The Wrathbreakers have arrived in the Valley of Gon, where assassins stalk them for reasons they do not understand, seeking the abducted apprentice of Siladan the Elder. They believe this apprentice, Sara, is being held in the Freehold of Ar, which previously sent raiders to find documents once in her master’s possession. They plan to travel to the town of El, whose Warlord leader Elizabeth the 4th is a rival of the Warlord Argalt who holds Ar, and try to make a deal with her. The roster for today’s adventure:

  • Bao Tap, human stormcaller
  • Calim “Ambros” Nefari, human rimewarden
  • Itzel, elven astrologer
  • Kyansei of the Eilika Tribe, wildling barbarian
  • Ella, spume dwarf scoundrel
  • Xu, human weaponmaster from Ariaka

For this adventure the Wrathbreakers have two new members, a dwarven scoundrel on the run from a suspicious ship that she abandoned after learning the crew are occasional pirates; and Xu, a human weaponmaster who was introduced to the party by one of their marine guards. Their marine guards have left and will return to Estona, but upon leaving they gave the party some Striders and a special present: a Shardhawk, a rare bird capable of flying rapidly over vast distances, that is trained to return to the tower of the Myrmidon Kay in Estona. Should they need help they can send this bird back to Estona with their plea, and he may choose to answer it.

The town of El

First the wrathbreakers traveled upriver to El on a nameless riverboat, arriving two days later. El sits just east of the confluence of two rivers that make up the river Gon. The town used to have an outpost on the confluence itself but constant attacks by rival warlords forced the first Elizabeth to give up this town, which is now a ruin, and move El about an hour’s travel East. None of the warlords wanted any other warlords to have control of the confluence of the rivers, so aside from a few ramshackle travelers’ inns and a boat repair dock there was no activity remaining at this strategic point. To the east, however, lay the farms and mines of the Freehold of El, spread around its small but powerful centre, the town of El. Their nameless riverboat drifted into this town, passing through slums on both sides of the river to dock at the westernmost wharf. Here a crowd of scammers, grifters, longshorefolk and labourers gathered to pry the visitors’ money from their grip as quickly as possible. From amongst this gang of chancers the Wrathbreakers selected a guide, Scrim, to get them oriented to the town. Scrim was a busy, active and cheerful young man with an oily manner but an accomplished ease in the city: he had them in a tavern and preparing for their stay in El very quickly and easy. He found them a manse separate to a large and comfortable tavern and hotel complex near the central stronghold. The tavern, called the Last Ember, had multiple levels in its main building, a large and famous restaurant serving Ariakan food, and a pleasant garden surrounding its guest areas. Behind this garden was a separate outhouse, an entire building with multiple bedrooms and its own common areas, which Scrim was able to secure for them at reasonable rates. From there they were able to begin their plans to explore the city and meet the Virgin Warlord. Scrim set off to begin brokering meetings, and they moved to the restaurants and bars of the town to find out what they could before their meeting began.

They did not learn much at dinner. El is a small town on the border of Ariaka, with some long-abandoned deepfolk mines where they dig up what is left of the silver, gold and iron that the deepfolk were scavenging for hundreds of years ago. The mines were abandoned before the city of El was formed, perhaps before the Valley of Gon was disputed, and had been left with relatively intact ore loads compared to most abandoned deepfolk mines. This had made the warlords of El rich, compared to many of their neighbours, and they were one of the few Freeholds to have formed a kind of dynastic lineage, in which each Warlord had managed to choose their successor (called the Elizabeth) for the last four generations. This had made the town something of a power in the area, and the most recent Elizabeth – called also the Virgin Warlord – clearly had intentions to expand, perhaps with the ultimate plan of taking back control of the river confluence and declaring the entire Upper Gon their demesne. Such power plays require long, careful preparation, however, and the impression the Wrathbreakers received from their short time in the Last Ember’s bar was that this project was a long way from fruition – though nonetheless the locals of El were proud of their warlord’s power and confident in the superior position their Freehold commanded in the Valley. It was obvious that the wrathbreakers would need to appeal to that long-term project – perhaps offering a way to help with the vassalization of the Freehold of Ar – if they were to have any hope of gaining help from Elizabeth 4. With those thoughts they retired to bed, to dream of living in easier lands.

