A lone figure, wrapped in a fur cloak, silently rode across the snow-covered plane, with the rising sun at her back, and before her a walled city set on a cliff over an ice-blue lake. Spinning in a lazy circle high above the figure, a falcon cried out, then slowly starting descending. As it drew near the rider, it flapped its wings, slowing it’s decent and settled on the mounting post on the front of the rider’s saddle. The rider reached out from under her fur cloak and gently brushed the feathers of the hawk, as she whispered to it. She settled the hood over the falcon’s head, tethered it, and continued riding toward the city.

    The last words of her teacher lingered on her thoughts. Embracing them again, the words crashed over her subconscious, "Seek out the one named Drizzt do’Urden, he shall finish your training, and set you on your path". Hearing it then, Guinevere had no idea quite how far this first tasking would send her. Her own words, "What of the High Forest, how long will I be gone?" sounded so naïve to her own ears now, just a few months later.

    Her thoughts took a turn, to her mother’s last breath, filtered through the floorboards beneath which she lay hidden, scared and frightened. The last words echoing yet again their painful realization, "her real heritage." Stifling a shed tear, she wiped at her eye, remembering the happy childhood her adopted parents had given her, the horror of that last night, and as always, she wondered who and where her real parents could be.

    Seeking happier thoughts, her mind returned to the years she spent with Marcus, her teacher in the High Forest. Her first recollections are from when the lone woodsman found her, crying and hidden beneath the burnt shell of the family’s home. Then she remembered her first night in the woods alone as a test of her newly learned skills. And most recently, the moment of his gift, the falcon which rode with her. Her mind embraced each of these fond memories and the accompanying sensations they brought with them. The warmth of the sun streaming through those giant woods resting on her hair and filling her with the smell of nature was fresh on her mind as a bitter cold gust of wind whipped across her bare face, startling her back from her memories.

    Her mount had stopped not far from the gate, behind two wagons, a caravan going through inspection. She patiently waited to enter the town that the dark elf had said the group she was to join was staying. Silently watching the exchange between the rotund caravan master and the weary guard at the gate, Guin hoped that this group would be easier to track down than Drizzt had proved to be.

    As she waited, a mounted party neared the gate from within the city. She quickly counted eight of them, then started scanning the faces and forms to match those that had been described to her. A gray-blue haired dwarf, wearing his beard long, with two braids on the side. A female half-elf, bearing the symbol of Mielliki, with red hair and a staff. Another, elf, muscular with silver hair pulled back in a ponytail, two swords at his side and a bow strapped across his back. Gold hair glinted in the sun atop the head of an elf wearing chain mail and a fur cloak.

    The group wasn’t an exact match, but many of them were, so perhaps they had changed members, she thought to herself. Seeking one of the names she could remember, and the one that she knew to be the least common, she called out, "Mazyfum!", and watched their faces for a change in expression.

    Eight pairs of eyes, turned to fix on hers, and the golden haired elf, replied, "Who calls?"

    Smiling, Guinevere replied, "I am Guinevere, my friends call me Guin. I was sent by Drizzt do’Urden to ask to join your party."

    The others looked around in surprise, then sizing the young human up, Danot asked, "What can you do for us?"

    "I can quiet animals down, speak with them," Guin began.

    Llynowen spoke up, "She is a follower of Mielikki."

    "And Drizzt sent her," Mazyfum chimed in.

    "Very well," Danot said, "It’ll be on your heads if the child gets hurt."

    "Allow me to introduce myself further then," said Mazyfum with a slight bow. "I am Mazyfum, I am both fighter and mage, although you probably can’t tell I’m a mage by looking at me."

    Danot chuckled and spoke under his breath, but loud enough to be heard, "Can’t really tell he’s a fighter, either."

    The others laughed as Mazyfum fumed and spat, "I can’t wait to see the falcon eat a ferret."

