Compromise and Conceit

The Wrathbreakers have encountered parasites on the open seas on the western edge of the Archipelago, and also some monsters. Having killed the monsters, they decided to also kill the bandits who they are working with, but first they must travel to the Lambent Cays to meet the Gull, and find out what this mysterious dwarf knew about the Ashentide and the activities of deepfolk in the southern Spine Mountains. Can they hold their wrath under control until their work in the Lambent Cays is done?

A serendipitous offer

With 12 crew from the Stirge, two survivors from the Wages of Sin and the four Wrathbreakers themselves, captain Leneus realized that he could scratch together enough crew to sail both ships to the Lambent Cays provided the weather remained fine and he could put Bao Tap on one of the ships and himself on the other. He called the Wrathbreakers to his cabin and put this suggestion to them, followed by another, grimmer idea: if they would stick with him back to the Bones after their task in Lambent Cays was complete, he proposed that they help him destroy his boss Krotos and take over Krotos’s criminal enterprise. In exchange he offered to let them keep the Wages of Sin. “I’ll throw in a crew to get you as far as Hadun, and you can even keep the boy,” he added, “Provided you return him relatively intact when his family have paid their debts. Don’t worry, you’ll be bored of him by the time they do, it’ll be no skin off your back.”

Given that the Wrathbreakers had already agreed quietly together that they would murder Krotos and break up his criminal enterprise when they returned to the Bones, and had been planning to murder Leneus on their way to the Lambent Cays as the first instalment of their plan, his suggestion seemed ideal. He and his little crew of flotsam could help them to surprise Krotos and kill him, and hopefully during the battle a few of them would be killed by Krotos’s men. Then they just needed to clean up Leneus with the same treacherous moves he had shown himself willing to deploy on his own boss. For once, they really did have an effective plan! They agreed to his scheme, and the following morning Bao Tap and Ella joined seven crew on the Wages of Sin, to help sail it to the Cays.

Pearl Reach

The Lambent Cays are a string of small islands to the west west north of the Bones, which are situated on a wide shelf that forms a shallow sea surrounded by deeper ocean. The islands are all between 10 and 30km apart from each other in a chain, and each island is about 1-5km across. Most of them are uninhabited, but five of have small monasteries on them.

The islands are surrounded by sprawling coral reefs, which can extend up to several kilometres offshore and which glow during the night with phosphorescent light. This means that the islands are only approached at night, because the gaps between the reefs are clearly visible as pathways of shadow between the phosphorescent light of the reefs. The coral glows with a different colour depending on the position of the island in the chain. The waters of the northernmost islands glow a rich, dark bluish-purple, while the seas around the southernmost islands are flooded with a vivid red.

The five inhabited islands are called:

• Indigo Haven
• Cerulean Gardens
• Pearl Reach
• Amber Inlet
• Jasper

The Gull lived in the central island, Pearl Reach. The reefs around Pearl Reach extend several kms from the island itself, and are a brilliant flickering mixture of silver white and green. The channel to the harbour is an arc of darkness that spirals through this cloud of light, twice circling the island before finally opening to a small bay on its eastern side.

The island itself has a small port inside this natural bay, surrounded by cliffs. There is a small town here, called Pearl, which is a little back from the sea by the side of a small stream. Boats anchor in the bay and ferry in passengers and goods in small ship’s boats. The bay is lined with a smooth, clean beach of white sand. The town has a population of about 200, all support workers for the monastery.

The rest of the island is formed from the slope of the hill that hulks around the bay. The hill is about 100m high at the top of the cliffs overlooking the bay, but then sweeps back up to about 500m high, an old volcanic peak. It then reaches in a smooth slope down to the sea, falling over a distance of about 4km. The rear half of the island has two other small towns, of 200-300 people each, which support rice farms, sheep herding and fishing. The Wrathbreakers did not see these settlements as they sailed into the island, because they had to circle the island at night, sailing carefully through the wide, dark channel that cut between the reefs in a steady spiral towards the bay, Bao Tap and Leneus concentrating on the wind to ensure the ship stayed steady, the sailors rowing carefully and concentrating on the steering. All about them the sea glowed a deep, rich mixture of whites and greens so that they felt they were sailing through star-glowing clouds rather than water.

