Compellor's shorts and snippets

[Compellor]

Salvage

At an hour to dawn, under a clear sky, Relmae Half-Elven looked down from a lonely hill and resisted the urge to awaken her travelling companions just to have someone to talk to. The few scattered stones of a missing fort reminded her that this was a place for silent watching. To the north, the sea, and a dozen tents surrounding half of a strange-looking ship resting on the beach. To the south and east the tops of the Giant's Forest almost matched the hill she and her not-quite-friends had spent an hour scaling this past evening. Behind her, three figures slept next to their armor: two men, and one cat. She liked the cat best. Autumn Harvest was a pleasant name for a foreigner, exotic and familiar at the same time.

In the forest below a chorus of night insects buzzed, the earliest bird chirped, and a strange sound like a baker stacking bags of flour repeated with an uneven cadence. She'd wondered about that one, for a time, and about what had to have been a few broken tree limbs, but nothing moved in the gentle starlight.

Leather and fur wrapped around her mouth, battered at her temple, suffocated her. Relmae half-screamed, half choked, and got a lungful of earthy musk. Something sharp scratched at her cheek and bloodied her lip. Something wet bumped and dragged across her forehead. She threw off the bat, and it flapped unsteadily into the night. It was a few minutes before she got her breathing back under control. Just a few. That was the third time this evening. It had to be her perfume.

As Relmae sat and fixed her hair she thought, why in the names of a thousand gods had she let herself be dragged this far from civilization? Sure, she'd needed an excuse to lie low after that mansion heist, and signing on with gently-snoring-Juordizal's little courier crew had seemed like just the thing. But they hadn't done much delivery business, now had they? For a solid week she'd held down a perfectly legitimate job, and then suddenly it was ancient ruins, and magic lanterns, and a far too clever group of imps that had chased them across two kingdoms just because she had put a few dusty tomes in her bag. The little crew had baited the imps, and counted their number, and banished them all back to hell. Most were struck down by Jalavash and his glowing warhammer, one by Autumn's silver arrow, and the last by Relmae herself with a dragon-tooth dagger. So they were all gone, for three weeks now, and there was absolutely nothing left to worry about.

Was the flour-bag sound a little louder now? She still didn't see anything.

After the imps they'd finally done some real business in the elven lands, and a bit of commodity arbitrage on the side, and then Juordizal's uncle showed up looking to combine the family businesses. He'd never even mentioned an uncle. Supposedly this man had found a shipwreck full of magic in the absolute middle of nowhere along the northern coast. He'd brought a little hovering glow-globe as evidence. He had hired porters and divers, and his girlfriend said she could scout the water as a squid (don't think about it, don't think about it), but he'd run out of coin to hire guards willing to make the journey. Nobody came out this far north without a good reason. It wasn't safe.

Something crunched in the hillside brush. A tingle walked up Relmae's spine. Should she wake the others? It was tempting, so tempting. She wanted to light a torch, too, but if something really was down there she didn't want to draw its attention. Not after the mountain lion incident. So she waited. It really was getting louder, and more spread out. Smoosh, thump, snap. Almost halfway around her now, like a great hand massaging the hillside from the direction of the forest, something flittering in her peripheral vision wherever she looked, but never quite where she looked.

Relmae crept slowly over to wake Autumn Harvest - a cat's night vision had to be better, right? It was not. The horses and Autumn's pets became agitated. Autumn's tail thrashed as she moved to string her bow and soothe her birds. Relmae hurried to wake the others. Handsome Jalavash, always falling behind, was a particularly sound sleeper. The two men scrambled blearily for their weapons.

Thoom thoom thoom, footfalls! A great singular nothing was charging up the crest of the hill. Some instinct rescued Relmae's pretty skull as she ducked under a rushing wind. A terrible unwashed odor followed. As someone lit up the ground with a spell, Relmae saw footprints as wide as her torso pressed into the ground all around her, whole bushes pressed like Jalavash's botanical specimens.

The lantern! She'd almost forgotten. There had been no reason to wield the demon's lantern since the last imp was banished. As Relmae ran back to her bedroll, tripping and stumbling in the dark, more heavy footfalls joined the first in a chaotic bass drum roll.

"Shoot it!" Relmae broke her silence. "Just shoot something!" An arrow whispered past in reply and fell down the hill.

A brutish voice from above said, "'Eh fancy one is gonna be my breakfast. You louts can split the others." Relmae dove for her pack. "Lengthwise if you like, ha ha, ow! Something bit me shoulder."

"Lengthwot?" replied a deeper voice from the other side of the camp. Juordizal screamed as something crunched in the dark. The boys were both in mithral plate, thought Relmae, surely they would be fine.

"Like a turkey," cried a nasal voice from a third direction, with no meaning Relmae could discern. "Ouch! Why's his little stick all glowy?"

Thump thump, pause, scrape. Relmae lit the lantern. Past the golden relief of demons and trickster gods a shape loomed in the dark. An ogre, back revealed, half missing, waved a sapling's trunk like a lecturing professor at the other side of the camp.

"You idjuts better quit playing with your food or I'll come over there and thump you I will. We got more plunder to move today, and by the hair on my chin we will be moving it promp... pro... with the sun."

The boys were not fine. Their armor still lay next to their bedrolls. Best not to look too long at the blood. Nimble Juordizal ran circles around his pursuer in spite of his dislocated shoulder flailing the wrong way. Another arrow sailed out of the darkness to bury itself in the backlit ogre's thick hide. "Yeow! And you better save those horses for our supper! What's that light?"

The triple-height mockery of man turned toward Relmae and raised its tree, drooling like a waterfall. Autumn's arrows finally found their place in the creature's eye and neck. Relmae scrambled out of the way as it fell.

After that there was a tedious minute of spells, blades, and violence, followed by a round of Jalavash's private recipe healing potions. Once dawn came, the four survivors marched down into the forest and found a broken crate filled with boxes of little powder packets.

Juordizal lifted up a broken plank and pointed at a painted symbol, "This was on the ship's manifest my uncle found. It must be from the same ship."

Relmae sprinkled a packet on herself, and disappeared.

(A/N: I used to DM, and I studied a lot of horror to make my encounters more impactful. This was one my players found to be more surprising than most. I don't think this turned out all that scary but I hope I at least built some tension before the monsters showed up.)