    As if he’d seen the bird for the first time, Danot reflexively put his hand over the pouch strapped to his belt that the ferrets were housed in. He looked to Guinevere, and asked, "Is the falcon trained?"

    Guinevere smiled reassuringly, and told the dwarf, "Aye, I keep Pebbles hooded and tethered, for the most part. You have ferrets? I’d like to meet them someday."

    Danot grunted a half-satisfied response, but continued to watch the hooded falcon.

    "So long as we coordinate training and feeding times, it won’t be a problem," Guinevere told the dwarf reassuringly, who didn’t seem to be any more relieved at the prospect of travelling with the raptor.

    The rest of the party introduced themselves, and after briefly explaining where they were going, they set off up the Bremen Trail. As the sun rose high in the sky, they stopped in Bremen and had another piece of fish on a stick. Xena and Zanzabar refused to come out of their pouch to eat, so Danot ended up putting their piece of fish with them.

    Triolus wrinkled his nose in disgust and told the dwarf, "That’s going to stink later."

    "What do you mean later?" Mazyfum chimed in with a broad grin on his face.

    Danot gave them both a sneering look of disdain, as they remounted and headed on northward. By evening they were again at the Lonetree, looking down into the depression and the standing stones below. As he was looking down something seemed wrong to Triolus’ eye, he looked again and noticed, the hole they had dug into the tower was gone. He informed the others and they went down to look to where the hole once laid, was now covered by snow and below, tundra.

    Danot looked up from the refreshed earth and said, "Well, so we dig it out?"

    Triolus shook his head and replied, "I think there was a reason it was covered, I’d rather not let it sit open all night while we camp, we’ll work on it in the morning."

    They climbed back out of the depression and began setting camp. Guin approached Danot, and asked him if he could make sure his ferrets stayed put away for awhile. When Danot agreed, she returned to her falcon and whispered softly to it as she untied the tether from her horse, and slowly raised the hood from its eyes. It cried out, then flapped its powerful wings and took flight.

    As they sat around eating dinner, Triolus began the long story of why they were at this tower, what they were searching for, and what they had found so far. Guin listened intently, nodding, gasping and laughing as appropriate.

    After dinner Mazyfum took his new knife down into the depression and testing it out, carved ‘We were here’ into one of the half-buried crenellations of the tower. Danot watched the elf’s movements, but said nothing.

    The night passed quietly and after breaking fast in the morning, Danot and Gar pulled their shovels from their packs and descended into the depression and began digging where the last hole was. After about 30 minutes of digging, the permafrost ground gave way to solid rock. Danot and Gar stopped, and stepped back, aghast at what they had found. Danot shook his head and looked around.

    "This stone is not new stone, it looks like it is thousands of years old," Danot said, staring at the rock in disbelief.

    "Perhaps we dug in the wrong spot, " Gar asked.

    "No, I’m sure this was it," Danot said and looked at the rocks again, rechecking his bearings.

    Pulling his dagger, Mazyfum moved up to the exposed stone and said, "I’ll cut us a hole." The others watched with disbelief as he plunged the dagger into the rock, and began cutting a square into it as if it were cloth instead of hard rock. As he finished cutting the rock groaned as it slid out and fell to the ground.

    Mazyfum wiped the dagger on his cloak, then sheathed it, and started to unwind his rope. He looked into the other’s wide eyes, and said, "Who else has a rope?"

    Danot, having seen the dagger's power before, was quick to quip, "Good to see you're finally being useful."

    As the others were gathering ropes, Guin climbed back to the top, spoke softly with Pebbles, and removed Pebble’s hood and released her tether.

    Triolus unhitched his rope from his pack and took Rissa and Mazyfum’s rope, and tied them end to end. He looped one end around the Lone Tree, and tied it off, then after climbing back down into the depression, dropped the rope down in the hole. One by one they began to descend into the tower. As Danot stood waiting for Guin to start climbing, he saw her waver and step back as she looked over the edge.

