98. Bog Bodies

* Having been forced to leave Aerendyl behind in Dis, Clwyd, Pyt, and Wilfred, along with their entourage, ride nightmare horses over the the Third Hell, Minauros, the Bog of the Damned. In their first few days of travel, they encountered the magic-leeching properties of the Hell swamp, downpours of acidic rain, clouds of biting flies, wailing banshees, and finally, the dilapidated shell of a once-beautiful city. While riding in the air over the swamp-swallowed ruins, they were beset by a massive, raging goristro demon. They ended their fourth day in Minauros having fled the demon but not successfully covering enough ground to get to the other side of the ruined city before having to bed down. Before resting, Wilfred attempted to use Sending to open negotiations with Dispater regarding Aerendyl's fate, but cut off the spell almost immediately when he suddenly felt an invasive, heavy-breathing presence listening in on the conversation. All the while, they've been surviving on drinks from their Decanter of Endless Water and food in the form of Clwyd's somewhat limited supply of magically sustenance-rich frogs, while hunting for feed for the horses in the form of lemures recently emerged from the Styx.
* The Fifth Day:
	+ Wilfred's nightmare acts wilful all day and the group is forced into a slow riding pace.
	+ After around three hours of riding, they reach the end of the ruined city.
	+ They put in another hour of riding to distance themselves from the city and the powerful demon lurking within before turning their attention to looking for lemures to feed the mounts. They find two, swap them with two of the older lemures in Ingvild's feed sack, and let the carnivorous horses eat their fill. The horses have now eaten enough to last them to the end of the Seventh Day, and Ingvild's sack is filled with four more lemures.
	+ They get back in the saddle and put in some more hours of riding. With the frog supply dwindling and nobody having spotted anything looking particularly edible in Minauros yet, they decide to start pushing the horses a bit. They get two more hours in on top of their standard 8 in the saddle, but then Molly's exhaustion causes them to stop for the day.
	+ Ingvild searches out a place for them to rest and they alight in the crumbled remains of an old, stone henge. As they walk their horses into the cover of a mostly intact stone building, they encounter a scene of sheer terror: an armour-clad death knight is hand-feeding his nightmare horse inside the building. He turns eyes like pinpricks of red light at them and begins raving.
	+ The group try diplomacy but the knight shakes his head, mounts his horse, and draws his sword, all the while talking as if addressing acquaintances from his past. Then the death knight attacks.
		- Wilfred shields the group from the undead knight's opening salvo -- a massive ball of burning black fire that even burns away the stone -- with a well-timed Wall of Force.
		- Zadimus and Ingvild try to box the Death Knight in and begin chipping away at him with their recently acquired magical weapons.
		- When the knight tries to augment his already formidable attacks with spellcraft, Wilfred is able to Counterspell, but in doing so he leaves himself unable to Shield when the knight's smoke-streaming longsword comes for him straight after.
		- Pyt hurls one of his bottles of Red Rona's Styx Juice at the Death Knight and, miraculously, strikes him square in the face, Feebleminding him! Unable to cast spells or speak, reduced to a bestial creature of intelligence and instinct, the knight becomes a much more simple foe, though his deadliness remains a real threat.
		- Clwyd grows frustrated with the limits of being a passenger in Pyt's saddle and dismounts before letting off some Eldritch Blasts. This earns her the simple knight's attention, and see feels the force of his mounted prowess. Thankfully, her new fey-based magic allow her to teleport away and turn invisible after the knight's first swing, because two more potent attacks were coming right for her.
		- Soon after that the damage they've all done to the knight is enough to fell him. As he slips from the saddle, both his armour and his bones turn to smoke, leaving only the longsword behind. The blade sinks into the stone up to the hilt.
		- The nightmare continues to attack them and they're forced to kill it too.
