2024
Morning in Eldervale. The guards came around before sunrise, urgent knocks, no apology for the hour. The growths on the trees have been spreading overnight, faster than anyone tracked yesterday. The town square has them now.
The question on the table: go to the ruins, or find Selene first. Either clock is ticking. The group decides Selene is the more immediate problem. She knows where the ruins lead. She has a head start. And she already charmed one of them once, which nobody is going to mention out loud but everyone is thinking about.
They split into two teams and start working the districts.
What Happened
Rhurzth took the Little Water District. His first stop was Thorn's shop, where he negotiated a contract: Thorn would sell items of similar quality to the skeleton archer armor at a fixed price. Then he returned to Selene's temple and cleared out the giant rats in the basement. Under the altar he found something unexpected, a holy relic that turned out, after a conversation with Priestess Liora, to be the Holy Relic of Drakmere. That opened up a lot of questions about how it got there and what Selene's cult was actually doing with it.
Meanwhile Milo and Cil worked the Old Eldervale District. They visited Jim Gump at the blacksmith forge, which started rough, Jim had some opinions that required patience to work through, but the group made their case about the threat to the town, and Jim agreed to make non-magical items at cost. This mattered: Rhurzth had been trying to afford plate armor for weeks.
The useful information came from an alley behind the market square. Milo and Cil encountered cultists in the dark and defeated them. The story that came out afterward was more alarming than the fight itself: Selene had been with Thorn on his original trip to the ruins. Thorn looted the first few rooms. The cult believed the curse spreading through Eldervale was being driven by something he took. And those skeleton archers from Session 1, some of Selene's people had guided them out of the ruins and back to Eldervale deliberately. They had a method. Nobody knew what it was.
The three reconvened at the town hall and made one final call: back to the Crow's Roost to confront Thorn directly. He was there with several bandit captains. The fight went the party's way. The captains didn't make it. Thorn was taken alive.
He had answers. And now he had nowhere to go but a cell.
Session 3 →