The Orun Cliffs

The Wrathbreakers (for so they are now called) have rested for two months in Estona. They have passed the month of Settling attending to mundane matters in the town – shopping for weapons, making connections in the Church of Salt and the Academy, cleaning out and refurbishing their stronghold, and resting after their month of conflict and terror in the mountains. At the end of the month of Settling they visited Siladan the Elder, whose fate seems intertwined with their own, and asked him many questions about his past and about those sadly dead adventurers who they discovered on the journey to Estona.

During this period of relaxation and recovery they also met a Myrmidon named Kay, leader of a division of marines, who invited them to his office in the tower called the Redoubt, a small fortress overlooking the Docks and the bay. Here he acquainted himself with them, and mentioned to them that he had a few agents amongst the underworld of Estona who might occasionally make contact with the PCs, and offer them work on Kay’s behalf that he preferred not to have associated with the marines. They agreed to this suggestion, thinking it would be good to have things to do while they investigated the loose ends of whatever spiders’ web of lies and trouble had been cast over them when they stumbled on the deepfolk in the Middlemarch.

And so it was that, early in the month of Ice, one of those agents made contact with them, and they were invited to a meeting at a dockside dive bar called Charlotte Sometimes.

The Wreckers of the Orun Cliffs

The bar was a narrow single-counter slot between two warehouses at the edge of the docks, run by a man called Argalat. When they entered he gestured them upstairs, to a small second floor lounge with a single table big enough for one group of six. They settled around a small table that was soon groaning under a load of freshly grilled seafood and ales, and in between serving laconic patrons downstairs, Argalat explained the situation and the job.

Argalat himself was a sleazy-looking older man with a narrow, pinched frame and a cold manner. He was no doubt deep into various illegal activities, but carried himself as a man not compromised to within an inch of his life and up to his neck in treachery. He revealed that in exchange for this job he would owe the Wrathbreakers a favour, though it was hard for them to imagine what they might need from him – watered beer, perhaps, for a party? They were relieved to hear that they would also receive coin and a few potions.

Argalat told them that recently two ships had gone missing along the coast to the west of Estona, perhaps a day’s sailing west, along the Orun cliffs. A navy ship returning a few days ago had seen a light near the wreck of the second ship, and the marines now suspected there were wreckers operating on that stretch of the coast. Their guess was that a crew had a base somewhere in the Orun Cliffs, and were using a fake lighthouse to cause ships to wreck, then stealing their cargos and reselling them in Estona. The wrathbreakers’ job was to travel to the latest wreck, kill most of the wreckers, capture at least one, and bring him or her back to Estona to reveal their contacts. It was made very clear to the Wrathbreakers that once they had captured a suitable informant no other wreckers were to survive, and if they were to die by drowning it would be considered a bonus. The Myrmidon Kay wanted the Wrathbreakers to do it because he assumed someone would escape or somehow get a message out, and he wanted their contacts in Estona to believe it was a raid by rival gangsters, not a bust by the marines – that way their network in Estona would not go to ground, and when the Wrathbreakers returned with their information they would be able to move on the whole network.

They would sail the following night, heading along the coast until they were about a day’s walk from the shipwreck. That area of the coast featured a long, straight beach that they could easily walk along, so they would be taken past the wreck during the night by a shrimper’s ship and dropped at a safe cove a long distance from the wreck at dawn. They could then walk back along the beach until they reached the wreck and begin their investigations. There was a possibility that the wreckers were only accessing the beach by sea, the Orun Cliffs being imposing and often impossible to navigate, so in order to ensure the Wrathbreakers could bring their prisoners out, the marines would land at the wreck after three days. If the Wrathbreakers were not there to meet them, the marines would search for them and kill everyone they found.

An easy job! They agreed and set off to prepare.

The beach

The journey to the beach was uneventful, and at dawn they set off along its black sands. A biting, freezing wind howled along the beach, and the waves crashed with an even, rhythmic roar to their right as they marched back towards the wreck. They threaded a line along the wet sand near the waves, where walking was easier and the wind a little less biting, and where they had slightly less fear of falling rocks. The Orun Cliffs towered above them on their left hand side, here rising more than a kilometre into distant haze. At their base here the Cliffs were not as sheer as around Estona, forming a kind of rubble-strewn series of ledges leading down to the beach. Here, in between the black tumbled rocks of the cliff itself, the ledges formed grassy slopes scattered with occasional stunted trees and scrabbly patches of ferns in the lee of the larger rocks.

Everything else was an endless series of parallel lines: the black horizon of the beach, perpendicular to the distant hazy edge of the cliffs; a white line of surf trailing towards them from that far set square of black stone and powder, and cutting between them all the faint grey line of the ocean’s horizon, light hazy grey above and dark threatening green-grey below. Nothing grew, nothing moved. They walked, cocooned in the roar of the surf and braced against the frozen wind at their backs.

Towards midday they came across a bleached whale carcass, a huge line of perfect white bones stretching along the beach in front of them. As they approached a throng of rats and scavenger-lizards scattered from their slow feasting on the bones and fled across the black sand, disappearing into the scrub and scree at the edge of the beach. A seal lay lazily in the white foam of the breakers, watching them with innocent curiosity as they walked into the arch of the whale’s rib cage and stood staring at its monstrous form. The whale must have been an old giant of its kind, far bigger than a longship, and now here it was reduced to bleached white ruin, its empty eye sockets staring endlessly at the uncaring grey sky as a multitude of insects crawled over the bristling plates of baleen in its enormous jaw. Kyansei tossed a stone in the seal’s direction, and they walked on.

