Post by Dead Greyhawk on Nov 30, 2007 8:06:12 GMT -5
"We have to get the prisoners!" exclaims Antonus. "We've left them behind, and they will not be safe, unconscious and sprawled on the ground in the guard room."
"Raven, Diego, and Jasper, you are with me. Winthrop, Antonus, and Pfiffwin, watch the door. Use the wands," commands Otto. "Herbert and Hugh, go to sleep." Otto's forceful commands elicit an immediate response from the beleaguered Company. They drag themselves, grumbling, to their feet and head out of the cavern with Otto.
Otto leads the four of them down from the room of thrones and back to where the prisoners were stored. He keeps a close eye on the ground, watching for the track of the large bugbear. The bugbear seems to have made a beeline out of the Great Tree, but Otto takes no chances, tracking the bugbear's trail throughout the passageways. Little has changed since the Company came up the Great Tree; the only thing of note being that the door on the opposite side of the darkness-enshrouded pool is now open rather than closed. Perhaps the green-scaled creature slain by Hugh came from here, thinks Otto.
They follow the winding trail through the mushroom forest, where the carcass of the great spider still sits, and then descend further down past where the shadow creature fought them. No sign exists of the corpse of the shadow creature. Finally, they reach the doorway behind which the freed prisoners were cached. Otto stares intently at the ground, searching for signs that the bugbear has tarried here, but sees none. It appears as if the freed prisoners are likely still safe. Otto pops the door open with his shoulder and finds it to be true. Both the women lie unconscious on the floor, wounded, but still breathing. They are hoisted up and carried back to the throne room, where the Company has decided to rest for a short while.
The Company sets up camp behind the double doors and attempts to get some rest. Winthrop and Antonus can not bear to go to sleep before collecting samples from this strange dragon. They have never seen the like, Antonus having never even having seen a dead dragon before. Winthrop compares the dead dragon to the other dragons the Company has slain: the green one in the Dreadwood, the blue one in the Crystalmists, and the white ones on the glacier. This dragon appears to be of a totally different species. Rather than having heavy armor made from thick, broad scales, it has small, overlapping sheets of scales, and its head is shaped very differently than the other dragons, with a squarer, flatter snout. The dragon seems to be deliquescing as time passes by. Once Winthrop's sample bottles are full, he goes to turn in for a brief rest. As he does so, a dull glint from beneath the thrones catches his eye. Carefully, he goes over to the thrones and looks underneath them. Hidden up in the seats of the thrones are handfuls of black gems, dully glittering in the light. It is quite a treasure trove, and Winthrop is put to the test. His comradely nature wins out, and he calls over Raven so that he can assess there worth. Raven looks at the collection of black gems and whistles, eying the thousands of gold eagles in Winthrop's hands.
After sufficient rest and prayer, Hugh and Herbert are able to dole out healing magics to the prisoners, the only two wounded. All of the wounds of the Company, with the exception of Alouicious's, have been healed by the green-auraed creature. Alouicious is approaching hale, Myrick's ring doing its work, but is still very weak from what would have been fatal wounds. Hugh blesses Alouicious with Trithereon's grace, drawing his vitality back to him from his experience at death's door.
Upon being healed, the two women regain consciousness, both surprised and thankful at being rescued from. They explain that they were adventurers that had signed on with the Oytwood Scouts. Separately, they had been engaged in aiding the woodland creatures in defending against the humanoid mercenaries invading from the south and east. The elven female, Rhiannon Gill, served as a liaison with the forest spirits, able to locate and speak to them more easily because of the magics she is able to wield. While physically weak, she has studied long and hard in the magical arts. Pixies, sprites, buckawns, and atomies had been individually swayed by her constant courtship, and she had been able to convince them to ambush gnolls and the like in the souther portion of the Oytwood. While the attacks were always small and never against large bands of humanoids, they were successful in waylaying couriers and small groups. She was captured by a group of gnolls when she was traveling alone. She had hoped to avoid discovery during her quick trip between bands of the faerie folk but failed. After long imprisonment, she was traded to the green-scaled creatures, who brought her here.
The half-elven female, Grizela Rowantree, was engaged in a more active role. She was part of a small group of adventurers that was engaged in scouting the humanoid emplacements and then setting ambushes against patrols that came out from them. Her group was ambushed themselves, and she and her boon companion Tootall Furfeet survived and were captured. Tootall Furfeet died on the wall beside her two days ago. Both of the women are pleased to have their freedom, rather than their deaths, and agree to follow the Company's leadership once their health is restored. Neither of the women are able to move long distances without assistance, having been without food and water for several days and having lost significant amounts of blood earlier.