The Guard Captain’s Problem

By the next morning Scrim had organized a connection for them: a meeting with the chief of El’s guards. They would not be able to meet Elizabeth 4 until they could satisfy this man that they were of use, and as they expected, he had a trial for them. They would have to deal with a small “problem” the town had uncovered, and if they could do so successfully he would pay them 2500 coin and arrange them a meeting with the Virgin Warlord. But they would have to do so immediately, and it would not be easy.

The guard captain told them that a monster had been unleashed in a mine to the southeast of El. A group of miners had broken through a wall a week ago, uncovering a strange set of linked chambers. When they explored those chambers they had been attacked and slaughtered by something, with only one survivor. Some guards sent in later that day had also been killed. The miners had resealed the wall but the guard captain doubted that their hastily improvised stonework would hold for long, and he needed some brave warriors to go in and kill whatever was inside. He had been preparing to send in some of his own guards but did not want to waste his elite soldiers on such a task, which made the Wrathbreakers’ arrival extremely fortuitous. They simply had to go in, kill it, bring him evidence it was dead, and make sure nothing else was in there that could leave any nasty surprises. He wanted them to go immediately before the thing broke out and news of this trouble reached Elizabeth 4. Once it was done he would present the evidence of its elimination to her, along with an invitation to meet them. Since the old mine was originally a deepfolk excavation, his best guess was that it was some form of deepfolk monstrosity, left behind when they abandoned the mines in those previous eras.

The Wrathbreakers agreed to his suggestion, of course, and set out immediately for the mine. A few hours’ travel on their striders got them to the location by mid-afternoon on a dreary, grey and slightly snowy Still day. The mine was a simple hole carved into a hillside, with a messy jumble of shacks and open service tents scattered around the muddy slopes. They perched their Striders and moved into the camp, speaking to a few resting miners at the edge of a shabby tea tent who told them to visit the hospice tent. These miners were obviously not working here by choice: they were typical Valley of Gon indentured labourers, effectively slaves working where their patron sent them. They were thin, grubby, scared and wary, with injuries and signs of mistreatment hidden under scanty clothes. Up the hill a few ill-disciplined guards lounged around a fire, watching the PCs suspiciously.

The hospice tent was just a stretch of awning on poles, barely keeping the drifting snow out of a rush-floored space that had two canvas beds, a rough wooden bench with some herb jars on it, and a pair of miners siting on logs in place of real chairs. One of these was the sole survivor of the initial contact with the beast. He was physically unhurt but appeared gaunt and withdrawn, and he shook when his friend handed him tea. After a little time to break the ice, mostly spent assuring him that they had not been sent by the guards to permanently shut him up about his experience, the surviving miner told them that he remembered little except a brief flash of pale white light, a sudden rush of movement, then everything went dark and people started dying. He described a cloying, supernatural fear in the darkness, and then he just ran while behind him people died. He was followed out by a piece of someone, who had been killed so brutally that their dismembered body parts had flown out of the gap in the cave – he told them it was now being disposed of after the guards investigated it.

They thanked him for his limited information and headed off to find the person disposing of the body part. It was a severed arm that looked as if it had been brutally torn off the body, but there were no signs of teeth marks or claws. They could learn little from such limited evidence, and finding the guards to be of no use at all decided that their best approach was simply to go into the caves and start fighting.

