Grubgullet, happy to see his friend again, lumbers over and gives Kalora a big hug.
"Hrk" Kalora grunts as the taller ogre bear hugs her. After escaping the hug and stretching a bit, she nods to Goivan. "Sounds dangerous. We've just been scouting, but if you're still planning on dealing with those raiders, maybe you could use a hand."
"Dry land? Sorry, I mean need a hand?"
Lily looks hopeful.
As the two group meet and discuss and trade information they have. The one group decides they will head off and perhaps try to meet up with some other groups or head back to Cliffort. Aury after pondering a moment decides to leave with them. After some discussion, the two groups decide it may be beneficial to swap a few members, and Kalora and Lillianna both decide to stay with your group and forge ahead. If the lake is an important gathering location, it make be wise to make for that rather than heading north.
I have no reservations. We do need to head north towards the ice though.
Shaeyl looks up at the sky, we can camp here for the night and move out in the morning.
"Sleeping dry sounds appealing. Did you clear the warren then?"
Lily repacks her gear, having shaken most of the wet out of it.
Day 11 - Morning
The groups camp for the night and enjoy each others company but in the morning you part ways, each going about their separate missions.
Pleasantries exchanged, the groups give their goodbyes set out.
I suggest we follow the river upstream. If need be, it will speed our return.
"The problem with that plan is that the river is wet, cold, and full of awful. We can follow it, but I vote we move away from the bank at least."
Lily finishes up her morning routine, then tucks her cloak around herself.
Goivan chuckles. "If the murk bothers you so, I can carry you through."
Day 11
Having decided to move upriver, the group gets their gear in order and starts the march northwestward, following the banks of the river. While not traveling exactly next to it, due to the thicker foliage, the group stays within a hundred or so feet of it to keep it as reference and source of water. Your normal rate of travel is about 3 miles per hour, reduced due to the trackless terrain to 3/4 of that.
You spend the entirety of the day along the river's edge moving slowly and occasionally stopping to investigate. Ptery flies patrol overhead to keep watch. Your group stops for rests for meals and to survey the area for signs of giants or their allies.
As the late afternoon draws on, Ptery swoops down low flying toward Shaeyl, squawking and screeching in concern. Via your empathic link, it seems clear he has spotted danger ahead on the river. The group takes a spot of cover and spies upriver what appears to be a ship or a boat of some sort moving downstream toward you.
Kalora tries her best to stay behind whatever bush looks big enough to conceal her, and whispers, "Any idea who is on the boat? If they're just fishermen or travelers going towards the fort, we don't want to startle them."
Lily turns to Shaeyl and grins.
"If you can take a look without them noticing, that would be best, but just in case, here."
Lily chants softly, activating a minor ward around her smaller companion.
"Come back safe to us. We'll try to stay out of sight of the river."
While the rest of the group hides, Shaeyl creeps down to the water's edge to get the best look. He sees what seems to be a longship of sorts coming downriver with the current, not really using its sail, just steering by rudder. It is steered by a giant, one wearing heavy plate armor, skin as black as soot, and on board seem to be a smattering of other humanoids, some large wolves or dog like creatures, and perched on the deck are several winged women, perhaps harpies. At times, one or both of them take to the air scouting.
The boat comes by swiftly and passes down river toward the lake.
Shaeyl returns to the group, that sure looks like a scouting party to me. Chase them or keep going?
"Hmmm," the minotaur rumbles, "The dwarves would surely appreciate it, but I'm not sure it's the best idea - we have no easy way to get to the boat, or effectively fight those harpies."
"We should stay down, the dwarves will be able to handle a few battles on their own."
"Scouting parties are made to report on enemy positions. We should only go after them if we think we can surely take down every single one of them. With all those fliers, I doubt that's a possibility. I agree Kalora, I say we let them pass."
"We could probably do something about the boat, and then track the fliers down, but if you think it was just a scouting group the dwarves could handle, we can look for the attack party." Lily agrees, hesitantly.
"I can take 'em! I say we go fight."
"It's not if we can take them, but if we can keep any of them from escaping. I can't fly, and I guarantee one of those fliers would get away and report on us, compromising our position."
"If they escaped, are those catacombs you found easy enough to defend if we hid there?"
She hefts her greatsword and shrugs. "I just don't have any way to stop them from getting away."
"It's got some underground, probably pretty easy to defend."
"I don't wanna go back there. It's too small."
Bad idea, we only saw the one entrance, they could just collapse that.
We could just fire some arrows to harass them.
