We begin our adventure where another ended, at the could-have-beens and the never-was. Somewhere between midnight and dawn was a darkest reflection where time and events went differently for Saphriel. A time so dark that Renald traveled with his master Sir Varik to investigate rumors of at the behest of Dexter Cross.
The rumor of Caldwell's black deeds.
They set off toward Pine Coast where a manor perched precariously, pondering pestilent Veidrheim below. En route their cart ran afoul of the road, the wheel splintering. The driver bid them farewell and said these were Fae wood, not to be trifled with. Awesome wonders and nightmarish terrors both resided in this space, for Sir Varik and Renald to experience together.
Our heroes:
Recently annointed Sir Varik was still growing into the role of a potential quartermaster, but often forgot to replace the items he tallied. Too frequently he'd find a stray blade or shield in his hall and was too ashamed to bring it back, often whispering that he'd definitely return it tomorrow. He was compelled to count out the inventories, a troubling confluence. But while this was either not noticed or overlooked, for he was skilled when times were golden.
Renald had quick hands and did not always think before he acted. He was as swiftly impatient as he was deftly equipped to execute error, or in this case cheat so often his name preceded him to even haunts unknown. He was here to learn from his new smithing master, but also to learn the name of a demon.
They pushed through the pathways and were beset not by cosmic misery, but mundane bandits. They bore unfamiliar colors and one whispered to the other before they cleared their throats and commanded the pair to lay down their arms and join Zachary.
Renald replied.
With his trusty Mad-Kin Pystall. Varik followed with an assault of his own, stepping into the large brute who spoke for the pair. "Scias would fine me if I joined you."
The crack of the whip and Renald remembered that he loved the idea of armor and armor accessories. Because he didn't like whips in this context.
Soon enough the foes were felled and they made their way into Veidrheim. It was a place of foresters and hunters, sat at the ruins of Fort Evergreen. Sir Varik had obsessed over learning of the place more in-depth before their arrival and had noted how his blade had been custom made to dole out punishment to the many animals and wicked creatures they were likely to find here. Renald confidently said he'd make a proper beast slayer.
Tragically, Sir Varik didn't inform Renald of the wound he suffered when the cart had crashed. It left a scar that holy didn't reach in time; some wounds lingered like memories. He'd have it seen to later maybe.
Either way they caught up with Dexter Cross at the hamlet, who told them of the rumors swirling around the town like a storm. Anything from nightmares given flesh to ghosts still lingering from the fall of Fort Evergreen at the hands of the Cult, to a dark cloaked figure lurking in back alleyways. Renald felt the hair at the back of his neck stand straight at the last, sure that he saw a smile in the dark. But he banished the thought.
He rejoined Dexter and Sir Varik, who discussed the plan moving forward. Sir Varik asked if others had answered the Regent's call to aid. They were in luck as the first to arrive were healers: Lady Gwendolyn of House Qorinvayas and Gregory of line Topaz, formerly Black. With holy and experience on their side they had high hopes.
She was maybe a bit overeager with the Alteration but she had spirit.
They set out, into the ruins of Fort Evergreen. It was said that there were still shambling remains of the Cult's assault, the grim reminder of the pyrrhic victory the kingdom had endured. The gate was shattered, previously broken by some morbid juggernaut. Its footprints were long eroded but the stone remembered.
It wasn't long before they met with old comrades that Lady Gwendolyn almost called to before Sir Varik hushed her. Too late, Gregory bitterly pointed out and cast a nearby candlestick into a skittering skeleton. They put the beasts to route, breaking bone and sundering skulls. Suddenly Renald shot out into the dark with his Pystall and called out "Cultist!"
The shot landed, but a spell of darkness already fell upon them and cast their formation into disarray. The battle was fierce, the cultist casting magical shields to thwart Sir Varik's strikes as Lady Gwendolyn struggled to push off the sudden swarm of former knights. The battle raged on and the group chased after the cultist, who flicked from one shadow to the next, from a swarm of undead to battle hardened Grendels who fell upon them.
In the end they prevailed. Sir Varik plunged his blued sword through the Cultist's left eye while Gregory sewed up a gash in Gwendolyn's torso. The rest of the journey was a wandering through aged and broken halls, where when they strained they felt they could still hear the din of prior sieges. Varik realized he could ask for maps of some of the old halls and while they had been shattered beyond recognition, it may yet serve.