Finally they reached the bay, and the crew visibly relaxed as they broke free of the channel between the reefs, leaving the silvery water behind them and sailing into the secluded, lapping shallows in front of the town. Ahead of them they could hear the gentle susurration of waves on the beach, and see a line of lights where the town sat a little back from the shore.

The Gull’s Secrets

They found a hostel near the shore and collapsed into the first decent sleep in 10 days, freed of sailing responsibilities, the noise of the bandit crew fussing on deck, or the constant unsettling swaying of the ship. In the morning they headed up the cliff face to the monastery, to find the Gull.

The monastery, they learned, is a complex of caves set into the top of the cliff, with visitors rooms, chapels, galleries and accommodation in the airy, open network of rooms with windows overlooking the sea and laboratories, libraries and workshops buried in the depths of the mountain. Somewhere above this, slightly inland and higher up the hillside beyond the cliffs, they were told there was an ancient forest called the Sacred Grove, which acted as a kind of seed bank and repository of all the ancient herbal and natural resources the dwarves used in their seasteads. Although the origin of the dwarves was a secret kept from humans (or perhaps a mystery to even the dwarves themselves) one rumour held that they had sailed to the Archipelago from the west, beyond the maps, and the Lambent Cays had been their first stopping point. Here, before they spread out to settle seasteads all across the western and southern oceans, millenia before they formed their first settlements on the Isle of Teseran, they laid in a stock of their most precious magical and medical plants, and left a devoted priesthood to husband the grove in perpetuity. Now thousands of years old, the grove was a seedstock for the entire dwarven realm. If a seastead on the Sahakan Ocean suffered some catastrophe and lost some of its most precious herbals, it could send word to Pearl Reach. The guardians of the Grove would procure a cutting, bulb, spore or seed or shoot from the Grove and send it with all due care to the supplicant, restoring their ability to grow all the most important things they needed. It was also said that these guardians regularly harvested the magical and medicinal plants of the grove and worked to make potions and potent magic items which would be distributed to seasteads and ship’s captains as they were needed. Particularly on the Sahakan and Dorato Oceans, these magical items and the full range of apothecary goods and trinkets were essential for dwarven stormcallers to protect their seasteads from storms, leviathans, pirates and all the mysteries of the ancient seas.

And, upon retiring from adventuring, the Gull had joined the guardians, to spend the rest of her days in quiet gardening and arcanery.

They met her in a pleasantly furnished and comfortable viewing gallery with fine views over the bay and the flickering reefs, and she led them to her personal study. This was a smaller, cozy room with a balcony protruding from the cliff face, notes scattered around, some plant cuttings on a bench and pencil sketches on the walls. They sat down to talk in comfortable chairs around a coffee table, taking coffee and sweets. She was a lean woman tending to middle age, with scars of dark magic on her neck and cheek and a calm, detached manner. They told her about the deaths of her fellow Ashentide members Gerald and Verbere, and a little about how they had helped Siladan in Estona.

In return she told them again the story of the final adventure of the Ashentide, of how they had to abandon Ash’s body and did not know if she had been brought back as undead by the deepfolk. She remembered that they had stumbled on a small squad of deepfolk carrying the box of elven documents, and they had fought hard to defend them. She remembered that after they retreated from the deepfolk camp they had checked the documents but it had all been gibberish to her. Many of the pages, she recalled, looked like the diary of a madman, with strangely chaotic writing in many different sizes and styles, lists and diagrams and doodles that made no sense. She tried copying them but could not easily capture the sense of the writing, and gave up quickly. After that the group retreated to Estona and broke up there. When they parted they left the documents with Siladan, who seemed most interested in them.

The Gull told them she still had a box of mementoes from her time with the Ashentide, and they were welcome to take the afternoon to go through it while she worked. They searched the box and found little of interest, but between two sheets of paper with attempted sketches of the elven documents they found a note, written in deepfolk. The sketches had stuck together with damp or some light glue, perhaps an accident of the work environment at the time, and the Gull guessed the note had been between them. Looking at it now, many years later, she guessed it had been amongst the elven documents, and had fallen amongst her sketches at some point. She could not read it, of course, but the Wrathbreakers could. It read as follows.

Master

These notes are old, and make no sense. You curse me with their interpretation. This language is filthy when spoken by the sane from amongst the Tree Scum, but this is madness, one crazy man’s notes on his dreams.

