Garbos and Bert would notice that the leshys are being hostile to Orla as most of the hooting and shaking of dead animal parts is coming at her.
"χατ χουτ" "χατ χουτ"
Orla, meanwhile, would hazard a guess that the creature seems quite lucid and in his senses as he talks to her.
"Rope?", the leshy crafter says turning his head like an owl. "Rope might be useful. Too thick for this, alas. String is better, but rope might be useful for creating bigger leshy, yes?" He then turns his runic eye upside-down. "Can't tell any difference, but it looks it all works the same, yes? If it saves us time, it's for the best."
"χατ χουτ" "χατ χουτ" "χατ χουτ"
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As the other depart, Inzo, Amsu, Nazgub and Hammick go around and seek a point of entry from the back of the vallet. Nazgib easily finds handholds along the side of the crevasse and points them out. From their vantage point, they see Orla, Bert and Gabros beset by the leshys as their retreat is blocked. Not wasting any time, the older frostfur leads the way, pointing out handholds as they descend. It's a bit touch and go for Inzo, perhaps from carrying Amsu on his back, yet the lumberjack manages to head on down while all the other leshys are preoccupied with Orla, Gabros and Bert. Hammick with some forethought is covered in leaves and twigs, giving the ranger a rather wild look to him, a thing that comes most in handy as he and Inzo sneak in.
Nazgub, however, has no luck and while striding forward slips in the mud, making such a ruckus that half the leshys stop hooting and turn their pebble and socketless eyes at the sneaking party.
"Oh, hello. One of you looks like a leshy?" He says to Hammick. "A failed creation? Are you also here to restore the natural order?"
The leshys grow agitated.
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Orla snatches at the crafter’s words.
”Yes. Yes, he’s here to help restore the natural order, along with all of us. They insisted on going to long way around - they said it was ‘more natural’. It’s that stone growing out of the ground that’s throwing things off, I reckon. We can fix it.”
Orla smiles her best smile.
"Aaahhh! Do not bare your fangs at me, monster!", he says, raising his staff at Orla's perfectly normal smile. Several of the leshys hoot louder in response, bones clacking in menace.
He calms down and lowers his staff. "The forest here is very unnatural, ugly gremlin and aberrations," It appears to be talking about your three.
"Very strange, sad. The plants are a very strange color, they’re green, the rivers never flow with blood, strange monsters everywhere! Just other day, I saw a thing. Like a rat, with a long, fluffy tail! Burying an acorn in the ground. Very horrifying! And my brother leshy says he saw a thing, four feet and a little white tail, soft furry branches on its head. Monsters everywhere! Very disturbing!"
The leshy looks quite earnest as he says this. One of he smaller leshys, which looks like a fox that has been turned inside out and is leaking dead leaves from within, comes and bumps their head against the leshy crafter, as if comforting him from these unspeakable horrors.
"So I think something must be done! It’s unnatural, this place. But I’m only one leshy, so I’m making friends. Together, we’ll make this place work right, proper nature, with eye-mushrooms, and screaming flowers, and snakes! Not these bad snakes, only one head. Very upsetting. Should have sixteen heads like proper snakes! And dripping acid! We will fix this!"
"It’s a very difficult and important job." The leshy puffs up as he says this. "But I can do it. Eventually, yes?" He pauses. "It may take me a bit, though."
The sharp upside-down stone in the leshy’s eye glitters as it says this. "You look a little creepy. Almost like hideous monsters, no offense given you ugly, twisted creatures. Only he looks almost decent", he says this pointing at Bert and his mismatched beard. "But maybe you are friends? You will help, yes?", he asks taking the six of you in.
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"Uh..." Bert stands a little gobsmacked at the leshy's bizarre speech. He fishes the length of rope out of his pack.
"'s not gonna work fer what yer doin' there, but mayhaps if'n yeh tryin' to build a big ol' behemoth of a leshy I can show some knots an' such that'll help with the leverage an' such," Bert rambles a little, uncomfortable with engaging the strange creature in dialogue.
