The Fifth Crusade
For over a century, the demon-haunted wasteland of the Worldwound has bled into the world of mortals. As the magical Wardstones that hold back the tide begin to flicker and fail, a new generation of crusaders must take up the sword. But this war requires more than steel; it requires the power of Myths.
Paladin / Wizard
Monk / Paladin
Inquisitor / Rogue
Paladin / Oracle
Intelligence Report: The Marchlands
Held, and ordered to leave. A giggling demon flew up to the north wall with the ultimatum — abandon the city within the week — and was given a one-word answer. The escape tunnel under the eastern bridge is open at last. The wizard is still missing, and every morning the scrying is shut in the company’s face.
Reported as a temple of Baphomet, and it was one. Underneath, it was a lost house of Irori. When the last cultist fell it put itself back together, stone by stone, and it is clean now. Its keepers said they would wait.
The heretic still lies in her crystal with her grave goods untouched. Then, on an ordinary evening in Drezen, four crusaders saw that crystal melt away at the same instant. Nobody knows what it meant. Nobody has gone back.
The only place along the escarpment a wagon can climb, which makes it the only western road. Reported to have demons living in it. Scouted, and nothing found — a thing that flies leaves nothing on the ground to read.
The supply road’s gate, and quiet for the first time in months. The clan that raided it now camps beside it and takes whatever work it is given, under a leader who answers to a dwarf.
Empty. A windowless stone hall whose chieftain is ash outside the door, and whose people have gone east to the Ford.
A river of lava where a river used to be, with the old caravan levee — the Gray Road — running along the bank. Four days from Drezen on foot. The Templars were holding prisoners in a cavern above it, and there was an Abyssal rift burning at the far end of that cavern at midday which was simply gone by dark.
The east gate is reinforced, the watch is doubled, and a dwarf stonemason who answered the call for masons turned out to be Korroc's mother, and is already telling the engineers what they are doing wrong. The tunnel under the bridge is open. None of the dead in it were dwarves. The staff is still on the command table.
"A demon hovered thirty feet off my wall and told me to abandon Drezen within the week. I put the question to the knights. One of them said 'nope,' and I have decided to treat that as the citadel's formal reply. We fortify. And if four of my best ride north at nightfall after two men nobody has seen in decades, I let them go — because I would have gone myself."
The Worldwound
Session XXIII — The Road North
The thing that holds the wizard sent a messenger: a small red demon that hovered off the north wall, giggling, and told the citadel to be gone within the week or more would be taken. It threw the wizard's own journal at them, torn to pieces, as proof. Sewn inside the cover were two old letters that Caleth read twice and has not spoken of since. Four days later, while riders on drakes tore through the digging at the eastern bridge, the escape tunnel the Stonevein fathers dug their way out through was finally opened. None of the dead inside it were dwarves. One of them, asked by a priest, said the two brothers were the reason anyone got out at all — that one of them was hurt, and that they had meant to make for a crypt somewhere up the dry riverbed. He did not know if they reached it. So the company rode north at nightfall with three days left on a demon's deadline, and Korroc's mother watched them go from the gate.
Fallen Guardian
Silver Dragon · Protector of Kenabres
“There was never a body. Whatever came down in that square at Armasse was gone before anyone could go back for it, and what Kenabres has in its place is a patch of swept stone that people cross on their way to market. Not a grave. An absence with the edges worn smooth. She spent a hundred years being walked past in that city, and then spent herself in about four seconds on four strangers she had no reason to trust, and left them a silver scale apiece and no instructions whatsoever. The company is only now learning what that particular kind of loss costs — the kind with no body in it, and no word.”
The One Who Kept the Letters
Paladin / Wizard
He found the one drawer in the wizard’s study that had ever been locked, and asked Thane to open it, and did not say what he found. On the wall, two old letters fell out of a torn journal’s cover; he read them twice and put them inside his coat, where the pocket is getting crowded. He killed the drake that was carrying Thane away by standing directly in front of it, and it landed on him. On the road north he woke with his hand clamped to his shoulder and said he believes the wizard is trying to reach him.
The One Who Found the Seam
Monk / Paladin
He picked up the ruined cover of the wizard’s journal, ran his thumb along the inside edge, and felt what nobody else would have — a second seam, too carefully made. He handed it over without asking what was in it. At the bridge he was first into the fight and three of the lancers did not get up; when a drake spat acid at him he simply dropped beneath it. He turned down a horse for the night ride and ran beside them, and promised a dwarf woman he had just met that he would bring her boys home.
The One Who Asked the Dead
Inquisitor / Rogue
A lance found the seam under his arm and a drake carried him off the field; he woke in its claws, tore loose, floated, was taken again, and when he came down he killed the man who had put him there. He told his aunt to her face what he had never managed to put in a letter. In the tunnel he asked a dead man four questions about his father, and one of the answers was no. Then he said he needed a horse, and nobody could talk him out of it.
The One Who Said Nope
Paladin / Oracle
Asked whether the citadel meant to obey a demon’s ultimatum, he shook his head and said nope, and that was the whole of the council. His mother walked into Drezen unannounced and he could not stop grinning. When a drake carried his cousin into the sky he ran under it on borrowed speed and threw healing upward like a man throwing a stone, and it landed. He asked the dead where his father went. Then he climbed onto a horse, cursing it, because Thane was going.
Current Status
An ultimatum refused · The tunnel opened · Three days left on the week
Drezen stays. Irabeth is fortifying against whatever Xanthir Vang sends when his week runs out, and the scrying that found the wizard twice now finds nothing at all — it is shut off every morning before it can take hold, and the last time it was thrown back hard. The four knights are not in the citadel to see what comes. They are camped along the dry riverbed a few hours north, riding for the place Korroc's mother remembers from before the fall: a graveyard for the dwarves who died when Khar-Zadûn fell, a day out, with a waystation on its grounds where travelers once stopped for food and a roof. Two escaped prisoners may have gone there, decades ago, one of them hurt. Nobody knows whether it is still standing.
Retrieving field report...
A visual record of the Worldwound and the souls caught in its wake
End of Record
