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Within just a few minutes, Rend has cleared a path to the entrance, whacking away shrubbery (perhaps a little more than intended), and occasionally tossing larger stones haphazardly over his shoulder. The ground before the right half of the cairn entry is now clear enough to be considered normal terrain for movement. The muted daylight that penetrates the gray skies above is barely enough to illuminate the first ten or twenty feet of a cave that stretches much further than that into blackness.
As the half orc cuts closer to the entrance, you can see that the entry stones are in remarkable shape, though they are gray-green with lichen. The shoulder of the broad hill slopes gently, but here at the level of the cairn entrance, the crown of the hill rises above you in a steep, sixty foot cliff face. Framed by the weathered marble, a wide, dark hole, twenty feet across by twenty feet high, plunges into the hillside where the shoulder meets the cliff. You can't see far enough into the cave, but the stone of these hills is pretty stable, and not prone to collapse.
The sun is warm for the brief moment it peeks out from behind the clouds, but it soon disappears again, the unseasonable chill in the air returning with the overcast gloom. As you all step out of the crumbling structure and start walking over the hilltops again, you look back and notice that a large raven is perched on Harlon's shoulder. Harlon: Spoiler:
I just brought the bird into the picture to keep us moving, I hope you don't mind.
Your light lunch passes amiably, and by the time you've finished, the drizzle has even slowed to naught but a few random drops and sprinkles. Out on the rocky hills, the pale bits of crumbled stone from civilizations long gone litter the landscape. Moisture glistens on every surface, and sparkles to life as the sun peeks out briefly from behind the clouds.
A low stone wall surrounds the building, though it too is crumbled and falling apart. Weeds and brush choke the yard, almost obscuring the small path that leads to the front doorway. As you step through the ruins of what was once a porch, and cross the threashold into the building proper, it seems that the building is not as ruined as it seemed upon initial viewing. The main room of the house is a large living area, perhaps sixty feet across from the front door to a set of closed double doors in the wall on the other side. To the right, a swollen and rotted wooden door lies crookedly across its doorway, leading to a slightly smaller room on the western side of the building that, judging by the shelves of corroded books, was once a library. To the left, the smaller hearth room that sticks out from the main structure lies completely destroyed, save for the actual hearth itself. Everything else around the hearth -- its chimney, the stone walls, and most of the eastern wall of the main structure, is heaped in a pile of jumbled stone around it. Above, a gaping hole through the floor timbers of the second level continues straight through the timbers and thatch of the roof, allowing the deluge to drench the room as easily as if it were the front yard. The large main room is strewn with destroyed timbers and furniture (including some that surely once resided in the room above), and is currently doing a passable impersonation of a lake. However, at least for the front side of the building, with the exception of the eastern wall, all of the external and internal walls look intact and sturdy, and while dripping with half a hundred leaks the library to the west does seem to offer true respite from the rain.
Chapter One: Whispers in the Dark All through the morning as you walk, the chill never leaves the air, though it is late spring. The overcast skies seem always to threaten rain, and you even hear the occasional muted rumble of far off thunder, but aside from a few scattered drops, thick and noisy as they splat, the clouds give no release. The air is heavy and still. Not long after you leave town, you leave the main road, following a smaller, disused mining road into the hills. What little information Kharid has to go on for finding the Whispering Cairn comes from and old, hand drawn map he found in his research at Jhesail. He'd procured a more accurate surveyor's map of the area upon arrival, but the Whispering Cairn is not listed, even though it notes many others. Still, between Kharid's map, and Harlon's best guesses from local rumor, you're all confident you're on the right track. At one point as you crest a hill, you all think you see three figures atop another hill off in the distance, in the direction of the Stirgenest Cairn. Whether it is Tirra and her companions, and whether they see you or not is impossible to determine. Though the sun is hidden, it feels like almost midday before you crest a small rise and see an abandoned building set back from the road. Harlon's heard the local kids say the Whispering Cairn is near a "falling down house," and this is surely it. Once it was a two story building, left over perhaps from some older, failed mining venture; now empty and falling to ruin. The whole eastern side of the structure, and all of its second floor, lies in rubble, but the western end of the building still seems to have ground floor rooms with intact roofs. A lightning bolt arcs across the sky, accompanied by a loud crack of thunder. Moments later, the clouds unleash such a deluge, you almost feel as if you're standing at the bottom of a waterfall.
As you gather together at the Feral Dog, the town is almost exploding with activity. Miners (almost half the population of the city) are heading off in every direction to go to work. Carts full of equipment and supplies crowd the street and threaten to crush pedestrians at every turn. New arrivals -- refugees, merchant caravans, supply trains, messengers, and other odd assortments of people -- add to the chaotic press. The occasional mine boss walks down the street casting haughty looks at those they consider beneath them (which is almost everybody). As you make your way west out of town, militiamen bustle around the top of the garrison hill to your right. To your left, the ancient observatory stands atop its own hill. The standing stone circle on the next hilltop after that competes with the observatory for Creepiest Location in Town.