They raise a question for me though. You say these writings are old. The mad fool who penned this dross implies that the Seven Children of Rage did not exist until the beasts who walk beneath the sun (may they all be reaved from this land) arrived.

We cannot know. But I have heard rumours of an ancient observatory from before The Awakening, somewhere in the region the beasts call Darepo (may the seas around that peninsula swallow them whole). Of course it is lost to us. If its records survive, they will have the truth of it.

Bid me not journey there, I would never again walk under the sun. There must once have been a road there under the earth, but it is lost to memory.

Who would journey all that way for simple rumours? Unlike you, I care not for the stars we abandoned, but only for the beauty of the still darkness beneath the earth, and the consolations of rage.

WRATHCHILD!

So, the Wrathbreakers surmised, the deepfolk had once long ago had an observatory on the Cape of Darepo, and had abandoned it at about the time that humans arrived on earth – which is what they suspected The Awakening referred to. Why would people who live under the ground have an observatory? Simple curiosity? Furthermore, the Seven Children of Rage was a reference to the seven stars that must align soon, at which point the Deep Cult’s secret goals might be realized. Yet this letter – taken from amongst the elven documents – suggested that these stars had not existed before humans arrived. How was this possible? And how could this information be in elven documents, which were apparently the raging of a madman? What mad elf had written these documents and how had they been lost to the elves and recovered by deepfolk?

The Wrathbreakers would find out. They planned to return to the island of Hadun through Alpon, and to get there they had to pass through the Cape of Darepo. They would find this observatory and loot its ancient books, learn why the Deepfolk had an observatory there and why they had abandoned it, and uncover whatever secrets it held – no matter what the cost.

But first they had to slaughter Krotos the dwarven gangster, break up his evil gang, and take back the Eye of a Dead God, which currently slept in the darkness of a cellar in the millenium-aged bones of an ancient leviathan. They bid the Gull good day, and turned their faces to the sea…

The Wrathbreakers have secured the Eye of a Dead God, and now they have a list of artifacts that the deepcult is searching for. Though they do not know why the deepcult seeks these strange and disturbing items, they at least now know what they are seeking. They decided to take the Eye of the Dead God to the Reliquary in Alpon, on the assumption that once there it would be far from its original location, protected, and difficult for the deepfolk to locate. To further complicate the search, they decided to take it there by way of the dwarven region known as the Outriders, and to spend some time looking for the only other surviving member of the Ashentide, the dwarven stormcaller known as The Gull.

The Bones

Although the town they were staying in was small they were in luck, and after a few days were able to obtain passage on a ship called the Wanderer, that was visiting the largest seastead in the Outriders, a place called The Bones. The Wanderer was a small, tough, weathered looking dwarven Cog, with a mixed crew of dwarves, humans and elves. The captain was a middle-aged, extremely tall, extremely thin elf called Antazel, and the first mate was a Changeling called Stalker. Once they were out to sea Stalker transformed to his natural form, which was disturbing to a group of adventurers who were increasingly coming to view Changelings with fear and distrust. Nonetheless, despite his dour manner Stalker seemed much-loved by the crew of the Wanderer, who seemed to all intents and purposes like a tightly knit and warm group, with no secrets or enmities.

The Wanderer delivered them safely to the Bones. As they approached the seastead they came to a strange region of large, regular waves, breaking in the open ocean in a perfect arc pattern that stretched for kilometres to both sides of the boat. In the distance they could see small ships floating in the water near the waves, and dwarves surfing the waves on solid wooden longboards. Captain Antazel explained that the Bones was surrounded by a region of supernatural calm, induced by generations of stormcallers working constantly to protect the community from storms and extreme weather, and this zone of calm at its edge acted like a kind of reef. Here the waves from the deep ocean broke smoothly and regularly against the magical wards surrounding the Bones, and on clear, calm days they presented a perfect surf break. Young dwarves would come here and surf at the edges of their community, resting on wooden buoys that marked out the edges of the Bones’s calm zone in between breaks.

They passed close to one of these breaks, to watch the dwarves surfing, and then resumed their journey westward to the Bones. They arrived an hour later, sailing into the strangest community the Wrathbreakers had ever seen[1].

