Sensing his fear, I urged Faelian onwards, knowing that if we never got started, he'd probably try to back out or charge us more gold, and I was becoming slightly aggravated with his haggling. Inside the mist, fog? I'm not really sure what it was but it had a clear effect on the entire party as our light sources were unnaturally dimmed. Depression and despondency seemed to wash over us in unending waves that set a bleak mood over the entire group. Knowing I had to boost morale somehow, I tried to tell some jokes and perform an inspiring tumbling routine in the back of the wagon. Neither were very successful, though I was utterly delighted by the fact that I was at least doing something.
Faelian the Frellwit, as I think he should now be dubbed, eventually admitted once we noticed that we should have been through the gray wall after only twenty minutes, yet he somehow managed to get lost. Kaellana, the only one in our group to have a feeling for which way we needed to go, directed Frellwit, and we eventually cleared the mist, feeling immeasurably better, but with our lanterns still dimmed. Using my map, she then proceeded to choose a new direction that would hopefully lead us to White Hearth.
The blasted and barren lands we passed through were devoid of any semblance of almost life, though the few "trees" and plants that we saw were twisted, thorny, perversions of their natural states. Considering Kaellana's background I would have thought she would have been more moved than she was by the sight, but I suppose her mind was on other things. We shortly came across what appeared to be a recent battle site, but as I inspected the soldier's armors, I recognized them as having hailed from Thrane, Breland, and Cyre. They seemed to have died while fighting around two wagons and a catapult and Arad saw this as a great time to add to his bag o' skeletons. I have to admit, I was disturbed by the desecration of the Thranite bodies as those men were once my own comrades in arms. I mulled this over but realized that they had no need of their skeletons any longer and since Arad wasn't actually binding their souls to the bones, there shouldn't be any harm to them.
Setting out to help him with this task, the rest of the party spread out in a small group around the front of Frellwit's wagon. Of course, just after Arad and I had ventured a short distance to collect the corpses, an eerie rumbling could be heard emanating from the unnatural darkness around us and everyone was attacked by a small herd of skeletal horses that interrupted Arad's preparations. Tossing an everburning lantern out, we helped illuminate a larger area around the wagon and set to our foes with magic and steel. Demon guy-friend used his magics to great effect and reduced two of the abominations to splinters while Aramel and his bodyguard worked on some others. Kaellana, Tara, and I held our ground on the other side of the cart while Arad attempted to force these undead beast to his will. Mere moments after the beasts had emerged from the gloom, more than half of their herd was obliterated, and Arad had 3 new undead mounts, clasping arms included.
Now that we had apparently cleared the vicinity of hostile forces, Arad continued with his animation while we searched the area for anything of use. We moved onwards and after a few hours we realized that we had to be off course, as we should have already reached White Hearth. Through some careful evaluations of our direction, speed, and possible lost direction in the gray mist, I'm sure I impressed everyone by deducing the correct course change we needed to make to reach the Cannith facility. Also, for some reason Aramel and demon guy-friend really wanted to bring the catapult so we attached it to the rear of the cart, and were forced to proceedat a slower apce.
Of course, this then led us directly into the path of a house sized crab encrusted with spines and weapons from the Great War. It emerged, as the undead horses had, from the gloom and our only warning was when it toppled the wagon over on its side. We eventually managed to extricate ourselves from the wreckage and began to deal with the new threat.Arad's horses harassed it while Aramel, demon guy-friend, and Kaellana used ranged attacks. I charged in, using my acrobatic skills to evade the massive crab's claws and punched my spear through it's shell. It focused on the horses, possibly due to their size, unwisely deciding that the were the more serious threat. On my next attack I misjudged the creature's reach and received a punishing blow that sent me staggering back ten feet. I'm sure that if some of the other party members were hit that hard they'd have been toppled or killed. As it was, I retained my feet and readied myself for another attack, but it wasn't needed, as one of the magic casters took it out from afar. A quick search of its exterior yielded an impressive looking set of gloves that are probably magical, and we tucked those away for identification later.
As we continued forwards, we came across a mountain of corpses that looked freshly slain but considered how our encounter with the dead had gone earlier, we decided to press onwards and ignore it, despite the potential for wealth it may have contained. Shortly after this, we came to a large mound that had a well worn trail leading towards its interior through a clearly artificial opening. The house Cannith symbol was in evidence above the mantle and we knew that the we may have finally reached our destination. From atop the mound came a familiar form that I recognized instantly, the undead crow-thing that had been perched atop the chapel in Rose Quarry. Seeing it meant that we were either followed, or beaten to the facility, but my surmising was cut short as the creature attacked, swoping out of the sky to buffet us with its wings. I, in a moment of tactical error, decided to leave my spear int eh wagon and hop out with just my shortbow, as I assumed it would try to fly around instead of landing. Luckily the rest of the group quickly overwhelmed it, though Arad took a severe blow by standing in front of the catapult as Frellwit drove it into the cave.
After the fight, though, we were able to crawl through the wagon into the caves inside and saw that a path led deeper into the darkness. To allow some of our spellcasters enough time to regain the use of their magic, I took first watch inside the cave, watching the passage out of our chamber in case anything tried confront us. My watch passed uneventfully and once I had slept, we all headed into the cave, convincing Frellwit to wait until we came back. We were soon presented with branching paths and followed the first one to our left, as the other one led down. We found a metal hatch inset into the ground and sued the blue crystal tipped rod in the hole that had apparently been designed for it. I got a shocking surprise as a lightning bolt flow out and it me in the chest, knocking me off my feet. This was obviously not the correct entrance to the facility so we took the other path. Working through all of the branches, and using skeletons to open the hatches, we discovered that the lowermost hatch was the actual entrance to the facility... though that probably should have been obvious to us.
Climbing down the ladder that descended from the hatch, we found ourselves on a pedestal in a spherical room with a strange control mechanism with receptacles for spheres of different colors, brown, blue, and green. Through trial and error we stuck the one blue orb we had into one of the sockets and braced as the spherical walls shifted around us to bring the opening through which we had entered, around to reveal a lit hallway heading into the distance.
-A.N.-
Nice picture of your hole, Aveg.
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