Rocky Road to Reflection

It seemed like a good idea at the time.
 
Famous last words, I suppose. This is the first time in a day, though it feels like its been a month, since I got to sit down and put my thoughts on paper. Granted, much of that I've been hauling my furry ass over and under the gods' own unforgiving ground most that time. So I've been a bit busy.
 
The next morning we rose, got our things together and set a plan into motion. Naturally, it took some argument to iron out most of the wrinkles. But I'm coming to understand that's how the SNAFU guild does things. It's noisy, messy, but it works for them.
 
But it made me miss getting a chance to talk to Scaevola before she took off to get some scrolls that'll let her move her tree where the Ministry can't find it. I hate that I didn't get to talk to her but damn if I don't wish her luck.
 
Anyway, the plan. The whole idea was simple. With Miss Melinda not stirring the soup on one side, that left the lich on the other. He was dug in and set, spreading out his influence like a sickness. So, I figured he would sense us coming.
 
To counter that, we had to whittle down his numbers and distract him. Sephia, Chung, and myself set out North then West to scour the canyon walls and find those crops of blood sucking cabbages and other necromantic plants. We burned any we came across.
 
Meanwhile, Jessie, Miro, Chef and Chica headed out West then North to take a wagon that we could use to carry the stolen townsfolk back home. My thought was that the lich had set up at a waterfall. There were two, so if he wasn't at one, he'd surely be at the other.
 
Turns out, I figured that part about right. The rest of the plan? That was a work in progress.
 
Those of us burning the crops did our job. Wiped out dozens and dozens of the things. A pack of those pumpkin golems nearly ended us, but Chung is fast with those healing potions when needed. Exploding golems took down Sephia and nearly took me down. Chung pulled us through. It was also where I learned something real important about the banshee I'm trying to help get some revenge and peace.
 
But more on that in a bit. Back to the plan.
 
We worked out way across the canyon. I'm not sure how well or poorly it went for the others, they never said. But Jessie, Miro and Chef met us at the second waterfall at the far end of the canyon. Chica had, against my advice, gone off on her own to deal with demon infested cattle at Sarsaparilla Ranch. I honestly can't blame her. Not ever had someone special or hardly any real friends - I might have maybe less than a handful - but I understand it. Chica wanted her wife back. Tracking down if Chica is safe ranks high on my future plans for later.
 
However, as I said, we met up at the waterfall on the far side of the canyon. Turns out that was where the lich was dig in and that waterfall? Yep. That was the dead Stormborn. Now dead, he had been trapped in his purest form of elemental magic which was raging storm and water. Naturally, the lich was using the sorcerer's soul for some sort of source of power or something.
 
The trapped soul wasn't outside in the canyon but underground. Seems the lich had found some crystal lined caves and did some reworking to make them more what he wanted. He also had plenty of those Fey warped plant things running around as guards, too. A lot of them. They caught us by surprise outside the cavern entrance.
 
It was a horde of those Fey things. Briar Seed Children. Nasty creatures that are from the Feylands part of Outland or so I'm told.
 
To my surprise, we handled it. It was some quick thinking on Jessie's part that confused them, then got the Briar Seed Children fighting among themselves. We slipped away into the caverns.
 
I have to admit, inside the caverns was the most beautiful I've ever seen. Glowing crystals dotted walls and ceiling. There was one big one in the entrance that glowed with its own light. Sephia didn't trust it, which isn't a surprise, she doesn't trust much of anything. But it turned out to be safe enough. So we spread out to look around for any of the stolen townsfolk, then the lich.
 
We found all that and more.
 
The townsfolk were being used as slave labor to support the lich's "plant army" and whatever plans he had for the canyon. As for the lich himself, a yokel named 'Evilseed', he was where I expected. In his laboratory cooking up who knows what. That's when we finally ran into a few wrinkles.
 