With Dell gone, the job of searching items and objects for traps falls to Pfiffwin. After what happened to Eig outside the Great Tree, no one seems confidant in relying on the illusionist's abilities to find traps. Jasper offers to double check any of Pfiffwin's work, but that doesn't seem to increase anyone's spirits. Instead, Hugh establishes a holy enchantment on Pfiffwin's vision, allowing him to see the presence of mechanical traps and other magical wards.
Pfiffwin starts by entering the three rooms found off of the room where the great battle was fought. The first room, where only a single bugbear appears to have lived, contains a desk and large table; the chest is, of course, protected by mechanical traps. Pfiffwin gets to work on the traps, taking his time and carefully laying out his tools before him. "You can take care of any poison that I might run into, right Hugh?" asks Pfiffwin, and Hugh smiles reassuringly.
Pfiffwin succeeds in opening the chest without undue incident, and he pulls out a variety of objects from within, gems, bags of coins, and the occasional dagger. In the bottom of the chest is a bundle of papers written on in a language unfamiliar to Pfiffwin. The writing appears related to goblin, but still different enough that he can not make out the words. Pfiffwin passes the papers around to Perrin and Al, hoping that one of them can make heads or tails of it, but it is just as foreign a tongue to them. Finally, Raven, with his magical helm, takes the papers and begins to scrutinize them.
The writing seems to contain a set of instructions to someone named Bugrot, presumably the bugbear chieftain, from someone named Hanuman. The orders are quite explicit: Bugrot is to lead his men from the Castle Crag to the druid grove to hold and occupy the tree, meeting with the green-ones and taking orders from the mighty creature of darkness. Raven finds, as he usually does, that the translation granted by the helm is legible, but not at all colloquial. Similar words may be transposed for one another, rendering the exact meaning difficult to grasp. Here, it is more obvious.
Grizela pitches in that Castle Crag is a human fortification on the eastern side of the Oytwood that fell to the humanoids long ago, when the conflict first started. As part of her duties, she had been scouting the castle for Arden Prindive before she was captured. Castle Crag overlooks the Javan River just south of the Rushmoors and was a strong point for controlling shipping down the Javan. A mercenary band known as the Green Tree has occupied it.
While the others are busy debating the meaning of the letter, Perrin has been helping Pfiffwin move the items out of Bugrot's room. As he does so, he looks down at the floor and frowns. Stopping, he traces regular-looking crack in the wood, a crack that runs perpendicular to the grain of the wood. It makes almost a half-circle, and several knots are on the far side of it. "Pfiffwin, give me a hand please," asks Perrin, trying to wedge a dagger into the crack. With effort, he and Pfiffwin are able to pry the wood up slightly, exposing the fact that the knots are hinges and the cracks the outline of a trapdoor.
Pfiffwin moves on to the second room, the room undisturbed by the bugbears for a long time. The chest and the desk here are both trapped with powerful magics according to Trithereon's sight. Behind the bed is wooden shield, appearing as a headboard to the bed. Under the desk, as if fallen on the floor, is a short scrap of paper on which is a hastily scribbled note. The note is written in a strange tongue that, again, no one seems able to read, but Raven's helm provides a translation for. The note reads "Keefe -- Abyssal -- Darkbringer!" The Company argues what it means, with Hugh claiming it is a connection to the vision seen in one of the temples within the thorn wall outside the Great Tree.
The Company debates what to do. Winthrop offers to dispel the magics in the room, but he warns that such action could destroy potions or other weakly enchanted objects that might be in the desk or the chest. Instead, the Company opts to weather the damage from the magical traps. Reasoning that traps developed by druids are likely to be based in fire, the Company backs far away from the chest and desk. Then Antonus casts an opening sorcery, freeing the locks. Fire bursts out from the desk and the chest, charring the surface of the furniture. Raven dashes in, Frostbrand in hand, and tries to quench the flames. Frostbrand glows a bright bluish-white light as it is wreathed in cold fire, sucking the heat of the blaze into the blade of the bastardsword. Raven appears singed, but not injured. He paws around inside the open drawer and draws out a stack of paper and what appears to be religious objects of the druids: a gold sickle and a set of copper, silver, and gold bowls nested within each other. Herbert takes possession of the religious objects, scowling at Diego's suggestion that they be sold for the precious metal they are made of.
