Kari welcomed Ramona inside, and offered her some herbal tea.
On the subject of expeditions, she replied, "I think a good thing to look at next would be the strange trail. We can finally have a closer look and see where it goes. Maybe it leads to the statue I saw from the mountain."
When Urrum said that he was OK with Carver accompanying them on expeditions, Kari replied, "I have no problem with him coming along."
She spent the time before the next exploration finishing another carpentry project, and heading out into the bay for some fishing.
Fenna shrugs. "Sure, I'm fine with Carver coming along."
The next day Fenna makes no particular plans for what to do. Instead she wanders about the colony checking in with people, and offering to lend a hand for a while where it's needed.
Expedition Day 66: 26 Arodus, 4717 AR; Wealday
The dark weather from yesterday rolls into today, but the rain is still very light allowing for work to continue. Kari's carpentry projects goes quite well, and while her evening fishing doesn't lead to a large haul, it's very relaxing. Fenna is greeted kindly by all, helping a little with the palisade in the morning before retreating into the Provisions building for some less physically demanding work. Urram is even coaxed outside for a bit by Lyra, where he sees the advice he gave to Eamon yesterday seems to be moving progress along quite well.
As the sun gets lower, Ramona seeks out Kari as she comes in from the bay. "If you guys are ready to go tomorrow or the next day, I think I'll send Lyra with you. I'd feel better with some more land surveys of the area before expeditions get too far away from the colony. Carver can go with you guys on your next trip. Again, please stick to the western side of the island, and don't be gone more than a few days."
Urram, despite his many projects, finds himself unable to resist Lyra's entreaties and as 'a quick breath of air' soon becomes an hour long stroll he finds he doesn't mind all that much!
"I am glad you will be coming with us," He tells Lyra in their common elven tongue. "I miss you when we go away."
Kari replied, "I'm ready to head out tomorrow. I think we should be back within three or four days."
She spent the rest of the evening making sure everything was ready for the next morning. "We're going exploring again tomorrow, Hrolf!"
Hrolf wagged his tail. He always enjoyed getting out for a good walk.
Fenna finishes off her day doing basic maintenance on her gear, taking care of any mending needed and resharpening her weapons.She gathers and packs four days worth of food.
The next morning after a quick breakfast she hefts her gear and asks Kari "So back to that trail we found when we were out there the first time?"
Expedition Day 67: 27 Arodus, 4717 AR; Oathday
Travel back toward the old rendezvous point goes quickly as you’ve traveled the path a few times before. Breaking for lunch as you emerge from the boar-hunting woods, the dark clouds above begin to give way to clear blue skies.
It’s early afternoon when you come upon the trail. Having dealt with rain for the last few days, you were not optimistic that the trail would still be there. However, as you come into the valley where you’d found it before, it appears to be there; not so much intact, but made fresh again in the mud.
The section of ground approximately ten feet wide crossing the path looks as if it is grooved, covered with minute depressions and trampled grass. As last time, it appears as the path were left by hundreds of thousands of insects marching in a tight formation, but none of the plants appear to be eaten or damaged. Where the strange trail intersects with obstacles, it either splits and goes around the obstacle like water, or veers to avoid it entirely.
Kari examined the trail again.
"Time to find out where this goes, I think!", she declared.
"The trail is fresh again. It's been remade, and it seems to be precisely where it was before. Whatever's making it doesn't seem to have single body, more like a swarm or colony of smaller things all together."
"I want to know what it is, but I have to say this creeps me out too. I think we shouldn't just follow the trail right along. Let's keep it in sight, but follow it back without walking it."
Urram bends down to examine the tracks carefully as Five flits above his head. He makes no objection to following but lags behind with Lyra, clearly deep in thought.
As before, the trail is not perfectly uniform in width, but it is consistently about 10 feet wide with some minor variances, usually where the terrain is uneven.
Close examination reveals tiny pointed impressions, like the trail was formed by hundreds of stabs from small spikes.
The trail seems to have been created by hundreds of creatures or objects, rolled or rolling across the ground. Each is heavy enough to leave a slight impression but not enough to flatten the ground.
After a few minutes of examination, Lyra proposes your three apparent options: stay and wait for whatever made the trail, follow the trail, or move on to another location.
Kari gave her opinion on the matter, "I'd like to follow the trail. Who knows how long we'd have to wait for whatever it is to come by again?"
"We must be careful." Urram says, a note of caution. "This thing seems to not stop for much. If it comes we should get out of the way!"