The Bones was a seastead built in the skeleton of a huge sea creature. A kilometre long and rising a hundred metres above the water, the skeleton’s fin-bones sank 200m deep below the waves, and the bones of its spine and a strange keel structure in its chest stabilized it beneath the water. Its largest veretbra was 100m across and 50m high, and its skull was 100m in diameter. Submerged beneath the water were two huge swim bladders, each 250m long and 50m deep, made of a strange transparent membrane that allowed light in, and which had been turned into huge parks. Wooden homes had been built on and between the vertebrae of the beast, and chambers and tunnels carved within them. The Wanderer docked on the partially submerged bones of the beast’s giant tail, and the Wrathbreakers disembarked into this strange dwarven floating city made of bone.

Antazel told them that the Wanderer would travel from here to the cape of Darepo, where it would deliver dwarven manufactured goods, before returning via the Bones to the Moran Kei Peninsula, carrying wheat or wood or buffalo meat. The Wanderer would leave in a few days and they would have to find their own onward transport, or wait months for its return.

This suited them fine – they had things to do. Once they had settled they asked around about the Gull, and were able to learn that she was now living in a place called the Lambent Cays, an island chain much further west from the Bones. They tried to investigate further, but it was made clear to them that humans were not allowed at the Lambent Cays, and they should stop asking questions if they wanted to remain welcome on the Bones.

The Stirge and the Crab

The Wrathbreakers were not so easily discouraged. They found an area of the Bones where gangsters and smugglers plied their trade, and asked around. Sure enough, after a day a dwarf called Krotos approached them with a deal: he had a ship that needed guards to perform a mission, and that ship would take them to the Cays “in an emergency” if they would do the mission for him.

Of course they agreed. The mission was simple: a ship of his called The Wages of Sin had gone missing, and he suspected foul play. It had been on a shady mission, and something might have gone wrong. They were to sail on a ship of his called the Stirge to find it, to kill anyone who had interfered with it, and to retrieve his cargo. Their orders were clear: kill the people they were told to kill, and don’t kill the people they were told not to kill.

Of course they agreed, and the next day found themselves shipping out on a grim, vicious little ship with a grim, vicious crew of little men, headed west south west. They traveled for a week before they entered a strange miasma, a weird area of rotten smells and stench. In the distance to the north they could see a disturbance in air and sea. Thinking it might be a floundering ship they headed north, and soon arrived at a strange, small island, perhaps a kilometre across, that was covered in rotting marine plants and surrounded by a fine film of scum in the water. A feeding frenzy of birds, fish, sharks and cetaceans was busy in the water, and the whole area stank of death. They rowed a ship to the island and walked up to its highest central point, about 40m above sea level. From here they could see all around, and ahead of them on the far side of the island they could see a small ship moored in a chain of tiny islands just offshore from the main island. This, the sailors told them, was The Wages of Sin.

They headed down to the bay and walked through the stinking water between the small islands, which formed a kind of causeway. As they approached the ship they turned to look back, and it became clear what had happened: the island was actually a giant crab, its shell a kilometre across, and the promonotry on which they stood was one of its extended claws. It must have died weeks ago and most of its rotting meat had been consumed, but the last dregs of its remaining rotting body parts were seeping into the water and being consumed. Under the shell they could see a huge cave in which surf boomed; this must once have been the face and soft parts of the crab, now rotted and gnawed away to reveal a huge, yawning chamber of dead meat and carapace.

They turned back to the moored ship. No one hailed them and there were no signs of life. The crew were either dead, lost or in hiding. They had found a ghost ship moored to the corpse of a gargantuan crab.

The Wrathbreakers shrugged, and prepared to board…

fn1: I have a schematic but it’s so embarrassingly bad I won’t put it on the web.

The Wrathbreakers have crushed a deepfolk raiding party and scattered its remnants across the lands south of the Fanurae Inland Sea. Now they rest in the ruins of the deepfolk camp, and investigate its mission in this area.

Securing the site

The Wrathbreakers were badly injured, exhausted and running low on supplies and luck. They did not have the energy or the time to chase down every escaped deepfolk worker and kill them before they could return to their lair and raise the alarm, but they guessed it would take days for the deepfolk to receive the message that the camp had been destroyed, gather a sufficient force and return. They first decided to secure the area, using a combination of their nature lore, magic and skullduggery.