	+ With the Death Knight dealt with quite soundly, the party settle into the stone building to rest. They let their horses eat the dead nightmare and the half-eaten lemure the knight was feeding to his horse. Wilfred and Zadimus play a bit of dragonchess, making use of Pyt's illusions to form the board. Though the vampire is a competent player, he's no match for Wilfred in his current state of magically-enhanced intelligence.
	+ 9 hours of progress riding at a slow pace means they covered about 54 miles in the day.
* The Sixth Day:
	+ The oppressive atmosphere of the swamp beginning to weigh on Wilfred. He wakes up feeling as if he hadn't slept at all.
	+ Wilfred prepares the Identify spell so he can see what's going on with the Death Knight's sword. Touching the handle of the weapon is a horrible experience but he learns that the fallen knight's soul is sealed within the blade itself, and that the knight was at that very moment regenerating, and would be ready to take up his form again soon enough.
	+ With that, they all mount up in a hurry and ride on.
	+ Everyone agrees to push for a faster pace. Putting heels to horse, they ride uninterrupted for a solid 8 hours!
	+ Feeling good and reasoning that if they're going to push hard, they should do it during these early days in the swamp when they are better equipped to handle the fatigue, they keep going for a total of four more hours.
	+ After their solid 12 hours of riding, Ingvild finds them a place to put up the Tiny Hut, they eat five more of Clwyd's frogs, and they rest.
	+ 12 hours progress riding at a fast pace means they covered a massive 144-ish miles.
* The Seventh Day:
	+ They saddle up and go for a fast pace again.
	+ After about six hours riding, they come across a peculiar sight. All the land before them is marked by small hills, and a veritable *tide* of bulbous, bumbling, pink-fleshed nupperiboes are pushing their way through the shallow valleys between them. They slip and slide in the muck, occasionally tripping over and causing a pile-up of dozens of nupperibos behind them, but mostly they all keep moving. And the tide is going in the same direction as them.
	+ As they ride over the millions of nupperibos, Clwyd wonders what the swollen, seemingly useless devils are even for. Zadimus thinks he might know, and he and Clwyd get to talking about the nature of demons and devils as he goes into his suspicions:
		- Devils and demons are united in the fact that they are made out of mortal souls. This is in contrast to the Shaytan, aka the Soulless, who are not.
		- Devils are made of a single soul. A more powerful soul is capable of becoming a more powerful devil, but when a soul crawls its way out the River Styx in the Nine Hells, it solidifies into a lemure. These least devils then require further processing to be turned into stronger devil forms. Generally, the bulk of processing of generic souls -- those not beholden by contract to specific devils or Infernal households -- happens either on the Second Hell, Legion, where they're pulled out the river and made into front-line infantry, or the Fourth Hell, Dis -- specifically in Mammon's mint, where they're turned into soul coins, a convenient way to store the energy of the soul.
		- Demons, on the other hand, can be made of many, many different souls, and even pieces of souls. For starters, unlike when a soul arrives in the Hells, a soul emerging from the Styx in the Abyss is shattered into pieces. Each little piece of soul, when mixed with the essence of the Abyss, can form into a low-rank demon. Thus, in terms of raw numbers, demons have the edge over devils. And the way demons get stronger is far cruder and more horrifying than devils: they eat one another. Or, more specifically, they Feast on souls and pieces of souls of any sort, amassing them within themselves until they have enough to metamorphose into stronger forms.
		- All that is to say, were some demons able to make it down to the Third Hell, given enough time they might be able to amass great power by simply eating masses of lemures. Now the soul processors in Legion are supposed to identify and fish out any souls that are strong enough to swim beyond the Second Hell but not strong enough to make it to the Fourth, but given the quantity of souls coming down the Styx, this is an all but impossible task. Each soul of this type that slips through emerges from the Styx in Minauros, and could represent a source of power for sly demons therein.
		- Thus, the nupperibos come in. Minauros appears to be 'designed' as a self-sustaining, zero maintenance bastion against another demon assault, and the flies and gasses that poison lemures, inevitably turning them into the ruined nupperibos whose flesh and souls are no good for anything, rob any real potential of accruing large amounts of power from demons that get trapped in the swamp.