The stack of paper is a collection of ledger documents, letters, and other missives. Some are sealed, while others are not. Raven, Winthrop, and Otto read through the documents, the three most likely to survive the sudden explosion of protective ruins or the like. Eventually, the dross is removed and three sets of documents are found to be of interest. The first is a scroll and a ledger, both written in the foreign tongue of the scrap of paper, that describes the defense of the Oytwood and the grove. Both show a decision by the druids to repel the humanoid intruders and active defense until roughly eight months ago, according to the lunar cycles referred to in the documents. At that point, all entries in the ledger cease.
The other two documents are more interesting because they seem to be written in the common tongue. Written with a strong, smooth hand, they are easily read, but the words within carry much weight. The first letter is apparently from the Druid of the Great Tree of Rillifane Rallathil, Aaron, to Querchard, Earl of Sterich. The letter is signed and was sealed with a great glob of wax, a hawk rising in front of a crescent moon embedded in the wax. The letter is very polite and asks kindly that the Earl to watch for large outbreaks of spiders, or anything similarly mysterious, in the Jotens and report such information to the elves of the Oytwood. It appears the letter was never sent, and no drafts of the letter are found in the stack of papers.
The text of the letter stirs Rhiannon's memory. She tells the Company that she and her compatriots had waylaid gnolls carrying messages that said the druid was with the spiders. She assumed that they were tactical messages, directing the recipients to attack some place that they knew of that had many spiders.
The last item is another sealed letter. The seal is without a sigil in it though. This one also lacks an address and is unsigned. The hand that wrote this letter appears different than that of Aaron. The information within the letter is extremely distressing to the Keoish among the Company. It accuses Jessa Kimbertos, Stephen Linderall, and Richard Kitesmith of supporting the humanoids and mercenaries, through provisions and receipt of plunder. Winthrop recognizes the name Jessa Kimbertos as an archaic name for Jessa Scotti, daughter of Kimbertos Scotti, King of Keoland. Raven recognizes Stephen Linderall as Jessa's betrothed and the employer of Thomas Louvain, the Reeve that attempted to first hire and then slay the Company. "We're in it deep now," says Raven.
While the leadership of the Company was busily going through the paperwork, Pfiffwin, supported by Perrin and Hugh, was finishing searching the last room, that occupied by, presumably, the two subchieftains. Both of the chests contain mechanical traps, but no magical ones, and Pfiffwin quickly has them open. Inside the chests are more coins and gemstones, but nothing else of note.
The Company is of two minds. Some wish to hole up here until Hugh has had an opportunity to regain his spiritual center. Others perceive the Company to be almost at full strength. They argue that the Great Tree is mainly devoid of enemies, since the Company has killed or routed them all, and those that are left need to be tracked down and slain while they are still demoralized. A compromise is struck; Herbert and Hugh will stay behind with Diego and the wounded women. The others will travel onwards. Winthrop enchants the warriors to great strength, and the company begins their trek.
The Company carefully opens the trap door found in Bugrot's room. A shaft down the tree extends from beneath the trapdoor, and a wooden ladder seems grown from the wall of the shaft. It is a remarkable achievement. The Company climbs down the shaft, finding that it leads to a landing. A trapdoor is obvious in the middle of the landing, a large ring jutting up out of the floor.
Otto heaves the trapdoor open and finds that the space beyond is an armory of sorts. Wooden shields, scimitars, and staves line the walls, but they are in disarray. Large weapons, including many arrows, are piled in disorderly heaps alongside leather and ringmail jacks like those worn by the bugbears. Looking at the leather and ringmail jacks, the Company realizes that the bugbears have an insignia on the leather under the rings of mail, a sigil of a green tree. A single door exits the room. The door has a heavy iron bolt and lock in it, the first mechanical lock seen in one of the doors of the Great Tree, and the door itself is banded with iron. Otto might be able to smash his way through the door, but Pfiffwin opts to try to open the door instead. After a little bit of work, the door springs open, Pfiffwin looking quite pleased with himself.
