Auborean 16, 22CR – 8-19-22CR: The group decides to journey southward towards Shem Vale to seek answers to the mystery of Thentis’ ancestor Aethis.  They intend to stop off at the ruins of Perac to seek treasure and adventure in the ruins of that ancient manor… Delsin in particular is fascinated by stories of the long dead artificer Iareth, who fell victim to the corruption of Khyrandros and the Hierarchy of Souls during the 2^nd Ascension War.  The heroes head south along the Falgenor Trade road, stopping in Strudoor and Dolen Downs on consecutive nights, and then cutting westward across the great plains of An-Uloren towards Fort Redshore and Lake Vanibril.

8-20-22CR: Two notable occurrences take place during the hot and muggy afternoon of the 20^th: first, on the road towards Fort Redshore, the heroes are accosted by a well spoken and arrogant highwayman named Dennis, with whom they are unwilling to bargain.  Disappointed that they will not make such an easy mark, Dennis calls for his bandits to take the heroes’ valuables by force, and the group of ten attacks from an ambush point in the roadside trees.  This proves to be a foolish endeavor for Dennis, as he is quickly cut down by Kaso’s blade and a barrage of missile fire from Delsin, and the remainder of his bandit crew is crushed by the heroes’ well coordinated tactics.

            Later that evening, as the heroes settle in for the night after eating a spicy venison stew prepared by Balale, a poisoned arrow strikes Thentis squarely in the back, debilitating him with a slow acting but virulent venom.  The assailant who fired the arrow, which is marked all over with black and gold runes of the Cymos Clan, is not found despite a rapid and well organized search.

8-21-22CR: Thentis wakes up feeling even worse than when he fell asleep; his health is slowly deteriorating due to the poison.  Fort Redshore is still a full days’ journey away, and the heroes make haste towards their destination. 

            In the early afternoon, they come across a wounded priestess of Elaera named Sioddha.  She was escorting a caravan of orphans and noncombatant priests to FortRedshore when they were attacked by a band of five trolls.  Kaso immediately pledges his support to her, and the rest of the heroes follow suit despite Thentis’ weakened condition.  Delsin sends his raven homunculus to track the trolls and the construct soon leads the heroes to their camp.  They launch a clever and efficient assault upon the trolls, waylaying them quickly and returning the captured orphans and priests to safety.  Sioddha is delighted that none of her charges have been harmed, and she agrees to accompany the party the rest of the way to FortRedshore.  Balale claims a masterwork greatclub from the troll leader and begins practicing regularly with the oversized weapon while polymorphed into minotaur form.

            That evening while the group rests, Delsin is struck with a poisoned arrow and he too falls victim to its deadly poison.  A subsequent search again reveals nothing about the attacker.  Clearly, the heroes are being stalked by some powerful agent of the Cymos who possesses the ability to strike quickly and remain unseen while doing so. 

8-22-22CR: With Thentis and Delsin weakening by the day, the heroes make haste to FortRedshore along with Sioddha’s caravan.  The day is uneventful until the early afternoon when, as the caravan approaches within a mile of the fort, yet another runed Cymos arrow flies out from a hidden location and strikes Balale.  Again their assailant avoids notice, and the heroes’ frustration and sense of desperation grows with each passing hour.

8-23-22CR: Desperate for a cure to the debilitating poison, the heroes visit a local wise woman (druid) in the near named Zoé, who lives by the eastern shore of Lake Vanibril at the village of Belara in a modest clay hut.  She is a skilled herbalist and healer, and takes pity on the party due to their excellent reputation in the area.  After studying a sample of the poison left on the Cymos arrowheads, she sets the party a task: gather six ingredients so she can concoct a remedy.  She requires Zor Fronds, Elaeren holy water, Violet Glowshrooms, a Potion of Cure Serious Wounds, a whisker from a SilverForest Panther… and most importantly, a rainbow dreamquartz from a sacred spring in the southern groves of the nearby Shemaiah Wood. The spring, she warns, is guarded by a sacred guardian of the Dreaming: one of the Jae-Kor dream serpents.

