wagon to find him, but proceeded on their journey.

It was the 1st of a new month, the month of Travel, when they broke camp to head deeper into the Middlemarch. After their struggles with the relatively smooth tree-scattered slopes at the head of the pass the land now rose sharply into a long, torturous slope of jagged ground criss-crossed by streams of steaming water, scattered with boulders and uncertain, crumbling patches of rough ground. The path was winding and unclear, sometimes fading into the scrappy ground and forcing them to wait at the wagon as Itzel or Kyansei scampered ahead over humped, rocky ground to find a clear path. By the end of the day they had reached a small but stubborn escarpment, which refused to offer them a pathway to the higher reaches of the pass. Here they stopped, but as they prepared to build a camp they were surprised by a sudden, violent storm. They had no time to make a camp but had to huddle as best they could in the shelter of the wagon. Bao Tap used his magic as best he could to ward it off but his magic was weak against the storm’s rage, and in the morning they woke exhausted, half frozen and hungry to find the wagon had been damaged by the storm. It took Quangbae all day to repair the wagon, and while he worked on it Itzel and Kyansei searched for – and found – a better campsite. They moved there before the cold night fell, and spent a second, more comfortable night huddled against the escarpment.

The following morning they resumed their search, and finding a way over the escarpment proceeded through the pass, reaching its highest point by the end of the day. They set another camp, and on the 4th of Travel broke camp to begin the careful descent towards the far side of the Middlemarch. Here as the pass began to slope downward the travel became extremely difficult. The ground was not only broken and cracked, but treacherous with ice from the recent storm, and covered in debris. Boulders, smashed trees, and rubble-strewn ground, cracks in the road, and sudden points where the road seemed to be lost, made the going difficult. By the end of the day they had made little progress, and everyone was exhausted from wrestling with the wagon. Night and the cold came quickly, and they had no time to find a camp. They found a small, pathetic stand of struggling trees and bedded down as best they could in their shadows.

Of course they set a watch, but it was to no avail. During Itzel’s watch, as she was huddling against their tiny fire trying to catch the last faint glimmer of its warmth, a squad of gobliin batriders fell out of the sky directly into their camp and began attacking them. Itzel screamed for everyone to wake up and attempted to escape the stabbing and slashing swords of the batriders, as a team of goblin raiders burst into the campsite to attack Bao Tap, and a band of small Grigg fighters slashed and hacked their way in too, accompanied by a goblin captain. Everyone struggled out of their bedrolls to join the fray, but their circumstances were dire: rolling on the ground, being stabbed at with spears and swords, grabbing for weapons and hasty spells as the darkness turned its teeth on them. The Grigg scrappers grabbed Hugo Tuya and dragged him screaming off into the dark, and other Grigg in the shadows fired arrows at Calim and Kyansei. Bao Tap, struggling to his feet among a horde of raiders, managed somehow to cast his most powerful spell, and moments later a huge, shaggy, iron-skulled old mountain goat charged into the clearing, trampling goblin raiders under its feet and roaring in rage. With this distraction they were able to regroup and slowly begin killing their attackers, but somewhere out in the dark they heard a man screaming and gurgling, and then more arrows fell on them.

Still, with the help of Bao Tap’s nature’s champion, they were able to slowly hack their way outward from the campfire, and eventually the last of their attackers fell or fled. The enormous shaggy goat chased after them, bellowing with all the inchoate rage of the mountains in winter, and silence fell on the camp. Calim cast his healing magic on those he could, they gasped and panted in the aftermath, and then they realized they had lost Hugo Tuya.

They found him soon enough, just outside the ring of trees, his throat cut from ear to ear and the snow around him brown with his own blood. He was dead, killed by the Grigg that captured him when they realized the battle had turned against them and their help was needed. Perhaps if one of the guards had charged out of the campsite sooner they might have been able to save him, but in the press of bodies and heat of battle no one had noticed. Their patron was dead. They had failed.

Here they stood, in the still cold dark of the coldest period of the night, exhausted, bloodied and cold, their mission failed, a dead merchant their only prize. They were at least two days from the base of the Middlemarch if their journey went smoothly, with only two days’ food remaining to them, surrounded by deepfolk who knew the land and the dark, running out of ammunition and energy. They had to make a decision: did they flee the pass as fast as they could, or did they follow these beasts and exact a bloody revenge for what they had done? The time had come for Hugo Tuya’s guards to define themselves, as failures or heroes…