The Company finds itself in a corridor filled with dead bugbears, their skin sloughed from their bodies. To the right is the entryway where the Company entered the Great Tree. Ahead of them is the corridor from which the bugbears came. The Company climbs over the corpses of the dead giant goblins until they reach clear corridor, and then they follow it. The corridor winds around the Great Tree, eventually intersecting with the opening where Antonus put his giant foot through the tree. Two stairwells leading up into archer alcoves bracket the opening. It is from here that the first assault on the giant Antonus was mounted.
Further down are a series of doors on the internal wall of the corridor. The Company carefully breaches them in sequence, finding a series of barracks. The rooms are in a squalid state, full of disgusting trash and remnants of unspeakable food. Thirty or more bugbears must have lived almost on top of each other in crude bunks crammed into three tiny rooms. The odor of the rooms is so strong that the Company is almost physically forced from them.
At the end of the corridor is another door. Otto looks at the floor before the door, and he finds that no tracks seem to lead through the door. Many lead up to the door and then turn about, but none appear to enter the doorway. The Company finds this to be passing strange, but they are unwilling to simply leave a door unopened. Otto shoulders the door aside, revealing a web-filled cyst within the tree. A huge spider, not as big as the one fought above but still a healthy size, scuttles forwards as Raven shoots at it, but Winthrop appears to not be in the mood to deal with such trivial annoyances. Bolts of magical power fly from his hands, smashing the creature to the ground and frying it to a crisp.
The small chamber that was the spider's home is packed full of webs. A large corpse, about the size of a bugbear, is wrapped in webbing and hung from the ceiling, but it is quite desiccated. The bugbear seems to have been sucked dry of any fluid that was in it.
The Company retreats from the doorway and heads back to the entryway. When they originally fought their way into the tree, they were attacked by white-furred humanoids that charged forth from behind double doors. They never tracked the white-furred creatures back to their dens, chasing instead after Al and the Warriors of the Horn. The Company now retraces their steps.
Standing in the entryway, they peer up the ramp behind the double doors. The ramp is broad and slopes steeply upwards, sharply ascending up the middle of the Great Tree. The wood, unlike other areas around the perimeter of the tree, seems rougher and more brittle, though it shows no signs of work or tool. The Company carefully hikes up the ramp.
The stench of the Great Tree increases as the Company ascends, a foul, rotting smell permeating the air, nauseating the soul. The Company, after ascending perhaps sixty-five feet, reaches a large round room with a passage exiting the far side of it. A slight breeze blows past the Company from a broad shaft in the ceiling. A matching shaft is in the floor. The floor surrounding the shaft is rotted and brittle, looking ancient and decayed, while the ceiling around the shaft appears as if it has been etched away, looking almost like wooden stalactites. The stench appears to come from the shaft or pit in the floor and smells very similar to the stench that rose up from the hole in the entryway.
The Company tentatively approaches the shaft, carefully watching for crumbling wood beneath their feet. The soul-deadening stench grows stronger and stronger until it is almost overwhelming. Pfiffwin can hear the sound of voices, those of the rest of the Company left behind to guard the prisoners, echoing down the shaft in the ceiling. The pit is coated with a vile black effluvium, and trickles and droplets of a similar material drip from the shaft above into the shaft below. "Now we know what is poisoning the Oytwood," says Winthrop, clenching his fist over his nose. "That's totally disgusting."
"This is beyond surreal," says Antonus.
"Nothing to see here," directs Raven. "Let's move on."
The Company skirts the pit in the floor and reaches the far side of the room where the other passageway exits. This passage does not rise upwards, but instead shortly ends in a square room. The room is covered with strange colored furs, generally of a white, gray, or black nature and collections of tanned hides. The hides seem lizard-like, but with a much finer scale structure than normally seen. Two large wooden chests occupy the far side of the room. "Those things must have had no sense of smell," whimpers Pfiffwin, his eyes still watering from the horrible stench wafting from the adjacent room.
The chests are not locked and are quickly emptied, revealing a collection of more furs and hides in one and large pile of wood shavings in the other. Pfiffwin takes one of the shavings and eyes it dubiously. Biting carefully, his expression becomes more pleased. "Cedar. How delicious!" he exclaims, stuffing shavings into his backpack. Strewn throughout the shavings are a variety of silver and copper coins minted in Sterich.
Winthrop and Antonus argue about what other places have been yet explored, but they agree that several doors near where the battle between the green-scaled creatures, the bugbears, and Al and the Warriors of the Horn took place have not been opened. The Company retreats from this foul barracks, past the nauseating pit, and back into the cleaner air of the entryway. Antonus peers outside, hoping to see daylight, but he finds that the darkness that permeated the area inside the thorn wall is still present.
