Heath Hooks

## Tangles with the Tigers

The party have met a scouting party from a group calling themselves Tarvesh's Tigers. They're mostly reliant on Massimo to translate back and forth between Deshi and Linguafranca, although Nitara (F), an older shaman, can speak a bit of Goblin. The Tigers view Elek, Adenor, Aldo, Dedalera, Marcus and Esplace the gobln medic with extra suspicion. Roquette seems to be getting on quite well with Hanuman (M) the ranger, and Darsh (trans-man), a well built and good looking fighter. Sathvik (M), some kind of cleric, appears to be hostile about the party but he's countered by Nitara and a couple of the other Tigers. The scouting party seem very concerned that the party are 'clean' and reacted with some interest to their purple flowers. Everyone in the scouting group has a small splash of purple colour somewhere on their uniform (more like an element woven in, it's not obviously a flower but they seem familar with the purple flowers).

The party's being taken through the jungle to Tarvesh's Stand, one of the Tigers' bases, where they'll meet someone called Kasiapa. The trip takes a while and involves at least one overnight stay in the forest canopy, sleeping in hammocks and treehouses. The party's already seen some of the magic users levitate rope ladders up into the trees. Ira (F), a yougner shaman, talks about the leader Kasiapa, how he "has unerring visions with his inner eye" and how clever and wise he is as a leader. It's clear that the party lives only because Kasiapa is curous about meeting them. Ira also refers to the Big Wall as "the Celestial barrier" that keeps the Heath "clean" and separate from the danger of demons and plague.

### Tarvesh's Stand

The place is a shabby shanty town, mottled with shadows and half-covered by the forest canopy. The Desh have woven little round nests around the trunks of some of the larger trees, like the dwellings of bower birds - they have a little entrance hole and a discreet profile against the jungle backdrop. Hidden among the leaves and pools of the forest floor are dozens of foxholes and tunnel entrances. Some of them were once neatly finished in Desh stone, others have been scoured out by what appear to be blasts of magic or just hard manual labour. The true scale of the complex is obsured by ferns, moss and orchids but underneath the greenery, there are solid sections laid out just a little too regularly to be natural. There must have once been quite a bustling city here.

The local people mostly have greyish skin rather than the intense blue-black that you saw at the Imperial Court. A couple of kids playing stick games in the mud have blotches of paler, less pigmented skin on their bodies. A few mud structures are dotted with chunks of coloured stone or painted with small sigils in a muddy yellow - but there are no really large splashes of colour anywhere. The Tigers' heraldry is quite stylised and features pale yellow banners painted with claws and teeth (sometimes actual claws and teeth are sewn on) to resemble a sort of wild tiger. There is in fact one real, tame, very fat tiger (smallish, like a Sumatran tiger) called Sumira loafing around on a heavy leather leash, she seems to be the local mascot. The muddy laneways are scattered with lots of bald Xolo dogs sniffing and pissing. A few Desh carry trained monkeys (tamarind or marmoset sized, with furry ruffs) or pet snakes, that seem to be kept like housecats and that eat the local pests.

There is a lot of open worship for what is effectively a guerilla military encampment. Lots of Desh, both adults and kids, meditate, prostrate themselves, draw rune-like parks in the ground or burn little twists of scented grass around the settlement, including by the roadside for maximum visibility. Some of the worshippers have stopped cutting their fingernails and toenails, letting them grow so long that they need help to feed. Others have pierced themselves with long bone and wooden implements, or have grown their hair out, or are ritualy fasting and painted with mud.

#### Going down?

A stepped pyramid marks the centre of the settlement. It's not impressive - at its height it is still squat and lower than the surrounding treetops - but it has a deep entranceway cut into one face of the stonework, leading to the classic central stairwell and undergound square basilica the party's come to expect of ancient Desh architecture. This building is large enough that the staircase down is more of a wide gentle spiral than a stairwell. It's lit with a few glowing magic stones to mark the inside edge (there's no railing, just a low lip) plus some guttering oil lamps, a few glowing orchids and helpful daubs of phosphorescent paint. Desh make basketwork, whittle carvings, say prayers and light incense in little shrines and laboriously grind roots to make damper bread along the outer walls of the stairway. Most everyone looks busy, hungry and a mix of curious and wary.

