Orhan 2 Day 31 TE 6061

We sail on towards our original destination.

We arrive at shore looking. We disembark and we head inland.

Kyrik, who fell off the wagon again during the last boat ride is dragged along with the party as it heads towards the island that once was.

Haeraan finds an overgrown trail and we start following it away from the water. The land is filled with wildlife.

Monko gets distracted by all of the monkeys around and wanders off for a brief liason with these back country monkeys.

As we walk, Haeraan notices an old leg bone sitting on the ground. It's from a skeleton that seems to have the top of its head missing. Alynna thinks it was torn off. Imre examines the skull and has a vision. There's a jungle village, and then the screaming and the running. And a shard.

Yes, a shard. All try to wake Kyrik, but he's still out.

Imre gives us a refresher course on shards. Their base move is 1000, so they are called, death upon the wind. When running their DB is unspeakable. They attack with these bony disks. You can theoretically hit them if you predict where they will stop to turn. Huge area attacks also get them.

We carefully press on. There's a buzzing sound and we all hit the ground! But it's bees.

We press on carefully. We come to the edge of the village the poor victim ran from. Imre starts doing a ritual on the bones of the dead villagers, but they start rattling and resist him. We find this to be creepy.

A young girl runs out from behind a house and grabs the remains of a little doll. Tina, as she introduces herself, lives here. Meanwhile, Haeraan's morningstar goes off. Deciding to confront the problem head on, Haeraan calls for all to come forth! Several more "people" come from various sides and ask us what we're doing here. We say we are passing through, and they nod. We ask them what happened here, and they deny that anything at all happened here. "Everything is fine." Haeraan and Imre consider how to deal with this.

Imre convinces one of the ghosts to lead us to the river (which is of course gone). He leads us for a while and then gets disturbed. Imre valiantly tries to talk the guy down.

Imre convinces everyone to sleep that night. Oathar doesn't buy it, and makes a big circle of protection against ghosts. Oathar stays in the circle all night long. Orhan and Charon are both approaching full. Sigh...

Orhan 2 Day 32 TE 6061

Imre's still trying to talk them down....

Eventually Imre gets the little girl ghost to lead us towards the "hunting party" which never seems to return. We head off to the north, carefully. Sigh.

Alynna starts hitting on the ghosts. Well, maybe not.

Imre has little luck again, but still we don't attack the ghosts.

Haeraan has a dream about shards that night and sees a giant black palace with a dome of darkness. Then it shifts to a dark chamber. Inside is a super-shard with evil glowing eyes with his face vieled. He lifts up the viel and smiles at Haeraan and then the dream ends. Then he has another dream looking down upon the jungle. There are little disturbances rushing around the jungle.

Orhan 2 Day 33 TE 6061

We wake to waybread in the morning.

Tina and Haeraan sneak off alone to find the "hunting party". They come to a clearing where there are a bunch of broken spears and skeletons. Oops. Haeraan calls out to them, but none choose to come speak with him. Pesky ghosts.

Imre tries to convince all the other ghosts to head out to the doomed hunting party area.

Everyone heads out to the place where the hunting party dies, and Imre confronts them with the horrible truth once more.

Suddenly they all scream "Noooooo!!!" and fade out.

Imre leaps into a frenzy of putting them down. Just keep putting them down. Down down down! They all get put down.

We pray more and head North with great trepidation.

Not much happens. We camp.

Orhan 2 Day 34 TE 6061

We head out again and nothing happens. Again.

We camp. Oathar, and Haeraan's prompting, looks at the stars that evening.

Tomorrow night, Orhan and Charon will both be full, and have simultaneous lunar eclipses while Charon is occulting Orhan.

Oh dear.

Orhan 2 Day 35 TE 6061

We've picked up the pace quite a bit. We find the hill that looks like a wizards hat. We start looking around in the appropriate area. After some searching we find a little entrance in the hilltop. Even as we find it, the sky overhead starts fumbling and essence streaks start flying across the sky.

Inside in the back of the cave is the usual thing with the polygon and the niches and we wear our rings and open the niches. There's a message. "The hier lives. The storm wizard remains faithful to the ideals of the empire. But where he has retreated to no one quite knows. Seek out the high peaks; perhaps there is a clue.."

Inside one of the niches, there is a telescope. Oathar attunes to the telescope.

We leave the cave and find the roiling cloud. Imre thinks teleporting at this time is a very bad idea. The ground begins to rumble and then settles a bit.

Given the horrible essence storms we decide that shapeshifting and merging are all bad so we cast fast sprint and just run like hell and see what happens. We run at 12 miles an hour. We run like mad.

In the first hour of sprinting, we make it out of the low lying area. Which is good since the land behind us sinks into the ocean. The essense storm descends upon us and night fall arrives and it's going to be a wild and crazy night. Oathar prays to Neela to save them from the shards. Suddenly the earth rumbles in front of us and a chasm appears in front of us, and suddenly the shards are upon us... One full Lat. (5 lesser and 1 greater shards.)