They searched the area and found a dry creek near the dig site itself, where once beavers had made a dam. The beavers were long gone and the lodge empty, but for some reason now the creek and dam itself were dry, the water long drained away and the base of the streambed overgrown with bushes and small trees. They used the abandoned dam as the base for their own camp, setting a fire in the base of the dam and piling cut brush outside the dam for extra cover. Here, hidden from view from all around, they could sleep and recover in relative safety. While the rest of the team worked on this, Itzel moved around the destroyed camp site, setting alarm spells to warn them if any deepfolk should try to sneak towards them. Then, having secured the area, they rested a little, and prepared to dig.

Sending for help

The deepfolk had established a worksite here, with some dozens of deepfolk labourers working in some kind of dig or construction near the shore. The Wrathbreakers wanted to uncover this site but guessed they would need workers, and it would take at least two weeks to travel back to Kei, gather workers, and return. So instead Itzel used her teleportation magic to travel instantly back to Kei on the same day that they completed the defenses of the camp site. She returned some hours later, carrying a supply of potions of healing and with the news that a gang of workers with some guards would travel north and could be expected to reach them in seven days.

In the meantime they would have to stay here, searching for food in the surrounding forest and trying to uncover the dig site themselves. They did not know if the work gang and reinforcements would arrive before the deepfolk attempted to recover the site, so they decided to set to work themselves, using magic and sheer brute force, to try to complete the work at the dig site.

The Poison Eye Clan

Having secured the campsite and set up a basic plan, the Wrathbreakers began searching the loot from the battle for clues about the deepfolk they had killed and their plans for the site. Mostly they found trash and useless deepfolk trinkets, but amongst the dead goblin shaman’s belongings they found a letter, which seemed to indicate the squad’s mission. Of course it was written in the deepfolk language, but by now Itzel and Ella had begun to develop some familiarity with this tongue, and so over the next few days, in between working at the dig site, they slowly decoded it. From this letter they learnt that:

• The deepfolk clan they had been fighting was called the Poison Eye clan, and it had been hiding beneath the western isles for hundreds of years, having given humans the impression it had been driven extinct
• The Poison Eye clan’s leader had learnt that deepfolk clans on the main island of Hadun had begun working with humans, and that this information was being kept secret from the Poison Eye clan
• The Poison Eye clan leader did not believe working with humans was a good idea, and wanted to either undermine the actions of its mainland brethren, or find some way to be invited into their conspiracy
• The mainland deepfolk were looking for 7 powerful artifacts, for some purpose. Spies had provided the Poison Eye clan leader with a list, and one of the items was obviously an item that the Poison Eye clan knew about on Fanurae, a thing called “The Eye of a Dead God”
• These items needed to be gathered within a certain timeframe, as they needed to be in the deepfolk’s possession before the alignment of a constellation the deepfolk call the “Seven Children of Rage”; if not obtained by this time, the deepfolk would have to wait another 1000 years to achieve whatever their purpose was
• The Poison Eye clan leader wanted to obtain this eye before the mainland deepfolk learnt where it was, so that it could be used as leverage to get in on the mainland deepfolk’s plan

The letter also held some clues about the location of the other seven artifacts, and suggested very strongly that the white object that the Wrathbreakers had found in the Valley of Gon was something called the “fragment of a fallen moon” (though none of them could understand what a moon might be, even though the pictogram describing it suggested what it might be).

They kept the letter, and hastened to dig up the worksite.

The Eye of a Dead God

Over the next five days they alternated between resting, attempting to dig out the worksite, scouring the land around for food, and decoding the letter. They were able to recover some wounds and heal some of their wounds, and although they had to rely on their dwindling supplies on some days they were also able to gather local foods to supplement their rations on others.

The worksite was a hole dug into the ground, protected from the elements by a covering of rough-hewn wood and secured from the sea by wooden hoardings. The deepfolk had attempted to destroy it with explosives before they fled, and for the first two days the Wrathbreakers had to dig out the collapsed parts of the site, combining Bao Tap’s earth magic with Xu’s muscle. Now that the month of Rain had begun the site was constantly inundated with the first downpourings of the season, which seeped into the mud and made the work difficult and unpleasant. They also suspected that the inland sea would begin to rise – despite its name it was simply a very large freshwater lake, and the constant rain was likely to swell the rivers feeding into it over the next weeks – so they had to do some work shoring up the defenses against flood from the seaward side. Nonetheless, by the fifth day they had managed to uncover a large box, perhaps 3m long and 2m in width and height. With the combination of Xu’s strength, Bao Tap’s earth magic and Itzel’s levitation magic they were able to drag the box forth and bring it onto dry land.