"Raven, Diego, and Jasper, you are with me. Winthrop, Antonus, and Pfiffwin, watch the door. Use the wands," commands Otto. "Herbert and Hugh, go to sleep." Otto's forceful commands elicit an immediate response from the beleaguered Company. They drag themselves, grumbling, to their feet and head out of the cavern with Otto.
Otto leads the four of them down from the room of thrones and back to where the prisoners were stored. He keeps a close eye on the ground, watching for the track of the large bugbear. The bugbear seems to have made a beeline out of the Great Tree, but Otto takes no chances, tracking the bugbear's trail throughout the passageways. Little has changed since the Company came up the Great Tree; the only thing of note being that the door on the opposite side of the darkness-enshrouded pool is now open rather than closed. Perhaps the green-scaled creature slain by Hugh came from here, thinks Otto.
They follow the winding trail through the mushroom forest, where the carcass of the great spider still sits, and then descend further down past where the shadow creature fought them. No sign exists of the corpse of the shadow creature. Finally, they reach the doorway behind which the freed prisoners were cached. Otto stares intently at the ground, searching for signs that the bugbear has tarried here, but sees none. It appears as if the freed prisoners are likely still safe. Otto pops the door open with his shoulder and finds it to be true. Both the women lie unconscious on the floor, wounded, but still breathing. They are hoisted up and carried back to the throne room, where the Company has decided to rest for a short while.
The Company sets up camp behind the double doors and attempts to get some rest. Winthrop and Antonus can not bear to go to sleep before collecting samples from this strange dragon. They have never seen the like, Antonus having never even having seen a dead dragon before. Winthrop compares the dead dragon to the other dragons the Company has slain: the green one in the Dreadwood, the blue one in the Crystalmists, and the white ones on the glacier. This dragon appears to be of a totally different species. Rather than having heavy armor made from thick, broad scales, it has small, overlapping sheets of scales, and its head is shaped very differently than the other dragons, with a squarer, flatter snout. The dragon seems to be deliquescing as time passes by. Once Winthrop's sample bottles are full, he goes to turn in for a brief rest. As he does so, a dull glint from beneath the thrones catches his eye. Carefully, he goes over to the thrones and looks underneath them. Hidden up in the seats of the thrones are handfuls of black gems, dully glittering in the light. It is quite a treasure trove, and Winthrop is put to the test. His comradely nature wins out, and he calls over Raven so that he can assess there worth. Raven looks at the collection of black gems and whistles, eying the thousands of gold eagles in Winthrop's hands.
After sufficient rest and prayer, Hugh and Herbert are able to dole out healing magics to the prisoners, the only two wounded. All of the wounds of the Company, with the exception of Alouicious's, have been healed by the green-auraed creature. Alouicious is approaching hale, Myrick's ring doing its work, but is still very weak from what would have been fatal wounds. Hugh blesses Alouicious with Trithereon's grace, drawing his vitality back to him from his experience at death's door.
Upon being healed, the two women regain consciousness, both surprised and thankful at being rescued from. They explain that they were adventurers that had signed on with the Oytwood Scouts. Separately, they had been engaged in aiding the woodland creatures in defending against the humanoid mercenaries invading from the south and east. The elven female, Rhiannon Gill, served as a liaison with the forest spirits, able to locate and speak to them more easily because of the magics she is able to wield. While physically weak, she has studied long and hard in the magical arts. Pixies, sprites, buckawns, and atomies had been individually swayed by her constant courtship, and she had been able to convince them to ambush gnolls and the like in the souther portion of the Oytwood. While the attacks were always small and never against large bands of humanoids, they were successful in waylaying couriers and small groups. She was captured by a group of gnolls when she was traveling alone. She had hoped to avoid discovery during her quick trip between bands of the faerie folk but failed. After long imprisonment, she was traded to the green-scaled creatures, who brought her here.
The half-elven female, Grizela Rowantree, was engaged in a more active role. She was part of a small group of adventurers that was engaged in scouting the humanoid emplacements and then setting ambushes against patrols that came out from them. Her group was ambushed themselves, and she and her boon companion Tootall Furfeet survived and were captured. Tootall Furfeet died on the wall beside her two days ago. Both of the women are pleased to have their freedom, rather than their deaths, and agree to follow the Company's leadership once their health is restored. Neither of the women are able to move long distances without assistance, having been without food and water for several days and having lost significant amounts of blood earlier.
