From the journal of Mazor, Windling Beastmaster of the 1st circle.
I was drinking with my new friends: Langren the Shaman, U'K'Tala, the T'Skrang Swordmaster (who actually has mastered the whip instead of a sword), and his friend Torgun Neumani who is also a Swordmaster (of the axe), We heard some people saying that looters have reported hearing strange music coming from the cave system nearby. Having nothing better to do, and with some of my companions never having been outside of Throal before, we decided to go investigate. First we traveled to Juniper Hollow, which took us 2 days. There we talked to a very nice dwarf shepherd named Shep. He gave us directions to Wolf Ridge and filled us in on some more details about the occurrences at Wolf Ridge.
We arrived in Wolf Ridge shortly after noon of the next day. The place was abandoned, the former inhabitants having been killed to the last person by a Plague Horror. There were some Boars in a pen, and at first I thought that somebody had resettled and was recapturing the animals, so I went over to check on them. Once I got way to close, I realized that the pen had been broken for months, and the boars were only in it because they wanted to be. They wanted to be in the pen because somebody had dropped a headless cow carcass in there that they were eating. We later found that somebody had dropped some dwarven bodies in there as well. The Boars were used to eating name-giver flesh, and tried to eat us. It was a very brutal fight, the boars seemed unusually strong and aggressive. U'K'Talla went down, nearly dead, and then I did also. I awakened a few hours later in a nearby house.
That night the watch's all reported Wolf activity. In the morning we found that an amazing amount of the Boars had been eaten. We also saw that all 4 boar heads had been chopped off. It looked like somebody hacked them off with an axe. Nobody on watch had not heard an axe being used. There was a blood train to the cliffs NE of the village. We also noticed the tracks of a cart pulled by two Hattawas. We thought about it, and decided that we were in no particular hurry, so we returned to Juniper Hollow until we were all healed again. Three days later we returned and entered the cave.
We entered the caves and explored them. At the far end we found a wolf den, but Langren managed to cast "Sooth the Savage Beast" on the Alpha wolf, and when we retreated they let us go unmolested. However the rest of the cave proved uninteresting. We did a bit of sneaking, and decided that there was a shaft to a lower level within the wolf den. I borrowed a whistle from Torgun, and blew it, getting the wolves to chase me. I kept well out of their reach, until I got the wolves onto the trail of some game. When they started following that, I returned to the cave. The others had figured out how to open the hatch to the lower level, and had started to explore that. I arrived just as they were attacked by 4 Flesh-beasts, beasts composed of the flesh of various name-givers and animals, crudely sewn together. One had the head of a cow, the others had the heads of three of the boar. We killed them fairly quickly.
We explored some more, and unwisely got separated into two teams of two, which proved to be a problem when I spotted some more flesh-beasts and only U'K'Tala was nearby. fortunately the other two were not too far away, and together we defeated 4 more flesh beasts. We found a laboratory that had notes from a T'Skrang named J'inal, a T'Skrang cart driver who has been bringing bodies here and experimenting on them with somebody named Lyrliant. It seems like in the days we had been healing in Juniper Hollow, the had returned to their base in Grakor. We never heard any piping, but assume that ether J'inal or Lyriant were playing.
We have been hearing very bad things about the settlement of Grakor, and it is a shame that we did not deal with these two while they were alone here performing their vile processes..
We got back to Throal, and I trained to 2nd Circle. Statistics:Posted by ChrisDDickey — Mon May 04, 2020 12:44 am
]]>