Arc 12 (Unearthly Tether)

## Arc 12

The party head from Gell, missing both Callien and Adora, to journey to the Catacombs of the Crypt Keeper. They meet up with Adora and a changed Callien whilst in the camp of a small gnommish family before moving onward to the foot of Mt. Thuross, despite the consistent interruptions of Ur Agarr.

 Synopsis

*This arc covers sessions 106 to current*

### **One More Thing**

With Adora and Callien missing, the only knowledge the party having of them being that they will "catch up", the Fresh Coats and their new guide Vin make final preparations to leave. Carlo, with Vin tagging along, takes care of a few odds and ends, sending a letter to his mother and going to pick up his pepperbox from the College. Meanwhile Yash and Snelm go item shopping, before realising halfway that they don't have enough money.

Carlo and Vin bump into an old friend of Carlo's, one Zarah Merwhan, who tells them of some trouble that has beset the College that she is on her way to help manage. The trio travel together before splitting up in the lobby. Carlo and Vin hear separately of the troubles, Carlo getting a bit of detail about a "grey-haired girl" that is considered a suspect. As Vin and Carlo leave, they find Yash and Snelm trying to find a place to buy magical items, before the duo give up and they all head back to the Toil to pick up their belongings for the road. They say their goodbyes to Ilvic at the Cinis Chapel and hit the road.

### **A Path through the Woods**

When on the road, they encounter a dead man with a half-uncovered chest. They all agree to bury the man and leave the chest undisturbed. The next day they encounter one of the Archangels of the Painted God, Ur Agarr, whilst trying to avoid a meeting with the Eagle Knight. The Archangel gently mocks them for their actions and drops the head of Scrunt, the goblin from their arctic bound vessel, at their feet. Though Ur Agarr is forced to retreat when he is caught in Vin's glitterdust, he leaves for them a nasty surprise.

From the woods erupts a Crimson Scaled King Raptor, which spots the Fresh Coats and assaults them, with assistance provided by some Painted things that Ur Agarr left behind, including the familiar form of Barag the Carver. The Raptor proves itself a deadly threat, resisting an attempted blindness from Vin before succumbing to slow alongside most of the Painted things. Despite this, the Raptor still manages to eat Yash, though Snelm keeps her conscious enough for her to claw her way out. As the Raptor escapes, Snelm takes pity upon it and heals it, though it does not slow its retreat.

As they continue further through the forest, Snelm flies ahead to scout, given invisibility by Vin. He finds many corpses of Barrow Rot and decides to travel a little bit further. All alone, he encounters Ur Agarr, who asks to engage Snelm in conversation come evening, to which Snelm tentatively agrees. He quickly returns to the group and informs them of both of the events that have transpired.

Their travels continue and Yash discovers some tracks that Vin knows to be of the Attisahran Painted Wolf and some obvious boot tracks. Not too long after that Vin hears the sounds of children laughing and scouts ahead to discover that it appears to be a small Gnommish family making camp beneath a statue of Temn. The party are disrupted in their resolution to move past unnoticed by the sounds of roaring flame and the children screaming, deciding all at once to make sure that the family is okay.

Luckily the family are in no danger, as it turns out the sound of flames was the rather sudden inter-planar arrival of Callien and Adora. Callien looks different, devoid of her changleing features, and they promise to explain on the morrow, quickly falling asleep. Snelm and Vin talk to the parents of the family, Doran and Essie, and find out that they have a rather diseased individual that they found on the road. Snelm notes that it is Barrow Rot, him and Vin quickly checking all of the family members to see if they had contracted it. They are clean and as he is unable to cure the disease with his currently prepared spells, he provides a temporary relief to the afflicted individual and commits to eliminating the disease in the morning.

As promised, Ur Agarr arrives for light conversation during Snelm's watch. They talk on each other's perspectives of the advent of the Painted God, the conversation remaining civil throughout. When Snelm returns however, he is quite shaken by the experience. When he wakes up, he quickly moves to heal the man afflicted by Barrow Rot and does so successfully. He talks to the man, who it turns out was delivering a letters alongside another person.

Over breakfast, Callien explains what had happened to her. From the beginning she tells them of how she found out about the Golden Flame that the College kept, their horrendous methods of maintaining the Flame through the life of the people of Gell and Callien's need for it to reform herself via reincarnation and cast off the yoke of the Changeling's Call. She tells them a (censored) version of her and Adora's cunning infiltration of the College and their escape into the plane of Hacirous. From their, she tells the group of her time joined with the plane itself, her soul kept in limbo as her patron, a creature named Irxaceln, reforged her corporeal form. She is unable to convey the experience that she had when part of the plane, but notes that when they were done, her patron was the one who sent them back to this plane via the Gnommish family's bonfire.

Before they leave, Doran gives Snelm a large satchel of coin to repay his help with the afflicted messenger. Elsewhere, Vin tells the children a love story between a Quasa man and a Dwarven woman, set in the time shortly before the Quasa were granted the ability to breathe air.