            After meeting with Zoé, Kaso shares a smoke with Hali and fishes on the lake shore for a little while.  He finds that the clay near the shore has excellent properties for his sculpting, and gathers enough clay to fashion a statue of the fallen dream serpent Kir-Jae-Kor.  The work is superlative and by far his best effort to date.  He leaves the statue at Zoé’s hut to bake dry in the sun.

            That evening, the heroes venture into the forest groves south of the lake to search for the herbs and other ingredients they need.  Finding Zor Fronds is not particularly difficult; Thentis spots a healthy patch of the feathery herb growing under the shade of an ancient oak.  The group searches deep into the grove and picks up a trail of purple Glowshrooms, one of which Chyann plucks from the ground.  Unfortunately for her, the lighter purple fungi are poisonous (she failed to heed Zoé’s warning about them) and touching the fungal cap burns her skin!  Lesson learned, she ably tracks down the darker violet Glowshrooms in a nearby clearing.  However, the area is quite close to a node of primal dreamstuff, and entering the clearing causes the party to experience a strange hallucinatory slowing of time and auditory disruptions.  The effect passes quickly, and they take their leave of the strange grove.

8-24-22CR: After a brief stopover at Fort Redshore to acquire a vial of Elaeren holy water from their friend Sioddha, the party returns to the southern groves to seek out the guardian Jae-Kor and hopefully to find a Silver Forest Panther.  The latter goal seems easier at first, as Chyann catches the scent of a panther on the wind.  However, she is too eager in her stalking of the beast and spooks it; the beautiful silver-furred cat slips away into the groves of Shemaiah.  Chyann doesn’t give up easily though, and continues her hunt steadfastly.  Eventually the heroes catch up to the panther, but as they approach they see a human poacher closing in on the beast for a killing shot.  They intervene to prevent him from killing the panther, but the man is a dangerous outlaw and a vortex addict.  He injects the dangerous drug into his veins and enters a blind rage, but the party cuts him down and prevents him from attacking the panther.   After the dust settles, Chyann tries to make empathic contact with the panther using her morph ability of wild empathy.  Grateful for the help in escaping the poacher, the panther agrees to let her approach and pluck out a single whisker.

            The group continues trekking through the Shemaiah wood in search of the sacred spring, and they come upon it with only a few hours’ daylight left.  There they meet the dream serpent Aan-Jae-Kor, sister to the fallen Kir-Jae-Kor.  They spend the entire evening speaking with Aan, first relaying the story of Kir’s attack on the group and subsequent death.  At first this enrages the serpent, who notes correctly that Chyann is carrying her brother’s fangs fashioned into a weapon, but the party’s fair speech and honest manner convinces her that their story is true: Kir-Jae-Kor was a corrupted and insane version of his former self.  Even his coloration had changed; normal dream serpents tend towards silvery and bright rainbow patterns of scales, but Kir’s colors were black, blood red and violet, and his countenance had devolved into a bestial snarl and wild eyes – quite different from the calm and bright eyes of Aan-Jae-Kor.  Kaso also wins the dream serpent’s favor by presenting her with the statue of Kir that he crafted from lake clay; Aan is touched by the gesture and by the moving words of Delsin, who describes her fallen brother’s last stand and his own distaste for what the Cymos apparently have done in corrupting Kir. 

Once the truth of Kir’s death is established, tensions between Aan and the heroes dissolve and they talk well into the night of many subjects, not the least of which is the fact that the Jae-Kor have been charged with guarding the portals between the Dreaming and the Material Plane for millennia, and the recent Convergence has created much confusion and strife in their ranks, for now their sacred springs are far more vulnerable and the serpents themselves are likewise compromised (witness the capture and corruption of Kir, no doubt by violence and torture, given that he had a gatestone amulet embedded forcibly into his forehead by the Cymos).  Eventually the talk dies down and Aan begins to sing a mournful, hauntingly beautiful song in her native tongue (a strange amalgam of Celestial, Draconic and Dreamspeech).  The heroes listen until time melts away, and eventually their voices join Aan in singing the dirge of Kir-Jae-Kor.