	+ They ride for three more hours after first encountering the nupperibo tide. It doesn't let up at all, and Molly eventually picks up a level of exhaustion, giving them pause to stop for the day.
	+ Ingvild finds them a hillock with good solid ground for the Tiny Hut to go on, though the tops of the nupperibo heads are a mere five feet from where their feet meet this hilltop -- uncomfortably close for most of the group.
	+ Clwyd uses Bones of the Earth to set up a bit of a tide-break between where they're going to put the hut and the oncoming nupperiboes. She also wreaths the hilltop in Hallucinatory Terrain to make it look like any other craggy hilltop, not one containing a drum-shaped magical hut, a group of seven travellers, and their four burning nightmare horses.
	+ Zadimus gives her a bit of shit for even her illusions being rock themed, particularly after Clwyd tried to underplay her earth and rock-themed magics earlier.
	+ The group have a bit of fun messing with the nupperiboes, killing a few of them, causing some traffic jams, and so forth. Zadimus also remarks that it seems like a bit of a waste, since each one could have been a soul coin, which in turn could have been a few hours getting massages or drinking some lovely blood in the Umbral Market.
	+ They eat another five of Clwyd's frogs, meaning she's only got enough for four more days now.
	+ They rest.
	+ 9 hours progress at a fast pace means they covered about 108 miles in the day.
* The Eighth Day:
	+ Having been germinating in the unique atmosphere of Minauros for a week, the disease cultures Clwyd, Pyt, and Wilfred opted to harbour for the Plagueman have matured:
		- Clwyd has a case of Brittle Bones and a case of Deep Fatigue, making her both weaker of arm and less hardy.
		- Pyt has picked up a case of Death's Helper, meaning that should he find himself on the edge of death, it'll be harder for him to come back.
		- Wilfred has a case of Brittle Bones, like Clwyd meaning his limbs feel heavy and weak, and also a case of Unequilibrium, causing a ringing in his ears and a distortion in his sense of balance.
	+ With their diseases worsening, their food supply growing short, and Clwyd still unclear how much further to go until they reach the mysterious destination between them and their actual goal -- and her with no idea at all of how far it will be from that place to an exit to the Second Hell afterwards -- the group agree to go fast. They push the horses hard.
	+ After a few hours, they outpace the nupperibo tide and ride onward. Wherever the masses of least devils are heading, the party would get there first.
	+ After a total of seven hours in the saddle, the group come to the edge of a Dread Forest. Thick, dark-leafed trees with a wrongness to the shape of their branches form a lank blanket over the landscape before them.
	+ Faced with the same options as when they came to the city ruins, the group again agrees to fly over the top -- though they plan to stay close to the canopy so as to hopefully not draw too much attention.
	+ Three hours further riding at their clipped pace and Wilfred picks up a level of exhaustion, as do the nightmares themselves.
	+ The group agrees that they have no choice but to duck into the forest, look for a place to rest, and then continue on afterwards.
	+ At this stage, having ridden hard for 10 hours, they covered about 120 miles.
	+ Ingvild quickly identifies a place for them to rest. Ducking below the canopy, she leads them to the place she'd suspected would be good from above. Though the canopy cover is still thick here, the ground has formed into a perfect clearing for their purposes, and a rock formation would allow for three-quarters of the Tiny Hut to be sheltered. All in all, it's the perfect sort of place for their designs.
	+ Too perfect, Wilfred suspects. And a clearing of this sort with the canopy so thick above makes no sense. The gnome is able to see this for what it is: an illusion of what they were looking for. He quickly tells the group, they agree to ride away, but as Wilfred turns back to face forwards, Molly is missing from the space right in front of him in the saddle, where she was sat between him arms and legs. He looks around but can't see her anywhere.