"Well if we are chasing, we should go quickly. That boat is going to outrun us on the river if we don't make haste. If we are not chasing, we should go cautiously. I favor letting the dwarves and our friends handle it. After all, Aurys and the others went that way as well. We should find the camp that is launching the boats."
Lily stands up again, and looks further upriver.
"We can make another mile perhaps, but let's find a defensible campsite instead. We'll want some way to watch the river, and possibly some plan to foul further boats. I might be able to roughen the water a bit, if it came to that."
"Agreed, let's continue traveling and let the dwarves handle this."
Shaeyl sends Ptery to scout upriver for a few miles. As they trek along, they can stay out of sight of the river while Ptery keeps watch for them.
Day 11 - evening into night
The group carefully watches as the longship passes by south towards the lake. You note it and then move westward along the river now making as much progress before nightfall as possible. Curiously you wonder from where the enemy would launch such a boat. As the evening draws on you find a suitable spot along the river again. The frogs, insects and birds all serenade you with their song as the sun sets, and you prepare your camp and evening meal.
Lily takes a moment to play with Birgitte as the sun sets, then settles herself and her companion together in a spot near the fire to eat.
"I should ask the usual questions of travel I suppose. Is there any particular magic I should pray for? I've been studying generic protections, but our group saw little beyond the fishcreature, and had little interest in blessings. I will need sleep enough to clear the mind for spells, much like Shaeyl, but I see well enough in the dark to keep watch either at dusk or dawn."
"Well I was thinking that if that boat hadn't been raiders, we wouldn't have any way to quickly say we were friendly. Anything to fix that?"
If that boat is raiders, and there is another coming, that fire won't do us any good.
Shaeyl sets his bear traps in the likely approaches to the camp before finding a bush to crawl under and set his sleeping bag.
"I'm hungry. What are we gonna eat?"
As Grubgullet tears through his pack looking for food, and then finding none, as the group doesn't leave any spare food with him, he starts rummaging through the camp looking for more.
Eventually realizing there is a pot of stew on the fire, he settles in impatiently as it cooks, gnawing on a hard crust of bread in the mean time, his stomach rumbling.
The group discusses their tactics and options for moving ahead. With the addition of two new members and departure of another, there are opportunities for different strategies, and the group feels stronger. They recall and discuss their mission to find and intercept any raiding parties of giants and/or their allies. Plotting possible plans to deal with the power of a giant, they use the boats inhabitants as a guide.
I think a little foraging as we travel will stand us in good stead. As we get closer to the ice fields, it may be harder to find food and saving our travel rations would be a good idea.
If there is another boat, what can we do about it? We can't chain the river, lacking the chain. It looks to be too wide and deep to drive poles into the ground as well. About all we can do at this point would be to fire a volley or two of arrows. So, do we harass a boat going by or leave them and look for the launch point?
"Could we fell a tree across the river? It would slow down any other boats that try to pass through, or force them onto land. But we should probably find where their coming from."
Lily considers the river a moment, and shares a glance with her companions.
"We could probably divert the river if we felt so inclined, or shallow it, but that delays the inevitable without solving the problem. I think our best hope is to find the dock the boats launch from, and silence it. Still, sinking a few trees into the bottom might make quite a nasty surprise for a boat. If they were sunk correctly."
She ponders the forest thoughtfully, then looks upriver.
The river is a hundred feet across and deeper than Grub. It would take us months to move that much material. These trees aren't tall enough to bridge that width.
"Valid. I yield to the scout's wisdom. Our best plan is finding the launching point, or a natural shallows/rapids that the giants would be forced to portage, which amounts to the same thing. Further upriver. I'll see you in the morning."
We could make a giant crossbow or small ballista. Something heavy enough to hole a ship. Grub should be able to use it without too much difficulty.
Days 12 - 14
The group pushes west and north along the river. Progress is slow but steady, and over the next three days you push further north. Now the mountains are easily visible in the distance along the west, and the river seems to creep ever closer to the foothills as your wind your way north. The wind is stronger, the nights cooler, despite it being almost the summer solstice. You see no signs of any other giant raiders or sign of their armies or other boats. You know that far to the north the black ice is supposedly where they spawn from.
You took some part of day twelve to hunt for food and replenish your reserves. When meal time comes and Grubgullet sits down to partake you remind him that his magic item allows him to transform nearly anything along the trail into an edible source of bland goo he smiles happily. You have begun to remind him in the morning and he typically transforms a rock or log into a thick wad of pasty goo large enough to overflow a 5 gallon bucket. Through creative basket weaving and perhaps a bit of prestidigitation, you create a basket-pail to hold the 45lbs of sludge for Grub to eat all day. Most of the days his hands are covered in it as well as his face, and his frequent trips behind a bush or tree attest to the amount of food he is eating.
