cinaed

Session 170: Day 27 of Saedan (9/5)

Diana is the first to react, taking a half-step backwards. She can feel the wind whipping at her back from the ravine. The way the air smells, the distant river and damp mud of the perpetual rainforest, it all reminds her of the night that she left. It all crashes through her, that same frigid horror and desperation. She knows that Rezod is so close right now.

Terror makes her stay away from the cliffside, and she looks towards the enormous wargs. She takes a deep breath and then blows out a fiery breath towards two of the wargs. One of them takes the full brunt of the flames but the other one manages to dodge most of it. The burned one rears back with a deep howl. She can see the singed fur give off thick black smoke, not unlike when a person burns certain wood or pine needles.

She tells Adrin to go bite them, hyperventilating as Adrin races towards the closest one. Adrin digs her teeth into the thick of its leg, making the warg cry out again. The sound doesn’t sound like an animal but rather something trying to imitate an animal.

The warg that Adrin bit lets out a loud howl, an unnatural sound that hurts everyone’s minds. Diana and Adrin are the worst affected, both frightened of the warg.

Hava channels Twilight Sanctuary, casting it across the entire cliffside. She tells Diana to get closer to Galowen before she casts Spiritual Weapon next to the warg menacing Adrin. It stabs into the warg, which makes a sound of broken sticks instead of breaking bone.

Yolov sends Es forward to float beside the most injured warg. Everyone watches as Es’ pages flick wildly before lightning crackles across his pages and shoots out in a beam and strikes all three of the wargs.

Audacity races forward, squeezing Diana’s shoulder on the way past, and gets up in melee between two of the wargs, attacking the one looming over Adrin. All of his strikes hit it hard, and the warg looks extremely injured.

One of the wargs rushes forward and bites Galowen, its jaw clamping around him and trying to pick him up. He sees the warg reconsider and then drop him and bite Hava instead. It tries to lift her up off the ground, trying to pull her up as though to devour her, its jaw biting into her chest and back. She manages to keep herself grounded.

Az does some quick calculations and teleports himself in a puff of smoke behind one of the wargs, striking out with Eldritch Blast. All three bright flashes of light like lightning hit it, launching it forward, then sending it scrambling at the edge of the cliff, before the final Eldritch Blast sends it over the cliff.

It is an unsettlingly long time before they hear the body crash at the bottom of the ravine.

The third warg lunges and bites down on Az. Adrenaline spikes through him and he shoves his shoulder deeper into its throat and makes it open its jaw enough that he can slip back down to the ground. It snaps at him and manages to bite him again.

Galowen sends Glyn charging at the warg that tried to eat Az. Glyn slams into its leg and gores it as Galowen strides forward and swings at it with his sword. Both strikes land, flames and divine radiance burning its fur as the warg looks distinctly unhappy.

Diana remains frightened, frozen in place. She tells Adrin to bite the warg in front of her. Adrin bites down on its foreleg, almost bringing it down but not quite. With trembling hands, Diana tries to shoot the warg. The first arrow misses, but the second one hits it right between the eyes and kills it.

Hava sends her Spiritual Weapon at the remaining warg but it manages to evade the spiritual trident. She follows it up with three Eldritch Blasts of her own, all of which hit it squarely in the chest. It looks badly injured as she moves in front of Diana.

Yolov throws a crackling Chromatic Orb at the warg, but it misses. He positions himself between the last warg and Diana as Audacity begins another flurry of attacks.

Audacity brings his quarterstaff down on the back of the warg’s neck and hears a sickening crack as it goes down. He stares down at it and asks what the hell are these things.

Diana tells him that they’re wargs and then puts her hands over her face and breathes hard and says that she needs a minute. Hava puts her hand on Diana’s shoulder and says it’s okay, it’s over. Diana looks at her and says it’s not. He’s down there.

Hava says it’s over for now.

Diana says thank you before Audacity says he saw her just now. She was terrified and she still killed that thing. They can do this. She’s not helpless anymore, neither is her sister, and neither are any of the Hooligans.

Diana says she hopes so.

Galowen says if all else fails, she can do it scared.

Audacity says that’s what he plans to do. He’s not looking forward to fighting this dragon, but the dragon is bothering his friend and has kidnapped a kid. Galowen says more than bothered.

Diana looks at the ground beneath her feet. The earliest memory for Diana is one of the lady who took care of her, a woman whose name was also Whiteleaf, but she was more Diana’s caretaker. She remembers Rezod eating the woman and telling Diana that this is what happens when you cannot prove yourself useful. To this day Diana doesn’t know if that was her mother or not.

She takes a step and a twig snaps and crunches under her foot and for a moment she flinches as it sounds similar to the crack of bone. She’s tried to untangle herself from these memories, but this close to Rezod it sticks to her chest. She doesn’t remember much about this woman except the love and kindness she showed Diana as she raised her and treated her with a kindness and care that was so deeply uncommon in the life that she and so many people in Rezod’s lair led.

It echoes in her mind as she steps forward, that sickening crunch of human bone under Rezod’s teeth.

She takes a gulp and takes two steps back, bumping into Hava. She apologizes and Hava tells her she’s all right. Diana asks if she’s said before that she doesn’t want to be here. Hava says she has, but there are things they have to do.

Diana says there’s a kid to save. Hava says yes, it will just take some time.

Diana knows that Audacity can walk down the cliffside, but everyone else getting down is a different matter. No one wants Audacity to get out of sight, though, and Diana tries to remember how she and Adrin escaped. It’s hard to think about. What she remembers most is the pain and fear. Every noise in the wood was Rezod after her, every crack one of his warped creatures there to drag her back.

