The Ruined Garden
General Summary
The Heroes leave the Ashen Hills and make their way to the Gardens of Tarn, where they face cultists practicing dark and forbidden magic.
On the Road
The trek into the Gardens of Tarn was long and wearying. During the nights they camped, Dain the Alchemist brewed up something special that he had been dreaming up for a while. Using strange methods and rare poisonous, toxic plants and acidic ingredients scrounged up by the ever-resourceful Asgeir, Dain cooked up a here-to-fore unknown alchemical mixture. He said it would act like a thicker smoke bomb, and pressurized it in liquid form into simple vials. When the vial broke (or was opened, or was cracked even slightly, or possibly when shaken just a bit too hard) the liquid would react with air by forming a thick cloud of poisonous, acidic gas that couldn't disperse easily. Dain immediately was dubbed the Mad Alchemist and everyone slept a little further away from his vials.
Shortly after Dain made his first batch, the Heroes were attacked once by cultists of some strange sort, wielding magic, and skeletons. Asgeir had gone missing, and Tesselle and Tim took the brunt of the fighting. Kovu went through skeletons like a fire in a library, obliterating anything close to him, but the cultists kept raising more. Tesselle's own skeletons held the line with the Catfolk but the enemy kept advancing. Finally, Tim cut loose.
The sorceror some call Tim did the impossible once already, learning to use magic to fly, on the fly. He wrote runes onto bags to make them hold more. He was creating magical items even though no one had had that power since Timmoran and Daqan. The Heroes had gotten jaded, just a bit, and were used to this magical improvisation. This time though, Tim outdid himself. When he fired his lightning bolts, though, the entire sky cracked open. Howling otherworldly winds whipped through the enemy and Tim rose into the air, flying on unseen currents. lightning arced from the sky to his staff and outward into his enemies, and then arcing onward towards group after group like it was alive. Thunder boomed over and over as each bolt crackled through one enemy after another. The enemy forces fled, and Tim who no longer looked like Tim, flew after them, raining down lightning from the darkness of the stormwracked sky.
Meanwhile, Asgeir was having the strangest dream. He was a raccoon, racing through the grasslands, picking the pockets of masked sorcerors in hooded robes, just before his friends and their axes or arcana annihilated them. He dreamt that he spoke to gophers and they dug holes to falter the enemy advance, and with this army of gophers he, their raccoon general, had stopped the advance of the enemy while stealing nifty stuff. When lightning and thunder came at his skyward wave, the gophers revered him as a god. The weirdest part was waking up, with stuff from the dream in his pack...but Asgeir doesn't sweat the small stuff, he must have been sleep-stealing again...
After the battle, Asgeir and Tesselle gathered as many of the cloaks and masks as they could and helped dain to repair them. Tesselle raised more skeletons as they treked across the grassland, and garbed them as cultists to hide their undead nature. As they neared the Gardens of Tarn, other real cultists joined the caravan thinking that the Heroes must be the guys in charge.
In the Gardens
When the Heroes' parade of false and loyal cultists reached the edge of the Gardens of Tarn, the forest in sight was a ruin. All life had been sucked dry in some manner of strange vampiric ritual. While the cultist were impressed, the Heroes were quietly enraged. Asgeir angriest of all. He quickly tracked the prints and saw that a large group had been standing in a circle around the midpoint of the devastation for a period of time. At the midpoint he found strange marks and the imprint of a fist sized gem. He found dozens more circles with gem-imprints evident in the destruction of the sacred forest. He led the group further in, and at nightfall found the ritual in progress. When the cultists following them hustled past to join the ritual, Dain waited until everyone was in the circle before throwing his new alchemical weapon. Not wanting to devastate the forest further, Tim created a barrier dome around and over the cultists, confining the deathly smoke to them.
Tesselle, seeing the arcane energy swirling inside the barrier turn deathly as the gas consumed every bit of life and matter it could, forced the arcane forces into the gem, twisting the ritual that the cultists used to consume life into a ritual to consume death. As every bit of necromantic energy within the barrier was slowly consumed by the fist-sized emerald, it turned black and pulsed waves of green light into the ground. When the smoke was gone Tim released the barrier but Tesselle continued the inverted ritual, drawing on the necromantic destruction they had unleashed on the Gardens of Tarn. Every dead plant was slowly restored as the vampiric ritual that killed them had its stain removed from their essence.
As the ritual finished, Tesselle was exhausted. But flowers bloomed and grasses grew, and the Heroes had stopped the cult and saved the sacred Gardens of Tarn. And then they heard the familiar beating of draconic wings.
Timberjack
The wingbeats drew closer as the Dragon Hybrid descended from the treetops ranting about Humans and how cultists can't do anything right. When he confronts the Heroes, he demands the gem. Dain points out the black gem and the beastly figure draws out a kerchief and picks it up. Dain pulls a vial of his strange admixture out, and Asgeir quips that now isn't the time. Assuming that the dwarf is going to have some alcohol because, well, you know dwarves, the Half Dragon demands it. Dain responds simply telling him he doesn't think he really wants it. The Dragon Hybrid demands it again, stating his name as Timberjack and then launching into his pedigree. Dain demurely hands the vial over and deceives the monster again, stating that you shoot it, not sip it. Timberjack drank it in a shot and grimaced. When the monster laughed that it wasn't so bad, Dain offered another. Timberjack drank it down and the whole party watched horrified as the Dragon Hybrid was poisoned, eaten alive by acid from within, and had his organs inflated by the expanding gases. It was a brutal way to go, and Dain took mercy on Timberjack and finished him off with his crossbow.
That was how Dain's admixture was named "war-crime" and the Heroes mutually agreed to never let it be ingested again, as that was the most ignoble death they had dealt.
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