He begins to run through a series of knots:
The leshy crafter and the other leshys stop paying attention to Inzo, Hammick and Nazgub as they look upon Gabros, Orla and Bert in curiosity.
"Yes, yes! A bigger leshy will purge all these horrendous creatures faster and bring the fire and blood back! We might even have proper songbirds with sharp teeth and mad-inducing songs as it should be." He looks intently at Bert doing the knots.
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Orla continues talking to the crafter, not yet discouraged, but careful to keep her smile in check.
"That stone of yours...your eye. It still isn't right," Orla frowns, taking her disguise kit from her pack. "You won't be able to build a snake with sixteen heads with it the way it is, darling. Give it here." Orla uncaps a small container with foundation powder and brandishes a brush. "I'll get those runes working proper so you can make squirrels with snakes for tails, mushrooms for eyes, and lightning fangs that drip poison, and, uh...playtypuses!"
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Uncle crouches down behind the monolith, takes off his pack and gets out his artisan's tools before shouldering the pack again. Orla's efforts are going well but he's not sure if he's going to be drawn on to deface the monolith and he wants to be ready if that's necessary.
He takes a closer look at the monolith's writing, now that he's so close, deciding which symbols would be important to strike out should it be necessary.
"Oh, a platypus! Such beautiful normal creatures. We most definitely need those here. Their spurs bring about such delicious pain! Yes, yes, please help, of course." He leans into Orla.
The other leshys hoot in approval and seem to relax just a bit.
As Bert's fingers dig into the hard stone surface, the leshy puffs up, affronted. "What are you doing!? It’s MY eye, thank you very much! I like my eye, it’s the very best eye any leshy has. Stop it!" He struggles with Bert as they both fall and roll in the mud. Word fill Bert's head, their meaning lost, but the sense of a longing? calling? fill his mind as sticky cloying sap.
"Ελάτε μαζί μας, ελάτε μαζί μας, ελάτε μαζί μας στο θάνατο."
Bert's fingers grasp the rim of the stone tightly in triumph!
The leshy crafter stands stock still for a moment, raising a hand to touch the gaping hole in his face where the cyclopean shard had so recently rested. He sits up and gingerly probes the hole, like a sapling reaching out towards the sun...
"Oh. Oh." The leshy crafter looks about slowly, taking in the twisted and deformed leshys, the Abyssal plant life, the burnt and ruined valley. "...it’s possible that I might have misinterpreted one or two things."
There is a very long pause.
"Oops."
The remaining leshys stop hooting and sway like young saplings in the wind. They gradually slough off the rocks and animal parts that the leshy crafter used to form their bodies; though they return to somewhere close to normal (for leshys, that is).
As they take on a more natural shape, they retain signs of their Abyssal origin, such as a bark pattern that looks vaguely like a bleeding skull,
or extra vines that sway disturbingly in an unfelt breeze.
"Quite disturbing to look at, yes?", the leshy crafter says quietly behind you.
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"Not the only disturbin' thing," Bert mutters. He stuffs the eye-shard-thing in his backpack to avoid touching it anymore. "Feels like I need t' spend the rest o' the day scrubbin' out the inside of me skull."
He turns to the leshy crafter, and - after a moment of awkwardness figuring out how to do it - pats the leshy on the top of its body in a reassuring manner. "Mate, sorry 'bout all that jus' now but it was fer the best. Seems yer seein' clearly now."
The leshy crafter tilts his head at Bert, still trying to get his bearings at the sudden change of perspective of the woods.
He sticks a hand made of twings into the empty eye socket where the abyssal shard was embeded. It then turns to Gabros. "Blight, what blight? There is no... oh. Hmmm. The forest did not look good before. It was... wrong, yes? But now I can see and it was never wrong to begin with! Other leshys can now see the forest for what it is, so all is all right now? Much work we'll have to do to correct, uhm, previous mistake."