She remembers an incline and trying to scale the walls of this canyon, climbing and falling and scraping her arms and knees. She remembers her fingertips raw and bleeding, then running until it felt like her lungs would give out and her legs would collapse. At one point she rolled her ankle but had no point could she stop running. The entire time Adrin was beside her.

There was some incline that wasn’t as sharp until she could wiggle herself into a small animal cave and hid until they could get away. It took days to get out of the wood.

Beside her, Adrin puts her head under Diana’s hand.

Diana looks at everyone and says that when she got out it took her days to officially get out of the woods before she ran into Keyleth. There was an old animal cave that could get them there.

Galowen looks around for one of those cairns. There are some cairns nearby. He sees them more so up the mountain rather than down towards where they are. The cairns seem pretty old, like they haven’t been cared for recently. He figures they could probably try to use them.

Diana says she can summon two giant eagles to carry most of the group. One can carry Galowen and Yolov, the other Diana and Az, and Hava and Adrin can fly as Audacity walks down the cliff.

Galowen realizes they can’t get Glyn down the cliff and says, “Goodbye, buddy,” and dismisses Glyn before the elk can look too sad.

Then Diana summons the eagles. They come to her as though they’ve been waiting to be summoned, ferrying them all almost effortlessly down to the base of the ravine.

The deeper they go, the stronger the smell of magic grows. There is a deep innateness to this space that feels almost painstakingly discomforting. They can all feel it thick in the air. There’s an almost disquieting sense that old, exhausted magic gets thicker, making them feel like they’re plunging down through an umbral cloud.

When they break through the treeline, the wind whistling through most of their hair, the eagles are quiet as they descend. It feels as though everyone has been dropped into another world. The ground is a thick, rich carpet of grass, the trees an almost sickly green, everything a vibrant color that seems more like a painting than reality. It’s an almost uncanny valley to the liveliness and richness of the area.

The eagles drop them off near the bank of a very narrow and crystalline river. It’s bright and beautiful and sparkling in ways that it seems like it shouldn’t sparkle, not outside of a painting or a fantasy story. It’s beautiful in the way that it’s no longer recognizable as Astvanor.

They all get their feet underneath them. The eagles remain nearby. There’s a sense of dread but also one of unreality. The eagles follow with an unnatural feeling of following Diana wherever she will lead until she dismisses them.

When Hava checks on the twig, it is directing them up the river.

They follow and follow and follow.

Yolov is on high alert, studying the forest around him and unsure if the forest is truly like this or if it’s an illusion. But it’s no mirage. This is the effects of a dragon’s lair, which is exactly what the group is in. He has a moment of understanding that intimately.

Az summons Medrash as they walk.

Audacity and Hava lead the group upriver. They both notice as they’re walking that there are little glints of silver in the water. At first they think it’s a reflection or a particularly shining fish, but when they lean in and look down and catch a glimpse of red before a fish made entirely of steel, glowing red eyes and steel, appears.

They have that second of realization before the construct explodes, hitting them all with shrapnel. The sound sends water everywhere as the soul steel injures everyone. Galowen notices that no birds scatter despite the sound, or any animals running. There are no animals here when there’s the biggest predator. No animals would choose to be here willingly.

But most importantly the sound echoes.

Galowen realizes that they have a very limited amount of time before they’re found there.

They all pick up the pace, pushing forward a reasonable distance from the river, spying more of those fish as they move forward. Galowen can see over Audacity and Hava’s heads easily, his head on a swivel. The first thing he notices that is different than it should be in this place is that everything is this verdant green and this white blue water until he sees a little stream of water that is red.

His eyes follow it immediately to the upper half of a figure, mangled and submerged on the banks of the river. All he can see are legs and the bottom half of a torso. It’s about fifteen feet ahead of them.

The Hooligans move forward, keeping close to each other, Hava and Galowen looking at this submerged corpse as Audacity watches the treeline. The body itself looks like it couldn’t belong to someone more than a few years past childhood, still gangly. Its limbs are broken at a twisted angle.

Galowen leans down. The first thing he notices is that the body is wearing rugged linen pants. There’s hardly fabric left, it's become so threadbare, and the tunic is muddied and torn so much it’s impossible to tell what color it used to be. It’s a recent death, but it isn’t Cal’travor, it’s a young elven person.

They are all grappling with the dread of believing for a moment that it was Cal’travor before Yolov sees a shift in the ground beneath the body and spies something white move, quickly warning Galowen as a skeletal figure starts to crawl its way out of the ground.

Up the river, dotted like flowering plants beside the river beds are two more corpses. These haven’t been bitten in half, but instead dragon claws gutted them and spattered their intestines across the ground. But that’s not what draws their attention. Instead they all focus on the eyes that they can see caught in undulating and twisting vines, faces twisted into silent pleas as people thrash against thick, strong vines that lash them to the ground and to the trees.

At first glance they can see three people. Audacity and Yolov can see in the far distance at the mouth of the river another person in the far distance, except that person is lashed against the body of a very small, very red dragon. Another similarly young blue dragon is curled up in defeat near them, both wyrmlings the equivalent of toddlers.

Beside Diana, Adrin freezes. They both know that Rezod has also hoarded dragons before, though he’s never let them outside. She cannot forget how cruel and prideful Rezod was, and she knows deep in her bones that this is for her. This is a show.

This is to welcome her home.