Session 28

Property	Value
Beginning XP	319 XP (Level 7)
Beginning gold	306 gold, 353 silver, 813 copper
Ending XP	989 XP (Level 7)
Ending gold	306 gold, 353 silver, 813 copper

9 Lamashan 4710

An Ask of the Iruxi

Before leaving the village, Djacques raised the other reason they’d come. Hargulka was still in his fortress. His army was a quarter the size of Hexpan, and Nyrissa was behind him. If the iruxi wanted to be left alone in the Greenbelt, the troll wasn’t going to allow it.

He put it plainly. The party needed allies. Would any of the iruxi come north to fight Hargulka?

Vesket couldn’t spare many warriors, but Xiat didn’t need convincing. They’d already seen what a frightened king could do to a village, and a troll warlord with Nyrissa whispering behind him was the same problem written large. They agreed to come, and to speak to those they trusted.

The rest of the village was harder. Vesket had only just been pulled back from the edge, and his people were still shaken. Djacques worked the room the way he worked a tavern — naming what the trolls, hobgoblins, and harpies at the fortress would do to a sandbar village if they ever came south, reminding them that Hexpan had never asked the iruxi to be anything but neighbours.

Planning the Infiltration

Talk turned to how they’d actually get inside the fortress. A frontal assault wasn’t in reach. Last time they’d walked in claiming to be crossbow bolt traders, and that door was closed now — Hargulka knew their faces.

Xiat listened, then admitted the iruxi wouldn’t be much use in a straight fight. Standing in a line against trolls wasn’t what they were for. What they could do was cover. Smoke bombs, enough to fog a courtyard or a corridor and blind whatever was watching, so the party could slip in while the trolls were looking somewhere else.

With plans set, the party set out from the village. The road north to the fortress took the rest of the day and into the next.

10 Lamashan 4710

The Worm’s Tunnel

They came up on the fortress the following day. The entry sat on the slope below it, curtained in vines.

The opening was twenty feet across and twenty feet high. No dwarven cut on it anywhere. The bore was smooth, round, and pushed clean through the bedrock. Something enormous had eaten its way in.

Djacques read it at once. A purple worm, or one of its cave-worm kin. The dwarves’ bolt-hole had been found from the wrong side, centuries after it was sealed, by a creature that treated stone as soft ground. Whatever plug had been at the inner end was long gone.

It answered the question of why the trolls didn’t watch this face of the hill. Nothing this size stays open by accident, and nothing that made it was worth meeting in a corridor.

Still — it was an entrance. Vine-covered, wide enough to walk four abreast, pointing straight at the underside of Hargulka’s fort.

Into the Dark

They pushed through the vines and started in. Kairos and Leonardo had low-light vision and picked their way through the gloom well enough, but Djacques couldn’t see. Rather than carry a torch himself and give up a hand, he strapped a light to his horse and let it lead beside him. He called it Rot. From then on, that was the horse’s name.

The tunnel ran on ahead, smooth-walled and silent, sloping up toward the fort above. Some way in, it split — two mouths, both worm-cut, one running north and one south. The northern branch stank of troll piss. Something up that way was using it, or had used it recently enough that the smell hadn’t washed out. The southern branch had none of that. It kept climbing, drawing a line straight under the fortress.

Two doors, then. One toward whatever the trolls were doing down here, and one up into the fort itself. They took the south.

Kairos talked through sneaking the rest of the way. She could manage it herself — invisibility, stealth, the works — but a party moves at the pace of its loudest member, and Leonardo in full plate wasn’t going to be it. Neither was Djacques on Rot with a light strapped to the horse. She let it drop. Better to move like they belonged there and be ready when something turned up.

Djacques made that easier. Instead of singing, he orated a Speech of Marching. His voice carried down the bore in steady cadence and the party’s step fell in with it. Whatever heard them coming would hear soldiers, not intruders.