#### Kasiapa

Kasiapa's base is prudently elevated above the water table - the base of the complex might have been pumped dry in nobler days but it's now a cool, clear cistern with a few familiar water lilies sprouting on the surface and some eel-like shapes sliding about in the wet. Wood and bamboo walkways lead to a pontoon, which has a pointed, hexagonal roof and is lit with cute paper lanterns that honestly don't resemble anything the party has seen on their travels. Kasiapa has decided to hold court here. He's tried his best to look as fabulous as a starving jungle hermit can. He's got a headdress with large Garuda feathers (Massimo might be able to identify these - he'll exclaim with wonder that the beasts till exist). Kasiapa isn't wearing much metal as it tends to rust, but he has some very ancient gold jewellery on him: a complicated necklace with six separate sets of strands is hung with little gold earrings, that have been repurposed as hanging decorations. Kasiapa also has some rather nice wrist cuffs, and a clean turban that's dyed yellow and has a pointed head ornament and a couple of bone pins sticking out of it. He's not a musclebound orc, but rather small and wiry, with a dark, almost grey-green tint to his skin. One of his tusks is chipped at the end, he has a cataract in one eye and his eyebrows are very bushy, making him look rather wild. However, he spies Yiuri at once, with a shrewd eye for business.

Kasiapa's wants aren't quite the same as those of his people. He needs to save face as the leader of the Tigers - and that means he needs to test the party or otherwie prove that he's made the right call to bring potential disease vectors into his stronghold. Any traditional shows of friendship would be most useful.

He's used his cataract eye and charisma to sell his more fundamentalst followers on a vision of him as a great mystic and holy man. Desh like Sathvik are rampant traditionalists, while Nitara and Hanuman represent a less isolationist faction - often young scouts and shamans, picking at the loot from stray adventurers or sneaking glimpses over the Celestial Barrier while they conduct repairs, become curious about Ladinh and the recent changes in the landscape and people there. "Round ears" in particular are a new addition to the Tigers' worldspace and nobody yet knows what to make of the elves.

Kasiapa will single out the following people: Adenor, Dedalera, Aldo, Elek. He'll then ask each of them "What are you?" He has never seen or heard of an elf before.

The Needs of the Tigers:

* metal and tools
* Better food - malnutrition is a big problem
* freedom of religion - the Tigers have their own mystical spin on Desh religion which is very important to their identity.

The Wants of the Tigers:

* Sovereignty in their own nation state
* Access to their own history. The shamans would love to read the old Court archives
* Connection via trade
* a solution to the Contract
* assurance that the plague will be researched and stopped before they leave the Heath

#### The Last Mage

Kasiapa has taken one Speranzan prisoner. He refers to her as "the glowing round-ear. Very brave." Her name is Ravenna, she's in her mid thirties with shoulder length dark hair, an old scar at her left temple and skin that's lost its olive tan and is now jaundiced from long imprisonment in a sunless hole. She's not in her rubbery human robes; the Tigers have given her a choli, sandals and a skirt, all in bright yellow. Ravenna suffered some light singeing from the backsplash of her own spell fire; Desh magic turns destruction back on the user. She's been too exhausted to use combat magic for some days now. Ravenna's wrists bear keloid scars from weeks in woven shackles, as well as one of the Speranza NDA markings. This wrist writing drew the Tigers' attention because it bears a strong resemblance to Classical Desh. They can loosely translate it, even. "Chandra's (the lunar goddess) writ stop my tongue lest eternity's scribe Yama (Jergal) stop it for me. In the name of [Chandra]" - the writing starts and ends with Chandra's name in a neat loop.