But so was Padre. The poor priest was being used as a power source in some experiment the lich cooked up to put an end to the demon cattle. Padre was glowing with a soft light. The lich called it 'Angelfire'. I've heard of that. It's sort of like a sorcerer. Where a sorcerer is born with elemental magic in their blood, Padre's kind was born with deific magic in his. Real rare. Yet, here it was.
 
The other wrinkle was Jessie. He was still under the binding he stole off Scaevola. That was when it needed to kick in. Jessie went up to the lich and presented himself, looking to help his new 'boss'. A boss that promptly tried to send him out to get control of the land and deed for the demon cattle ranches. Unfortunately, the lich had no idea that involves actual written deeds and contracts. So when Jessie came back to us, we had a thing or two to say about that.
 
Mostly it was Miro. Of all the times for that pirate's love of contracts to come in handy, that was the moment. Jessie mentioned having to leave and why, Miro jumped into action with contract fine print, triplicate signatures and more. Jessie was so confused he had to go back to Evilseed to get some things cleared up.
 
This let Jessie's dire bee companion, Wrong Way, do an interpretive dance to help let us know the layout of Evilseed's room. What we couldn't figure out from that, Jessie was all too eager to translate Wrong Way's dance for us, what with Jessie being such a bee aficionado. It was a huge advantage and we took it.
 
Jessie was a nice distraction and we rushed the lich before he knew what hit him. We caught Evilseed by surprise and away from his defenses. That let us wipe out the lich before he could cause serious trouble.
 
Now, that doesn't mean the lich is destroyed. Oh, no. That takes tracking down whatever he's bonded his life essence to. Sometimes its a still beating heart in a sea chest, other times its a gemstone. Once I heard it was an old wine bottle. Thing is, its different every time.
 
We still haven't found what Evilseed bound his life force into. Not yet.
 
Also, we thought that would be the end of the trouble there. The Fate muses just didn't want the music to play that way. After doing away with the lich for the moment, we freed the captives, then promptly ran right into a new wrinkle.
 
The demon cattle had sent two demon possessed cattle hands to attack the lich.
 
Why? Who knows why right then. Maybe it was planned all along? Or maybe the demons got wind of what we were up to and decided to take advantage of it. But the fight went real sour.
 
See, those 'hell hands' have some mesmerizing song. Saps the mind right out of you. It got several, including myself. I blacked out just floating on a sea of hell-fueled bliss. Naturally, that meant at the end of that floating I would've been in for a lot of pain but I'm glad I never found out. What happened after I blacked out got told me to by the others.
 
It seems, the banshee that I swore to help? She jumped in and possessed me to keep me away from those hell hands. If anyone was to tell me that a banshee would help me, I'd not have believed them. But that's exactly what Yathue did. Yes, I know her name. But, that's not something for right now.
 
Yathue, doing her best even though the only one she could talk with was Lee Chung, worked with the rest of the SNAFU guild Pathfinders. The whole fight was ugly. It sprawled over the entire main chamber and nearly got some of the captives killed. Namely 'Princess' who Chica had been looking for! Yep, we found her, which meant Chica was off on a fool's errand.
 
Anyway, the fight was getting real bloody when somehow one of the hell hands forced Yathue to back off and lose control over me. She pulled back and I came to. Naturally, I was fighting mad, so I laid into the one hell hand in front of me. I really took after him when he nearly burned Chung alive with some sort of demon-fueled punch. But, I must be scarier than the little monk because the hell hand tried to run from me.
 
It was right then, that the Fate muses decided to play a tune just for me.
 
This hell hand had feelings for the lady hell hand across the room. Married? Just sweethearts? Don't know, don't care. Drawing my bow, I didn't end the hell hand, I threatened his lady love. Telling him I'd end her if he didn't knock it off. Though, if he wanted to keep fighting, I sure could do this all day if he wanted to. I gave him a glare to let him know I wasn't bluffing, not on any of it.
 
My words got through to him. He backed off. So did his lady love. As a result, we learned a few things!
 