In the early morning hours, the heroes bid their new friend and ally farewell and begin the short overland journey back to Belara, having gathered the last of the needed ingredients – a rainbow dreamquartz – from Aan’s spring.

8-25-22CR: Having gathered all the ingredients, the party returns to Zoé’s hut and the druid brews up the poison cure for all three of the effected heroes.  The cure works as promised, and within the hour they are ready to depart for Perac.  Thanking Zoé for her timely assistance and her kindness, they journey onward with renewed confidence.

8-26-22CR: The party travels all day across the south shore of Lake Vanibril.  After their journey through the central plains of An-Uloren, the heroes finally are within sight of the ruins of Perac.  They rest the night and prepare to explore the ruined manor house in the morning.

8-27-22CR: A heavy rain dampens the landscape during the night, and does not relent with the morning but rather intensifies into a blinding storm.  Before entering the ruins, Balale and Thentis attempt to gather information on the Cymos’ activities by using the crystal ball given to the party by Biotras.  While working together in the back of the party’s wagon, they scry the octagonal room, but in so doing attract the attention of an entity heretofore unknown to the heroes: Korelith, the self-styled King of the Undead.  Balale tries to break free of the powerful psychic hold he feels tightening around his mind, but is unable to detach from the scrying device.  Thentis reestablishes control, but is forced to watch in horror as a skeletal psychic tentacle wraps around Balale’s heart and instantly snuffs out his life with a mere word: “STOP.” 

At the same moment, the hidden Cymos assassin who has been harassing the party strikes, using improved invisibility to enter the wagon and makes off with Balale’s corpse.  He is also hasted and easily outruns the pursuing heroes, so Chyann takes matters into her own hands and mounts her horse, speeding off along the lake shore to retrieve her best friend and lay waste to the Cymos scum.  The party is caught flat footed and unprepared, but manages to make off after Chyann as a group about a minute later.  Eventually the assassin turns to face his pursuer, and challenges Chyann to single combat, which the morph bravely accepts with a wild battle scream.  The assassin finally drops his invisibility and reveals himself to her: he is a skeletal elf lord called Legari Cymos (his true elvish family name is not given), and he brandishes his greatsword with calm precision as he faces the raging warrior from Malo.  Chyann strikes first, but not hardest; Legari swiftly cuts her hard across the chest twice, then hamstrings her and drives his blade fully through her torso from back to front, piercing her heart and killing her.

The rest of the heroes arrive in time to see Chyann impaled on Legari’s blade, and they engage the assassin with a rare fury, expending their energy in a brutish and bloody fashion against him.  The reanimated elf perishes after a few tense rounds of combat, falling at last to Kaso’s blade Taskmaster, which splits his skull in two.  As his body collapses into a pile of inert bones, he whispers an unmistakable word of thanks in elvish.  The rain falls unceasingly, washing away blood and tears as the party gathers its dead.

8-28-22CR: The heroes return to Fort Redshore and petition the local temple of Jenoic to have Balale and Chyann returned to life after Legari Cymos’ devastating attack.  Surprisingly, the prelate Father Jonah offers them a significant discount on the raise dead rituals without prompting.  The rituals proceed throughout the afternoon, and by early evening the two fallen heroes have been returned to life.  Chyann is furious at herself for being so undisciplined, but the rest of the party assures her that if not for her quick action, Legari might have stolen away with Balale’s body and the wizard may even have been reanimated as a Cymos minion.  Such a fate would undoubtedly be worse than death, for not only would the heroes have lost a leader, friend and ally, but the Cymos would then have access to all his knowledge of the party’s plans.

8-29-22 – 8-30-22CR: The party takes two days to rest and recuperate while also fabricating some useful consumable items for the delve into Perac.  On the 31^st they travel west-northwest all day from FortRedshore, skirting the shore of Lake Vanibril, and they arrive at the outskirts of the ruins by nightfall.

The Heroes of Falgenor