The party continue onward, finding further evidence of battles and an expanding Barrow Rot presence throughout the woods. As evening comes once more, Snelm talks again to the Archangel, this time accompanied by Vin. Ur Agarr notes to Vin that there is something that may trouble him up ahead, before beginning to converse with Snelm. Whilst Vin stays around for it, the Archangel mostly focuses on talking to Snelm, conversing about topics near to Snelm's heart. They first talk on the prophecies of Rudra, an Attisahran Prophet that spoke on the coming of a golden hope to face an Age of Calamity, with the Painted creature comparing the form of the Painted God to such a prediction. The Archangel talks of how the Kherran Empire is what killed Snelm's parents, even showing Snelm the face of their killer, and asking why he fights to defend such a thing. Finally they talk upon the location of Korrig, with Snelm doing his best to misdirect the Angel, but unable to tell if he was successful due to a cryptic response.

Vin then moves to investigate the threat that Ur Agarr had indicated was ahead, discovering the Painted Wolf he had found the tracks of keeping its distance from a Haunt. As Vin looks over the Haunt, he notes that it is about to become something far more dangerous. He brings back Callien and Snelm for an initial lookaround, but quickly decides that they need more help after he and Callien contract Barrow Rot from the miasma surrounding the Haunt and the various rotting corpses begin to rise from the ground around the centre.

The group return en masse and begin to try and push their way through to the centre of the Haunt. They are held up by the difficult terrain, with Adora, Yash and some of Callien's summoned creatures pushing into the area and dealing with the various bloated corpses and corrupted pixies, though Adora is infected by the noxious atmosphere. Carlo's gun attracts the attention of some dread wargs, which pose an incredible threat to Callien, before Vin and Yash move in to save her. Looking to cut to the heart of the problem, Snelm flies overhead and to the centre of the fallen trees, purifying the central corpse of the Haunt and allowing the rest to clean it all up.

Snelm cures Adora of her disease and the group minus Vin and Callien head back to shelter, leaving those two behind to start a pyre. Whilst they are doing so, the duo make friends with the wolf who had recently lost her master, who they bring back with them.

The next day of travel is largely uneventful, aside from bonding with their wolven tag-along, and they arrive at the foot of Mount Thuross.

### A Trek up the Mountain

The trip up the mountain was only predicted to take a day and a half to two days, with the only events at first being furtive glances from goblins on ridges. These goblins seeming rather hesitant to engage the party even as they approach a a rickety bridge across a chasm with a troll sleeping on the other side. Though as the party discuss their methods of crossing, one of the goblins grows bored enough to loose an arrow at Yash, prompting all hell to break loose.

As the goblins rain arrows down upon the party and command summoned air elementals to knock them from the narrow cliff edge, the party respond in kind by dispelling some of the elementals, Yash transforming into an owl to face the goblins directly and Carlo putting the troll back to sleep as they wake it. Snelm unleashes lightning upon them as the goblin witch attempts to weaken Vin against an attack poisoned blade and Yash takes inspiration from this and sends a sonic scream into the goblin forces and the cliff beyond, prompting an avalanche.

Adora and Callien manage to entirely avoid the avalanche, with the swashbuckler expertly stepping upon the falling debris to keep her upon the cliff-side whilst Callien hides against beneath the edge to avoid the onslaught of rock and ice. Though many of the rest are able to avoid the initial landslide, that does nothing to shore up their footing and they are cast to the rocks below. Whilst Yash manages to assist most of them (including their unfortunate canine companion) by reverting from her owl form and casting feather fall upon the group, she is unable to target Vin, due to invisibility that he cast upon himself to avoid the attacks of the goblins.

When the rocks stop falling, Callien carries Adora down to the foot of the mountain and they reconvene with the group proper. They wait around for the rocks to stop falling before searching for Vin. When they find him, he is stunningly not dead, revealing that he had ingested a berry of etherealness to avoid taking the fall, though having done it so late, he has only just made his was back to the surface. They decide to take a break and rest for the evening, before attempting the mountain again.

## Characters

#### Player Characters:

* Snelm Brightstone
* Yasheritska
* Adora Hawkinsight
* Callien Felrasi
* Carlo
* Vin

Non-Player Companions

* Elessa Alcroft
* Idvia, an Attisahran Painted Wolf

Guest Characters:

#### Non-Player Characters:

* Zarah Merwhan
* Raff, shopkeep for Raff's Rarities
* Ilvic Proda, Eparch of Cinis Chapel
* The Eagle Knight, Eparch of the Crypt Keeper
* The Family from the Irric Vale
	+ Doran and Essie, the parents
	+ Treia (daughter, 10), Jol (son, 9) and Revest (son, 4)
* Tirril, diseased messenger helped by Snelm

#### Significant Adversaries:

* Barag the Carver
* Crimson Scaled King Raptor
* Ur Agarr, Archangel that Veils Truth
* The Barrow Rot

## Locations

* Caelda
	+ Gell
		- The College of Gell
		- Edwin's Plaza
		- Oedwig Road
		- The Toil (inn)
		- Cinis Chapel
		- Raff's Rarities
	+ The Caeldan Woods
	+ Mount Thuross