The Mound
One of the mounds of the iruxi village itself, which according to Xiat seems to hold an evil spirit. Not an outlying barrow - it is part of the settlement. Entered by the party in Session-27.
Interior
The mound has a deserted look. The air within is cold and dry - wrong for an earthen mound on a sand island in a river marsh, and a sign that something is maintaining it. Cold and dry is also what preserves bone, and cold is actively unwelcoming to iruxi, which may be why the place looks abandoned rather than any decision having been made to abandon it.
Xiat is the exception - they are cold-touched and inclined to cold, so they can be in here when the rest of the village cannot. That makes Xiat the settlement’s only practical witness to what the mound contains.
The interior is decorated with scenes of war and violence against humans and elves, in which a regal iruxi directs armies to great victories. Iruxi keep their history in carvings and epic poetry rather than in writing, so these are not ornament - they are the record.
Whoever is interred here was a conqueror, and the current king has abruptly begun ordering exactly that war resumed. The regal figure has not been identified, and it is not yet known whether they are the green skull or something else in the same mound.
The spirit - destroyed
The spirit appeared to the iruxi as a green skull, winking in and out. In Session-27 the party met it inside the mound: an angry green wisp, visible rather than hidden, which made the images of the regal king move. The party attacked at once. Djacquess opened with Courageous Anthem, Leonardo struck, Kairos cast force barrage - the one spell that penetrates a wisp’s immunity, which she had identified before the fight - and Djacquess finished it with Horde of Underlings, summoning iruxi.
Kairos’ will-o’-wisp reading was correct. What it does not settle:
- Resolved the next morning. Xiat reported that Vesket only began turning aggressive, hostile and fearful after he started spending time in this mound, and was a good king before it. The creature came first and made the crisis rather than arriving to feed on one - it worked on the king over months, and the hunts were the result. Not possession: cultivation.
- The regal iruxi returned to being a wall carving once the creature died - the movement was an illusion cast by it. The mound itself never woke; the walls are not hostile and the ancestral bone stayed inert.
- Illusion is not standard will-o’-wisp behaviour, which keeps this in the “same family, not the same creature” bracket. It also means the green skull the iruxi kept seeing may itself have been an illusion, and the party may never have seen the creature’s true form.
- Open theory: something that projects convincing images could influence a king without possessing him. Xiat maintains the two problems are separate, and Kairos isn’t overruling that - but if the king recovers now, the creature was involved after all.
Kairos’ reading
Kairos keeps the two-problems possibility open, but doesn’t think this is undead at all - she puts it in the will-o’-wisp family:
- A wisp is naturally invisible and seen only by its own coloured glow, and can Go Dark to extinguish that glow entirely. “Appears and disappears” is a wisp’s default behaviour, and the green skull is the shape of the light rather than a body.
- Wisps are local and established: Elga warned that Candlemere is thick with them (Session-15), and the party watched them drift over the swamps in Session-26, where Kairos identified them as aberrations common to the River Kingdoms.
- Wisps feed on fear, healing when a creature within 15 feet is frightened or dying, and a wisp that has gone dark reignites when it feeds. A village under a king ordering it to hunt is a standing food supply.
- The spirit and the possession are related, but which is cause and which is effect is unknown. Either the king was possessed first and the resulting fear drew a wisp in to feed, or the entity in the mound is what took the king - in which case it isn’t a textbook will-o’-wisp, since those feed on fear rather than riding people, and would be something in the family but worse. Kairos won’t commit to either until the party has seen one of them.
Combat warning: a will-o’-wisp is immune to all spells except force barrage, quandary and revealing light (Creature 6, aberration, Monster Core pg. 349). If this is one, Kairos’ spellcasting is almost entirely off the table and the answer is weapons and force damage.
Notes
- Because the mound belongs to the village, the usual iruxi practice applies: they build their dead into their settlements and hold ancestral rites among fields of fossilized bone, and decades of veneration cause primal power to pool in those remains. Whatever is in the mound may have a claim to be there. “Evil spirit” is how it appears to the iruxi, not an established fact.
- If Kairos is wrong and it is incorporeal undead, the prep is different: force damage, vitality damage, or a ghost touch rune. Worth establishing which before committing, since the two readings want opposite loadouts.
- Not the haunted graveyard Elga warned about - that was the Lonely Barrow, cleared in Session-20 and now the museum site.