It sounds truly abashed by what it has happened.
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"It's ok, darlin'. We think it's comin' from that cyclops monolith there," Orla says, pointing at the fallen stone. "We've come up with a plan to prevent it from doing that again." She nods at the other group of Pathfinders.
"As an aside, I've never met a leshy who could make other leshys. That's mighty powerful. You'll pardon my stupid question, but, is this how leshys are made normally?"
"Huh? We're all spirits invited to this plane temporarily. All I've done is made the physical shell. We're usually created by those with a strong tie to the energies of nature. I-I do not know why I can make others, I just knew I had to if I wanted to set things right... or maybe it was wrong back then. If you have a plan to help us correct this terrible misunderstanding, please, go ahead."
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Bert pales slightly as the conversation continues. He shifts the woodcutter's axe on his back suddenly uncomfortable with its weight.
"Damn fool me, could've been rackin' up decades o' bad luck hackin' away at spirit-filled trees," he mutters to himself.
He looks to the leshy with worry writ plain on his face:
"Are yeh sayin' that plants an' trees can 'ave spirits livin' inside them all this time? Or is it jus' some special ones that are made like yerself?"
The leshy crafter looks at Bert curiously with its one remaining eye, seemingly ignoring the woodcutter's axe at his back.
"Why, all plants and trees can have spirits living inside them. Leshys such as ourselves are a good example. Plus, there's the arboreal wardens, the awakened ones, the dryads, wemmuths, counterflora... Of course not all of them are nice."
Nazgub, approaches, perhaps with trepidation the monolith. He reaches out to one of the runes and the hair on his body immediately stands up. The amber, snaking shapes seem to rearrange themselves in front of his large eyes, while words fill his head full of promises of power. Images run through his head. Nazgub playing in front of a packed theater in Absolom, Nazgub as a Venture-Captain in Irrisen, Inzo following him everywhere and hanging on his every word.
"Ελάτε μαζί μας, ελάτε μαζί μας, ελάτε μαζί μας στο θάνατο."
As his hand unwillingly reaches out to touch the slithering runes, to be a part of them, visions of fiendish depths intrude his thoughts as demonic figures like winged jackals reach out with clawed hands to grasp him!
"χαχαχαχα!"
Reeling back, he finds himself back in Finadar Forest, voices of squealing pain-ladden laughter echoing in his head, the charred blood pines perhaps a welcome environment after what he has seen.
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Orla, meanwhile manages to anchor herself onto reality as she too is assaulted by visions of a town having a feast at night. The monnolith and the visions blur as the runes wiggle and squirm in front of her. The shapes resolve themselves into halflings gathered round a long table with delicious trays of food placed in front of them by priestess of Desna with moth patterns in their dresses. Effigies of the Tender of Dreams are propped up around the table, their heads made of gourds and the wings made of white cloth. Orla's hand begins grasps a swirling form and its squirms between her fingers as she can envision roasted pig being served, the halflings with napkins tucked beneath their chins.
She can smell the cooked pork and for a moment sees Bert and Gabros further down the table, waving at her as from the shadows a human-sized, mosquito-like creature with a long, flexible proboscis in the shape of a murderous stinger attaches itself to her companions and starts feeding on them as large mosquitoes cover the sky and devour those around the dinner table, proboscis jabbing themselves against each halfling neck as they wither in ecstasy as their blood is drained. The effigies of Desna turn their gourd heads, reaching out to the sky as they burst into fires and the misshapen swarms of mosquitoes continue to feed on the revelers. The remaining halflings are no more but withered husks that raise from their chairs, their skin cracking to reveal chitinous plates ripping through their skin as they toast goblets of blood and yell:
Orla falls on the floor next to Nazgub, pale and sweaty.
The monolith stands in silence.
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Uncle holds his head in his hands.