"Yeah, we can't wait for it. Who knows how long it might take for it to come back? But like I said, let's try not to be too obvious about it. Stay off to the sides and hopefully out of sight rather than just walking up the middle of it like a road."
As you examine the markings on the ground Lyra follows the trail a bit to the north, staying within sight, before returning. “Hard to say which way the trail-maker is coming from,” she announces. “That way continues north, and it looks like it goes southeast the other way. But I don’t know what difference it makes if it keeps coming back to this area.”
"A great circle then?" Urram asks. "It must go past something. If we follow perhaps then we shall find what it is?" He moves off to the side of the trail and looks to the women of the party to lead.
Kara proposed, "Shall we start going southeast, then?" Riding Hrolf, she directed him off the side of the trail and started heading along beside it.
Following along the strange trail is slow-going. As Urram noted, the path stops for very little, so going through trees and over tall mounds keeps progress slow. The trail itself doesn't travel south very far before taking a path straight to the east. The afternoon hours pass quickly by, and the light of the sun is starting to fade.
Kari is first to hear a faint buzzing, but as she stops and gives the signal everyone else hears it too. Thirty feet off to the north, the forest gives way to shattered fragments of rock and stone, the barest recognizable remnants of a lost civilization. Jutting from the grass and shrubs is a stone promenade, ten feet wide with intermittent flights of short steps that climb up a gentle slope—miraculously unchanged despite titanic upheaval of the past. Walkways extend east and west briefly before terminating into hills of wind-eroded stone rubble that might have once been buildings. A solitary, seemingly intact tower is visible on the northern horizon, approximately a mile away.
As you watch for the source of the strange buzzing, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of very tiny bits of metal shine against the light of the setting sun. Like a carpet of spiked metal bearings, the swarm emerges from the crevices in the rubble, moving along the path to the west.
Fenna can tell the creatures are diminutive constructs.
Urram recognizes a Warden Jack Swarm, a hive-mind of little constructs that can be used to patrol and defend large environments.
"Warden Jacks." Urram says quietly. "Mechanical creatures, many many of them, very small. They are guardians of large territories. That tower must be what they protect. We should avoid them - it would be an unpleasant battle. Or I could send Five to talk to them."
The little Ioun Wyrd buzzes and its core pulses rapidly with light, it doesn't seem to like the idea.
Kari marveled at the tiny constructs, "How fascinating! I imagine my water blasts would be effective against them, but perhaps we should leave that for another day. Shall we continue following the path, in case there are more ruins that they protect?"
"We should look to the tower." Urram opinions. "We would get a good view from the top."
Fenna watches the flow of metal balls with a frown.
"A couple of questions for you Urram. Do you think it's, they're?, flexible in thinking? I mean does it just keep doing the same thing over and over until something happens that it's ordered to react to? And how fast do you think it can move?"
"If this thing has been around for a huge span of time guarding that tower, it seems like something we should investigate. If we wait for the ball puddle to move on along its route, will it change up what it does unexpectedly, or can we roughly predict where it will be if we know its route, speed, and direction?"
"Constructs are not noted for... flexible." Urram replies, having a little trouble with the final word. "They do as they are ordered until they are ordered not to do it. But... over a long time, situations change. I think it will follow the route unless something major stops it, but if it sees us as danger. Then it will stop. It will be quite fast I think, and will not tire. So it should be consistent."
He gives an exaggerated shrug, clearly copying the gesture from somewhere. "I would like to catch one and study it, but now I can only guess."
"So, if we wait until it's well on its way, could we cross it's pathway and go on in without it noticing where we crossed on it's next time around? I'm not really wanting to get caught up in a fight with the thing. I've no idea how we'd hurt it."
"That should work." Urram replies. "Fighting it we'd need large explosions - fireball and similar magics. It's never been something I've done but I could try to learn them."
"I'd say it depends on what we can find out about the tower. If there's something interesting about it, we could figure out how to get rid of the ball puddle. If it turns out to be just an old building, it's probably better to just warn everyone to avoid the area and let it be."
As you watch the metallic swarm roll off to the west, you note its patrolling pace seems to be about as quick as Kari moves, though how fast it might go in a pursuit is still unclear.
“We might be able to figure out the swarm’s path,” Lyra adds, folding her map over to point out the tower in the distance, and the markings she’s made to indicate the trail of the construct swarm. “So far, the swarm seems to be going in a circle around that tower. If you do want to go check it out, it might be good to get a better idea of the Warden Jack’s path first.”
