The Awakening Song
General Summary
Dreki, Zaketh, Cecil, Kingra
The city of Quan was hosting the Awakening Festival, a multi-day celebration of stories and song. The Great Bibliopolis had opened its doors to promote learning and appreciation of literature, and festival goers congregated in the Erudite Bastion's south plaza.
Procella and Professor Surinaal led some youngsters to a classroom for tutoring, while several bard-priests of Jaxhyde began to lead the gathered crowd in one of the countless verses of the Awakening Song. The song was a telling of events in and around Quan, in both distant and recent past. The priests, the Proclaimers of the Song, added verses regularly, some that told stories of grand historical importance, and some that were of smaller scale, but personal significance to the individuals and families of the city. Some stories of joys to be shared, some of losses to be remembered.
As the crowd joined in on the call-and-response, collaborative experience of the Song, a half a dozen strange figures approached. Instead of their festival fineries, they wore muddy farmer's coveralls, and rather than smiling and singing, they stared blankly. They raised rusted farm implements and attacked! The crowd screamed and scattered.
The party, seeing the blank faces and eyes red as though with bloody tears, suspected the assailants were not in their right mind, and tried to subdue them non-lethally. A woman pushed through the fleeing crowd and called to the farmers by name, and confirmed that these good people were not acting like themselves.
When the attackers were subdued, the woman introduced herself as Aunt Dellie, and expressed worry for her goddaughter Kianna. Kianna had gone to work on a farm collective outside of the city, and the attackers were workers from that same farm. Then, crumpled in one of their hands, Kingra found a charcoal sketch of a boy being dragged into dark waters by many grasping hands, and Dellie recognized it as Kianna's work.
Dellie told the story of the drawing: when Kianna was a child, she'd witnessed her friend Culley drown in Cradlelace Lake, and carried the grief and guilt with her ever since. One of the bard-priests, Proclaimer Tungsten Ward approached, and told his part: that he had collected the story and immortalized it in a verse of the Awakening Song.
Dellie borrowed a wagon and asked the party to accompany her to the farm to check on Kianna and the others. Proclaimer Ward joined them.
They traveled beyond the cultivated farmland around the city, to a fertile but untamed area of red soil known as the Rattle. New small farming collectives were making progress into these wild lands, but it was hard and dangerous work. Then they saw movement in a nearby field of crops. They heard a man's footfalls and gasping breath, and the yips and growls of animals giving chase. Cecil ventured into the dense crops, but was lost in the low visibility. The others moved ahead and found a clearing, just as an older man stumbled out, pursued by coyotes the size of horses.
The party killed two coyotes and chased off the other, and the man introduced himself as Uncle Polder. Polder knew Kianna's farm, and had last spoken with her a couple of weeks ago. He admitted that at the beginning of the season he had been unsure if she was suited for life in the Rattle, but she seemed to be settling in well. She had spoken excitedly of her friend Culley coming to the farm soon.
Dellie and the party were concerned, and told Polder that Culley was Kianna's childhood friend that she saw drown. A confused Polder insisted Kianna spoke of this Culley in the present tense, as a current friend.
They traveled further, coming to within sight of Kianna's farm, when the ground trembled, and the wagon collapsed into a sinkhole. Small burrows riddled the ground inside the pit, and undead severed hands scrabbled in the reddish dirt and skittered to attack those who had fallen.
The hands dealt with, they hauled the cart out of the sinkhole and pressed on warily. The farmhouses looked abandoned, the fields untended and overgrown. The crops were sickly though, as though the soil was tainted. The houses were daubed with red mud, some marked with Xs, some with clusters of hand prints.
The party ventured into Kianna's farmhouse, the only one without a red X. Proclaimer Ward held Aunt Dellie behind, and mentioned to the party that they should check ahead first. Inside, they found Kianna's room, with more of her painted and drawn imagery of water, drowning, and hands. The entire living room floor was painted with red hands, and a depiction of a boy being pulled down by them, while another child reached for him.
The dining room bore signs of scuffle, and floorboards pushed up from below. A cluster of the crawling hands lurked under the table, and attacked when disturbed. The ruined kitchen housed four enchanted farmers, their eyes bloody red. They stood still in a circle, perhaps awaiting instruction from whatever had charmed them. Carefully, the party tied their hands and feet.
In the pantry, the party found a trapdoor to a root cellar that stank of death. The collapsed wall revealed a tunnel to a cave, where they heard a young woman singing. She sang Culley's verse of the Awakening song, but with the lyrics clumsily rewritten to suggest he was instead rescued by his best friend.
Kianna stood in a dreamlike daze, surrounded by dismembered bodies, their limbs piled at the cave's far end. When she noticed the party, she seemed erratic and confused, first fearfully telling them to leave, then happily asking them to meet her friend Culley. She told them of Culley's death, but then insisted that he had survived. They tried to usher her out of the chamber, but she maintained that her singing kept Culley calm, and that he was sleeping after feeding. She indicated the pile of severed limbs at the far end of the cavern. They began to move.
The heap hauled itself up on many arms and hands, and reached out to attack. It grabbed and tore at Dreki and Kingra, trying to envelop them into its mass. Its fractured mind called to them psychically in a boy's voice, insisting they stay and play, and join him forever, and not to send him back to the lake.
Eventually the undead horror was dispatched, and the remaining hands scattered, trying to burrow away. The party destroyed them.
Kianna and the farmers were broken out of their stupor, in confusion and distress. Reunited with Aunt Dellie, Kianna told of how she had heard Culley's voice in the cellar, and broke down the wall to find the cave. She knew now that it wasn't Culley. Just something foul that came out of the lake, and used a fragment of him, along with her memories and grief, to coerce and control her. It encouraged her to bring others to the cave, and forced the farmers to inflict violence on each other, growing its mass of limbs.
Proclaimer Ward stayed at the farm, to collect their stories, tend their wounds, and help them rebuild. Dellie and Kianna traveled back with the party to Quan, where those at the festival continued to tell stories, and keep memories alive.
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