LOST TRAILS 8: The Harrowdale Horror, part 2

[ewancummins]

Klokulf lays hands on Benn and heals him, at least enough that Benn can stand.
The Lamordian scholar rubs his reddened eyes, blinking in the sunlight. He mumbles thanks to Klokulf before staggering off a short distance to vomit on the grass.
Kat, regarding the stains left by the monster, flings her soiled cloak across the lawn.

As the party recovers from the fight, the fire in the temple burns on, growing smokier and louder. It doesn’t look at all safe to enter now.

Heading back up the road, the heroes find Alwina and Randal, safe and well but a bit on edge.

The boy says, “We saw smoke, heard screams...”

Alwina grabs Klokulf’s forearms and steps very close to him, tilting her head up to look up at his face. “You weren’t hurt?

…

While the fire burns out, the party has time to look at houses in the neighborhood.
All the gardens have been dug up and several trees cut down.
Some houses have been boarded up, or locked and tightly shuttered, but at most the doors and windows hang open—some busted and splintered as if struck with axes from outside.

Going inside a one cottage with an undamaged door left ajar, they find a table set with flies buzzing lazily over four bowls of gray-brown stew and some orange cheese. The food smells stale and looks greasy.
Randal, sniffing the food with a wrinkled nose, remarks “I think I know this house.”
A brown stain spreads from the splinters of an earthenware mug under the table. The pantry’s apparently been cleared—spilled flour on the middle shelf outlines the bottoms of absent cans, jars, and packets. A ripped yellow and dun striped cloak hangs on the open door of a small wardrobe of the bedroom behind the kitchen/eating area. The bed is a shamble.
Randal looking about the cottage with a growing look of familiarity, freezes up when he spots the cloak. “That belongs to Mistress Aularue, the wife of Jahast the cobbler. She is very proud of it and...”
…

Further investigation in nearby-homes and shops shows signs of hasty departures, ax and tool marks consistent with break-ins at some sites, possible looting, and a few wall or floor stains that could be blood. No bodies. No dirt mounds suggestive of shallow graves-though the gardens have been stripped and flower-boxes emptied.

Looking back toward the temple, the smoke appears to have thinned.
Heading back that way, the party encounters no living creatures in the eerily quiet, empty town, not even a stray dog or a crow perched on a roof.

At the temple, they fan away smoke from one of several broken stained-glass windows and crawl through.

The floor and walls feel hot to the touch.
The air is stifling, and the acrid taint merely lessens after someone opens the barred front doors and lets in the breeze.
They see no obvious foes lurking in the smoky worship hall. Fallen plaster litters the sooty floor and the blackened pews.
Up a short dais, behind the altar table, stands a life-sized statue of a robed maiden with uplifted hands. Bright pigments show here and there under the coat of black the fire painted over the statue.

Alain uses his magic to search the area.
He discovers two crispy, child-sized bodies in a side room near an exit.
They appear to have left a trail in the soot getting from the main hall into this side chamber; hand-prints and drag marks.

Something smells sweet.
Alain swiftly locates the perfume's source: smoke wafting from a fire-damaged cabinet that holds packets of incense, which are now partly incarcerated and still slowly burning.


When Benn examines the fire-damaged remains of the two small humanoids, he notices some queer anatomical features. Not just the tube-like fingers and toes, but internal abnormalities, exposed by tissues peeling away in the heat.

[alhoon]

Raen, still shaken by the ordeal is not far from Benn. As usual this foul day, he doesn't like what he sees.
"By the gods, what happened here? Do you know what made them like that Benn? Or if they're some strange humanoids?"

[ewancummins]

Raen, still shaken by the ordeal is not far from Benn. As usual this foul day, he doesn't like what he sees.
"By the gods, what happened here? Do you know what made them like that Benn? Or if they're some strange humanoids?"

WHILE BENN examines the dead creatures, Alain finds two objects in the debris and ashes close to the bodies:

a gardener's fork with sharpened tines

short, y-shaped stick fitted with some strange, fibrous greenish-black material formed into a pouched loop and attached to either end of the forked part of the wood.

The second item seems a bit like a truncated staff-sling.

[Adam]

For a moment, Bennedict looks greenish around the gills as he spies the child-sized bodies, but he quickly breaths a sigh of relief as he examines them more closely.

"Some kind of plant-based beings," he says. "I've read accounts of them, though nothing that linked them with a creature like the one we faced outside. I suppose I could examine one more closely to get more information, but for now I'm not sure what use that would be."

He looks to the others. "If one of you has magic to speak with the dead, we could perhaps get some answers from them. I'd be curious to know if they summoned the mouth-creature or, perhaps, if they were more of its victims."

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

He looks to the others. "If one of you has magic to speak with the dead, we could perhaps get some answers from them. I'd be curious to know if they summoned the mouth-creature or, perhaps, if they were more of its victims."

"As long as only one person needs to be cured of disease," Klokulf replies, "I can muster the ability to speak with the dead." He frowns at the inhuman bodies. "I certainly hope these inhuman things can be understood, especially in light of the charring."