While Renald, sadly, only recalled old sins committed during that siege. Of tragic, ill-thought deals and of men he had left behind. They all dwelled on the experience.
Once they returned they found Dexter grinning from ear to ear. He proudly announced that two more friends had answered the summons; Dame Nanna Fromm and Catherine Ingret. They shared a round at the tavern, all laughing and sharing stories save for the quiet Nanna and the somewhat sullen Gregory, who stared at Caldwell's estate in the distance. "I doubt it." The others paused and asked who he was talking to.
He waved it aside and forced a smile that was wasted behind his mask.
Catherine ran to the tavern, shrieking, clawing for comfort as a drowning man might for air. The bartender was quick to clear the path for the priestess, who fell into the brothel. There a group of comely individuals surrounded her while she wept. Tonight they didn't offer their flesh for pleasure, but their hearts for understanding. While they were still paid, they merely kept Catherine company and let her speak on the horrors of the fort above. Nanna, disgruntled, silently wandered to the gambling den and took a seat at a table. The other gamblers were quick to protest the interruption to their game... and quicker to comply when they saw the dark look pass over the knight's features. Acheron settled in for a round of drinks, laughing the whole affair off with a shrug. Elves were clearly just better suited to this sort of thing. Not to trauma, no. But hiding it, smiling through it? Acheron raised a mug and bought for the house, who cheeered with him.
News of the disastrous mission swept through the assorted heroes. One of their primary healers was down and the other was still a little rattled. Sir Varik was concerned that this early issue would slow the entire campaign, worried more that those who went in were too hurt to continue. It was a concern Glaedwin understood but reminded that they had no choice but to press on, at least for now, while hoping for the best. To that end he volunteered to go with the group to keep their spirits up.
There was protest at first. Gregory noted the Regent should really stay at the town, where it was safer. The kingdom would suffer if he perished, all the more if both he and Varik passed on.
Where there was risk, Glaedwin said, there was the potential for reward. And anyways he was looking forward to the brothel, which was currently busy so he had nothing better to do.
Glaedwin suggested that the ruins would be a hotbed of despair after the failed attempt. They needed to check the other routes and see what might present itself. In his experience, all things magical experiment led to failure and runoff so it was time to check out the spaces under the fort to see what was left behind. Rooting through trash told a lot about a man. Varik agreed that this was worthwhile and off they went. The goal was to seek out any travesties and put them down, then look them over to see if they could reverse engineer what was going on. Dexter gathered his things and came along to record the events.
You tell em, narrator.
Glaedwin's very first remark upon seeing the twisted horrors in this space, which were all pigflesh layered and stretched over conjoined forms, was that he didn't expect to see his ex so soon. Despite herself, Lady Gwendolyn laughed. The opponents were so startled they had to scramble for their tools of war.
Renald, Glaedwin and Varik made short work of their opponents. While the drum beats were loud and sure to warn the rest of this vast underground complex, they maintained high spirits. Glaedwin made light of it all, congratulated their successes. Varik took up this opportunity to more actively invoke the spirit of battle, his yell piercing the earth as he shouted out commands.
Lady Gwendolyn already felt more relieved and Renald put in work, slashing and hacking through enemies with fervor. Even so the challenges they faced here were varied and plentiful, ranging from displaced cultists to bandits, to flesh horrors. At first the presence of the cultists made them feel they had already solved the mystery, but Gwendolyn found a small note on the corpse of one that suggested they, too, were here to investigate what was going on.
Unnerved, the lot had a hard battle with more of Zachary's wretched muggers, who gleefully sought to relieve them of their HP and their GP. They were left wanting.
Unfortunately in the next chamber they found an odd, stone monolith. Simple as it was, its very presence quieted Glaedwin's jokes. He stared at it, his hollow eyes distant. Yet he showed that ture Elven grit, even for being only half of one himself, and waved off all concern when asked about the matter. The next hallway was an absolute gauntlet, leading into the thick of battle. The din of conflict was up ahead, where they came across a free for all between bandits, cultists and flesh horrors that had no names. Quickly they were immersed in it, caught in a fight that would have made Uldir proud.
