The Fifth Crusade
For over a century, the demon-haunted wasteland of the Worldwound has bled into the world of mortals. As the magical Wardstones that hold back the tide begin to flicker and fail, a new generation of crusaders must take up the sword. But this war requires more than steel; it requires the power of Myths.
Paladin / Wizard
Monk / Paladin
Inquisitor / Rogue
Paladin / Oracle
Intelligence Report: The Marchlands
Held, and short one wizard. The four soldiers carried off the broken tower were brought home alive out of a cave four hundred miles south. The dragon that took them is dead. Aravashnial was moved somewhere else before the company could reach him, and the scrying will not find him now.
Reported as a temple of Baphomet, and it was one. Underneath, it was a lost house of Irori. When the last cultist fell it put itself back together, stone by stone, and it is clean now. Its keepers said they would wait.
The heretic still lies in her crystal with her grave goods untouched. Then, on an ordinary evening in Drezen, four crusaders saw that crystal melt away at the same instant. Nobody knows what it meant. Nobody has gone back.
The only place along the escarpment a wagon can climb, which makes it the only western road. Reported to have demons living in it. Scouted, and nothing found — a thing that flies leaves nothing on the ground to read.
The supply road’s gate, and quiet for the first time in months. The clan that raided it now camps beside it and takes whatever work it is given, under a leader who answers to a dwarf.
Empty. A windowless stone hall whose chieftain is ash outside the door, and whose people have gone east to the Ford.
A river of lava where a river used to be, with the old caravan levee — the Gray Road — running along the bank. Four days from Drezen on foot. The Templars were holding prisoners in a cavern above it, and there was an Abyssal rift burning at the far end of that cavern at midday which was simply gone by dark.
The broken tower is still broken and the garrison is still short of sleep, but four men everyone had written off walked back into the infirmary under their own power, more or less. The staff is still on the command table, snapped in two, because the man it belonged to has not come back for it.
"Four of the five are home and the dragon is carrion, so I will hear no more about whether it was worth going. The fifth is alive, or was. We have a name for who holds him and nothing at all for where. Write down every road, every rumor and every Templar we take breathing. Until someone brings me a body, he is missing — and we look for missing people."
The Worldwound
Session XXII — The Worm That Walks
They asked two questions about the thing that had come over the walls — what color it was, and what came out of its mouth — and the two answers did not belong together, which is how the company learned that somebody is building dragons now and sending them at fortresses. A kettle of water found the wizard four hundred miles south, bound in a cavern full of Templars, while an elegant woman in very good clothes read his spellbook, decided what he was, and had him taken away — leaving the soldiers captured with him for the dragon. The company went in on top of them without waiting for morning. They brought all four soldiers home. They killed the dragon. They put a holy blade three times through a woman who turned out not to be a woman, and she vanished before she hit the floor. They did not get the wizard. And the next morning the water found him again, in the dark, in a cage too small to stand up in — with something in the room that was not a man and made no footfalls at all.
Fallen Guardian
Silver Dragon · Protector of Kenabres
“There was never a body. Whatever came down in that square at Armasse was gone before anyone could go back for it, and what Kenabres has in its place is a patch of swept stone that people cross on their way to market. Not a grave. An absence with the edges worn smooth. She spent a hundred years being walked past in that city, and then spent herself in about four seconds on four strangers she had no reason to trust, and left them a silver scale apiece and no instructions whatsoever. The company is only now learning what that particular kind of loss costs — the kind with no body in it, and no word.”
The One Who Asked the Color
Paladin / Wizard
He asked what color the thing was and what came out of its mouth, and when the two answers did not match he walked out of the command room without explaining himself to anyone. In the wizard’s study he found a page in that familiar sloped hand with three lines added at the bottom in a different ink, and sat down harder than he meant to, and put it inside his coat. Then he built a window in a kettle of water and took the company through it. He was pinned against a cave ceiling with a glaive in his hand when they carried his friend out the far door.
The One Who Broke the Dragon
Monk / Paladin
He held out both hands to say he would go, and went, and searched a room beside his friend for an hour without once asking what they were looking for. He heard something said aloud in that room that he has repeated to nobody. In the cavern he put two men on the floor in four seconds. Then he turned his back on a third and walked to the dragon that was standing on Korroc, went under its tail, came up swinging, and hit it five times. It did not get up. He was bleeding from the collarbone down before it fell.
The One Who Saw the Blade
Inquisitor / Rogue
He said the hard thing first — that you cannot track a flying creature, that there is nothing to read. In the cavern he put a man’s shoulder against a pillar of rock and killed him off the counter, then went through five more without ever appearing to hurry. Afterward, counting coins over a dragon’s hoard, he looked up and asked whether her blood was still on the glaive. It was. And when the hunt failed anyway, he said flatly that he could not have picked the man out of a line of three either, which was the kindest thing anyone said all night.
The One Who Said Of Course
Paladin / Oracle
Asked whether they ought to go after five people carried off by a dragon, he shrugged and said of course, and a carefully built argument died unused in another man’s mouth. He bound half of two men’s wounds to his own body, then stood still in the dragon’s acid so that four tied prisoners would not have to. Six claws came down and he got his shield on three. Most of the blood he lost that night was somebody else’s, arriving through a door he had opened on purpose.
Current Status
The dragon dead · Four soldiers home · A name in the dark
They crossed four hundred miles in a single step and did very nearly everything right. The four soldiers taken off that tower are in the Drezen infirmary and two of them will be back on duty inside the week. The six-legged dragon is dead on a cavern floor near the Molten Scar. The woman who signs the Templars' orders left her blood on a holy blade and got away on a spell she had laid into herself in advance — and she is not elven, whatever the paperwork says, because the blade told them so the moment it went in. But the wizard was carried out a different door while the fighting was still going on, and the water cannot find him. What it found the next morning was an iron cage, and a courteous voice with no footsteps under it, and a name this company now has to learn how to hunt — Xanthir Vang.
Retrieving field report...
A visual record of the Worldwound and the souls caught in its wake
End of Record