They opened it immediately, of course, and after dragging away a covering of rotted straw and mud they uncovered the box’s contents: a huge, unblinking eye, squeezed into the box and packed around with mud. It had a slightly rotten smell but it had not rotted, and although they thought it must be dead there was something in its unblinking stare that suggested it was not fully gone. It also exuded an intense aura of the new magic that Itzel had discovered on the scrolls in Anyara’s bedroom, and which had corrupted the Beast of the Bones. Truly, they suspected, this thing must be the eye of an enormous, long-dead cephalopod deity of some kind.

After they had cleared the box Bao Tap tried to touch the eye. He was immediately drawn into a nightmare of darkness, chaos, blood and vast powers urgently seeking him from some other dimension. He tried to maintain his grip on the eye, to plunge in and learn its secrets, but he lacked the courage, and pulled his hands away before he could learn anything of its terrible secrets. Nonetheless, in its death it maintained some baleful outward-looking rage, and its power was even then too much for mortals, after untold time buried dead in the earth.

By now they had been here five days, and they began to fear that the deepfolk would return for them soon. With the work done early, before the workers from Kei could reach them, they decided to decamp and retreat back towards Kei. They would meet the expedition on the way, and gain some safety in numbers. Itzel established a levitation spell on the box to lighten the load and they set off, dragging the box over the dry ground of the land south of the Fanurae Inland sea, heading back to Kei. What unseemly horror did they drag back to civilization? And what could they do with this thing, now that it was in their possession?

And what were the deepfolk trying to do? What ghastly ritual did they have planned with the Eye of a Dead God, when the Seven Children of Rage came into alignment? What evil would be unleashed on the world if the Wrathbreakers failed to guard this monstrous scraping of a god’s flesh?

The Wrathbreakers were attacked by a large force of deepfolk as they approached what they thought was a human camp and worksite by the Farunae Inland Sea. Itzel and Bao Tap were captured during the battle and Xu and Ella forced to flee. Now Itzel and Bao Tap need to escape from the camp before they become breakfast.

The Goblin’s conversation

Itzel and Bao Tap woke after several hours of unconsciousness. They were completely naked, all their magic items and weapons gone, their hands bound behind their backs, legs tied, and gagged so they could not speak. They lay their for a while recovering their wits, and then heard people approaching their tent. Outside, they heard one deepfolk giving another orders.

Fortunately Itzel had spent time studying and now understood a little deepfolk. She was able to eavesdrop a little, and so learnt that they were not to be eaten, but to be “used” in a few days. She also learnt that the camp’s forces had been badly depleted in the battle. They also learnt that the deepfolk had looted their magic items and had determined that the strange white ceramic-like plate they had picked up in the Valley of Gon was of great value and had to be returned soon to the deepfolk’s underground kingdom. They decided to wait a little, recover some of their fatigue, and see what happened in the camp. They assumed that the deepfolk knew they were magic users, and had bound and gagged them to prevent them using magic. However, it was unlikely that the deepfolk knew that both Itzel and Bao Tap had been given regenerated arms by the healer Aragan in Kei, and these arms granted them the special talent of needing no free hands to cast magic. So any time they wanted they could use magic, but without their items and heavily exhausted by the battle, they thought it might be wise to wait and see what happened. As they lay there waiting a goblin captain strolled into the room, yelled abuse at them, and sat calmly on a chair on the far side of the room, axe in hand, to act as their guard. Truly their situation was desperate.

Xu and Ella return

While they waited Ella and Xu had retreated to the edge of the forest, where they spent an hour recovering their strength and taking the last of their healing potions. Xu was injured but not seriously, and Ella was relatively unharmed but exhausted and stressed. Even though night had fallen by the time they finished resting they decided not to risk waiting longer, in case their friends were scheduled to be on the evening’s menu, and headed back towards the camp.