"No, I rather don't think I'm all right, that was quite the mental assault! The monolith's energies have subsided, but I rather think Orla may have had more to do with that than I did."
He plays a quiet, somber tune and casts Soothe on himself.
He distractedly starts to pack up his tools, his hands rather shaky, glancing at the leshy crafter.
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"Why, all plants and trees can have spirits living inside them. Leshys such as ourselves are a good example. Plus, there's the arboreal wardens, the awakened ones, the dryads, wemmuths, counterflora... Of course not all of them are nice."
"oh... oh no. I'll have to ask Uncle how to pay reparations for my old line of work.
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Inzo scratches his head. A lot has gone on in the last minute, with Orla retrieving the abyssal shard, and the other half acting all weird and saying strange things over with the monolith.
Now that everyone is re-united, there is mention of some kind of king. He turns to the leshy "Do you have a king? Does Iobaria have a king? Gossamer sounds pretty fancy."
Orla would recall that The Gossamer King is Ghlaunder the demigod of parasites and disease and an enemy of Desna.
The leshy crafter shrugs at Inzo's question. "I do not know, but gossamer is something light like spiderwebs. Maybe it's a spider king?"
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You leave the leshy crafter and the other leshys in the valley, with the promise that there would be no further leshys being created and for them to wait there until someone from the Redpines could come and speak with them.
On hearing about the monolith being deactivated, Kaana sends several of her warriors and Ceneviel to speak with the leshy. Urwal approaches you with a far off look in his gaze. "Did the star align in a favorable position?", he asks you earnestly.
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Bert travels quietly from the valley, deep in thought at the leshy crafter's words. He sidles beside Inzo at one point during their trek:
"Mate, this 'as been a weird one. Me head still feels mucky from pullin' out that fella's eye shard thing, but it also feels confused wit' all the talk about trees 'avin' spirits an' such in 'em. Travelin' out into the big world I thought'd be easy an' adventurous an' we'd get paid like - if'n not kings - at least a noble's wage or two. But I keep gettin' learnt all this new ideas an' I ain't sure my head's big enough to grasp 'em all. 'ow are you handlin' all o' this?"
Urwal smiles Inzo's comment. "Triumph is good, as peace is good. I am most pleased with this turn of events, as are the Redpines. Here, take this." He hands over a red gemstone and two quivers, one of crossbows and another of arrows. The shaft are studded with tiny flecks of glimmering gemstones. "A warrior's weapon", he adds dryly.
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The next day, as you prepare to leave Finadar Forest a still-rather disturbing hogweed leshy trundles out of the woods into the camp with a longsword in its claws. All the warriors immediately raise their javelins with as Kaana barks to hold their attack.
It approaches the six of you uncertainly and speaks in raspy voice.
"Bring gift from Blackberry, the creator, I do. A legendary sword, for the good hideous monsters." It then carefully lays at your feet longsword with the image of a grasping arm etched into its blade. It stands in awe of you, trembling. "You horrible creature-things are the greatest heroes in our history and we will honor your memory in the woods! We will carve your faces into the trees, so when they explode, they send good omens to you!", it exclaims out loud, thrilled by the prospect of you being honored such.
Once the twisted creature leaves, Urwal comes to see you off. "Fortuitous if the stars align to see us meet as a passing eclipse. I will take the Redpine sapling with me. It wishes to grow in fertile soil and take the nutrients from other lands. You have done well."
"...thus ends this chapter in the Pathfinder Chronicles regarding the Abyssal corruption of the leshy of Finadar Forest. Recorded at the Grand Lodge, Absalom, 24 Desnus 4720."
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When we return to Absalom there is a parcel waiting for Gabros. He picks it up and a look of unbridled joy appears on his face.
"Friends! Come here at look at this!"
Tearing the wrapping aside he reveals a slim, single-bladed dueling sword with a slight curve and a sharp, reinforced point.
"I left an order before we left! Custom made to my measurements of course."