Orhan 3 Day 70 TE 6063

Haeraan wanders around the small town of Stonedepim looking for someone he can communicate with.

Eventually an older guy comes up to him . A dark-skinned dark-haired mostly human guy. A woman accompanies him. They start writing with him. They are apparently in need of aid and looking to make an agreement.

They take us to a house. There are two other people with them in the house. The older women say they are Faena, and Naenye, and the men are Paer and Bron.. The young man is Staven, and the young woman is Arzaena. The offer us water and explain their problem. "He doesn't know how much we understand of the politics, but their daughter Cheru has vaished. They think she has been kidnapped. They have witnesses that someone dragged her out of the house several hours ago..." If we give and they will be greatful.

Haeraan looks behind and sees a woman in a grey gown show up and the little girl says "teacher?" and the little girl leaves with her when she says "Yes..." Her's is an evil voice. The others identify her as Gadrel, (the storyteller). Gadrel and Gadrel are twins, but have never been see together. Master of seductions. We ask why Gadrel would be interested in the girl and they get all agitated and blame each other for stuff related to the family, but don't really want to talk about it to us.

The younger woman wants to storm off but is restrained. Something about her being the sister and not dying.

"Why are we doing this?" "We are shaving yaks in hell."

Haeraan asks Rianne if we can get the girl back without a fight. Rianne says, "No," unequivocally.

Sigh. Well, we head off. As we leave town we see new track leading off to the north. We pursue for about 10 miles and get to a house in the plain. The sister identifies it as Gadrel's retreat. We hear a faint scream coming from the house. We charge ahead. When we get to the door, it' slocked, but we think the screaming is actually coming from around back, so we charge around the house. The back yard is surrounded by a 10 foot tall wall.

Inside the wall is a small pyriamid with a naked beaten 10 year old girl on top of the altar with a large man with a knife standing over her. Advisors and guards look on.

We assault.

It doesn't go so well. Gladrel plunges the dagger into the girl's heart while Oathar fails to disarm him or remove her. The rest fight guards. Imre has Skully announce his arrival. Then he yoinks the soul of the little girl. Whoa! This actually get Gladrel interested in Imre. He'd been pretty bored before. Gadrel tastes of the blood on his dagger, and then starts wandering down towards Haeraan. Strange.

At this point, Blinky shows up. All but one of the advisors leaves. Teh soldiers freak. Gadrel wonders what the heck. They stare at each other. Then Blinky says, "I'm out of here." He blames Imre. The rest of us are appalled.

Gladrel just starts licking the dagger again.

We continue fighting guards.

Finnaly, Haeraan takes a back strike on Gadrel. Gadrel goes down. Then the last advisor goes into the house and comes back out with a lifekeeping herb for the girl. He sends us all away. He says "Find hubda hubda" and points to the southover the hills. Azaena writes: "He said to find the loremaster."

We leave. We start heading towards the hills south of Stonedepen to find the loremaster.

After teleporting around the hills a bunch we eventually find a small hobbit-like structure sunked into the ground. The entrance is warded by a glowing white field channeled through crystals. We press the little button on the side. Gandolf answers the door. He introduces himself, and so do we, and then there's a healing montage... Yup, he's the missing loremaster. (He looks very little like a typical Dyar, but you can see if it you look closely.) She' sexpected to have a lot of mental trauma.

Imre asks him if our theories about this place are correct. They are not.

He prepares to tell us "The entire story."

"You know of the great cataclysm which ended the first era. Not all of utha and kadaena's followers were killed in that final battle. One of Kadaena's follower was named Neora Jiro. She and her disciples, one of Kadaena's sects, attempted to sieze control of the remaining forces. Neora and her cohort named Pale Daaig were conducting research into freeing the great demons from beyond the pale. As it turns out, previous to joining Neora, Pale Daaig had a daughter names Mahari Ridane. Pale turned to evil and the unlife, but Mahari did not. Neora and Pale were constructing a ritual and gateway that would open up from this plane to beyond the pale. This was the origin of Gathaena. Mahari discovered what her father was up to and ended up deceiving her father and agreed to join them. She found ways to sabotage their ritual and contributed to their research by creating the Kurzalaen, which was a monterous crystal with 1000 facets. It was their power generator, but she turned it into a containment sphere instead. Just before the final ritual was to begin, a battle ensued, and it was activated and Mahari was imprisoned within it. Everyone else was imprisoned within the cavern. Two essense lords, servants, and other creature where trapped here too. The Ishru were gather by Neora to be her servants.

Neora and Pale then created a chronogenic vault to sleep away the ages until it was time to break out of their prison.

Recently, the servants of the ishru, the ataza, have started to secretly rebel against the ishru. The taza will just take orders from whoever, so the ataza have formed two separate group rebelling against the ishru. The politics are thus somewhat complicated. One fo the ataza has managed to create a device which mimics the signature of Mahari Ridane and with it can access her remaining caches of devices. This we can not allow them to have.

The two main ataza groups are the Haraessia Combata, which is attempting to overthrow the ishru, and the Nictum Oreate, which is attempting to open the barriers keeping everyone in.

We tell him about our problems. He says, "Ah, then you must free Mahari Ridane!"

He also mention that we are "actually" under the desert of Uj.

The main thing we need to get is the device that allows you to mimic her signature (The Linaen), but other divices worth mentioning are the Narsirubaen, a set of weapons that create an energy bubble that can imprison anyone, including the Ishru. At this point, Alynna gets a message from Cay, "Get as many as you can."