With Dell gone, the job of searching items and objects for traps falls to Pfiffwin. After what happened to Eig outside the Great Tree, no one seems confidant in relying on the illusionist's abilities to find traps. Jasper offers to double check any of Pfiffwin's work, but that doesn't seem to increase anyone's spirits. Instead, Hugh establishes a holy enchantment on Pfiffwin's vision, allowing him to see the presence of mechanical traps and other magical wards.
Pfiffwin starts by entering the three rooms found off of the room where the great battle was fought. The first room, where only a single bugbear appears to have lived, contains a desk and large table; the chest is, of course, protected by mechanical traps. Pfiffwin gets to work on the traps, taking his time and carefully laying out his tools before him. "You can take care of any poison that I might run into, right Hugh?" asks Pfiffwin, and Hugh smiles reassuringly.
Pfiffwin succeeds in opening the chest without undue incident, and he pulls out a variety of objects from within, gems, bags of coins, and the occasional dagger. In the bottom of the chest is a bundle of papers written on in a language unfamiliar to Pfiffwin. The writing appears related to goblin, but still different enough that he can not make out the words. Pfiffwin passes the papers around to Perrin and Al, hoping that one of them can make heads or tails of it, but it is just as foreign a tongue to them. Finally, Raven, with his magical helm, takes the papers and begins to scrutinize them.
The writing seems to contain a set of instructions to someone named Bugrot, presumably the bugbear chieftain, from someone named Hanuman. The orders are quite explicit: Bugrot is to lead his men from the Castle Crag to the druid grove to hold and occupy the tree, meeting with the green-ones and taking orders from the mighty creature of darkness. Raven finds, as he usually does, that the translation granted by the helm is legible, but not at all colloquial. Similar words may be transposed for one another, rendering the exact meaning difficult to grasp. Here, it is more obvious.
Grizela pitches in that Castle Crag is a human fortification on the eastern side of the Oytwood that fell to the humanoids long ago, when the conflict first started. As part of her duties, she had been scouting the castle for Arden Prindive before she was captured. Castle Crag overlooks the Javan River just south of the Rushmoors and was a strong point for controlling shipping down the Javan. A mercenary band known as the Green Tree has occupied it.
While the others are busy debating the meaning of the letter, Perrin has been helping Pfiffwin move the items out of Bugrot's room. As he does so, he looks down at the floor and frowns. Stopping, he traces regular-looking crack in the wood, a crack that runs perpendicular to the grain of the wood. It makes almost a half-circle, and several knots are on the far side of it. "Pfiffwin, give me a hand please," asks Perrin, trying to wedge a dagger into the crack. With effort, he and Pfiffwin are able to pry the wood up slightly, exposing the fact that the knots are hinges and the cracks the outline of a trapdoor.
Pfiffwin moves on to the second room, the room undisturbed by the bugbears for a long time. The chest and the desk here are both trapped with powerful magics according to Trithereon's sight. Behind the bed is wooden shield, appearing as a headboard to the bed. Under the desk, as if fallen on the floor, is a short scrap of paper on which is a hastily scribbled note. The note is written in a strange tongue that, again, no one seems able to read, but Raven's helm provides a translation for. The note reads "Keefe -- Abyssal -- Darkbringer!" The Company argues what it means, with Hugh claiming it is a connection to the vision seen in one of the temples within the thorn wall outside the Great Tree.
The Company debates what to do. Winthrop offers to dispel the magics in the room, but he warns that such action could destroy potions or other weakly enchanted objects that might be in the desk or the chest. Instead, the Company opts to weather the damage from the magical traps. Reasoning that traps developed by druids are likely to be based in fire, the Company backs far away from the chest and desk. Then Antonus casts an opening sorcery, freeing the locks. Fire bursts out from the desk and the chest, charring the surface of the furniture. Raven dashes in, Frostbrand in hand, and tries to quench the flames. Frostbrand glows a bright bluish-white light as it is wreathed in cold fire, sucking the heat of the blaze into the blade of the bastardsword. Raven appears singed, but not injured. He paws around inside the open drawer and draws out a stack of paper and what appears to be religious objects of the druids: a gold sickle and a set of copper, silver, and gold bowls nested within each other. Herbert takes possession of the religious objects, scowling at Diego's suggestion that they be sold for the precious metal they are made of.
