Shortly after the events in Tamerlan's laboratory, Semyon contacted me again this time by sending a messenger bat to my new home in the little village some of us Trolls were building up just above the gates. He asked for assistance at the first gate of the Cloister of Silence, to keep things quiet but to bring extra help if possible, something that definitely piqued my interest.
It turned out that he'd sent similar messages to Karl, Dubhan, and William, who'd all been on the first trip there a few months before. Our combined efforts at gathering more support yielded only Jael and his menagerie. The trip to the cloister was short and uneventful but we had time to explain what we knew of the cloister to Jael. Once we got there we found a fortified camp, with about thirty people between scholars and guards.
Semyon greeted us and explained that he had reason to believe the camp would come under attack in the next few days: scouts had been going missing but some had reported an "army" coming from the plains. He didn't have much information about this threat other than it was unlikely to be connected to the horror sieging the cloister. After meeting Zeddy Rorana the camps guard captain, we decided to send a bat to Sosanopa to warn them of the nearby threat and to scout out the "army" to determine their intentions and possibly origin. Meanwhile the camp would continue to prepare both physical and mystical defences.
The next day we reached a ridge looking over the Serpent and spotted the "army" to the west. Well it was more of a horde of fifty or so creatures, including cadavermen, walking corpses, animals and so on. As we got closer Karl and William spotted Leech Rats controlling some of the living animals. We also spotted several smaller groups moving to join the main host.
The first thing we did was to eliminate a few of the smaller groups before they could reach the safety of the horde, before returning to the cloister to help with preparations. As we examined the bodies of the enemies we took down, we found hallucinogenic Telesa berries and some poisonous Nerishman bark. As we climbed back into the mountains the horde seemed to have swelled to about seventy people and we spotted a group of five trolls in their midst.
The next day was spent preparing even more defences, Karl and William rigged ways to trigger more landslides on the "landslide path", while Dubhan and I set up boulders to drop on the "safe path" and Jael found good ambush spots for his pets.
The next dawn found us manning an improvised wall in one of the chockepoints on the path as the horde approached. The traps had definitely taken a toll on their numbers but not enough to stop them and to make matter worse some manner of horror constructs was flying above them. Soon the battle was engaged, the lines held well through the morning even if Jael took some nasty wounds and had to move back to recover. As the afternoon rolled around things were still going well and William found a small path that would let us intercept a group of monstrous boars and apes that had been a major problem earlier.
We took the chance and engaged the creatures in an arduous fight. The apes we dangerous and almost took out Jael's shadow bunny, but the boars were the real threat, their charges hit like avalanches and they seemed to have some form of fireblood. Eventually we prevailed and rejoined the main fight as evening fell. At this point the fight was turning in our favour and we gave the horde no quarter, Dubhan empowered our troops to keep fighting, William tried to take out their leaders, Jael commanded their living animals to leave, and I took position as part of the wall itself plugging a breach. In just a few hours more we'd taken them down almost to the last namegiver, but their troll leader fled before we could reach him.
Just as we were about to call it a victory, something felt wrong and we turned to see the old windling lady who'd served as quartermaster and healer for the camp use some magic in an attempt to murder Renrick, Semyon's husband and nethermancer who was warding the monks outside the cloister. Noticing that she was spotted, the old lady flew away shedding the her illusory windling form and turning into a bloated caricature of herself.
William estimated she was flying towards Grakkor, while I moved towards Renrick's body to try and put it back in some semblance of dwarf shape, but thankfully he was still alive, so I opted for shoving a healing potion in his mouth and calling for a medic. Dubhan was the first physician to arrive and managed to help him some more, hopefully preventing too much permanent injury.
At this point we turned back to cleanup of the battlefield. We spotted some large worms crawling out of some of the corpses, but William didn't think they were mindworms. He also estimated that the troll leader was also making for Grakkor.
Semyon thanked us profusely and offered some treasures from his family vault in recompense on top of a large amount of coin. William received a cloak, Karl took a package without revealing the contents and I was handed the most massive crystal plate suit I've ever seen. Semyon also revealed that, based on his understanding of the ritual protecting the cloister, repelling the attack may have actually strengthened the defences.
The cloister of silence endures and in enduring grows strong.Statistics:Posted by sigfriedmcwild — Sun May 17, 2020 7:25 am
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