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 Drezen Approach
Taken. The Banner came down the side of the tall tower and every road out of this place closed at once; the gates went in within the hour. Seventy-five years ended in an afternoon. The forge beneath it has been cleansed and given a new name.
Cleared. Four chained beasts meant to drop the span are dead; engineers shore the piers. The road west is open.
Some two hundred prisoners freed. Many now carry bows for the crusade.
Taken and held. Paradise Hill sealed at its back — nothing reaches the hill now but wings or magic.
Emptying. The companies have moved up into the citadel and the prisoners with them, into cells cut for the purpose. One prisoner never made the walk — she chose to run, and then chose to fight.
The curse is broken and the tomb re-hallowed. The dead of the First Crusade sleep clean at last.
Seventy-five years in demon hands, and taken in an afternoon once the Banner was over it. The work now is the unglamorous kind: room by room, drain by drain, cultists talked out of granaries or not talked out of them. Below, the relic-corrupting forge has been argued back into an honest tool over four days and given a new name. Two shrines on two sides of one courtyard are being scrubbed by two sets of hands, and nobody gave the order.
"Enjoy tonight. Tomorrow I want every room, every crate, every loose flagstone in this rock turned over. There were five vials of the stuff that made the traitor what he was. He drank one. I do not know where the other four are, and until I do, nobody in this army eats, drinks, or pockets anything they find in Drezen. Say it to every company by noon."
The Worldwound
Session XIX — The Wounded Lands
An elven wizard laid four separate records side by side on one table and proved that the story the crusade has told for forty years is a lie the enemy built on purpose. A company of forty dwarves went into the Worldwound. Eight came home. The expedition was a trap, the survivors were let go so nobody would look, and most of the rest were not killed — they were brought here, to Drezen, and put to work on the walls they had helped build thirty years before. Two of those names are Stonevein. They were appalling prisoners. They stole tools, and they were written up for it, and nobody in this fortress ever understood why: the cells had been cut to within twenty feet of a water tunnel the demons did not know existed. It took better than a year. Neither man is on the list of the dead. Neither was recorded as recaptured. Then letters came up the road from home, and four crusaders read them standing in a gateway and said nothing at all to each other afterward. And then there was a priest to find — a young Erastilian who had cleaned a block of ruined city by himself, and wrecked his own shrine with his own hands, and walked south into a chasm full of molten rock to die of the shame of it.
Fallen Guardian
Silver Dragon · Protector of Kenabres
“They have started finding people alive. Names struck out of ledgers, men who were supposed to be ash, a priest hauled off a coffin with five days of dying still on him — the record keeps turning out to be wrong, and almost always in the direction of hope. Hers never will be. She died in the open, in a street she had walked for a century in a plain face and a small ordinary life, because being known would have cost that city more than it ever gave her. There is no ledger anywhere that is going to revise it. She spent the last thing she had slowing four strangers' fall, and they are falling still, in the direction she pointed them.”
The One Who Read the Name
Paladin / Wizard
Recognized a name smeared in blood across a desecrated altar and knew whose it was — an old heretic priestess dead centuries, and the reason a good man had walked south to die. Cleared four wasp swarms with a single fireball and sent a locust demon home without killing it. Restrained a possessed priest and flushed the thing out of him by accident. Then, slowed to a crawl by a spell and alone with a demon at his back, he did not block: he drifted four inches out of the line, came up out of the movement with the glaive already rising, and Radiance outshone a river of molten rock. He walked the party home that night under a light visible for six miles, on purpose.
The One With Farther to Go
Monk / Paladin
His first throw was lightning and the thing was immune to it, and his face did not change; he simply picked up cold iron instead. The whole day kept him at the wrong distance — a demon in the sky, then fifty feet of open pit — and with holy fire already burning in his fists and nothing in reach to put it in, he poured the smite down the shaft of a javelin and threw that instead. When he finally crossed, he crossed in one step. He is the reason a dead woman still has her grave goods: not our tomb, not our dead, and nobody here with the right to decide. A letter came from his order with a task in it he has not explained to anyone.
The One Who Knew the Look
Inquisitor / Rogue
He sorted the paper on that table before the wizard said a word, and understood from the count of it that this was a man who was certain. Afterward he went out alone to a dry riverbed against orders, searched it properly until full dark, and found nothing — then walked the last two hundred yards he had not covered anyway. In the tomb he was the one who said something was wrong with the priest, off nothing but the way the man’s heels argued with his knees, and nobody asked him how he knew. He put a dagger he forged himself through a demon’s chest. He wiped three clean blades twice that day, where no one could see.
The Hand on the Wall
Paladin / Oracle
He knelt at a broken bridge pier with his gauntlets flat on the ground and grew four courses of good stone out of the rubble, then went gray around the mouth and left his cousin to it. His mother had asked him for something: walk out into the ruins, find old stone away from the repairs, put his hand on it and tell the city she remembers her. He did it out loud, in an ordinary voice, in an empty street. Later he rooted himself in the floor of a chasm and hauled a dying man back over a ledge one-handed — and when evil came rolling off that man, he named it correctly and out loud: it is the demon’s mark, it is not him. Then he offered him a way back.
Current Status
The fathers survived · The priest recovered · The Queen turns them south and west
The Queen's answer has come north with paladins, clerics, workers and supplies, and it says the taking of Drezen was the first of many steps: hold the fortress, and range out into the Wounded Lands for anything that can be used against the Abyss. The first errand was a missing priest, and it ended two hundred feet down a chasm with a river of molten rock in it — a man rescued from something that had been wearing him for a month, and a dead heretic's grave left deliberately untouched because nobody present had the right to open it. But the thing that will not let go is older. Somewhere east of the walls there is a mile and a half of dry riverbed and an engineer's crew about to open the ground where a tunnel came out forty years ago. Two dwarves walked out of it and were never seen again, and their sons have just found out.
Retrieving field report...
A visual record of the Worldwound and the souls caught in its wake
End of Record