They moved carefully and quietly, but with Xu in his armour and the deepfolk operating at night they soon stumbled onto a group of scouts. They emerged into a dimly lit stretch of open ground to find the goblin shaman they had fought earlier, accompanied by a squad of strange, lizardlike humanoids they had never seen before, and the reanimated corpses of some of their earlier deepfolk casualties. Ella hid in a sniper position as Xu rushed forward to engage. He was immediately struck with a storm of spit by the lizardlike creatures, which penetrated his armour and staggered him so that he could not attack. Reeling from the acidic blast of the poison dripping in his eyes, all he could do was defend himself as the zombies attacked him, clubbing him slowly into insensibility.

As Xu collapsed under a horde of slow and inexorable attackers Ella opened fire on the goblin shaman, killing him with a single shot. She then took her sole invisibility potion, and slipped away to the deepfolk camp, leaving Xu to fight the lizard creatures and zombies.

Reunited

Ella slipped invisible into the camp and searched quickly until she found the tent where Itzel and Bao Tap were hiding. Near this tent there was a small open pavilion in which the surviving Grigg scouts – just 8 – were settling down to rest. She slipped into the prison tent, drifting in in such a way as to make it seem like the tent flap had simply stirred with the wind. Then, without much pause to think, she shot the goblin with her crossbow. The bolt hit him in the shoulder, shattering his arm and pinning him to the chair. Suddenly revealed, Ella began working to free Itzel and Bao Tap. The battle began.

The goblin’s screaming woke everyone and drew the remaining forces in the camp. From a nearby tent the Ogre champion emerged to fight, along with two goblin captains. The Grigg scouts roused from their rest, but following the goblin captain’s orders they moved to the edge of the camp to stop anyone else coming in. The Ogre champion charged to the tent and ripped it out of the ground, revealing a naked but free Itzel and Bao Tap, and Ella trying to put distance between herself and her enemies. Bao Tap summoned another nature’s champion. More of the lizardlike creatures joined the battle, and things were looking dangerous for a few seconds until Xu emerged from the forest, having successfully defeated the lizard creatures and zombies, and joined the battle. With Xu there to turn the tide they were able to escape, and fled into the forest.

Cleaning up

They rested for the remainder of the night and in the morning, when Itzel flew into the air with a telescope to spy on the camp, they saw that the remaining deepfolk forces were breaking camp and preparing to leave. No doubt with their leaders dead and a single goblin champion remaining, they had decided it was best to flee the scene before their attackers returned. The Wrathbreakers decided to ambush them, and moved quickly to a stream to the west of the camp. They set up an ambush, Bao Tap using his magic to dig a channel in the stream and Xu and Ella positioning themselves for battle. Itzel hovered above the scene, and they prepared.

The ambush was savage and effective. Bao Tap’s nature’s champion attacked the goblin champion when it slid into the trap they had dug in the stream, and while it was occupied they killed the remaining deepfolk fighters quickly and without mercy. The large group of non-combatant deepfolk broke and fled, abandoning all the camp gear and scattering into the forest.

The Wrathbreakers gathered up what they could and returned to the abandoned campsite. They were badly hurt, exhausted and at the end of their strength, but they had prevailed. Now they simply needed to try to understand why they had been forced to this battle – what were deepfolk doing here, and what dark secrets had they been searching for in that worksite?

The Wrathbreakers have killed a huge swamp beast in the swamps north of Kei, and during the battle discovered the beast had been corrupted by the same dark magic that was embedded in the scrolls they stole from a deep cult leader in the Valley of Gon. They decide to track the beast back along its path, until they can find where it originated and see if there is any information there about the nature of the magic.

They tracked the beast easily, following the mixed signs of destruction, corrupted land, and slaughter. The beast had killed indiscriminately as it traveled south, and had also stopped to rest at certain points in its journey, spending perhaps days at a time submerged in the mud in places that soon became corrupted and noticeably foul in its presence. They soon realized that the beast had followed a straight line directly away from the source of its corruption, and tracking it became even easier and faster as they no longer needed to search frequently for traces of it. Although tracking the beast was easy, the journey itself was tough. They had only three days’ supply of food, so had to gather food as they traveled, although they had some dwarven way biscuits that they could rely on if they were desperate. They also had to avoid mud-traps, wild animals and the seeping cold and damp of the swamp. After five days of walking through swamp the land began to dry a little and rise, with the mangroves and thick, lush foliage of creepers and moss changing slowly to rainforest and then to more sparsely scattered trees as they slowly ascended away from the fens.

