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

Eight of Olweje-hamba (Olweje Descendent), 1349 A. L. (After Landfall)

You hear the thing before you see it in the gloom, a sound like breaking boughs and yet not, wet and slurping, then the smell hits you, rotting fish and sick, like the floor of the foulest seaside tavern mixed with the slaughterhouse. Then you see, it seems a mass of tendrils without shape, without logic and then as your eyes adapt to the light, to the horrid sight you realize that amid the slick blue and purple limbs there is something horrifyingly familiar. Two of those limbs end not in octopus tendrils or hardened scythes of bone, but in hands warped and emaciated to be sure, but hands nonetheless that rip steaming meat from the belly of the hunter clearly dead before it.

Given that point of to focus on the mind begins to glimpse the places where the thing's body thins into what might have been a waist, though legs had long singe been replaced with five uneven slug-like tentacles that drag the thing along the ground. "Hold!" you raise a hand for the others to stand firm, but in your horror at the once human thing you had also spoken aloud.

Faster than you would have thought possible for such an ungainly thing the ghastly beast turns, chunk of meat still in hand and you see that where its head and maybe its chest should had been all of it had fussed into a mass of flesh around a glossy purplish-black eye, like a bubble of some deeper foulness in its glistening flesh


It turns that dreadful eye not on your, not Inge or Esha, not even at Wanderer... it turns at on Tom and the man suddenly staggers as one in the thrall of drink, then to your horror you head him speaking in the Saxon tongue in English that is his cradle tongue. "Yes... yes I see it now, we've all been lied to by the wizard, this is hell and we have to get out." The spear in his hand rises even as Esha shout that he had been bespelled.

Three things happen one after another then, Esha begins to weave a spell, one of slumber you recognize, you feel the familiar blessing of Ikomi cold against your cheek as Inge speaks her own... and the monster gives a shriek in many voices and lunges toward the wall of the estate, starting to climb it with stomach churning fluidity.

"Angel... angel don't go!" Tom shouts in despair as he wrenches the head of his horse towards the wall... and then he strikes to you.

Just as you raise your shield, unwilling to strike at Tom Esha's spell falls like a curtain on the battle and so too does Tom fall from his seat. Dropping your shield in a flash you steady his sleeping form

"He is still under, he is just also asleep, we need to kill that thing," Esha explains hastily.

"We can't just leave him out here," Zaia notes. "We either take him with us inside the manse and take the risk that he wakes up at the worst time, or one of us takes him back to the temple and there is one less to fight the beast"

What do you do?

[] Leave someone behind with Tom
-[] Write in who

[] Take him with you

[] Write in

OOC: And after all that work making the monster no one recognized the monster IC so I can't tell you guys what it is yet.

Eight of Olweje-hamba (Olweje Descendent), 1349 A. L. (After Landfall)

Though your anger screams at you to go after the damn thing now, caution bars your way. You had never even been on this part of the Koire estate, much less at night with a monster stalking in the night and not knowing the mind of the guards. So you wait, wait for the spells to be cast, wait for the sounds of heavy hooted feet unlike the light sandals common in the city, as much weapons as anything about the men and women who choose to hunt that which hunts their fellow man.

Hopefully they won't see you and your company as the enemy standing over the copse of their butchered companions. Esha flickering in the faint moonlight like a phantom behind her warning shadows, Zaia covered in scales thick as armor, Swift Pebble moving with grace and wit that no simple beast can show and yourself armed and armored in outlandish manner

The first to reach you is a tall figure their face hidden by a helm, their form warded under armor and cloak. The voice has a strange twang to it, a foreigner of some kind though now is not the hour to worry about such things, not given what he says when he sees the body of his ally. "Damn and a gods' curse on them all, it was a Two Soul and us all scattered for the beast to feed on, it'll be gone as soon as they merge gain."

"Merge?" It will take more than a small thing like battle to quench Zaia's lust for knowledge. "What was that thing."

"A fool's dream of enlightenment," the hunter spits. "We should have known, we should have guessed..." he shakes his head clinking from side to side. "What's wrong with him?" he points at Tom

"Enchantment," you explain and though you cannot see the expression behind the helm you have learned to head the posture of men well enough even across the gulf of different tongues, never mind mere silence, to know that it is grave.

"What?" you snap. "Speak quickly, the beast has escaped and that we did not face it together is the fault of yours."

"Rightly did you name it beast, it is a creature of two bodies and two natures, one seems perfect and alluring, one hideous and ever hungering for flesh, together they live and apart they die and yet their desires are opposites, the Beast wishes for solitude and meat, the Hollow power in the world of men. Yet because they are linked each has something of the power of the other, the beast might snare the unwary soul and the Hollow might grow claws of bone to rip out your heart with. If we kill one the other becomes more dangerous as all the life of its other half seeks to take root in its flesh. Such a thing would of course fail and the halfling will die ere the sun comes up on the morrow, but much time might it in the meantime do."

"The Hollow is the thing that Odorin Koire is supposed to marry, isn't it?" Esha cuts him off. "But that power could it gain in a house that has proclaimed itself plague-ridden?"

"The power to feed, that beast must have been starving..." yet the hunter cannot explain how that had come to be.

What do you do?

[] Go after the Hollow first, you can handle an over-mighty beast

[] Go after the beast first, that thing has already killed a hunter when it was supposedly weaker

[] Write in

OOC: So yeah, it's bronze age magical Jekyll and Hyde. Hope you guys enjoy, and are still here for it for that matter.