    "What’s wrong?" Danot asked the wavering girl.

    Holding her head and leaning over, Guin looked up at Danot and smiled weakly, "Just don’t like heights."

    "Don’t worry, the dwarf will catch you," quipped Triolus.

    "Better than letting him catch you," Danot smiled reassuringly and helped her down the rope and climbed after.

    They spiraled down the first tower, into the darkness, following the steps till they reached their end. They stood in the light of Gar’s lantern, shining through the oversized doorway and onto the skeletal remains of the ogre-sized guardian they had sent to final rest. They shifted their attention and light to the unopened door on the adjacent wall.

    Triolus reached out and gently turned the handle of the old door, the latch slid open, and with a great groaning the door swung into the room beyond. The filtered light of the lantern shone upon the broken remnants of a table and chairs in the center of the room. The opposite wall was curved, with three identical sturdy looking oak doors set in it, ten feet between each. At human eye level in each of the doors was a smaller door, with a metal bar latch holding it closed.

    Danot stepped up to the door on the far left side of the room and stared up at the window. He turned back and called to Gar, "Hey, come look in this window, see if we need to bother opening the door."

    Gar crossed over with his lantern and slid the bolt back on the window-door. He raised his lantern to shed some light inside and peered about. Behind the closed door was a small ten by ten cell containing a crude mattress made of straw. It lay crushed under a large stone, with six long spikes sticking out from it, one of which showed the black of dried blood. Nearby and partially obscured by the stone lay a pile of jumbled bones. Gar related this to the others and a light of recognition caught in Danot’s mind.

    "That’s the room I fell into when that javelin trap got me the other day," Danot sighed.

    The others nodded, and Gar moved to the center door, similar sliding back the bolt and opening the bolt hole. Beyond was a similar cell-like room, complete with everything except the stone crushing the straw mattress. A similar, but obviously larger set of bones lay scattered around the cell. Gar moved on to the last door, and finding an almost identical room to the second, closed the bolthole.

    "Well where haven’t we searched?" Guinevere asked.

    Triolus spoke first, "Well, I guess we could go back and finish the floor with the collapsed area and all the sludge."

    Danot’s brow wrinkled in disgust and he shook his head as he continued tapping his lip.

    Dardae said, "Well we can explore the cavern beyond that window, there is the tower that’s lying on its side out there."

    "Sounds good to me," Danot replied, and they headed back up to the level with the window large enough for them all to slip out of it.

    As Triolus tied a rope on the end of Dardae's grappling hook, Mazyfum pulled his knife and started carving a small niche underneath the window for the hook to catch on to. Dardae tossed the loose end of the rope out of the window and set the grappling hook on the windowsill. The others climbed out and set foot in the damp cavern that housed the sunken remains of Morienus’ Tower.

    The cavern walls shed a oddly glowing greenish-yellow light, enough to allow Gar to extinguish his lantern for a while. Upon closer inspection they found the walls were covered with phosphorous lichen that softly glowed in the damp darkness of the cavern. Chill air filled the cavern, a reminder of the cold weather far above them.

    They crossed the hardened mud floor to the tower that apparently had broken off the main structure and sunk halfway into the mud. As the approached the open end of the tower, they were faced with a rectangular room with an arched ceiling. Halfway up the wall to the right of them began a stairway that led further into the tower. With some care they climbed the stair until it came to a five-foot gap in the floor. The stairs continued beyond the gap, descending and inverted.

    They jumped down into the pit, resting on the landing that was the hallway that branched off from the stairwell, and followed it ten feet till it ended in a wall. Looking up, they could see that the hallway took a turn, and continued on, but to follow it they'd have to climb the ten feet of wall in front of them. Dardae pulled himself up the ledge, and helped Triolus, Danot and Mazyfum climb up into the continuing corridor. The upper corridor was ten feet wide by five feet high. About fifteen feet down the hallway lay an opening in the floor, which upon inspection was a closed door. Five feet beyond that was another door set in the ceiling.