On the 8th day they heard a strange sound ahead of them, like a distant storm making trees rustle, or the sound of many sticks being rubbed together. Then suddenly a horde of animals large and small fled past them, suddenly rushing to avoid some threat in the forest. Rabbits, rats, flightless birds, lizards, snakes and antelope all clattered, slithered, hopped and ran past them, and then the forest was still of all bird calls and animal sounds. The rustling sound grew to a clattering and then a roar, and then they saw the source ahead of them: a wave of ants, each the size of their fist, moving through the forest tearing up everything in their path. Small saplings were torn down and shredded, undergrowth cut down and mashed, and any animal that had not been fast enough to escape was torn apart or dragged along by the huge insects. They saw a rabbit being dragged along, struggling and screaming, as the ants tore it apart without breaking their march. They saw dismembered pieces of a goat being held aloft by a swarm of giant worker ants – and they realized they were next. They broke and ran. Itzel levitated into the air, Bao Tap made a magical shelter for himself, Ella climbed a tree, and Xu dived into a nearby stream. They waited as the swarm of ants passed them, Ella hoping they would not climb the tree after her and Xu watching in horror as the ants formed a bridge over the river by piecing together animal bones and pieces of harvested wood, glued together with some mixture of blood and fat and ant-spit. As Itzel hung in the air watching the swarm beneath her she heard screams and hoots in the distance. A troop of monkeys had been surprised by the ants, fighting back at first and then running, then being caught and dying, and their calls and screams of fear and pain echoed through the forest as their circumstances shifted from surprise to angry conflict to fear and then to horrible death.

Finally the ants passed and the Wrathbreakers could emerge from their hiding places into a new landscape, stripped and denuded by the army of ants, suddenly easier to walk in and transformed from light jungle to open savannah. They gathered themselves and continued their journey.

The Deepfolk ambush

The following day they reached a waypoint on their destination. The forest thinned and they emerged from the scattered trees onto a saddle of land, from which they could get a wider view of the landscape around them. The crest of this hill looked over another stretch of forest that swept downward to a huge lake, so large that they could not see the far side. This must be the inland sea north of Kei, and they guessed the swamp beast must have come from the shore of that sea. From where they stood on the hilltop the sea was perhaps an hour or two walk down the gentle slope, and they would likely be able to reach it by nightfall. They could see a small camp at the shore of the sea, and near the camp a worksite of some kind.

They discussed the best way to approach the camp. They were hungry, tired and dirty, and knew nothing about the area, and they really wanted to get down to the camp. They considered waiting until late night and walking through the forest at night, to emerge at the camp at dawn, but this seemed reckless and dangerous, so they decided to set off immediately with the goal of arriving by nightfall.

They had walked perhaps halfway to the camp, and were deep in the light scrub and forest leading down to the water, when they were ambushed. A flight of arrows emerged from the forest, hitting several of them, and they scattered to take cover where they could. More arrows emerged from the forest, finding their targets again, but they could not easily identify where the arrows came from. Then several squads of goblins rushed from the trees, grenades flying out of the forest ahead of them, and the Wrathbreakers realized that they had walked into a large and very well organized ambush.

The goblins were followed by an enormous ogre, and some heavily armoured goblin warriors with huge two-handed axes. The numbers were overwhelming but they put in a big fight, wiping out the archers and the fusiliers throwing hand grenades, and killing several of the goblin champions. Then, however, two spell users – a goblin witch doctor and a grigg shaman – arrived at the scene, and although they killed one the other one took control of Ella’s mind, forcing her to fire her crossbow at her own party. She was not completely dominated, but any time the witch doctor chose to it could make her fire on her friends. At the same time the goblin champions knocked Bao Tap and Itzel unconscious, and Xu and Ella realized that if they stayed in the battle they would be dead or captured too. They both fled, Ella running as fast as she could to clear the area before the witch doctor could command her again, and Xu casting a final look over his shoulder to see the goblin champion and some goblin raiders dragging Itzel, Bao Tap and Calim off into the woods, down towards the camp.

What they had thought was a human worksite must be some kind of deepfolk outpost. They had believed the western isles free of deepfolk but they were wrong, and they had paid for their lack of caution with a hard-fought defeat. Now Xu and Ella needed to regroup, and find a way to save their friends’ lives … or die trying …