Session XXIV — Two Humans Came Back
The Graves at Sesker's Gully
The dry riverbed led a day north to Sesker's Gully, a dead village built on the foundations of an old dwarven waystation, and to the graveyard of the dwarves who died when Khar-Zadûn fell. A crusader's ghost kept the gate of his family's broken tomb, shut out of it by a demon gnawing his dead below. The knights cleared the crypt, found the ghost's own bones where he had fallen and never been carried home, and laid him in the one coffin that had always stood empty. In return he led them over the hill to five graves marked with fieldstones and names scratched in by hand. Two of them read Thorek and Borin Stonevein. Borin died there of the wound he carried out of the tunnel, and his brother buried him and walked on. Some time later, two strangers carried Thorek back to lie beside him. Nobody knows who they were. Korroc's mother has ruled that her men stay where they are, among their own.
Fallen Guardian
Terendelev
Silver Dragon · Protector of Kenabres
“Nobody carried her home. There was nothing to carry — whatever came down in that square at Armasse was gone before anyone could go back for it, and Kenabres keeps a patch of swept stone where a grave should be. She lived a hundred years in that city as a stranger, and died in about four seconds for four more strangers she had no reason to trust, and asked nothing of them. The scales she left are the nearest thing she has to a headstone: four small pieces of silver, carried a long way from where she fell by people she never knew. This season the company learned what it is worth, to be carried by strangers.”
The One Who Showed the Mark
Caleth
Paladin / Wizard
He swore the company to a dead crusader’s errand before anyone could object. In an empty square he went still for two heartbeats and came back saying that whatever took the wizard has been watching him; that night he woke screaming, pulled off his shirt by the fire, and showed his friends a pale spiral he has carried since birth — and said only that he had been told what it was called. When a stranger fell in the grass west of Drezen and the hood came back, the name he cried out was the loudest thing his friends have ever heard from him.
The One at His Shoulder
Nageru
Monk / Paladin
He left a perfectly good shadow the instant two friends were caught in the open, and let a screaming swarm feed on him until it was gone. When Caleth froze in that square, it was Nageru’s hand on his other shoulder that brought him back, and that night he sat beside him until dawn, an inch away, saying nothing. At the Stonevein graves he stood well back with his head bowed, both days. West of Drezen he broke three walking constructs the size of elephants, rolled out from under the one that exploded, and looked mildly annoyed about it.
The One Who Read the Fifth Stone
Thane
Inquisitor / Rogue
He asked a fading ghost one question — had it seen dwarves pass this way — and it led him over a hill to five graves. He read three names he did not know, then his uncle’s, and did not need to read the fifth. His father had buried his brother there and walked on, and died somewhere else, and two strangers Thane will never be able to thank carried him back. A week later he picked a demon’s collar off the throat of a man who had walked home for days, then sat on the step outside and wiped his knives for a long time.
The One the Ghost Knew
Korroc
Paladin / Oracle
A ghost at a graveyard gate looked at him and said: and now the child comes before me. It had fought his father there, years ago. He stood at Borin’s grave with his face wet into his beard and did nothing about it, and the next morning went back up the hill alone. In the crypt his cousin threw him a screaming axe, and it has not stopped talking to him since. When a stranger fell in the grass west of Drezen, he was the one who said aloud that it might be the wizard — and he sat at that bedside until it was only sleep.
Current Status
He Walked Home
The fathers found · The deadline passed · The wizard home
Xanthir Vang's week ran out and nothing came over the walls. Four mornings after the graves, a lone figure was seen from Drezen's west wall, walking in out of the Worldwound, falling and getting up again, with three great constructed spiders coming over the rise behind it. It was Aravashnial, barefoot and beaten, wearing a collar that kept him from casting a single spell. The knights broke the spiders, Thane picked the collar open, and the wizard said four words — that he had been walking for days — and went to sleep in the infirmary, where Korroc has not left his side. How he got out, nobody knows. Caleth now carries the collar, and an old ivory reliquary that a demon on the road begged to be rid of.
Book 3 of 6|Mythic Tier 4–5|Level 11