Kari chimed in, "That sounds like a good idea. If we know how long the path is, we can estimate how long it might take the constructs to patrol it. Then we can try to time our expedition so they are at the furthest point away from the tower."
”Exactly!” chimes in Fenna.
Urram shrugs, unsure of the necessity, but he learned long ago not to argue with a collection of women and therefore follows along quietly.
The trail continues past the mound of rubble to the west, often winding in and out of the thicker trees inland. It's not long before the sun is gone for the day, and setting up camp begins.
Expedition Day 68: 28 Arodus, 4717 AR; Fireday
Lyra awakens the camp just as the first rays of the sun appear.
“We can continue plotting the trail of the Warden Jack Swarm,” she proposes first, “but we’re also near this other landmark. Up to you guys.”
"The statue that I saw from the mountain; yes, let's go have a look!", Kari replied. She hadn't been able to make out the details of the statue from that far away, and she was eager for a closer look.
You all march the morning away through the trees until you come upon a field. In the distance to to the south, you can clearly see the stonework Kari had spotted before. After a breath, you all move on, coming upon the ruins perhaps an hour before noon.
In a grassy field pockmarked with piles of fallen stone and sparse trees stands a monument that is relatively free from damage. A path of broken white marble leads to it, and the grass is curiously cut and edged away from it. The monument itself is a smooth marble disk, about thirty feet in diameter, and marked with representations of the phases of the moon. A semicircular row of thirteen columns surrounds the northern side on a curved marble base, the ends of which have broken off and subsided into the ground. Two adjacent columns near the center are broken and the lintel between them is sundered. Two curved stone benches sit before the semicircle on either side of the path, and two stone buildings lie to the north.
Kari cast a defensive spell, just in case, and moved forward to examine one of the broken columns, her mind full of questions. "I wonder what this place was for?", she said out loud.
Urram follows Kari's lead, girding himself with magical protections. He insists on casting on Lyra too.
Fenna also walks up to the ruined area, careful to stay quiet and limit her visibility. She goes to check the buildings-like structures for entrances.
A quick glance at the designs carved into the marble appear clearly, although long-worn. The columns and two buildings on either side of the disc do appear to be constructed of the same white marble. Each of the buildings have pitched stone roofs and columns on all four corners, with open window spaces that admit light and air. Each has a single door that faces the other structure.
Getting a sense of the layout of these ruins, they seem very clearly religious. However, none among you can recognize the symbology.
Kari moved over to the eastern building and examined the door, looking for any traps before she opened it.
Kari finds the simple wooden door is not trapped.
Urram hangs back, keeping Lyra away too. He's well aware that both Kari and Fenna are far more capable combatants than he is.
Fenna puts a finger to her lips to show the others should be quiet, and indicated with her hand for Kari to wait to open the door.
She sneaks around the side of the building, flattens herself against he wall, and peeks in through the window. After looking in one direction inside, she ducks under the window and switches sides. Again flat against he building she peeks in the other direction.
Fenna takes quick peek at the southern side of the building's interior. Seeing nothing but a stone wall, she looks further, finding only a stone bench below. Switching over to get a view of the northern side, Fenna immediately glimpses a statue. Human-sized image of a woman in silk robes decorated with stars, the statue stands on a knee-high platform looking down toward the bench on the other side. Otherwise the chamber appears empty.
Rejoining the other's Kari quietly opens the door to discover much the same sight, though she can also see a chest of wood sitting under the bench.
"RRROF RROF," Hrolf reacts suddenly, barking loudly. His fur stands up sharply at the surprise.
"Romam peregrinantes habita!" the face of the statue smiles warmly, stepping down off the base and regards Hrolf with caution. "Et quod bene fida comes. Hoc age quod praecipio tibi receperint."
Though you've all been hard at work learning Azlanti, the statue's speech is very dissimilar from Urram's dialect, so much so that only Urram can clearly understand.
"Pilgrims! And a loyal retainer as well. I bid you welcome."
Kari almost jumped out of her skin as the statue came to life. "What is she saying?", she asked the others.
Kari almost jumped out of her skin as the statue came to life. "What is she saying?", she asked the others.
"Immo qui sapiens. Nos ad sapientiam quaerere vias ad senem." Urram replies, slipping into the formal Azlanti of the Spire Elders.
"They think we are pilgrims." He explains to Kari. "I have greeted them with respect and told them that we are seekers of knowledge. Hopefully they will speak further."