Further up, the tunnel began to reek. Half-eaten corpses lay against the walls where something had dragged them and abandoned them, meat gone rotten and black. Piles of dung slumped between them, big and foul and fresh enough to catch the throat. Kairos crouched over one and couldn’t place it. Not troll. Not bulette. Not anything she’d read on. Leonardo and Djacques came up short too. Whatever had left it wasn’t in any of their books.

Then it turned up.

Trollhounds in the Bore

Trollhounds broke from the shadows further up the tunnel, several at once, closing fast.

Djacques led with Courageous Anthem. Leonardo took the front, threw Shield of the Spirits out around Kairos, and set his footing across the width of the bore — anything that wanted the caster had to come through him. Kairos didn’t wait. Spellstrike into the blade, driven into the nearest hound. It dropped where it stood.

The kill wasn’t clean enough. The dying hound whimpered before its throat gave out, and somewhere deeper in the tunnels, further up under the fort, something heard it. Footsteps, answering.

The pack hit Leonardo hard. One got its jaws around him in a critical bite, teeth grinding into the plate, and the impact took him off his feet. Fortitude shrugged off the worst of it, the armour held, and he went down with his shield still up and still in the way. The hound followed him down and worried at the plate. A second came in from the other side, jaws finding a gap the first had opened — Pack Tactics, the whole pack working the same seams.

A stone came out of the dark. Fist-sized, thrown hard from further up the tunnel, cracking past Kairos’s ear into the wall. Whatever had answered the whimper was close enough to see her now.

Djacques answered with Horde of Underlings — a pack of summoned iruxi swarming up around Leonardo, enough to muddle the flanking and buy the champion a moment to get his feet back under him. Leonardo came up, shield first, then blade — one clean swing hard enough to stagger the nearest hound and remind the rest he was still in the fight.

A troll came round the bend up ahead, big and pale in the tunnel light. Kairos took the stone-caller with Dimensional Assault, blinking the distance shut in a step, blade already swinging. The strike went wide — the troll got an arm across in time — but she didn’t waste the moment. Blur went up around her, edges smearing in the torchlight, and she dropped into Arcane Cascade with the failed spell still charging her stance.

The troll went for Kairos and both claws found her. Rend caught, and the wound tore itself open twice, once from the strike and once from the pull. A hound broke from the pack and lunged after her. It never closed — she caught it with a Reactive Strike as it stepped into her reach, Arcane Cascade humming in the blade, and it went from lunge to heap in one motion.

The troll saw it drop and screamed. Not a warning to the pack — grief, or rage, and loud enough to shake the bore.

Djacques sustained the Horde. The summoned iruxi swarmed the pack, biting flanks and legs, keeping the dogs turned away from the party long enough for the real blades to work. Kairos came in on the troll again — Ignition into the blade, Spellstrike out through it. Steel and fire. Trolls hate fire. The wound didn’t close.

She broke off and moved. The troll swung after her, and Blur bought her the yard she needed — the claw closed on nothing. Then it went back to rocks. Two more stones out of its hands in quick succession, both connecting: one into her shoulder, one into her ribs, hard enough to fold her a step before she caught her footing.

Djacques took another hound off horseback, then stretched the Anthem out with Lingering Composition, keeping the party’s step steady past its usual end. On the same breath, a free-action Demoralize — a jab about “the big flippo,” delivered with the timing of a stage insult. The troll’s stance shifted. Its next move was already a step behind.

Leonardo broke off to Kairos. Battle Medicine first, a rough field patch that closed the worst of the claw work, then Lay on Hands. Between the two, forty-eight hit points came back into her, and the Lay on Hands settled around her as a soft protective aura — harder to hit for as long as it held.

Kairos took the healing and moved. Dimensional Assault flashed her back inside the troll’s reach, sword already coming round for a solid strike into its side. Then Spellstrike again, this time with Dimensional Drop — she poured the spell through the blade and the troll came off the floor. Ten feet of air, then the fall, then the crash into its own filth. Prone in the middle of its own tunnel.

