E02

When we wake up peacefully in the morning, Pasquier is asleep from his last round of watch. It's very dark outside due to the clouds, we expect rain for the afternoon.

Pasquier and Marten check outside. Mostly tracks of at least six large dogs or wolves who came from the deeper part of the forest. We hear the sound of the donkey cart. Marten rushes to follow it. The man who drives it stops on a hill, looks in the direction of the cabin and seems to be pretty attentive. He also adds a piece of glass from his own to a tree, and from time to time goes to fill his bag in the forest. The other three follow from a distance.

The soil and track starts becoming muddy and we notice remains of brick walls around. The forest gets darker and we move closer to the cart. The villager insists that the donkey pulls the cart despite the mud.

We're almost there !

Amelia hears a strange sound like a bag being beaten on the right of the road. Marten overtakes from the other direction to see for himself. The villager notices a noise and lights a torch and many pieces of glass reflect the light. Then he rushes with his cart in a tunnel.

Pasquier notices that the road ahead would be perfect for an ambush between hills. Marten climbs a tree to get a better view. There's in the direction of the sound a light for a second (like a signal ?) and a tree wiggling in place.

Amelia looks at the papers which are scattered around : "Warning / Danger" in various languages. Someone also seemed to be counting days, marking nearby locations, listing supplies, precious furniture, cattle...

We finally decide to follow into the tunnel. After a few minutes Marten notices something moving from the top, a large dog spying on him. He walks back quickly to avoid being burrowed in dirt falling from the ceiling. Commotions, tremors sometimes happened since a while. We finally reach an exit, in a large open area with less trees and just a few scrawny houses and dogs. The villager is standing with his torch with 2 others, older with pitchforks.

The driver seems to recognise Cerridwen and that he's been followed. He tries to convince us that the forest is very dangerous and full of monsters, and there are not bandits around. Marten throws their bag, full of remains of animals, to Pasquier and tries so sneak around. They also say they never heard about a witcher in the region. Cerridwen suggests to hire one of them to lead us in the region. One offers to lead us to the chief of the villagers. They also help us complete our map. They try really hard to convince us that we should not cross a bridge nearby.

When Amelia casts Suggestion on one of them, he reveals that the bandits are actually "heroes protecting them" from the baroness that he blames for all their disarray. It gets a bit heated from there but they don't tell us much more and we leave before killing one of them out of frustration.

We finally reach the bridge, pretty big, made of stone. The river underneath is dry despite the rain. We circumvent the bridge and notice more bags with remains; one of them is getting bitten at. A creature with 8 legs moves away. We also see black spots climbing on a cliff, we try to avoid them by going closer to the lake which fed the river before.

Pasquier sees golden eyes above us in the cliff and shouts :

Fazil - he's throwing rocks at us !

He also throws a bag stinking of chemicals in our direction, which attracts a huge insect from the ground, attacking Pasquier in the legs. A flower with tentacles and a smaller one also sprout in the middle of us. We manage to slice the scolopendre in 2 and it tries to flee back into the ground while the tentacles grasp Pasquier. Marten comes to the rescue and cuts him free so he can hack its way and reveal bones and teeth inside. More poison gaz gets out of the flower and seems to attract more insects towards us.

Get away from the flowers you fools ! There's too much coming for us !

Amelia casts a huge ball of fire in front us which clears the path for us to run through the insects. We roll in the warm mud to clean the spores from us, hoping to get rid of the smell, while Pasquier continues to slash the ground around the scolopendre, cutting the head almost clean. We manage to escape Fazil's trap and run to the other side of the river.