Chapter 13: Session 10

Characters are still travelling up the Violet Path amidst a series of strange and sudden storms. More than one person makes out the shape of a massive, copper colored bird resting amidst the stormclouds.

Several miles south of the second Pilgrim's Oupost, they are ambushed. Finding a wounded man on the pathside, the PCs rush to help him. However, while the man is not a willing or active participant in the plan of ambush, he has been marked as a target for a series of spell attacks that leave most of the party caught in an explosive, fiery assault. Defense Magics hold and the party remains relatively unhurt, when Soreiss and Slip both sense the sudden flare of another spell being cast.

Mitu grabs the stunned and injured man and, clutching him tightly in his grasp, hurls the both of them down the steep cliffside. Mitu slides down the rock and rubble strewn hillside just in time as a half-score mystic bolts streak past the stunned members of the party, and down the cliffside after the Ogren and his charge. Most of the bolts strike true and Mitu's body goes limp, crashing into the trees and brush, disappearing hundreds of feet below.

Everyone sees the tall robed figure standing atop the nearby bluff several hundred yards away. Simply reacting, Val, Slip, Rin, and the wolf all charge across the field of scrub and spindly trees toward the base of the bluff itself. Soreiss, however, opens a portal to the topside, and along with Lugh, they translocate near the caster...

...And find a half dozen crossbowmen armed with baneglass tipped bolts aiming right at them. The crossbowmen fire, but still Lugh and Soreiss's defenses hold true, absorbing the brunt of the attacks. The crossbowmen move into two ranks of three men, interposing themselves between the PCs and the Wizard -- an Usho mage of some measure of power -- and draw their melee weapons. A few minor spells are traded between Soreiss and the other wizard, (who almost mentally compels Lugh to leap off the bluff) and Lugh fires a few arrows into the mix before the melee troops close the distance.

Soreiss ignores them, and ports once more to move past them and stand next to the other wizard, delivering a surprisingly vicious strike with his darkblade. Lugh's own attacks -- a final ranged shot past the soldiers to the wizard's midsection, and his warwood melee strikes -- aid the battle in a small amount, though Lugh is being beaten back, knocked around by heavy melee attacks that do little real damage except to potentially daze or stun him.

With Soreiss's furious assault, the Usho seems taken aback, especially when he is unable to complete a spell after a particularly nasty blow from Soreiss's Darkblade. Soreiss is unwilling to ask for quarter -- even though the Usho is actually a more skilled caster than he -- and increases his aggression.

After taking several wounds, the Usho decides to retreat. He uses a nasty spell which not only teleports him from the field of battle, but expels a wave of concussive force that splits and sunders the flesh of a whole rank of the Usho's soldiers, but is unable to penetrate the defensive barrier triggered by Soreiss's warding stone.

With the Usho wizard gone, and only three tired and beleagered soldiers remaining, Lugh and Soreiss finish off the remainder -- taking one alive as a prisoner. Rin arrives first atop the bluff as the fight is ending, his arms replaced by feathered owl-wings. Slip and Val both struggle to climb the hillside, and there is little need when Soreiss opens a gate to port all of the party (except Mitu, who remains missing after his long, unconscious slide) up to the bluff, where they interrogate their prisoner, a soldier with a missing hand.

The Usho wizard, they are told, was hired by a man named The Blade, who is himself a Spellsword well placed in The Company. The Usho, however, is an unaligned mercenary, hired because The Blade suspected he could not remain anonymous and undetected in an encounter with the PCs. The prisoner knows little else, except that the pay was outstanding, enough to furnish them all with glass weapons.

Realizing they have gotten what they can from this man, the PCs bind the prisoner and begin instead to search for Mitu. It takes Lugh's Wolf howling to summon the other wolves in the region to find Mitu quickly. The massive Ogren is sprawled unconscious and battered, the once-injured old man quite dead, but still gripped in one of Mitu's arms. Lugh does his best to tend Mitu, but realizes the Ogren is in a deep coma. The PCs do what they can to stablilize him, and Soreiss ports everyone back to the Violet Path itself.

The PCs flag down a Pathguard and with his aid, deal with the captured mercenary soldier and drag Mitu uphill several miles to the Second Pilgrim's Outpost, where a camp is set, and Mitu's battered body is left to recover. Lugh experiments with herbs to help speed the Ogren's recovery, but knows it may still take at least a week or longer for Mitu to regain consciousness.

During this time, Rin tells the party what he knows of The Blade, and of his own colorful past as a former Company Elite, revealing his arcane fleshmark to everyone (though it had already been detected by Soreiss).