Gwendolyn kept them healthy, Varik acted as a wall of flesh and metal while Glaedwin and Renald alternated between support and ruthless, bitter offense. They danced between the enemies as war cries filled the air, accompanied by the relentless drums of the enemy. Varik elbowed a bandit and struck a cultist with a pommel while Renald and Glaedwin ducked under, carving into his chest with two separate blades.
They came out of that grand melee victorious and wholly covered in the remains of combatants. Sifting through it all, the works seemed too random, too chaotic to be of the cult Glaedwin noted. Sir Varik concurred, lifting a piggy stump with the end of a sword. When Renald asked what they meant, both explained that their experiences with the cult left no room for error: a cultist creature was a living weapon. These were something else, a breeding mass that had no purpose.
They collected their things and set to go. Whatever Glaedwin witnessed left its mark on him, laying out his past pains for present thought. While his smile was just as wide, there was no light in his eyes. Gwendolyn suffered a different problem: she felt as if she was falling behind and needed to catch up to the enormous will of the group. She was wrong, the Lady was keeping pace just fine.
But it was hard for her to realize that, comparing herself to the rest as she did.
They returned in high spirits, a sharp contrast to the earlier attempt. While Nanna looked just a touch bitter, it was only at the idea of her failure. Everyone assured her, what she had was a success since all made it back alive. Sarah came out of the church in time to be joined by Ken and his hound Sable, as well as Braq who was a relative newcomer and part of a mercenary group called the Black Suns. He proudly said his leader, Yama, would definitely join them in time.
Oh yeah she led alright, right into a terrible situation where they were shot at from every angle by archers in the rafters. Worse, they were crafty things that were hard to catch even when Nanna closed the distance. Their very first battle was an ambush and they were not having a great time, except for Lord Acheron who laughed. He was clearly having a blast.
He peeled the enemy off of their high haunts for the group to tear asunder. But literal moments after they were struck by another ambush, even more terrible than the last. The enemy chanted black incantations that destroyed the mind and ravaged hearts, seeping into Sarah Church. She didn't know what message the cursed liquid contained, only that it annihilated her resolve.
In just two battles, Nanna and Catherine were peppered with arrows and struggling to maintain coherency. Someone was laughing at them in the dark beyond the shadows, a smile that followed closely, observed from between assaults. Despite the horrors, Nanna wished to persist just as they did. Acheron felt it was a poor choice and spoke up, but Nanna said there was only victory and that he should understand.
Sarah exchanged glances with him. Acheron shook his head. To an Arrynlocke, victory was the long game, not the minor struggles. He held fast to the idea of retreat so eventually he bargained Nanna down to camping. The next room they would do just that. Getting there, however...
May be more difficult than hoped. Catherine tripped over a pile of barely seen rocks and several corpses fell on her. By the time they dug her out of the mess she was ranting about the end of tomorrows. She kept at this, with every step coupled with Catherine's newest religion: doom.
Nanna finally relented, settling down to camp. They tried to ease Catherine down but her cries echoed through the halls. It got to a point where everything they attempted was met with abject sabotage. Catherine stood up and cast her scriptures into the flames. The others jumped to their feet in surprise and tried to save the tome, missing the conversation just a little to the side.
A horde of spiders ambushed them during the camp, marking the single unluckiest run in Darkest history, where every battle was enemy sided. Catherine barely held it together, using the light sparingly but more often wondering aloud if the cultists were right. Dame Nanna recognized she had made mistakes in leading the mission but she fought tooth and nail to get them all out alive. She stabbed and shouted, eventually pushing back to the exit. They abandoned the quest and chose survival.
The first expedition had gone so well that Varik was confident the next would end just as smoothly. Gregory muttered something under his breath until Nanna sat next to him at the bar. At which point Gregory was ready to go into the depths of madness.
Sir Varik had consulted the maps and noticed a vault. While no manifest was present, Gregory pointed out that an old holy chalice had been left behind when the Fort fell. Gwendolyn in particular was interested in this and, despite her somewhat frayed nerves, urged them all to seek it out for the greater good. Gregory shrugged and said it would be a great boon while Renald wondered if he could smash the cup against his hand to see if it would heal it.
After a two minute staring contest, Varik realized he couldn't fix Renald and just led on with a sigh.
It wasn't long before Gwendolyn accidentally kicked over a stack of books and flung their torch through a gap in the wall. Out came a swarm of overlarge spiders to which Gregory noted the ones Skroop had faced years back were much larger. These were fiiiine.
