The Magic Goes Away · Campaign Chronicle
Day 6
The Order and the Beastmen
A hidden watchtower offers supplies and strange bargains before the party hunts Beastmen into the western mire and survives a Purple Worm summoned by their druid.
- Party
- Asuran · Halen · Karl · Toby
- Route
- Dwarven Underways → Order Watchtower → Western Mire
- Encounters
- Beastmen · Beastman Druid · Purple Worm
← Previous chronicled entry: Day 3
✧ Gains & Changes
The hidden stair
The Order’s Watchtower
The dwarven cart carried the party onward through the ancient underways. For most of the day the tunnels offered only stone, old air and the clatter of wheels, until Asuran noticed a fault in the wall and the faint shimmer of long-unlit dwarven runes.
Beyond it, a narrow stair spiralled upward to a forgotten watchtower of the Order. The guards greeted them as brothers, though weariness hung on the place. They had little enough to spare, but trade followed: bread for bolts, salve for steel.
Toby bargained carefully and came away with a set of elven-forged armour, supple and light as mist.
Bones and coin
Halen’s Gamble
Halen found a soldiers’ cup game and was soon caught up in the clatter of bones, coin, laughter and curses.
By the end of it, the Belt of Kord was gone. In its place Halen had a gambler’s die carved from bone, faintly humming with something mischievous.
West into the mire
The Hunt for the Beastmen
By dusk, the Order’s captain spoke of Beastmen defiling the wilds beyond, their crude rites poisoning streams and soil. Karl’s answer was immediate.
“If they foul this land, then we cleanse it.”
The party followed the Beastmen west into the mire. Their trail was easy to read: trampled ferns, snapped reeds and the stink of unwashed hides. Near nightfall they found a smaller group gathered beneath twisted trees.
Asuran moved first. Five Beastmen died quietly near the campfire before a snapped twig broke the silence and three more shapes rose snarling from the dark.
The hidden master
The Beastman Druid
Beyond the firelight stood the Beastman druid, cloaked in rags and bark, fur matted with mud and leaves. He clutched a carved staff that pulsed faintly with light.
Asuran hurled a knife into the druid’s shoulder, but not before the creature drove its staff into the ground. The earth shuddered, split, and something enormous rose from below.
The earth breaks
The Purple Worm
The worm smashed through the clearing. Halen charged with his greatsword while Toby fired into its bulk. Karl raised his shield and called out to Kord; the answering flare broke the druid’s spell apart.
The worm struck again and its jaws closed around Toby. For a moment he vanished completely.
Halen hacked into the creature while Asuran leapt onto its back, scrambling along its slick body and driving his rapier between the plates near its skull. The worm convulsed and vomited Toby back into the mud, half-drowned in bile but alive.
Halen finished the druid. Freed from its master’s control, the worm slammed into the ground one last time and burrowed away into the depths.
Smoke and spoils
Aftermath
Karl knelt beside Toby and tended him while Asuran searched the druid’s corpse. Beneath its cloak were three small pouches: dried leaves, powders that shimmered like old copper, and a black paste smelling of damp roots. Whatever they were, the mixtures were foul but deliberate, and Asuran kept them.
Halen wiped the gore from his blade. “If that’s their druid, I’d hate to see their god.”
The party burned the remains of the camp. Smoke curled into the night while a distant rumble moved somewhere far below the swamp.
“Some things don’t need temples,” Asuran wrote that night.
“They just need the dark and the will to kill for it.”
They headed back to the Order and to rest.