It hauled itself back up and came for her, two claws, one after the other. The first found her. The second grabbed at empty air where Blur had shifted her outline. Leonardo called Glimpse of Redemption from across the tunnel, offering the troll the way out — take the wound back, spare the strike. The troll refused. It wanted the hit more than the reprieve, and it took the damage the reaction cost it in exchange.

A trollhound peeled off the scrum and made a run at Djacques. Teeth met leather and not much else. He shook it off and cast Soothe on Kairos instead, a soft wash of positive energy from across the tunnel, mending what the troll’s second claw had torn. Leonardo finished the last hound with one hard stroke into its neck. Pupper dropped in the mud. The pack was gone.

Only the troll left.

Kairos ran a Magus Analysis on it — a quick read of its weaknesses and shape, the pattern of it falling into place. Recall Knowledge filled in the rest.

A cavern troll. Darklands stock, not surface — insatiable scavengers that ate anything they came across, rock and mineral included, and dug through stone with iron-hard claws when it suited them. Its skin was flinty, studded with small crystals and pebbles where the years had worked them in. Old ones grew crystalline fangs. This one was on its way there.

The vulnerabilities were the useful part. Sunlight petrified them on sustained contact, which was why they crept up into the surface world only at night and why “boulders” in the wrong places sometimes weren’t. And their regeneration — the thing keeping this one’s wounds knitting shut in front of her — was shut off by acid or sonic damage. Fire hurt them, but wouldn’t stop the healing. Acid would.

Then Spellstrike, everything she’d learned poured into the strike. The blade went in clean. The troll went down.

It stayed down, for now. But she watched the edges of the wounds knitting already, gristle drawing itself back over bone. Trolls didn’t stay dead unless you burned them. They had a minute, maybe less, before it was back on its feet.

Finishing the Troll

Djacques moved fast. He pulled a card from the Cantrip Deck Kairos carried, glanced at what he’d drawn, and pressed it into Leonardo’s hand.

Acid Splash. Leonardo read it, cast it, and let a green bead of acid drop onto the troll. It hissed into the meat where the wounds were closing, eating faster than the flesh could re-form. The regeneration stalled, then failed. The troll stopped moving. This time it stayed stopped.

The Larder

With the fight over and the tunnel quiet again, they took a proper look at the room they’d been fighting in.

Carcasses lined the walls. Dozens of them, stacked like cordwood — deer, boars, a bulette calf, wolves, some things too far gone to name. A larder, if a rough one.

The south end was worse. The corpses there were halflings, gnomes, humans, elves. All decapitated, the heads gone. Whatever had been eating down here hadn’t been picky, and hadn’t stopped at animals.

Pausing at the Threshold

They didn’t push on. The troll master had been the reception at the door, and the fortress proper was still above them. Going up bleeding, spells burned, Kairos short of the reserves she’d started with — that was how ambushes turned into massacres.

They pulled back down the bore a way, out of sight of the larder, and stopped. Time to rest, refit, and wait until they could go in with everything they had. Hargulka wasn’t going anywhere.

Their Own Voices

They didn’t get long.

Voices carried down the bore from somewhere ahead. Familiar voices. Leonardo’s, weighing up who still needed healing and how much he had left. Kairos’s, low and clipped, arguing to scout the next room quietly before anyone went in.

Neither of them had spoken.

Whatever lived in the larder wasn’t just a head-taker. It listened, and it played back what it heard.

Kairos Scouts

Kairos didn’t ask. She cast Invisibility on herself and slipped forward up the bore, past the larder, toward the voices.

The next chamber opened out of the worm-cut. Three creatures were in it. Hyena-shaped but larger, heavier through the shoulders, jaws set wrong for a dog. They paced and muttered — and the muttering was in her own voice, in Leonardo’s, in fragments of the argument the party had had further down the tunnel.

Voice-mimics. Head-takers. Three of them.

