Date: September 26, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Randoah of Oak, Enki, Ivek the Seer, Ulfgar Kegbreath, Captain Gor
The party walked home from the crossroads at dawn and found the country changed behind them. Fields they had left standing were reaped, or else rotted where they stood, and the fine clothes they had bought for the Count’s party had come out of the mists drained to greys and browns. A farmer’s wife fed them leftover porridge out of duty to St. Terragnis; Enki paid her a gold coin, which she said would finally mend the well they had gone without since winter, and while she talked Randoah slipped round the back and mended it herself with a vial from her cauldron, letting the woman believe it was providence. At the door she added one warning: hooded figures with bandaged hands had been seen at the neighbour’s farm.
Ivek went straight there. The neighbour’s livestock lay dead in the fields, blistered and melted from the inside, with a wolf dead beside them that had fed on the carcasses. The crops had liquefied into a sticky green ooze. The farmer sat dead at a cold hearth, his flesh sliding off his skull, and the house had been stripped of tools and clothes. Ulfgar judged the animals poisoned or diseased, not starved. Enki kicked in the grain silo door and a wave of ooze ate his boots and burned his feet, and Captain Gor salved them. Then Randoah, bored, started kicking at the melted rats — and they rose, skeletons full of green jelly with green-lit eyes, and the wolf got up behind them with its belly hanging open. Randoah went down under the rats. Ivek’s prayers to St. Terragnis were met by a bubbling voice in his head telling him he was weak, and Ulfgar’s healing would not come in the corruption. Enki forced his own demonic power into Randoah, eyes flaring red, and dragged her back from the edge of death. Gor put an arrow through the wolf’s ear and it burst like a waterskin; Brielle shot a rat out of the air as it leapt for Enki’s face, and Ulfgar and Ivek smashed the last of them. Stacked by the poisoned well were empty barrels coated in green mucus and stamped with the seal of the Bittermold Estate. Ivek knew it: his old cult kept a hideout there. They burned every carcass on a pyre, and Ivek tore off the cult robes he had never quite stopped wearing and fed them to the fire.
Outside Marin’s Hold’s palisade a tent city had grown up: refugees from the failing farms and from Orlaine, queuing for Egrid’s gruel while a goblin clerk took their names under the eye of a kindly, red-bearded man. A woman from Orlaine recognised Ulfgar — people there were vanishing from their beds, Valos had come away with the refugees, and her own husband and son had gone off days ago as guides to an old, suspiciously friendly medicine woman with a colour in her name, paid in two chickens. A fourth body now hung from the posts on the road: a charlatan charm-seller. Inquisitor Morvath introduced himself over it — severe black clothes, a tall buckled hat, a silver rapier, guards with red crosses on their mail — checked Enki’s neck for bite marks, and made him the sign of the Order of Ydris. He had let Mathilda be as one of the village’s last healers, but had heard dark rumours and did not know where she had gone. Randoah quietly snapped a charm off the dead woman to bury it for her.
The gate guards told them they were a week overdue. Finch Three-Fingers, denied his Heart of the Raven, offered a new job instead: an importer bringing salt pork upriver from the Southern Kingdoms was a week late, and a fisherman had pulled the man’s finger and signet ring out of a carp. He bought their silverware, censer and candelabra, named the Bittermolds as one of the first houses to fall when the curse took the forest, and asked Enki to destroy his vial of ooze; Enki kept it. Gor split the takings evenly. The village’s young dwarf smith, whose master had died in a forge accident, wanted every scrap of silver they could find — the Inquisitors had ordered silver arrows for the wall. Gor left with a longbow.
They spent their share on a feast at the Crayfish. Ysolde Brack sent Timtam running for the Castellan’s wine and the huntsman’s venison, and a broken, drunken farmer asked whether they had found his daughter Elsie before fleeing into the night. The party lost at cards to a stranger nobody could later describe; Randoah woke in a gutter, and Enki and Ulfgar woke in the stocks as arsonists, having burned down a house testing fire arrows. They were held two days.
Egrid had turned the church into a relief kitchen. Ivek told her Sister Geraldine and Brother Kristoff were lost; she was troubled instead by visions of a woman trapped underground — a student named Jane, she thought — who only wants to rest, and asked the party to lay her soul down. Ivek stayed behind to pray. The Reeve, told that Count Demetrius was a vampire beyond any army, paid half the reward and sent them to the Castellan and to Morvath; he also muttered that his bastard kept begging him to send someone into the woods. Castellan Vane — the red-bearded man from the gate — offered a hundred gold to investigate the ruined Bittermold keep, where cloaked figures had been seen, his goblin clerk noting it in his book. Ysolde stopped Randoah in the street — “I know what you are, lass” — to ask for the moonlight-flower tincture Mathilda used to make for her sickly granddaughter, and promised Ulfgar she would look for Valos among the refugees. Morvath, in private, handed Enki a lead coffer marked with what Randoah knew for a witch’s seal of binding, and fifty gold to bring back a book from an ancient temple — the Threshold of Twilight — unread and untouched, to be destroyed.
Mathilda’s cottage was unlocked and cold. A note addressed “R of O” said she had gone on a short journey with her apprentice, and that if she did not return, the red jar must be destroyed. The jar sat on her workbench, stoppered and ritually bound in twine, beside a flask labelled for Randoah. A book of folk tales lay open to a story of young women seeking a witch’s training: follow the forest path west to the Hangman’s Tree, south to the Giant’s Playground, west to the Blood Falls, then follow the laughing stream to the place of learning. Pressed between its pages was a flower labelled moon lily. A raven’s feather drifted down past the window. Randoah asked her brother’s skull about the Threshold of Twilight, and for the first time heard his voice: a catalyst for transformation, a doorway from this realm to another, a path through the Feywild — a gift and a curse. She wept, and tucked the moon lily into his eye socket for safekeeping. Ivek confessed that his own dark past began at Bittermold. The party chose Mathilda first.
The hunters of Marin’s Hold would not go farther than a day’s walk from the gate, but at the edge of town a line of old smooth stones called the Fairy Path ran west into the dark forest. Enki bought boots. After a night by Ysolde’s fire and a bowl of eel stew, they shouldered their packs at the edge of the Gloaming.