First, the captives were infected with griefgall parasites! Nasty things. Live in swampy areas and burrow into a host quicker than anything. Then they feed off a person's emotions until they use them up. Second, these hell hands may not have had a good choice to get possessed. Instead, it was the best out of real horrible choices.
 
The talking helped. Nobody trusted anybody right then but they were talking. That led to an uneasy compromise. Real uneasy since they thought Jessie was the lich, a moss-lich supposedly. Rare, nasty kind of lich. But it made sense what with the necromantic plants. I remembered enough after the fight with the lich that Jessie had snatched up the lich's robe for some plan to fool the Briar Seed Children again.
 
As I said, it led to an uneasy compromise. After some heated arguments, of course. None of us knew how to help the hell hands but Lee Chung had a quick conversation with Yathue, who said a sharp cold like from a blizzard would kill the parasite off. Naturally, those infected would need care from hypothermia but that's easier to manage that the damn griefgall.
 
That led to the next wrinkle. Where was Chef?
 
Sometime during the fight with Evilseed, the little kobold had gone missing. What with the mess of the fight then me getting enspelled by the hell hands, I didn't see what happened to him. Thing is, no one else did either.
 
Miro and Spiro went looking for any last captives we missed and Chef. They found the last of the captives but no Chef. Lee Chung was, of course, worried. He wanted to go look and asked if I would help. I told him I would but said he needed to go with the others. Chung had been hurt far worse than he was wanting to admit. Just one solid punch and he'd drop faster than if he'd been spit on by a scursal. He didn't like the idea but agreed.
 
Hell hands, horses, captives all trailed out of the lich's cavern through a concealed back way with the SNAFU guild riding escort on them. Me? I stayed behind. If I was to try and track Chef, I could do that best by not having any of the SNAFU guild asking me every few minutes "have you found him yet?" I knew the bunch would be fine. Sure, Miro and Jessie were worn down and Lee Chung was almost burned about to death. But Sephia was keeping an eye on the lot. She's a damn fine ranger. So I knew she'd keep them all alive and not let them kill each other.
 
Once they had gone, I turned my attention to the lich's lair. Miro, Jessie, and Chung had ransacked the place. I had grabbed a few things, too, so I wasn't one to throw stones. But it made tracking Chef harder than it should've been. I was losing daylight, and cavern light as the glow was fading from the crystals, so I lit a torch and looked around for Yathue. True enough, she appeared in the shadows.
 
I still couldn't talk to her but I managed some pantomimes to explain what I was about. She got it and so we set to work.
 
Chef's trail ended in the lich's chamber, so we kept our focus there. We learned a good bit more about what was going on.
 
The SNAFU guild had already discovered that Evilseed had trapped Padre in a crystal and was using the man's life and Angelfire to power ... something. It was also the light in the cavern's crystals. That was why it was so soothing. But that led us to look real close at where Padre had been kept before the SNAFU Pathfinders shattered that big crystal to let the man out.
 
We found the cap that went with the bottle holding the dead and trapped Stormborn. I had the bottle at the moment, something I had gotten my hands on during the fight against Evilseed, so I recapped it. I didn't want any of the poor man's essence spilling out anywhere. He'd been through enough. The cap had been on a rock shelf over where Padre had been caged.
 
That was where I last found any sign of Chef. My gut said Chef had been yanked away by magic of some kind. How, I didn't know. That's not magic I understand other than I know it can happen. Yathue and I searched the room again. Finally, we sat down and I pulled out a bag of trail rations. Popped corn mostly. To my surprise, Yathue sat down next to me and ate some when I offered it to her without thinking!
 
We sat there thinking, not able to talk to each other because we didn't speak the other's language. Until she had an idea. Swatting me on my shoulder, she had me turn over the Stormborn's bottle. She pointed at the maker's mark on the bottom, pointed at the exit and hugged herself. I didn't get it at first and started to search the exit. A few pantomimes later, she got her point across. The bottles. It was all about the bottles.
 