And it was fine. Between fire, pystall blasts and sheer determination to not let these things crawl on them, they prevailed. Sir Varik was especially pleased with his latest alchemy, which seared the enemy lines. The little spiders ran around in a burning panic while Renald chased after them, flattening what he could.
They were in high spirits. Onward they called to each other, with even Gregory smiling in that unsettling way he did, obscured by his plague mask. Their spirits dimmed when Gwendolyn's foot caught on a raised stone, which saw her dangle just over a newly exposed pit of sharpened spikes. One of many defenses meant to slow the cult, it had done little to stall their advances. Even now they saw some of the heads on spikes turn to face them, hands rise up to embrace a newcomer. There had been so many that they had filled these old hollows. Renald and Varik grabbed her arms and pulled her up. the lot shaken. Overconfidence...
...is a slow and insidious killer. They had moved through a few more chambers when they were caught in an ambush. Renald had just placed a hand over a door when an arrow pinned the palm to it. Several of the dead had clambered out of the pit to hunt for the warmth of the living, felled knights and squires. The man at the front slammed into Varik, smashing him against the wall with a bony rattled and a quiet sigh.
Gwendolyn asked Aderoth to lay light upon the horde while Gregory dug through medical supplies until he found a fine acid that he had packed as a curiosity. These was yeeted onto the skeleton that lurched forth, who succeeded in stabbing through Gregory's mask and grazing his cheek.
Renald shoved the skeleton captain aside, then was flung over a shoulder into the dark. Varik was picked up and thrown as well, landing square in the coffin. The lid slammed shut, muffling his screams until the fight was over and he was released.
He told everyone he was fine but that too was a lie.
Just as they were recovering they ran into a group of looters in the dark. They greeted the group with toothy smiles, mottled by greed and a despair that had stolen their humanity. The battle was fierce and Gregory, at least, found silver lining in the possibilities presented. He had some medical trials he wished to try out and they all had unknowingly signed the NDAs.
He really was charming.
Their luck had turned, falling into ever greater discomforts. The road was long, the light was fleeting. They felt sieged on all sides the deeper they went, finding hordes of undead, stray cultists and bandits alike. It was beginning to wear them thin. In the hour of greatest terror, when a cultist had deposited a bomb in front of Gwendolyn she acted before she had time to think. As all others could only watch she ran up to the bomb and kicked it through a shattered drainage pipe. Heaven only knew what it disturbed, but the bomb had not gone off and she felt empowered in that moment by both the light and the gratitude of her companions.
In that moment, Gwendolyn felt the strength of her Vodussi ancestors and the call to live up to her title. Courage flowed through her, guiding her soul and hand.
With new hope they found a strange, dark altar. Gwendolyn and Gregory had an immediate dislike for it and the red orb that sat atop its thorny mass. Renald wanted to lick it and that was when Varik knew it was a bad idea to touch the thing, though he couldn't shake the feeling that someone or something whispered into his ear. Urged him to move on. The voice was unpleasant.
Finally they found the vault and with it, treasure. A sacred chalice sat amidst a pile of gold and old documents that would be of worth to the Explorer's Guild, which would allow them to help find better routes through the woods for construction workers and more. The dungeon had taken a heavy toll on our heroes, though Gwendolyn felt greater for the trial. Varik was left scarred, obscuring his uncertainties and his strengths alike while Renald quietly descended into off the cuff remarks that hid a growing, gnawing fear that sat in his heart.
All of them felt as if they had been followed. Each time they checked, they found no one behind them.
The new roads allowed new adventurers, among them Lord Acheron with his stylish hat and a ryfle named Fan that had been forged by the Dwarves. With Arrynlocke, victory. He hid his scaled features from the townsfolk not for shame but to be left well enough alone. He was a dragon knight now, but he was bid to be even more. For an Arrynlocke could never settle.
Sarah Church walked somewhat near Lord Acheron Arrynlocke. On the road they had spoken lengthily about religion, philosophy and belief but once they grow close to town Lord Acheron had become more distant. First socially, then physically. They practically entered separately. Given her species she did not begrudge him.
Look at her living her best gambling life. She decided she had won the gamble of the divine, it was time to sweep the tables of men. Gregory was uh...
...not far.
Dame Nanna harshly commanded the first group to sit and rest while they sought out other scouting missions. She swore she would lead the next mission.