At the end of the day following the river, on Day 14, Ptery alerts Shaeyl that he has spotted something interesting ahead. Unable to see from the ground you follow the winged pterosaur through the hills to find an old ring of standing stones. Heavily weathered, moss and lichen covered, and nearly overgrown, these clearly have not been tended for visited in centuries or more. Given enough time, the grasses and brush will cover them entirely. One of them has toppled over and another has a significant crack in it that a few more winters of freezing and thawing ice may split the stone in half.
Guys, Ptery spotted something different than trees and bushes!
Shaeyl walks around the ring of stones, working out a general feel for the size of the rings and standing stones.
He casts detect magic couple of times as he circles the stones, looking at the stones, the inner circle, and the area outside and around the stones as well.
If he doesn't spot anything at this point, he'll approach one of the stones and scrape off some of the moss to look at the stone underneath.
"Fascinating. Megoliths. Hrm, what did I read about megoliths in father's library. Something religious I think."
Lily ponders a moment, then watches as shaeyl investigates.
"Any sign of tools, or was it magically set?"
She looks outward along each of the axis of the ring, analyzing the local mounds in new appreciation for potential ruins.
Lily inspects the stones, and determines they were cut from the same stones as can be found nearby, quarried perhaps not that far away. They stones were crudely worked, and in time the weathering as taken its toll. They were probably raised with manual labor, but there is no way to tell that now given the time that has passed. The group scouts the surrounding area, and finds a single other stone, that was once taller, almost a small obelist perhaps three feet high, to the east of the structure, this has toppled over and broken into three parts, and was lying under significant matted grass, and was only found by nearly stepping on it.
Scraping the moss off the stones does not reveal anything significant, but persevering and trying different areas, Shaeyl finds some runes at near the top.
Kalora smirks at the mossy stones. "Maybe we've found something old enough that we'll be able to read it."
"There's always pleasure in learning new things, even if we don't recognize them. This is crude, like their first effort. A far cry from any of father's works. Still, there is beauty and artistry here."
She sighs, melancholy with the thought of their missing guardian, and looks over the runes once more, taking special note of the structure.
Their lay out seems to suggest that they were used in some sort of ritual. Often these things were designed to help with astronomical calendars of sort. If the small toppled obelisk means anything it was perhaps used as a calibration tool to mark the passing of seasons, or perhaps even was moved as the stars in the sky moved each night as your world passed on its course. You had heard many rumors about how the world moved through the sky, and how the stars may be distant worlds. In your time there were legends about powerful heroes who tried to reach the starts and unlock their secrets, traveling through the vast open spaces above, leaving the blue skies behind for the black reaches of the void. You can only imagine that primitive peoples without access to the accumulated knowledge of the civilized world had their own ideas about what the stars meant.
You are only a week away from the summer solstice, so you have heard based on the talk around Cliffort. It had been difficult to tell based on your initial arrival what time of year it was, as the highlands were so cold. Even in Cliffort the winds whipped from the west and across the small lake, through the winding streets making it seem cooler than it often was.
Are these rings just a simple tool of a lost people, a mere mundane testament to their place in history long ago? Or, is there something more too them. Stories abound of magical stones that were used in powerful rituals. You won't fool yourself and assume every chunk of rock you encounter in the wilds has some unlocked mystery....but what if....?
As Lily and Shaeyl examine the runes, Goivan and Kalora circle around the stones looking for other clues, or taking different vantage points to see if anything makes sense. Grub walks in circles around the circle and pokes at the stones with a goo covered hand, leaving traces of his Allfood mush on whatever he touches.
Shaeyl tries to puzzle over the runes, he doesn't think they are magical, and they do not date you your time, so they are younger than 10,000 years, but nothing stands out to him. The runes are simple, in many ways like the dwarven alphabet, but they don't form together into anything that makes sense. Without the application of magic, there simply is no logic to them.
Detect magic?
Hey guys, it may be nothing, but these could either be a celestial calendar, or a gate.
Shaeyl notes the runes down for later study if he can't recall how they might fit together.
"Well, we can certainly compare it to the sky tonight. I've seen no sign of active enchantments on this section, how about you Shaeyl? If it's inert, it should be safe enough to sleep nearby and take some readings. If nothing else, we might find a rune which does not correspond to the stars, perhaps a pointer to a local settlement? I suppose it depends on their mapmaking ability. Still, it is interesting"
Grubgullet just frowns and waits for the magic talk to be over.