WRITTEN RECAP
Eldoria — Episode 16: Into The Black Mire
Episode Sixteen begins in Greymere, with the Old Dudes having actually left something better than they found it.
The chapel bell is ringing again.
The strange multidimensional creatures infesting the sanctuary are gone. Zayon Von has reconsecrated the chapel, Father Halver is cleaning up the damage, and the party has been rewarded with a small charm capable of lending someone a brief divine blessing.
For once, they have solved a problem without creating three new ones.
That does not last.
The larger mystery is still waiting for them.
The black ichor found on the corrupted lizardfolk has been identified as part of a process used to alter living creatures. Archivist Arthias has pointed the party toward Varic, a hermit living north of Greymere and one of the only known people to have escaped transformation into a Graven Sentinel.
Before leaving town, Wenende stops at the newly reconsecrated chapel and lights a candle to Varian. There is a brief suggestion that Varian's image should be moved into the center of the shared Pantheon shrine.
Wenende insists he is a vengeance paladin, not a vain paladin.
With theology properly settled, the Old Dudes head north.
After several hours they find a concealed cave in the side of a rocky hill. The entrance has been disguised with branches and brush, and the few tracks outside suggest that whoever lives here makes a point of not receiving visitors.
That would be Varic.
The party has been told he wants to be left alone.
Naturally, they visit him anyway.
Fars takes the lead, announcing that they have come from Shade Karn seeking counsel rather than trouble. From somewhere inside the cave comes a tortured voice ordering them to leave.
The sound is not simply angry.
It is painful.
Fars and Zayon cautiously enter while the rest of the party remains near the mouth of the cave.
Inside they find a man who looks like the aftermath of something that should never have been done to a living being.
Varic is huge and heavily muscled, his body crossed by dark veins. His clothing is ragged. His eyes carry an unnatural glow. Scars mark the places where his mouth was once stitched shut, and two dark scimitars hang at his sides.
Even sitting still, he looks dangerous.
More troubling is the way his mind shifts.
One moment Varic is lucid enough to speak clearly. The next he is confused, terrified or furious, demanding that the strangers leave and repeating fragments about pain, death and being left alone.
Fars keeps talking.
He explains that they believe someone has begun experimenting again, creating new Graven Sentinels and inflicting the same suffering Varic endured.
That finally gets through.
For a few precious moments, Varic becomes clear.
He gives them a name they have never heard before.
Silvara.
She came to him.
She wanted him to help recreate what had been done before.
Varic tells them of an old tomb or ruined temple somewhere north of Scaled Lake, near the foothills beyond Stonebridge. He also points toward a tattered banner hanging in his cave. On it is a strange archaic sigil surrounded by old rune work.
The sigil, he says, is important.
Perhaps even the key.
Then the clarity begins to disappear again.
Varic's hands drift toward his scimitars.
Fars tries to calm him. Zayon offers help. Outside, the others listen to enough of the conversation to realize things are going badly.
Zewor eventually enters and tries magical persuasion.
Varic resists it.
Zayon prepares to restrain him magically if necessary.
That fails too.
For one dangerous moment, the encounter is balanced on the edge of becoming a fight.
The Old Dudes make the better choice.
They leave.
Zayon pulls the others back, arguing that Varic has suffered enough and does not deserve to be attacked simply because his torment has left him unstable. Fars agrees. Even with the banner and its sigil still behind them, the party decides the information they have is enough.
As they retreat from the cave, Varic's last warning follows them out.
Silvara.
North of Scaled Lake.
The old tomb.
That is where the answers are.
The party decides Stonebridge is the logical next stop. They already know the town, and if anyone has heard stories about ruins north of the lake, Stonebridge is the best place to ask.
The trip takes about two days.
On the way, they find a campsite beside a brook.
Something terrible happened there.
Tents have been torn apart. Blood stains the ground. Clothing lies ripped among the debris. A severed arm is found among the remains, but the travelers themselves are nowhere to be seen.
The Old Dudes begin looking for tracks.
Instead, they find the things that may have made them.