Ravenna is the only one of the mage squad that has survived (or not retreated from the Heath). She looks malnourished, very shaken and traumatised. The Tigers have tried questioning them over the months, but since the Tigers don't speak Linguafranca and the mage doesn't speak Desh, this has involved occasionaly telepathic intrusions, a lot of mutually incomprehensible shouting and some psychological torture. Nitara almost had a breakthrough when she realised both she and the mage spoke a little bit of Goblin - however the mage's NDA kicked in and has meant they haven't been able to reveal much of anything about the Inner Court or the mages' intentions.

## The Tirtha

Once the party proves their worth and earns the Tigers' trust, they'll be given the location of The Tirtha, an underground bunker in the very middle of the Heath. Nitara will sneak over when Sathvik is out of earshot, and tell the party that this is the most sacred site in the area. If there is any knowledge on the Contract to be found, surely it will be here. Nitara warns that the site is dangerousr. It's said to be inhabited, either by a yaksha (nature spirit) or a rakshasi (demon). The locals refer to her as Daruka. Nobody has ever actually seen Daruka. One of the young Desh tried to sneak into the bunker and see her, but she never returned. Quite a few of the Tigers think Daruka's just a myth - there's plenty of danger in the jungle, after all, no need to add superstition to it. However, Sathvik and his people would be aggravated if he found out that the party had gone to the site - best to take a small squad there, not the whole party, and return quickly. Nitara can send her young protegee Ira and Hanuman to escort the visitors.

The surrounding jungle shows signs of old fox-holes and broken down sentry posts, as well as the crumbled remains of what look like narrow towers. The towers appear to be made of fine Desh stone and extend down among the jungle's buttress roots. They seem too narrow for anyone to have lived in there, essentially just glorified staircases going up. But their tops rarely reach as high as the canopy. Girders and chunks of masonry speckle the trees and forest floor from where the delicate structures have snapped or smashed. Few of the Tigers come here much, although they maintain a watch around the site and there's a general rule against people going to the bunker. A small group of scouts, usually female ones, occasionally brings offerings for Daruka. It's done out of a mix of tradition and propitiation. A brave scout walks out across a narrow stone girder that juts out over a large sinkhole, lowering a basket of food and fragrant herbs down the central air shaft. Prisha notes that their offering basket always comes back empty and clean.

The Desh offering system is delicate - a clever engineer might speculate that it's been deliberately rigged so that it can't take an adult person's weight. The rope that holds the offering basket is slender, finely woven and well greased. Even if the Desh are giving offerings to this Daruka entity, they clearly don't want it to get out.

#### The contract holder

Volumnia, Beloved of Uni, has been imprisoned at the bottom of the bunker for about 2500 years. She presents as a hunched, very old goblin with long, long white hair and who wears a stola fashined out of white offering-cloths, pinned with a couple of very old bronze brooches and tied at the waist with woven grasses. Every visible inch of Volumnia's pale skin is covered in blue tattoos. Because she's spent so little time in the sunlight, the ink is still quite fresh on most of them, though the ink has spread a little over time as her skin has aged. She also wears an amulet of Uni, an important female deity in the Duende pantheon. Volumnia herself hasn't seen a fellow goblin in hundreds of years - she will react to Marcus, Esplace or even Aldo with tears and an intense, lonely joy.

The party will learn more about the surviving Goblin tribes. Seianthi's people were once called the Volsci (swamp people). the people of Lago were the Aequi and Volumnia's own tribe were called the Latins. Volumnia and her people were relatively late to settle in the Desh Empire, and fought especially hard in the old wars of religion. They were repressed and scattered around various holdings to the north of Ladinh - leaderless and precarious.

#### Goblins from the northeast

The party and Volumnia manage to extricate themselves from the Tirtha bunker and decide to head back to Tarvesh's Stand for a reckoning with Kasiapa.

On the way there, they're interrupted by a clutch of agitated Desh. It appears that one of the Tigers' scouting party has had an encounter with yet more outsiders - they appear to be a group of armed goblins who have come from the northeast.