    Carefully stepping across the door set in the floor, Dardae examined the door in the ceiling. He tried turning the handle, but he noticed that it was hinged to open inward. He tentatively tried pushing up but met resistance, so put his shoulder behind it, and shoved the door upward, releasing a cloud of dust and debris. He quickly scanned the contents of the room, which lay on the floor near him. It appeared to be mainly dried mud and wrecked furniture.

    As Dardae ducked back into the corridor, Danot turned the handle on the door set in the floor. It opened inward and exposed a room thick with cobwebs. Mazyfum mumbled a few words and moved his hand in a sweeping motion. A gust of wind spread out from his hand and cleared a path in the cobwebs. Seeing what he was doing, Triolus did the same thing as Mazyfum repeated it as well and they quickly cleared the cobwebs from the room.

    Mazyfum lowered himself down into the room, dropping the last few feet. He landed awkwardly, twisting his ankle on the gathered debris. He cried out, but reassured the others that he was ok. He searched about the littered dust and broken furniture and found a tarnished tea set made of silver. He gathered what he could find of the set and climbed back up the rope that Triolus had dropped down to help him back out.

    They traced their steps back and continued down the stairs to find themselves at the bottom of a ten by five pit that stretched up twenty feet above them. Fifteen feet up on the right wall was a door set in the wall, turned on its side by the orientation of the tower. A ledge truncated the opposite wall about five feet beyond the door’s height.

    Triolus readied another grappling hook and threw it up towards the ledge. It clanged loudly as it impacted with the ground, but caught and held easily. Dardae quickly shimmied up the rope to the ledge and looked around. The ledge was covered with rubble, on the wall to the left of him, which was once the ceiling of this room, was a trap door about six feet up. On the wall in front of him were the broken rungs of a ladder that used to climb up to the trap door. Three feet in from the ledge in the floor was a door, partially covered with debris.

    Danot was quick to follow Dardae up the rope, and when he reached the top examined the rock debris. What Dardae saw as rocks, Danot noticed familiar form, and saw what appeared to be a stone statue buried in the rubble. He pointed this out to Dardae who nodded and continued looking at the door on the other side of the pit.

    "So, how do we check in there?" Dardae asked, staring at the door.

    "I think I can reach it", Rissa volunteered and began climbing up the rope till she was even with the doorway. She braced her legs against the wall and leaned out, reaching to grasp the door on the other side. Unable to reach it, she started bouncing away from the wall, stretching to reach the door. She managed to grasp the handle and it turned in her hand, opening inward, and falling out of her grasp. It continued it’s rapid descent and slammed into the interior wall, and the splintering of wood was loud as the door came off its hinges and crashed to the ground below.

    "Ok, I'm in," Rissa said sheepishly.

    "How could anyone in Faerun not know?" Triolus chuckled and smiled at the woman hanging above him.

    Rissa smiled back at him and made to grasp for the ledge of the door jam and pull herself across. She climbed up and sat down on the door jam and looked around the ruined semi-circular room. Realizing she needed a light, she pulled a torch from her pack and flint and steel and set to igniting it. While she was working on that, Danot climbed down the rope and swung over to sit beside her.

    "Hello," Rissa said to the dwarf and smiled happily.

    Danot grumbled and half-smiled back at the dark-skinned woman. He pulled the rope up and tossed it into the newly exposed room. He set himself and repelled down into it with Rissa not far behind. They searched through the smashed furniture that littered the floor. Apparently this room was once a bedroom of some sort, as one of the major distinguishable pieces was a four-poster bed, smashed, but still recognizable. Rissa and Danot dug through the debris, hoping to find the journal, but after several minutes searching they came up empty. Rissa returned to the bed and searched through it again, this time moving aside a pillow that exposed a dagger of good craftsmanship with a golden hilt. She slid this into her belt and they climbed back up the rope.