That set us to ransacking the shelves. I mean really ransacking them. Jessie keeps saying he wants to claim the caverns as a kind of druid grove. I hate to say it, Yathue and I left a big mess for Jessie to clean up. I'll have to apologize t him later.
 
But, we found what we were after. Two more bottles with the same mark. One had been cleaned but they had both been used a lot.
 
You see, what Yathue realized and I agreed with her on, was that the Bichierri caravan had been attacked for the damn bottles. They were of high, maybe masterwork, quality. Such a fine quality, those could hold anything.
 
Even a person's spirit.
 
Now, one of those two we found had bone dust in it. Did that belong to Evilseed? Chef? Someone else? No idea. But I left it in the bottle to figure out later, because I knew it was important. This also suggested that what happened to the Stormborn in the caravan was something Evilseed was trying to figure out. Trapping a person's spirit. It's also something the demon cattle side of the problem - such as Miss Melinda - had been working on as well.
 
If Yathue's and my guess was right ... the attack was for the bottles and this 'capturing spirit' part was an accident and it required both sides to use the right kind of magic to cause it to happen. Something like that was happening during the fight with Evilseed I think. Chef had been yanked away. I was thinking to the demon cattle ranchers. It was a place to start looking.
 
We kept searching for a few more hours. I would've kept going until Yathue indicated I needed to stop. She had been right. Killing myself didn't save Chef. It didn't settle what needed to be done here. So we grabbed a few things we found, namely some enchanted waterskins of oil then slipped out.
 
The rest was long gone by the time we reached the surface just as I hoped. But right then, something else caught my attention. The sky. Overhead was full of stars and the two moons were riding high overhead. I stood there for I don't know how long, just staring. Then I noticed a bit of motion beside me.
 
Yathue was 'standing' there next to me, looking up at the stars, too. There was a smile on her ghostly undead face. I nodded at her then started a fire not far away. A small camp to rest the night at.
 
I had not idea if a banshee 'slept' or 'rested'. Most of my studies were around a lich and they don't exactly 'sleep'. It's more like a meditation or 'short hibernation' or something. But when I set down and ate some trail rations, Yathue joined me in the shadows next to me at the edge of camp.
 
Not being able to talk to her had worn thin with me. She was doing her best here, despite being a banshee. That undead elven lady could've killed the others quick as a wink but didn't. Hell, she had protected me more than once over the past day in fights. So it was past time she and I built a bridge past that language problem. So I pulled out this journal and got started.
 
First, came our names. I mean pointing at something and saying a word is a terrible way to teach any sort of language. But my hope was that she understood that I was saying simple concepts first. Yes. No. Bottle. Fire. Rock. Boot. Just simple words.
 
I spoke in Hareno, my own people's language, then repeated it using Hebar, our sign language. Then again in Common. After a moment she did the same in her own language, Fa'lain. This went on for a few hours until I was too tired to go on. The next morning, we started breakfast off with another round of that.
 
It wasn't a lot, but we learned each other's names and a few important words like 'yes', 'no', 'maybe' and so on. I don't expect to recite poetry in Fa'lain. But it was a start on the two of us being able to talk. Given we needed to see if the others had taken the wagons or... gods forbid... went on foot overland, we'd have plenty of time to practice words. Maybe, hopefully, we'll get to phrases.
 
I don't know if it helped. But, I can say now as I'm about to pack up for the day so we can track down the others, she still is a banshee. She's still elven undead, being only in shadows and such. But she looks a bit more radiant. There's anger in her eyes but not 'rage'. To me it looks like determination. She looks... more... I don't know. Like she's getting more 'whole' little by little. Like she's not so lost anymore.
 
All I know is that before breakfast was done, I taught her a pretty important word among my people, the Nodin.
 
I taught her the word for 'friend'. Not sure how I know this, but I get the sense she understood me and what I was trying to communicate.
 
Anyway, now if we can just find the others before they find trouble bigger than Sephia, or really the whole of them can get out of, the better.