Large catlike predators emerge from the wilderness and attack.
The fight becomes one of those battles where the tactical plan remains perfectly clear right up until everyone starts taking turns.
Zayon calls on Spirit Guardians, filling the battlefield around him with divine protection while the table debates exactly what his celestial guardians should look and sound like.
Zewor works from range, maneuvering for cover and good firing angles.
Fars discovers that even a murderous wilderness predator can be subjected to Hideous Laughter, leaving one of the creatures incapacitated by magical laughter while the rest of the pack tries to kill everybody.
Garth Maul handles the problem in the more traditional Goliath fashion.
He hits things until they stop moving.
By the party's increasingly enthusiastic count, Garth is responsible for a significant portion of the bodies by the time the fight ends.
Wenende brings divine smites into the mix, while the rest of the party cycles between attacks, healing and the usual argument over who should be standing where.
One of the creatures manages to leave Garth suffering from a nasty poisonous affliction. Simply restoring hit points is not enough, forcing the group to remember that they have actual paladin abilities for exactly this sort of thing.
The poison is eventually purged.
The cats are dead.
The campsite remains grim.
The party searches what is left and recovers one hundred gold pieces, which divides neatly into twenty gold each. It may be the most mathematically convenient tragedy they have encountered so far.
Despite the blood, bodies and general smell of death, they decide to camp there for the night.
Nothing attacks them.
This counts as a victory.
The next day they reach Stonebridge.
The town has changed since their last visit. The Crimson Guard now maintains a presence there. A new barracks is under construction, and workers have begun building a palisade around the settlement.
Stonebridge has learned that being a friendly farming town on an adventuring route comes with certain occupational hazards.
The Old Dudes ask about the ruins Varic described.
The mayor has heard of them.
There is an old tomb somewhere north of Scaled Lake, close to the foothills of the Dragon Spur Mountains. People generally avoid the area.
This is treated as confirmation rather than a warning.
While in town, Wenende also finally gets the mysterious magical sword he has been carrying properly identified.
For one hundred gold, a traveling wizard examines the blade and reveals its name.
Frost Veil.
The weapon carries cold magic. It strikes more accurately than an ordinary sword, can chill its victims, and can place a freezing mark on an enemy that Wenende can later exploit.
Wenende has, in other words, acquired another way to make people regret standing next to him.
Zewor asks whether anyone in town can enchant arrows.
Stonebridge is a farming community currently trying to build walls before the next catastrophe arrives.
The answer is no.
The following morning the party hires passage across Scaled Lake.
There is some brief calendar-related confusion in which several extra days nearly pass through the power of Foundry rather than actual travel, but Jay manages to restore the flow of time before anyone ages noticeably.
The boat takes the Old Dudes north across the lake and leaves them near the rocky foothills.
From there the terrain becomes rough and increasingly difficult.
Zewor examines the ground and finds something important.
Tracks.
Not the scattered marks of a few travelers, but signs of repeated traffic. Wagons and horses have moved through the area in both directions despite terrain that should make regular travel difficult.
Someone has been supplying something out here.
The party keeps searching.
Zewor sends Fang Cloth ahead and into the air.
From above, the familiar spots an opening hidden among the rocks.
Then he sees the guardian.
It looks like a lizardfolk warrior, but only in the broadest sense.
The creature is grotesquely muscular. Its body has been altered. Its chest glows strangely. Its mouth appears to have been stitched or scarred in the same horrifying manner as Varic's.
The Old Dudes do not need Arthias standing beside them to understand what they are seeing.
A Graven Sentinel.
And this one is not a relic from some old experiment.
It is standing guard outside the place Silvara supposedly used to recreate them.
A second transformed lizardfolk appears.
Weapons come out.
The investigation ends and the fighting begins.
Episode Sixteen closes in the rocky foothills north of Scaled Lake, with the Old Dudes battling two newly made Graven Sentinels outside the entrance to an ancient tomb.
Varic was telling the truth.
The experiments have started again.
And whatever Silvara is doing, the party has just found the front door.