The stack of paper is a collection of ledger documents, letters, and other missives. Some are sealed, while others are not. Raven, Winthrop, and Otto read through the documents, the three most likely to survive the sudden explosion of protective ruins or the like. Eventually, the dross is removed and three sets of documents are found to be of interest. The first is a scroll and a ledger, both written in the foreign tongue of the scrap of paper, that describes the defense of the Oytwood and the grove. Both show a decision by the druids to repel the humanoid intruders and active defense until roughly eight months ago, according to the lunar cycles referred to in the documents. At that point, all entries in the ledger cease.
The other two documents are more interesting because they seem to be written in the common tongue. Written with a strong, smooth hand, they are easily read, but the words within carry much weight. The first letter is apparently from the Druid of the Great Tree of Rillifane Rallathil, Aaron, to Querchard, Earl of Sterich. The letter is signed and was sealed with a great glob of wax, a hawk rising in front of a crescent moon embedded in the wax. The letter is very polite and asks kindly that the Earl to watch for large outbreaks of spiders, or anything similarly mysterious, in the Jotens and report such information to the elves of the Oytwood. It appears the letter was never sent, and no drafts of the letter are found in the stack of papers.
The text of the letter stirs Rhiannon's memory. She tells the Company that she and her compatriots had waylaid gnolls carrying messages that said the druid was with the spiders. She assumed that they were tactical messages, directing the recipients to attack some place that they knew of that had many spiders.
The last item is another sealed letter. The seal is without a sigil in it though. This one also lacks an address and is unsigned. The hand that wrote this letter appears different than that of Aaron. The information within the letter is extremely distressing to the Keoish among the Company. It accuses Jessa Kimbertos, Stephen Linderall, and Richard Kitesmith of supporting the humanoids and mercenaries, through provisions and receipt of plunder. Winthrop recognizes the name Jessa Kimbertos as an archaic name for Jessa Scotti, daughter of Kimbertos Scotti, King of Keoland. Raven recognizes Stephen Linderall as Jessa's betrothed and the employer of Thomas Louvain, the Reeve that attempted to first hire and then slay the Company. "We're in it deep now," says Raven.
While the leadership of the Company was busily going through the paperwork, Pfiffwin, supported by Perrin and Hugh, was finishing searching the last room, that occupied by, presumably, the two subchieftains. Both of the chests contain mechanical traps, but no magical ones, and Pfiffwin quickly has them open. Inside the chests are more coins and gemstones, but nothing else of note.
The Company is of two minds. Some wish to hole up here until Hugh has had an opportunity to regain his spiritual center. Others perceive the Company to be almost at full strength. They argue that the Great Tree is mainly devoid of enemies, since the Company has killed or routed them all, and those that are left need to be tracked down and slain while they are still demoralized. A compromise is struck; Herbert and Hugh will stay behind with Diego and the wounded women. The others will travel onwards. Winthrop enchants the warriors to great strength, and the company begins their trek.
The Company carefully opens the trap door found in Bugrot's room. A shaft down the tree extends from beneath the trapdoor, and a wooden ladder seems grown from the wall of the shaft. It is a remarkable achievement. The Company climbs down the shaft, finding that it leads to a landing. A trapdoor is obvious in the middle of the landing, a large ring jutting up out of the floor.
Otto heaves the trapdoor open and finds that the space beyond is an armory of sorts. Wooden shields, scimitars, and staves line the walls, but they are in disarray. Large weapons, including many arrows, are piled in disorderly heaps alongside leather and ringmail jacks like those worn by the bugbears. Looking at the leather and ringmail jacks, the Company realizes that the bugbears have an insignia on the leather under the rings of mail, a sigil of a green tree. A single door exits the room. The door has a heavy iron bolt and lock in it, the first mechanical lock seen in one of the doors of the Great Tree, and the door itself is banded with iron. Otto might be able to smash his way through the door, but Pfiffwin opts to try to open the door instead. After a little bit of work, the door springs open, Pfiffwin looking quite pleased with himself.
The Company finds itself in a corridor filled with dead bugbears, their skin sloughed from their bodies. To the right is the entryway where the Company entered the Great Tree. Ahead of them is the corridor from which the bugbears came. The Company climbs over the corpses of the dead giant goblins until they reach clear corridor, and then they follow it. The corridor winds around the Great Tree, eventually intersecting with the opening where Antonus put his giant foot through the tree. Two stairwells leading up into archer alcoves bracket the opening. It is from here that the first assault on the giant Antonus was mounted.