The wreck

Towards afternoon they reached the wreck. It lay in the waves at the beach’s edge, marooned and half broken by the constantly pounding surf but not yet fragmented. Perhaps 300 metres further on was a small promontory of Orun stone, jutting into the sea like the prow of a great black stone ship, but the wreck was surely too far away to have hit it. They guessed perhaps a light could have been set on that promontory, and decided to investigate it immediately after the ship. After some confusion and fussing Quangbae, Calim and Bao Tap waded out to the wreck to search it.

They found three bodies in the lee of the central cabin, rolling in the gently undulating water of the ship’s wave-shadow. As they approached them a seal popped its head out of the water and swam away, the only other living thing at the wreck. While Calim dragged the bodies out, Kyansei waded over and dived in to search the underwater parts of the wreck.

The bodies were long dead. Two were wearing leather armour, one carried a knife at its waist, and one was dressed in typical sailors’ rags. They had been gnawed on by fish and slowly rotted despite the freezing temperature of the water, and in their condition Calim could tell little about how they died. He did, however, find a small gold locket on one of the sailors, which Itzel identified to be enchanted. Upon deeper inspection, though, she noticed that strange greasy, unpleasant sensation of deep magic – it was an evil artifact of some kind. They covered it in salt and gave it to Calim for safe-keeping.

Under the wreck, in the frozen sea, Kyansei dug around in the captain’s cabins until she found a small chest, which she dragged out. On land as she slowly unfroze they smashed it open, revealing a pouch of coins and a bolt of a strange kind of chamois leather material, a super supple leather on one side lined with fine, short grey-brown fur on the other. Underneath the fur, embossed on the leather itself, was a complex geometric pattern of fine silver-blue lines, which had been applied in such a way that they must be some kind of tattoo. Were they looking at the skin of some person or monster? And if so, what? And who would remove it?

They realized then that there was an obvious problem with this wreck. It had not been looted, the single signature job of wreckers. Whatever reason it had been run aground here, it had not been for money. The “wreckers” they sought were either psychopathic killers who wrecked ships for pleasure, or had some other purpose behind their actions. At this point Kyansei voiced the question they had all been asking: what was this ship? What had it been carrying? And they realized that they had forgotten to ask this essential question before they set out from Estona. They were alone on this frozen black beach, in possession of a mystery, pursuing the wrong cause, and at least one of the bodies was steeped in deep magic.

What tangled web had they caught themselves in? (Again)

The Caves

From the ship they set out to the promontory. Bao Tap had conjured a spume-owl, a kind of owl that lives in the waves and almost never sets foot on land. He now sent it ahead to spy on the promontory and cliffs. So it was that by the time they had walked the short distance to the rocky outcrop they already knew that there was a cave in the face of that rock, with an open area of stone in front of it and a second entrance from its roof. They also knew that two men were watching them from the cover of the Orun Cliffs, though those men did not know they had been seen. The Wrathbreakers decided to try the caves first, and come back to the men in the cliffs when they knew who or what was inside the caves. It would be very bad to be trying to scale cliffs in pursuit of two men and have a whole brigade of archers emerge from inside the caves.

They checked the flat stone area outside the cave mouth for signs of a fire or light of some kind, but found none. So, with nothing left to investigate, they entered the cave. Kyansei entered first. She saw a line of shells scattered across the entryway, their mother-of-pearl sides all facing up to reflect the weak light from the cave entrance and the hole in the ceiling, but only realized it was a trap after she stepped over them and triggered it. From the eastern wall of the cave a huge blast of water erupted, striking her and driving her back out of the cave. Fortunately it did not do much damage, and Calim was there to heal her.

Guessing that the line of shells was the trap, and seeing it was now washed away, they entered the cave. Calim had noticed that the water that hit Kyansei was fresh, and wanted to investigate the source, so they headed east into a narrow tunnel that soon opened into a large cave. Here there was no light, so Itzel used her magic to cast a pale silvery glow around the cavern. This cavern was filled with a pool of water, in the middle of which stood a small rocky island. It was perhaps 2 metres from the entrance to that rock, and submerged in the water just a bit further into the pool was a human body.

Kyansei and Calim jumped into the frozen water to retrieve the body, and it immediately began to swirl and bubble. Four seals emerged as if from nowhere and began swimming in rapid circles around the rock. Sensing the worst, Kyansei hauled herself onto the rock, but behind her the current suddenly strengthened and dragged Calim under. He fought against the pull of the water and dragged himself out just long enough for Kyansei to drag him onto the rock. Everyone fled from the cave, and a moment later another blast of water hit them, knocking them down as they fled into the entrance cave but fortunately doing no damage.

When they ventured back into the cave the seals were gone, and there was no sign of any way they could have entered or left. Kyansei swore they had just appeared in the water as if by magic.

They all cursed. These were no wreckers. They had stumbled into a nest of fey, and now they were going to have to fight their way to whatever sick and twisted secret lay at its heart. Vivid memories of the redcap and its horrid games returned to them. What was it with Fey, water and twisted games?

There was only one way to find out. They girded themselves, and prepared for the worst …