Radio Mojave

Session 2

Journey’s First Steps

The sun rose on Hollowlight the 10th, as the party stirred they readied themselves for the 50 mile journey north through the Grove of Sibilations. Rhys asked Zach if he could help heal his broken ribs - Zach obliged and impressed the Palatinate soldier Bartholomew. The party then divided Kormakur’s belongings and buried his clothes near their campsite.

Jesper realized it was going to rain come the next few hours, so you quickly packed up camp and set off. Ferns, mosses, and fungi intermingled with saplings and towering oaks, spruces and the most abundant, thick trunked and heavily orange foliaged beech trees. The trees had begun to change to vibrant shades of orange and yellow. The forest thickened visibly after the first mile into the wood. After the first 5 or so hours, your path became heavily covered by the tree’s shade. The atmosphere became dark even during the daylight hours.

Your feet crunched loudly over the difficult terrain, and you had to trek through uneven ground filled with leaves and mud that obscured small gullies and rocks. You walked in a diamond formation, with Zach ranging ahead of the group a few miles at a time to keep an eye ahead.

After a ten hour march, Sigmund and Rhys found a small cavern for the party to rest inside during their first night of the march. You noticed the grime of the woods and the saltwater had left your steel in a pretty sorry state. Your weapons were in need of a proper cleaning at that point, and most of you followed suit.

You huddled close to the fire, and it was difficult to sleep with the ever-present animal noises and the occasional roars of far stranger beasts through the wood. Branches and trunks occasionally snapped or groaned, reminding you the trees around you were living monolithic things that towered over you and your allies in the darkness. Alive. Silent. Watching.

The party again slept in shifts with Huamanipuni, Rhys, and Sigmund on first watch. Sigmund approached Rhys and asked if he was gonna sharpen his sword, but Rhys denied him. Later, as Sigmund left the cave to watch the perimeter, he heard a many-legged creature moving north from no more than 100 feet away, pausing to hiss as it picked up the party’s scent before continuing on its way. Huamanipuni later joined Sigmund and handed him a whetstone as she took out a pipe and began to smoke.

Suthri, Bartholomew and Zach took the next shift, with Bartholomew shirking his duties to stay in the cavern as Suthri and Zach stepped outside to keep a watch. Zach and Suthri had an awkward conversation, given Suthri was tense with arachnophobia and pissed off with Bartholomew. She insulted Bartholomew over his allegiance to the Palatinate, but soon they began exchanging questions about each other. She asked Zach questions about his faith and where he will head after Thalnadel, while he asked her similar questions about her short-term goals and allegiances, footnoting a few future queries about her long-term goals for another time. Lastly, Sasha and Jesper took watch. These two were the chattiest of any of the watches, and soon Jesper revealed he was going to try to visit the capital of Dun to meet a man who had a similar issue to himself - a man by the name of Gorm, who heard a disembodied voice from an object in his possession. This was a lot for Sasha to take in, from the fact he now knew Jesper’s book speaks to him to the fact that he had explained to Jesper that Gorm is one of the wizards that started this war they’ve all fallen into. During their watch, a horned manul cat approached the fire, but they shooed it off. They chatted for hours until the birds began singing, the sun rose and their fellow companions stirred from their slumbers.

It was now the 11th of Hollowlight. Nearly all of the party proved to be early risers and began their morning routines. Huamanipuni began a morning smoke, while Rhys started a simple morning workout. Jesper began some breakfast as he sat next to Sasha who double checked his wheelchair for the day’s journey. Nearby, Zach searched for fuel to feed his sacred fire, walking past Sigmund in his search, who was packing his belongings inside the cave entrance. Behind him, deeper in the cave, Suthri washed her clothing in a small pool - casting a glare over at the late rising Bartholomew.

The party began their trek through the dusky woods, over bracken and undergrowth, past boulders and broken ground - all still traveling in the shadows of the ancient beech trees. You encountered a spring sometime around lunch time and took the opportunity to refill your waterskins and bathe for the first time since the shipwreck.

As you pressed onward in your trek, you came around a rather crowded patch of the forest, walking under the shade of deep red beech leaves and branches, like a sea of leaves stirring overhead. You lost your sense of direction for a moment and Jesper pulled out a compass to redetermine north. And that’s when you heard it, in this quiet darkness you heard a faint gibbering, a fast paced and quickly rising shrieking and howling. The quiet was soon broken as the noise surrounded you, it came from the darkness, small beady sets of glowing eyes began to appear around you under the cover of shadow.

Gibberlings jumped the party, bloodthirsty with daggers ready to kill. But they didn’t.. The party quickly found their bearings and slew their attackers. The gibberlings were practically slaughtered by the party. Many of the Gibberlings dying gruesome and bloody deaths - shaking the spirit of two members of the party. Rhys and Sasha were shaken by the encounter, their allies unable to provide solace. During the combat encounter, Jesper used necromancy to attack and savagely slay one of the gibberlings. This incident upset Zach who immediately confronted Jesper about the magic, which appeared similar to the essence of the Ghostwalk they had been in days before.

Jesper picked up a few of their enemy’s weapons and handed them over to Sasha. The party continued on their way, until they found a large raised rocky bluff to set up camp upon. You could almost see the sky above, given the small amount of trees that grew in that area. It was easy to make camp around the fire and divide yourselves into nightly watches again. The night passed without conflict, Rhys washed his clothing of the gore from the battle earlier that day, clearly shaken. Zach, on the last watch kept his eyes on a cloud of bioluminescent moths that danced their way over their fire and then rose into the sky, seeming to join the twinkling stars. The party again rose early in the morning. Sasha, under the request of Zach, forged a cauldron out of Kormakur’s old Crownsguard Breastplate. This smithing and the sound of Sasha’s ringing hammer scared off any creatures from approaching the camp that morning.

The party continued on the morning of Hollowlight the 12th in their journey to Thalnadel. Jesper figured they had to be about 30 miles into the woods, and would be near the settlement by midday on the 13th.

As the forest had grown over more rocky terrain, the mosses began to become more abundant, and the grasses and dirt more sporadic. You came to walk under tall beech trees that have rooted themselves deep, breaking apart the stone and earth they had grown upon with their sturdy and ancient roots. More apparent too, were the highways of webs twenty to thirty feet overhead, sometimes blocking out the sky’s light more than the trees before them. Occasionally, you were alerted to a noise overhead, and were tempted to draw your steel but were convinced by the groaning of the trees and the low hush of the leaves in the wind that it had just been your mind playing tricks on you. Ahead, the trees gave way to a hall in the wood, unnatural. The remnants of an unkept road. Posts marked the edges of the road as you continued. Rotten over and covered in moss, these posts were draped in large sticky web that fell from nearby trees. The webs overhead hung like a high ceiling, in some areas covering the ground and stopping grass or moss from growing. You marched on for the day through this lonely hall, until a particularly well-defendable campsite was found in the afternoon and the party decided to make camp early.

Zach decided to use the last hours of daylight to range ahead of the party, attempting to press on a little further than he had before, to see if he could reach Thalnadel by the overgrown roads. He passed more posts and signs of civilization - all unkempt. Coming to a bend in the path and over a ridge, the hall of branches opened up to a cave-like clearing, about 300 feet across. In the clearing below Zach, ruined Tudor-style buildings stood like decrepit skeletons dressed in white veils of web that fell from the forest-ceiling of this cavern and across the roofs like highways.

Alarmed by what he saw, Zach quickly turned to retrace his path back to the party. In this moment, in the silence of his mind, a soft voice echoed loudly. “Hello?”