    "Find anything?" Dardae asked as Danot poked their heads back out of the door-jam ledge.

    "No book, just a knife," Danot replied as he pulled himself back up.

    "Damn," Dardae cursed.

    Danot and Rissa climbed back up to the ledge and they all stared at the door beneath them for a moment then looked at each other.

    Dardae sighed and nodded, and reached down and opened the door into the room below them. The debris that littered the door fell down and clambered loudly against the floor below. Twenty feet below them was yet more ruined furniture. A few telltale webs in the room gave proof that something had made it's home here. Danot loosed his rope and tossed the loose end into the hole and braced himself against the debris and Dardae climbed down to search the room below.

    After a few minutes of searching, Dardae cried up, "Doesn't seem to be any…. OUCH!"

    He reflexively reached down and brushed off the spider that had climbed up his leg. It tried to scuttle off into its hiding place, but Dardae's boot was faster. Dardae cursed again and rubbed at his leg, looking around for more spiders.

    "You ok?" Danot shouted down to him.

    "Yeah, just a spider," Dardae replied back up to the dwarf.

    Dardae took another look around the room and declaring it searched climbed back up the rope. The three of them went to the ledge and looked back down at the others below.

    "Nothing on this level, there's a trap door in the wall yet, probably leads to the next level" Dardae shouted down to the others.

    "Well, check it out," Triolus shouted back.

    Danot sighed and stood up and brushed himself off. He climbed up the rubble towards the trap door. As he did he noticed the statue's eyes open and shine a deep red. Reflexively he jumped back and reached for his axe as an explosion of debris let loose from where the statue hid. Standing in its wake was a creature that looked like a stone demon, full of malice and hate with long talons and horns, bearing towards the living people that had disturbed it's sleep.

    The statue crashed into Danot as he was raising his axe and pushed him into the wall, leaving a gaping wound and causing him to slump to the ground. Dardae pulled his magical blade and swung a mighty blow knocking off a piece of the creature's right arm. It hissed in response, and swung around to face him. Rissa dodged to the side to get a good shot at the creature with her axe. She swung and the axe struck off the hard rock and nearly vibrated out of her hands.

    Danot shook his head and gathered his wits, and grabbed his axe and stood up as the creature swung and missed at Rissa. Rissa backpedaled to avoid the next attack and stumbled on a piece of rubble and crashed to the ground and the wind blew out of her lungs as she sat there stunned.

    "What's going on, you guys ok?" Gar shouted up from below.

    Danot bellowed, "Moradin!" and charged the stone creature. His axe took purchase and bit deep into the creature's back causing it to spin and face him.

    Rissa's voice shattered the stillness of the moment as Danot and the creature stood staring at each other.

"Goddess Rua, bring forth your flame and bind it into form to smite this creature," she cried out and as she spoke the last word of the prayer a blade of pure flame shot forth from her hands.

    The creature turned to face the burning sword and shielded its eyes from the burning light. Taking the opportunity, Danot swung a mighty blow that caved in the creature’s head, burying the blade halfway through the creature's chest. As the light from its eyes faded it started to crumble and fell apart to join the other rubble at their feet.

    They breathed a collective sigh of relief and Dardae shouted down to the others, "Yeah, fine."

    Rissa hissed and opened her hands, causing the flame sword to wink out of existence.

Previous - The Icy Cairn

  5th of the Oldmoon: (Session 13)
    On the way out the gate of Targos they meet Guinevere, who joins them.
    They head to the Tower and make camp outside the depression.

  6th of the Oldmoon:
    They head back in, and explore the fallen tower.
    Finding the master of the tower, they fall back and lick their wounds.

  7th of the Oldmoon:
    With a plan in mind, they descend into the tower and take on it's master.
    After defeating the creature, they return to Targos and take the journal
     to Peddywinkle.
    They take up their rooms in the Wolf's Pelt and sleep well.
  
  8th of the Oldmoon:
    Current Date