Conversation in the bar, what little there was, drops to a murmur. The bartender pipes up, "Here now, none of that! Preachin' or Shovin'. The roudiness comes later, when I have more bouncers on staff. If you two can't sit and drink all quiet like, I'll have to ask you to leave, and come back when this is a less civil place."
The tavern you've all (so far) found yourselves in is called the Feral Dog. It's one of several buildings on the main, muddy square of Diamond Lake. The main road through town is called simply, "The Vein." The road runs in a lazy drunken curve, from west(ish) to east(ish), staggering south as it passes between the two main hills, then loping akwardly to the northeast, around the north end of the lake. At the southernmost bend in the Vein lies the town square, rung round with many of Diamond Lake's finest institutions -- The Feral Dog, the Church of St. Cuthbert next to it, Tidwoad's jewelry shop, the Sherrif's office, the general store, a dreary restaurant known as the Hungry Gar, the exotic curio shop (and exclusive brothel) known as the Emporium, and the gaming parlour known as Lazare's House. Unlike the Emporium and Lazare's, the Feral Dog does not charge for entry, and thus attracts a less.... exclusive clientele. Unfortunately, it also means you have to put up with things like the nightly dog fights in the pit at the back of the main room. It's still early in the day however, so there's no fight, and thus less people and less noise.
The Town of Diamond Lake Central to the great Northern Continent is the Freehold Nations, a collection of squabbling kings and generals cursed to forever bicker with each other as punishment for their successful war against the Witch Kings. In the southeast section of the Freehold Nations, along the coast of the Crystal Sea, lies the Freehold of Sunter. Astride the mighty Forrin River, less than a days ride inland from the coast, lies the city of Jhesail, capital of Sunter and seat of the Freehold Council. Three days ride east of this glorious city, among the damp and stony Cairn Hills, lies the town of Diamond Lake. It is in Diamond Lake that the Freehold Nations make war upon the land itself, boring holes deep into the hills, and raping the earth of its minerals. The black, oozing ichor of the earth bleeds down sluice ways into the lake itself, choking the life giving waters with offal and draining the countryside of color, vigor, and hope. Nestled between the lake and three low hills, Diamond Lake wallows in bilious runoff and swampy humidity. Mines churn the earth for resources to feed Jhesail's ever ravenous maw, and mine managers sit themselves as petty kings and generals, bravely throwing wave after wave of humanoid chattel to ignorant to resist into the lightless depths to rape and plunder. Thieves and merchants pick through the unwashed masses, like crows through carrion, seeking to separate them from their hard earned wages. Adrift among this detritus, five young souls converge unawares upon each other, ignorant of the importance of the events about to surround them. They merely seek a way to make their mark or make their fortune, or just find a way out of Diamond Lake. But the Lashondi have a saying – be careful what you wish for.
Prologue: Wars and Rumors of War War comes naturally to the humanoid races. 'Twas ever thus. Mere skimming of the dusty scrolls and worm nibbled tomes of the Archivists histories proves this to be true. Long through the ages have we made war -- upon each other, upon ourselves, upon any living thing that chances down the road or soars through the air above. If you believe the epics and odes of the bards, we have even made war upon the gods themselves. But only damp and swooning maidens believe bards, and even maidens only believe bards long enough to shed their knickers and collapse sweaty into their fathers' straw bales. All of which is to say that murdering other living things en masse is perhaps what the so called civilized races excel at most; though damp and swooning maidens and the painted priestesses of the Red Temples might argue different. But that is a scholarly debate for another day. War should then be no more alarming than a sunrise, the bloom of a rose, or the wheel of the stars overhead. Just another turn in the Great Spiral of life. Yet we are incapable of refraining from alarm at any other part of life's circles, so why then should war be any different? Only kings and generals have ever seemed to grasp the dull inevitability of war, and among them only handful ever grasped it enough to be any good at it. The rest seem content to bravely throw wave after wave of their own subjects at each other, then pick through the aftermath with the crows, looking for loose coin. 'Twas ever thus. Still, if one reads closely through the histories and silly poems, sifting carefully through the obvious calumnies and self-promotions to get at the kernels of truth, certain events and patterns begin to stand out. Moments in time when something truly important seems to be at stake. Moments when kings and generals, maidens and priestesses, the sun and the flowers and the wheeling stars overhead, bards and murderers and even the gods themselves all seem to hold their breath at once, wondering if any of them at all would continue to be after tomorrow. Afterward, the kings and generals and bards, and especially the gods themselves, like to pour on the calumnies and self promotions, and play up their own part in things. They like to strut and preen and proclaim that the outcome was always predetermined by their hand, in whatever way secures the adoration and obedience of the masses, and the Archivists dutifully record it thus. For their part, the masses are as alarmed as any other time – it's all the same to them. But that is never the truth of what actually happened. The truth at such times almost always lies in the actions of a small handful of people, unaware of their own significance. People just trying to get by in their daily lives without getting shanked, or catching the pox, or one of uncounted other ways to take up residence in a pine box and serve oneself up to wormy feast. People who are almost certainly ignorant of their own import because they go about their petty errands in some muddy speck-hole like the mining town of Diamond Lake.
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