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

Fourteenth Day of Elnu-Hamba (Elnu Descendent), 1349 A. L. (After Landfall)

As Moru lays his hands upon the stone, silently praying his brother standing by him with blade drawn and you upon his other side there seems at first no change in the air, the fumes still stink and the thought of what you had learned is just as heavy in your mind, but even the birds and small scuttling things seemed to have gone, the only sound soft wings overhead as Ohun kept his own watchful eye on the clearing. Then slowly it comes: a subtle tremor in the ground, like the footsteps of giants, a rustle on the wind, some great unseen thing rushing close and deeper still, not seen, not heard, but felt a sense of destiny's jaws closing.

A fire is lit red as blood and hot as the heart of the world.

"Ware...!" you hear Ziku begin to shout, but his voice is lost in the sound of horses neighing in fright as silver tries to get in among them to quiet them. It is too late, all four of them snap the ropes they had been tied off with and it is only by the efforts of Ziku's own companion that they are kept from fleeing each on their own way.

Zaia curses in his own mother tongue, the tone unmistakable as Inge looks around, seemingly more bewildered than frightened. Gusts of steam shoot out of the ground until all is veiled in a foul yellowish mist such that you can barely see as far as Esha, never-mind Silver and the horses.

"Ambush!" you call, sure there must be some fresh horror in the mist... but none comes. The miasma fades, slowly slinking into the earth, leaving behind restive horses, surprised wizards and Moru slumped against the stone still praying.

Alas that relief is short lived, the first words out of the priest's mouth are a warning: "They saw, they heard! They have taken at least one of the temples, pray for the faithful of Inoko, the fire burns low."

"Where are they? Are they on the island?" you ask, not putting Durendal away, even while you wonder is there is some way to see past the veil of glamor.

"No, they lost here, it would serve them ill to send good money after bad," Moru replies, his voice rasping as if he had just been shouting. It takes you a moment to make sense of the mercantile metaphor, but once you do a sense of hopelessness comes over you. What can you do, go south with them when you had promised you would return to Orinilu? And then what if by the grace of God you managed to live though that battle, east and west north and south, you could spend your whole life setting your company against this foe like a man trying to beat back the tide with a broken pot and sill you would never be done.

"Being without fate does not mean you are fated to stand against fate" Esha says quietly as Zaia and Ohun try to interrogate Moru on what he knows, not that much as it turns out.

"Isn't that a tongue twister..." you chuckle wearily. "How well you have come to know me lady Esha."

"I find myself thinking the reverse just as often Sir Roland," she replies softly. "Come, let us see what we might find amid the jetsam and flotsam of war and then we shall decide what heading to set."

What do you do next?

[] Try to find the stolen armor, you do not have many leads but at the very least you can count on Ohun for help

[] Ask Aina for a reward for your services
-[] Write in

[] Go to the market and see if you can make any bargains for the Fellowship while the specter of war might incline the traders to sell quick and cheap
-[] Write in what you are seeking

[] Write in

OOC: That was close, Moru got though that by the skin of his teeth and you guys almost got an ambush, but all's well that ends not terribly.

Fifteenth Day of Elnu-Hamba (Elnu Descendent), 1349 A. L. (After Landfall)

The world is on fire and for once you are not part of the people pouring on the oil, the thought was bitter and yet in its own way savory, like the taste of Kola nuts and honey on the tongue. Esha flipped a strand of hair, already plastered to her forehead by the heat out of her eyes. The second thought was less weighty, almost a balm: I've spent so long shivering in the damned northlands that I forgot how to dress for decent weather.

Alas that did not make the demented scribbling in front of her revolve into anything like sense. It was not that she could not read the script, somewhere along the bloody thread that bound her to that first evil that had infected a fresh made corpse there had been someone who could read it. No the problem was that it didn't make any sense for a wizard's grimoire to look like this. Leaning close she could still smell the faintest whiff of dry blood and she had a strong suspicion about where the leather for the parchment must have come from, one she did not share... that was commonplace enough for a certain sort of magician, one who saw all about him as tools to his arts, for whom spring a spring of water and the bile and blood of their foes was much the same.

It was the willingness to transmute themselves that sent a chill down the sorceress' spine. One had to believe in any spell one used, utterly and without question, easy enough to do when the task was 'I am fast enough to run from the enemy' or 'there is a shied there for me to hide behind', but there were other things there, spells of glamor and spells of transformation, enchantments to wipe away sight and sound and even scent, even a deranged enchantment to rip off one's own skin and puppet it from afar like one of the shambling dead walkers. A shadow in truth seemed to have inked these pages, as if they did not want to live in their own skin, as if they had already given themselves up to some higher cause.

Shadow's Formulae Book
1st Level: Shield, Heightened Awareness, Expeditious Retreat, Disguise Self, Monkey Fish, Fabricate Disguise, Detect Undead, Negate Aroma
2nd Level: Ablative Barrier, Invisibility, Alter Self, Skinsend, Enshroud Thoughts

One might thus conclude that the Shadow was simply a creature of the Anjo-Oru, a tool which they had chosen for their own reasons not to chain to one of their ilk, but that did not fit all the pieces, for six centuries ago Unke had his Shadow and there had been no daemons then, not that anyone recalled.

With wit as sharp as his scalpel and just as steady Zaia had proclaimed the Kormani must simply never have known, or conveniently forgotten what their 'hero' had saved, but the words Unke had said in the few brief blood-soaked meetings before his fall niggled at the sorceress. He sounded more like he was trying to, in his mind, prevent some evil, not simply watch the world burn for the amusement of dark masters. He had taken and twisted Obari 'the hollow', who then had the Shadow taken... how had they been made?

What sort of man does not want to live in his own skin, chooses instead to take up the cause of another, without thought, without pride and without ambition? What sort of man chooses to be unseen. It sounded almost noble when one thought of it that way.

Noble...


In most lands it would be unwise and ill serving to one's future health to wake a monarch in the middle of the night, particularly with such news as this, but thankfully the Anwa did not commonly stand on ceremony and a new made queen could afford to do so even less then most. "How did your younger brother, Adetayo, die?"

Midnight was no time for niceties.

"Why do you need to know?" the words were harsh, angry.

"Because I think he did not die then and if I am right his body would be tossed to Ikomi like so much offal," Esha replied

"Ronku..." she swallowed heavily. "Smashed his head in with his mace, there is no way he could have lived though that, I saw the Anjo-Oru flee he corpse as a dark cloud with my own eyes."

A free man has more of an attachment to his home than the thief who broke in and those it for his lair. Souls struggle to leave their bodies and yet the head is the seat of all thought... a broken vessel perhaps remade in images of old, a warrior made assassin, Esha thought. There must be some place in this palace, a seat of old magic, of blood magic where this sort of transmutation of the mind and the soul could make place... but alas looking at the face of the queen it was clear that she was not minded to delve further into her kin's sordid past, not not to her.

What do you do next?

[] Try to entice the fey of the Thousand caves to reveal where Unke and his Shadow might have been re-made

[] Try to question Aina more, perhaps she will open up to Roland

[] Try to learn more about Obari and Adetayo from the servants in the city and others who knew them, perhaps in knowing them more you can learn of what befell them

[] Write in

OOC: Really good investigation rolls with a diplo flop at the end from Esha. She is not used to being sympathetic, at least not when she is being sincere like this, so she came off too strong.