1. Half a Quest and a Chicken
The three new adventurers had barely left Fendry behind when they found their first opportunity to prove themselves. It involved chickens.
A farmer named Thompson had lost control of his flock and needed them returned to their coop. It was not quite the sort of heroic deed Da’ar had travelled so far to perform, but the General Questing Alliance expected its members to be useful, even when no one was offering to pay them.
They made rather a mess of gathering the escaped birds until Ayla used her magic to charm them into following her back to the coop. Along the way, the party took a liking to one particularly peculiar chicken, whom they named Charlie. Charlie was not blessed with an abundance of good sense, but he had something else going for him: the party wanted to keep him.
Thompson agreed to let them take Charlie, though he was rather less pleased about the arrangement than the adventurers were. That mattered when he signed their magical Questing Tablet. The tablet did not merely record a name; its ink reflected the signer’s genuine feeling about the help they had received. Thompson’s reluctant approval appeared as a faded signature, worth only half a quest.
They needed three and a half quests to earn their place in the Alliance. After all that chasing, they had made a start, if not quite the start they had imagined.
At least they had a chicken.
2. A Night at the Stageway
Cliffwood was too far to reach in a day, and after a journey marked by more than a little bickering, the party chose the comforts of the Stageway Inn over a night in the forest.
There they discovered Fire Whiskey and Flower Whiskey, drinks with curious swirls of arcane colour in their glasses. For a little while, there was food, warmth, and no particular urgency to be anywhere else.
Kai’thos took a room of his own. Alone that night, he thought of his missing sister, Sirith, and all that had happened at the Opera Eclese. Ayla and Da’ar shared a room, along with Charlie, who seemed determined to escape whenever the chance arose. Ayla eventually managed to settle him.
Da’ar tried to start a late-night conversation with Ayla, then fell asleep before it properly began.
By morning, the bed beneath Da’ar had broken. The party paid for the damage, though this was becoming a surprisingly regular expense of travelling with her.
Before leaving, Kai’thos performed a line from one of his plays for the innkeeper. He delivered it with such feeling that she was moved to tears. Whatever else had happened to Kai’thos, the actor in him was very much alive.
3. The Butter and Brew
Cliffwood was a small town beside the forest that shared its name. Shortly after arriving, the party gave a young boy a feather from Charlie, who was already making his own peculiar impression on the locals.
A noticeboard directed questers to Valen and Varriga at the Butter and Brew Inn. Behind the bar stood Varriga, an older, slender, blue-skinned tiefling cleric in plain dark clothes, and Valen, a shorter, rugged human warrior who was particularly fond of a great axe mounted on the wall.
The inn had the comfortable feel of a place where people had lived for years. Behind the bar stood a door marked Allegra, its sign decorated with a flower and a knife. No one explained the name.
Valen was far more interested in his axe. He raised his hand above his head, and the enormous, double-bladed weapon vanished from the wall and appeared in his grasp.
An excellent trick.
Then Valen looked at the empty space where the axe had been and seemed to remember the less impressive part of the demonstration. He fetched a hammer and fixed it back in place. The many old holes in the wood suggested he had been through this particular performance before.
The innkeepers had a request of their own. Somewhere in the forest was a tree marked with a golden sigil. They did not know where it stood; they simply wanted the adventurers to find it and report back. It sounded straightforward enough.
There were other people worth meeting, too. Dobson, a local storyteller, particularly caught Kai’thos’s interest. When three patrons needed drinks brought over, Kai’thos returned with Dobson’s water alone. Tom and Leff were left to collect their own.
4. A Storyteller Falls
Then Dobson collapsed.
He had been drinking ordinary water, and Kai’thos had been the one to bring it to him. The sudden illness made for an alarming misunderstanding. Varriga cast Hold Person on Kai’thos, leaving him unable to move or speak while the others tried to work out whether the drink had been tampered with.
But the water was just water. There was nothing poisonous hidden in the glass. Ayla healed Dobson, and when he was able to speak, his account pointed away from the inn and towards a meal he had eaten earlier.
Dobson had recently dined with his brother Garrif and sister-in-law Lowen. Garrif had found a dead boar in the forest, butchered it, and served the meat. That meal was now a much more troubling possibility than the glass of water.
The party went to find Garrif. He directed them towards the woods to the south-west, where the boar had been found. If the meat was responsible, there might be something wrong with the animals in that part of the forest—and others could have eaten it, too.
5. Where the Forest Fell Silent
The forest offered an answer of sorts, though not a comforting one.
Following signs among the trees, Ayla heard the squeals of wild boars. Three creatures came upon the party, hostile and horribly changed. Their eyes shone an unnatural blue, and their bodies looked dried out, as though something had drawn the life from them.
Unlike the training golem back in Fendry, these creatures were not waiting patiently in a controlled arena. Da’ar met them with her greatsword, while Ayla fought with her druidic abilities and Kai’thos brought fire to the fight. The boars proved unusually vulnerable to flame. It was a more serious test of the three adventurers, but together they prevailed.
Nearby they found strange blue mushrooms. The party began to piece together a disturbing possibility: something in this part of the forest had drained the life from the boars, and the curse had passed, in lesser measure, to those who ate their meat. Dobson’s ordinary drink was no longer quite so innocent. The cursed meat appeared to have left him vulnerable to water itself, so that drinking it stole away his life force.
They had found a likely explanation for his collapse, but not the source of the corruption.
Ayla could sense the lives of the trees and creatures around her. She had known that feeling since childhood. But farther along the cliffside, there was a place where that familiar presence simply stopped.
Not faded. Stopped.
She approached what looked like an ordinary wall of rock and reached out.
Her hand passed straight through.
The party had come to Cliffwood looking for work. They still owed the innkeepers a golden-marked tree, but they had found a sick storyteller, creatures drained of life, and now a wall that was not a wall.
Whatever lay beyond it would have to wait until they dared to look.