Session 3 Journal

The night above Weber Hollows was the kind of night where you stop pretending you understand the world. We made camp in the crop circle. I told myself I was being practical. The cattle had already been carved into the ground there. Whatever was hunting on this hillside was already done with this particular spot, and if it wasn’t, the survivors of last week’s massacre would be a more interesting curiosity than a fresh kill. That is the kind of reasoning that sounds rational right up until the fog comes.

I took first watch with G.L.U. on the high ground. I told him I would tinker on him. I did. I also kept looking at the trees. He kept looking at me looking at the trees, which is the closest thing to companionship I have outside of K’roaa’ka and a quietly bewildered cleric. At some point near midnight a voice in the woods began calling out for help in the voice of a child. The voice landed in the wrong place, the wrong cadence, the wrong distance. The trees did not change. The fog did. It rolled in low across the lower terraces of town and stopped, like water finding its level.

Azalea’s animals went savage in the fog. A chipmunk bit her. When she asked it why, it only said feed. The land is hungry. That is not a metaphor I am ready to write down yet, but I am keeping a column for it. Tharion cast some species of ancestor ritual into the campfire and the burning wood cracked into the shape of a skull. He pronounced it confirmation of negative spirits in the area. I pronounced nothing, because I do not pronounce when the data is two correlated observations and a chipmunk.

Roland climbed to higher ground and saw red eyes in the distance and felt the town itself descend several levels and rise back up again, “like a docking plate.” That was the moment I closed my notebook and started a new section. There is a mechanism under Weber Hollows. Something in the bones of this place lifts and lowers on a cycle, and the fog comes in the lower position. That is not nature. That is a machine. Someone built a machine the size of a town. I have been awake for eleven hours and I cannot stop thinking about it.

In the morning, Nora came down from the higher town with Shiloh and a basket. We talked. She said her father-in-law Aradorn the Unifier used to speak of fog before he died. She said he lost his mind several years before he passed. She said it the way you say a sentence you have said too many times to count. The fog is not new. The pall is not new. We are arriving in the middle of a story that has already eaten one Verdant Lord.

She also referred to her husband Flinter as the Verdant Lord. Casually. In passing. Confirmed.

We went to the crypt after breakfast. The crypt is not a cave — it is a building, mausoleum-style, vines on the outside and sunlight bleeding through gaps in the roof. Two stone statues stood at the entrance with weapons that read “swords to plowshares” so loudly the lore master would have wept if he weren’t already grumbling. The walls bore two names: Aradorn Barrows and Isar Recmir. Recmir, not Barrows. Brothers in arms, not blood.

The puzzle was a story in three pictures with the bottom halves overgrown by vines. Three slots. Five animal sigils on the walls — vulture, stag, wolf, boar, bear — and only three slots, which meant two of them were lying. I sent Mage Hand at a vine and the vine slapped my Mage Hand away, which told me everything I needed to know about how the room felt about being touched. We picked: stag for the brotherly bond, wolf for the expedition, vulture for the caves. The bear was rejected. The vines receded. The story changed.

In the second telling, the brothers were not bonding. They were arguing. One of them set fire to allow the other to enter the cave depths. There were metallic structures in the background of that picture. Metal augmentations to homes. Something nature would reject. I do not know yet what those structures are. I have a guess. I do not write guesses down.

Then the cave caved in and separated them forever, and the panel below it depicted a slender white-furred humanoid creature with antlers like a stag and arms too long for its body, posing ominously. The book Brandon — I mean Flinter — gave us said Amareses was a stag-headed mortal-bodied figure. This creature is almost that. Almost. I do not yet know whether what we are looking at is Amareses, an early Amareses, or something that walks under her skin.

The statues woke up.

Tharion crit a nat-twenty on the first one and emptied his entire spell slot pool into a stack of Divine Smites. Sixty-six damage on a single swing. The construct died beautifully, then stood back up because the vines knit it back together. Lesson logged: kill them on the same turn, or burn the vines. I missed my crossbow shot and the arrow ricocheted into Tharion’s knee. He took it like a man who had just earned a saying. On my next turn I cast Catapult on a stone — a real spell now, because Azalea convinced me to drop Faerie Fire for something with teeth — and the construct failed its DEX save and took eleven points. G.L.U. moved on the same target. We were a unit.

Lilith ended it with a crossbow bolt through the second guard’s eye. “Try and take my acorns again.” That is now a catchphrase, whether she meant it to be or not.

We searched the bodies. Faint protective magic. They were guarding something. I rolled investigation and found a latch in the floor. The lever opened the chamber and exposed two sarcophagi.

Aradorn’s casket held a body. Rotted, but his. Something had been ripped from his hand. A ring, presumably, given the bone exposure on that finger.

Isar’s casket was empty.

I named it on the spot, because that is what I do when I do not know what to call something else: there is a Crypt Lord. Isar — or whoever has Isar’s body — is animate and probably wearing Aradorn’s missing ring, and the ring is doing something. The cattle blood symbol of Amareses is a misdirect. The fog is decades old. The town descends at night. Aradorn lost his mind to the fog before he died. None of this is new. We just walked in.

We tracked the goblin who fled the cliff caves. Tharion named him Bubbles and converted him to Elythrael in a single conversation. Bubbles told us his boss had stolen a ring from the crypt and gotten dismembered by the owl bear, and the boss’s arm was still in the lair. We crept in. The owl bear was asleep, mourning a mate he lost to the fog. He let us take the ring. He said to slumber, or to suffer, and went back to sleep. I do not know yet which one of us he was speaking to.

The ring is gold with a green gemstone. Wearing it lets you cast Speak with Dead. We did not put it on. We are saving it for Aradorn. There is a conversation we owe him.

We split up at the end. Lilith and Tharion stay near the cave to follow the owl bear when he leaves at night, because the fog leaves around midnight and the owl bear may follow it home. The rest of us go back to town with Echo and G.L.U. for the night. Roland’s retainers had already broken camp and gone home, including Alaric — the loremaster who snores, who is not the same person as Aldrich, much as the table tried to make them one. Carrot sleeps under the wagon, which is apparently where squires always sleep, and Analese the spy was off doing whatever a knight’s spy does, which I would dearly love to know.

We have two weeks before the next session. I have two weeks of notes to read. I keep coming back to the metallic structures in the second-panel reveal. Something was built here. Something lifts. Something hates being touched. Aradorn knew. Isar knew. One of them is still here, in some form.

I will be the one to put the ring on.