Further down are a series of doors on the internal wall of the corridor. The Company carefully breaches them in sequence, finding a series of barracks. The rooms are in a squalid state, full of disgusting trash and remnants of unspeakable food. Thirty or more bugbears must have lived almost on top of each other in crude bunks crammed into three tiny rooms. The odor of the rooms is so strong that the Company is almost physically forced from them.
At the end of the corridor is another door. Otto looks at the floor before the door, and he finds that no tracks seem to lead through the door. Many lead up to the door and then turn about, but none appear to enter the doorway. The Company finds this to be passing strange, but they are unwilling to simply leave a door unopened. Otto shoulders the door aside, revealing a web-filled cyst within the tree. A huge spider, not as big as the one fought above but still a healthy size, scuttles forwards as Raven shoots at it, but Winthrop appears to not be in the mood to deal with such trivial annoyances. Bolts of magical power fly from his hands, smashing the creature to the ground and frying it to a crisp.
The small chamber that was the spider's home is packed full of webs. A large corpse, about the size of a bugbear, is wrapped in webbing and hung from the ceiling, but it is quite desiccated. The bugbear seems to have been sucked dry of any fluid that was in it.
The Company retreats from the doorway and heads back to the entryway. When they originally fought their way into the tree, they were attacked by white-furred humanoids that charged forth from behind double doors. They never tracked the white-furred creatures back to their dens, chasing instead after Al and the Warriors of the Horn. The Company now retraces their steps.
Standing in the entryway, they peer up the ramp behind the double doors. The ramp is broad and slopes steeply upwards, sharply ascending up the middle of the Great Tree. The wood, unlike other areas around the perimeter of the tree, seems rougher and more brittle, though it shows no signs of work or tool. The Company carefully hikes up the ramp.
The stench of the Great Tree increases as the Company ascends, a foul, rotting smell permeating the air, nauseating the soul. The Company, after ascending perhaps sixty-five feet, reaches a large round room with a passage exiting the far side of it. A slight breeze blows past the Company from a broad shaft in the ceiling. A matching shaft is in the floor. The floor surrounding the shaft is rotted and brittle, looking ancient and decayed, while the ceiling around the shaft appears as if it has been etched away, looking almost like wooden stalactites. The stench appears to come from the shaft or pit in the floor and smells very similar to the stench that rose up from the hole in the entryway.
The Company tentatively approaches the shaft, carefully watching for crumbling wood beneath their feet. The soul-deadening stench grows stronger and stronger until it is almost overwhelming. Pfiffwin can hear the sound of voices, those of the rest of the Company left behind to guard the prisoners, echoing down the shaft in the ceiling. The pit is coated with a vile black effluvium, and trickles and droplets of a similar material drip from the shaft above into the shaft below. "Now we know what is poisoning the Oytwood," says Winthrop, clenching his fist over his nose. "That's totally disgusting."
"This is beyond surreal," says Antonus.
"Nothing to see here," directs Raven. "Let's move on."
The Company skirts the pit in the floor and reaches the far side of the room where the other passageway exits. This passage does not rise upwards, but instead shortly ends in a square room. The room is covered with strange colored furs, generally of a white, gray, or black nature and collections of tanned hides. The hides seem lizard-like, but with a much finer scale structure than normally seen. Two large wooden chests occupy the far side of the room. "Those things must have had no sense of smell," whimpers Pfiffwin, his eyes still watering from the horrible stench wafting from the adjacent room.
The chests are not locked and are quickly emptied, revealing a collection of more furs and hides in one and large pile of wood shavings in the other. Pfiffwin takes one of the shavings and eyes it dubiously. Biting carefully, his expression becomes more pleased. "Cedar. How delicious!" he exclaims, stuffing shavings into his backpack. Strewn throughout the shavings are a variety of silver and copper coins minted in Sterich.
Winthrop and Antonus argue about what other places have been yet explored, but they agree that several doors near where the battle between the green-scaled creatures, the bugbears, and Al and the Warriors of the Horn took place have not been opened. The Company retreats from this foul barracks, past the nauseating pit, and back into the cleaner air of the entryway. Antonus peers outside, hoping to see daylight, but he finds that the darkness that permeated the area inside the thorn wall is still present.