The 'round ears' in the party are urgently called to go check on the Desh and determine if any of them show signs of infection. Anyone else risks becoming a disease vector. So, it is up to Elek what he will do while Yiuri and Roquette and the other humans go to administer first aid for the Desh. Volumnia is able to supply fresh purple flowers for everyone using her druidcraft.

The Desh scouting party are suffering a few flesh wounds, including arrow wounds and the odd gash from a spiny plant or a poorly-flung goblin spear. The party will find that one of the scouts - Aditi, who was also a member of the original welcoming party - is possibly in trouble, based on the slight wilting of one of the purple flowers. Aditi is not symptomatic at present, though she is panicked. She has a small laceration round her neck and reports that one of the goblins tried to garrotte her but she "punched him good" and he fled into the bushes. This skin to skin contact appears to have been enough to set the flower off.

It seems like the goblins were also unsure of what to make of their first meeting with the Desh and kept their distance after the first encounter - but they cannot be far away. One of the Desh will comment that they "seemed nervous". The goblin raiders also apparently had some blueish thick paint daubed on their faces. Aditi says a couple of them were riding on "tall, long-faced beasts with demon's legs" - Darsh, who is also in this scouting party, will laugh at the descripton and say that his companion is describing a "hoss" - he's seen the mountain ponies from his sneaky peeks beyond the Celestial barrier.

#### Goblin conflict

The goblin party's essentially a platoon - 20 people. There may have been more before they decided to enter the jungle. They're not using any of their own armour or weapons - instead, they'll have a mix of scavenged farm tools, small hunting bows and human or elven-made weapons and armour. Most of the armour and weapons look decorative, like they were made for showing off, or for sport, not war. Most of the raiders have daubed themselves in war paint - blueish, clayey stuff that stripes their faces and sometimes goes up into the hairline. They look wiry and careworn, despite their loot; some of them have well-stocked dufflebags. One raider, Saveriu, has an entire leg of goat strapped to the saddle of his (stolen) horse. He's also one of the few goblins to truly fill out his stolen armour - he has some fancy elven pauldrons on, which look flimsy on his broad shoulders, and he's cut the thumb and fingers out of a set of articulated gauntlets to accommodate his broad goblin hands.

There's a leader of sorts - a skinny, pale young creature with a massive shock of curly red hair and a broken nose. Their name is Lucca. They're one of the few goblins who hasn't painted themselves with the muddy blue face paint. They're wearing a tunic that's been cut out of a piece of upholstery - maybe a tablecloth? - bearing a distinctive fleur de lys pattern embrodered in gold thread. It's fastened at the shoulders with several clothes pegs and nappy pins and belted at the waist with a curtain tieback. Lucca doesn't strike the party as being "all there". Their hazel eyes are just a little too wide and intense. Their face always instinctively turns in Volumnia's general direction, regarless of whether she is in Lucca's line of sight.

The biggest challenge of the goblin encounter is trying to herd them away from the Desh. Lucca is going to make an unnerving beeline trajectory for Volumnia wherever she happens to be, and the other goblins will instinctively want to protect her. People in fancy gear are also going to be targets. The goblins' goals are, in this order: exfiltrate Volumina and fuck up anyone who looks rich and fancy.

If the party is able to dialogue with Lucca and Saveriu, they have a chance to get information out of the raiders. Del Flor's settlement La Paz, near Kingdom Plantae, has been completely overrun by a goblin revolt. These are the tattered remnants of the old Latin tribe, extremely grubby and illiterate. Del Flor used them as cheap labour to erect La Paz's glasshouse pyramids, and then turned them loose in the jungle when their work was done. Some of the Latins tried finding work in the kingdown of Ereb; others have gone back to try indentured farming in the elven enclosures. The rebels decided to claim the township that they'd built. And then Lucca claims that the gods gave them a vision... a trace of their tribe's ancient divine power, that they could reach out and reclaim.

Saveriu's more pragmatic. He's partly here because he has a thing for Lucca (they are a former house slave; he was a stablehand and "beater" in the elven hunts) and partly just for the adventure and to see what he can grab out of the jungle.