Age of Ice and Blood: A Pathfinder System Heroic Fantasy Quest

Day Ten, Year Unknown

The nine of you make camp upon a small ridge, the fire low lest you draw unwelcome company. Guards are set at once and kept up through the night in hopes of continuing eastwards by earliest light. Your own rest when you finally manage to find it is uneasy, plagued by the cries of gulls overhead like mournful wailing, for all your eyes still feel heavy and your head full of wool you welcome the hand that wakes you. "What time it is?"

"Third of the way though the night like you asked, milord," the man replies, then in lower tones he adds. "That leech didn't sleep a wink, strange fellow..." words heavier than 'strange' hang in the air unspoken.

You nod and rise to your feet and stretching out your stiff back, all too aware that you are going to feel that in the morning. You nod noncommittally and wave the man to find what sleep he can before taking your watch. Zaia is where you half left him, looking towards the eastern horizon as though trying to will the sun to rise swifter so that he might be about his search.

"Cold, you?" you ask, for lack of anything else to fill the silence. There are things you wish to say of course, questions you wish to ask, but all of them too deep to blurt out to a man you barely know.

"It will get colder," he replies. "This is spring in these lands, a late spring by the habits of bird and beast, and yet it is cold enough that I regret that I cannot wrap myself twice as tightly as I am now. How then might winter be?"

"Not so much colder than my home in Verley I should reckon, and there the skies are cheerful even in winter and the western winds keep us warm," you reply, making an attempt at cheer for form's sake.

"Cold western seas..." he muses more to himself than to you, though that he does so in a tongue you can understand makes it clear he is about to say something and indeed he opens his mouth, then closes it with a snap and says instead. "The gulls have stopped."

Indeed they had you realize, not fading into the distance, but gone at once, as though cut with a knife. Before you can reply you see something beyond the ridge moving, too large to be one of the goats which were the biggest animals you had so far seen on this island. Straining your eyes to peer into the moonlit darkness you think you see the outline of a person and call out to the man beside you.

"My eyes are too old and too used to looking at tight letters by candlelight to be of much use there I fear," he replies with a small shrug. "Still, I would counsel caution. If there are men out there then they will have seen the smoke fire far better than we can hope to see them. Better I think to greet them in the light of day."

Alas that the man, if man it had been and not a trick of the light, slowly walks past the edge of sight, taking out of your hands the decision on whether you should go out to meet them.


Day Eleven, Year Unknown

The next morning you wake to find all the grasses east of the ridge, which had been green with spring growth, slain as though by a untimely frost. When you catch the doctor's eye, hoping for some explanation, he simply shakes his head and thus you leave the matter be, not wanting to worry the men who do not seem to notice the odd blight.

On you stride under darkening skies until at least you can hear the sound of waves in the distance. A narrow gulf ringed by black stones like the teeth of some titanic beast open into the sea and among them, built of the same substance, are squat round towers linked by causeways surrounded by a wall perhaps twice a man's height, a keep perhaps to guard the anchorage.

"Well now..." you smile, "finally some good luck." The path you are on leads right to the towers. Yet as your pace quickens you realize that there is no trace of men about... living men that is. All you can see are corpses sprawling forgotten in death. Some of them are armored like the man you had buried, some of them not, white feathers gleam among the muck.

The doctor's eyes dart from one body to the other, counting in his own tongue, though the numbers doubtless look just as grim in any tongue, thirteen. He steps off the path and to the nearest corpse, reaching to turn it over... and then to your disbelieving horror the bloated corpse reaches out with fingers half-bone half rotting-flesh to grasp his hand and pull him down.

Feeling almost a stranger in your own body, driven by instinct and not thought, you draw your sword and in one smooth motion cut off the corpse's arm above the elbow. It's still moving, still moaning in some dreadful parody of speech...

Zaia stumbles back, his hand reaching for the dagger at his belt, but you do not have much attention to spare for him. All around you your men shout in horror and surprise as the dead are rising to their feet, faces peeling, sloughing flesh looking up at you through empty sockets.

What do you do?

[] Stand your ground here back to back as best you can

[] Make for the towers you can hold them off better here and it is only sixty feet away

[] Write in

OOC: Showtime. I hope the build up did not drag out too much, like I said the camp was not planned and I am kind of concerned it broke the flow.