[alhoon]

"Plants you say Bennedict? That thing that, well, ate you, was it also a plant perhaps? Or has some connection to the plant things? "

[ewancummins]

"Plants you say Bennedict? That thing that, well, ate you, was it also a plant perhaps? Or has some connection to the plant things? "

So far as Benn can tell from his initial looking-over of the bodies and the site, there exists no definite connection between the amorphous entity and the 'planimal' bipeds.
He has only taken a little while to look at the humanoid remains.
Nothing remains of the Thing except a polluted zone of dead grass and the stains on Benn's clothes and Kat's discarded cloak.


HIGHSUN AT THE FIRE-DAMAGED TEMPLE


Alain quickly locates stairs running down to the cellar near the front doors of the temple.
The flames hardly reached this area. Bare stone walls don't burn.

Going through the cellar doorway with a light and a readied weapon, he passes a slightly warped door and enters a well-limed low-ceilinged storeroom. The rotten meat stench of the blasphemous horror hangs thick in the close air. Alain’s search among the crates and casks shoved against the walls turns up no lurking monsters. Not even any vermin. Something crushed or chewed open most of the wooden containers; Alain finds bits of crumbled cheese and scattered kernels of wheat strewn among the slimy splinters.

Meanwhile, Benn retrieves the wheelbarrow from the roadside.

Kolkulf stands outside and prays as the others investigate the temple and its grounds or stand watch.

Further searches turn up a coin box fallen from its mount on the wall (half-full of coppers and silvers), some silver plate, a woodblock-printed book with colored prints, a sooty but serviceable pair of yellow leather boots, and a tarpaulin.
No heretofore undiscovered signs of monsters.
But of course, the fire may have erased, destroyed, or hidden tracks and clues.
…
AFTERNOON
COUNTRYSIDE VERY NEAR TOWN

Returning to its stream-side rendezvous on the outskirts of town, the party finds Randal’s father hunched under the footbridge, sweating and pale. The man laughs nervously as Klokulf approaches him, his eyes darting side to side and his outstretched hands shaking-- but he becomes calm and lucid almost immediately after Klokulf recites a brief incantation to him and clasps his hands.
“I feel much better now, holy-man! To which god should I offer a sacrifice in thanks?”

Randal hurries to embrace his father.

Alwina peeks under the tarp laid over the two small bodies piled in the wheelbarrow.
“What were they, anyway? Some strange kind of sub-men?”

[alhoon]

Raen doesn't partake in any division of coins and silvery from the temple of Tymora.

On the way back, he was looking at the plant things on the way back. "You are sure those are properly dead, right Benn? I have heard of trees throwing sprouts soon after they're burned. Nature is resilient."

Once Randal is healed, Raen smiles. "Congratulations Klokuff, you saved a man and gave hope to his children."

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

“I feel much better now, holy-man! To which god should I offer a sacrifice in thanks?”

Klokulf smiles, perhaps a trifle apprehensively. "To me, he is the Lawgiver. As to what he is called here, well, that is something I am in the process of learning."

Alwina peeks under the tarp laid over the two small bodies piled in the wheelbarrow.
“What were they, anyway? Some strange kind of sub-men?”

"To some degree, I would agree," Klokulf replies. "However, I doubt they bear any relation to the ones you know."

[Adam]

Bennedict strokes his mustache as he closely examines the burnt plant-people. "I don't rightly know," he says. "I intend to examine them more closely to find that answer myself."

He looks up to Klokulf and the others. "I had close contact with that...thing at the church. The rest of you did as well. We need to keep an eye on each other for signs of the disease. Until we're sure that we avoided it, it's likely not safe to return to the ship."

He looks regretfully at Randal's father. "I had hoped the affliction was magical, and the creature's destruction would end it's curse as well. Randal's father suggests otherwise. I fear this may only be the beginning for these people."

[ewancummins]

AFTERNOON NECROMANCY


In discussion about what to do next, Benn mentions that he possesses a scroll that should allow Klokulf to understand whatever language these strange humanoids use.

Preparations are soon made…

Alwina watches, fascinated, as Klokulf lays out one of the dead plant-animal bipeds on the tarp under the shade of a maple a stone’s toss downstream from the footbridge.
Randal and his father, Willen, keep their distance, remaining on the other side of the footbridge and upstream. Both locals seem afraid of getting near the monster bodies.
The Lawgiver’s priest reads Benn’s scroll, the parchment crumbling to dust in his fingers as he completes the recitation.

Then he performs a brief necromantic rite in Vaasi.

When he finishes by waving his hands over the body, smoke rises from the charred, lipless mouth and the slit nostrils.
The exhalation takes on a vaguely humanoid shape. Bulging gray eyes stare at Klokulf from the black, ghostly head.

Klokulf knows he cannot expect answers to more than a couple of questions, if the creature’s spirit-imprint understands his speech as well as he ought to be able to understand its…


What does he ask?

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

"Creature," Klokulf intones imperiously, "What is your connection to the abomination of many mouths and eyes?"

[ewancummins]

"Creature," Klokulf intones imperiously, "What is your connection to the abomination of many mouths and eyes?"

The smoky ghost lifts one hand to its breast and moves it close, away, close again, several times.

Hollow sounds rise, like a echo from down a dungeon corridor.


Klokulf decodes as the spirit-image 'talks':


THE GREEN MASTER
GUARD
GATHER
GROW
SOON
WORSHIP

[Adam]

Bennedict scribbles frantically in his notebook.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

Klokulf bites back the urge to ask what in the name of the Lawgiver that means, then asks his second question: "Will you attack the city of Harrowdale further?"