The beast in the darkness

They entered the mine through the cutting in the hillside and passed carefully down a long, smooth, circular passage. Aside from some small recent modifications this was obviously deepfolk work, of far too high quality to have been made by humans, and obviously very old. The walls were so smooth and well-worn that they appeared almost polished, and somehow a cool, dry breeze kept the tunnel airy and comfortable. It traveled smoothly down a considerable distance, curving back on itself and stopping twice at wide, flat rest areas that had obvious signs of recent human modification: quenched fires, rough wooden benches, coat racks and marks of rough human use. Finally the tunnel leveled out and split into three mine galleries. Following instructions they took the right hand gallery and passed along it to its end, where they found a pile of rocks from a hastily constructed makeshift barrier. The miners who had built that barrier a week ago had knocked it down an hour earlier to give the Wrathbreakers a way in, but they had done it as quickly as they could for fear of being attacked, and the gap in the rocks was barely wide enough for one member of the party to pass through at a time.

Naturally they sent their scout, Ella, first. She slipped through the gap and into a long, narrow cave in complete darkness. Behind her Itzel conjured a ball of soft blue light, but she could still barely see. The room was empty and cold. She crept along, checking for signs of enemies, and then crept back to bring the others through. In the glow of Itzel’s light they saw a small cave, probably also of Deepfolk design, that ended in another small gap in the rock. Passing through this gap took them into a smaller cave, fashioned as if it were an antechamber to a larger entrance in its left hand side. This entrance was open, and Ella’s keen eyes saw a thin line of white powder in a smooth arc from wall to wall in front of this gap. The miners who entered here must have missed it, because their feet had scuffed it and scattered powder over the floor, though the line was mostly intact. Calim tasted it and confirmed everyone’s suspicions: salt. It must have been here long before the miners came in here, judging by the way the powder at the ends of the line had solidified against the wall even in the cool dryness of the cave. Had the deepfolk – who hate salt – used salt to bind something inside this room? And the miners, not seeing the salt or guessing its meaning, had simply passed over whatever barrier this represented and into the room?

Sadly Itzel’s magical talent was not sufficient to probe this ancient barrier, and she could not tell if it was imbued with deep magic or any other enchantments, but they all guessed it must be. They paused, prepared themselves, and stepped over the line.

Nothing happened until they reached the middle of the cave on the far side of the room, but when it came the attack was sudden and brutal. Itzel’s light did not reach to the edge of the cave, so it came out of the darkness. There was a flash of light and suddenly a huge figure in bizarre, bone-like white armour rushed into the middle of their group, attacking Ella. They had expected it but it was so fast that they were still taken completely off guard, and it was able to strike before anyone could move. Two of them hit it but the armour absorbed their strikes, and then the room plunged into darkness and the beast was gone, hidden in the deep darkness it had called forth. A wave of torrid sounds flooded over them – the whispers of terrified children, screams of pain, discordant screeching sounds, and a gasping fear of suffocation. They stood solid though, and Itzel fashioned a spell to dispel the darkness. Bao Tap attempted to summon a nature’s champion but failed, and Kyansei struck the beast hard enough to damage it. Itzel then attempted to escape over the barrier, realizing she would be dead if the thing hit her. In the light she had summoned they could see it was 3-4m tall, humanoid, with heavy armour and carrying an enormous greatsword as if it were a shortsword. Its eyes glowed with a malevolent, pale blue light and every time it moved it emitted a sinister hissing sound. It hit Kyansei, Bao Tap summoned a giant scorpion, the thing cast some spell that suddenly caused Xu, Calim and Kyansei to slam into the ceiling with Calim suffocating and struggling on the ground when he landed. Then the thing attacked the nature champion, but Kyansei followed it. They exchanged blows, the thing sometimes exploding with white light and firing beams of brilliant white light at members of the group, but Kyansei’s strikes were hard and true. Soon the warriors in the group managed to batter it into submission and it fell, drained and broken, to the ground. The swirling shadows, the strange whisperings and urgent fears subsided, and the thing lay vanquished.

But not dead. They stood in the room, panting and shaking, looking at their slumbering foe. If they wanted they could wake it, try to ask it questions about what manner of creature it was and why the Deepfolk had left it here. Or, they could kill it and take its head back to the guard captain with incurious savagery. Which would they do? Were they sufficiently curious about what this thing was to wake it and risk fighting it again, or would they settle for simple, bloody victory?