She held the invisibility, counted the exits — and two of the creatures turned toward her anyway. They knew she was there. They started speaking, in her own voice and Leonardo’s, addressing the empty air where she stood.

She didn’t drop the spell. Message let her whisper back without giving her position away, a thread of sound reaching only the ear she chose. She kept it plain: the party had come to explore the tunnel, not to hunt them. Whether that would hold three head-takers off was another question.

It didn’t have to. Djacques came up behind her and took the conversation off her hands. He knew how to talk to something that wanted to eat him — voice easy, no threat in the shoulders, offering a version of the truth the creatures could live with. By the time he was done, the muttering had softened, the pacing had slowed, and the room wasn’t going to open with teeth.

Once they were talking properly, the creatures said what they were doing down here. They were seeking “the grace of Hargulka.” Whatever that meant, they weren’t squatters in the bore — they were petitioners. They wanted the troll’s favour, and they were living in his larder to earn it.

That changed the shape of the room. The head-takers weren’t between the party and Hargulka by accident. They were auditioning.

Djacques adjusted on the fly. Delivered flat and sorry, like a man breaking bad news he’d rather not: the last few who’d come asking for Hargulka’s grace had ended up eaten. That was how the troll answered petitioners. The party had come to warn people off, not to compete for the same favour.

None of it was true. The head-takers didn’t quite swallow it either. The muttering picked back up — his own voice, thrown back at him half a beat off, testing the story. They weren’t attacking, but they weren’t sold. He’d bought a pause, not a conversion.

The two who’d been doing the talking put their heads together. In the mumbling the party caught their names: Leu and Crot. Whatever they said to each other tipped it. They gave up on the petition, gave up on the larder, and said they’d go back to the Drakenpotermeer. Not a promise of alliance, just a decision to be somewhere else.

Before they went, they left the party with two warnings, plain and unprompted. There was an angry iruxi to the north. And to the east, a talking mudpile. Neither of them elaborated. Neither of them needed to — they’d clearly met both.

Djacques got one more thing out of them. A promise to come to Hexpan one day, on a proper visit, so the town’s scholars could study how they spoke. He sold it as linguistic academic endeavours. Whether they’d remember the offer past the Drakenpotermeer was anyone’s guess, but the door was open.

Smoke and Trolls

With Leu and Crot gone, the way up was open. The party pushed on past the larder and came to the next room. Xiat had caught up by then and was tight with them, smoke bombs in hand.

Two voices carried through from beyond it. Trolls, arguing about nothing in particular — bored, unhurried, on the far side of the room. They hadn’t heard the party.

Kairos laid the plan out. On her signal, Xiat would pitch a smoke bomb into the room ahead of them. The trolls wouldn’t see the door open. They wouldn’t see the party come through. What they’d see was smoke, and then whatever was already inside their guard.

Xiat nodded and set. The bomb went in. Smoke bloomed. The party moved.

Inside the fog, Djacques led with Horde of Underlings again — a fresh pack of summoned iruxi materialising around the trolls, biting and worrying at legs and flanks in the confusion. On the same breath he struck up Courageous Anthem, one round of it thrumming in the air behind the smoke.

Leonardo threw Shield of the Spirits, this time set around the summoned iruxi. The trolls swung at the underlings and took the swing back — every hit into the aura cost them a strip of hide in return. They couldn’t reach the pack without paying for it.

Kairos took the opening. Spellstrike, blade and spell together, driven clean into the nearest troll. It went down where it stood and stayed there — no time to regenerate before she’d already moved on.

Djacques worked the other. A flash across its eyes, sharp enough to leave it dazzled — vision fogged, every strike a little further off than it should have been. Between the smoke, the underlings, and its own blurred sight, the troll wasn’t going to hit much of anything.

It made up for aim with priority. It turned on Djacques instead, muscling through the underlings and the aura both to get a hand on him. Blood was drawn.

That was all it got. Kairos came in from its blind side and finished it — a second Spellstrike, another troll down, no rise afterwards.

The room was theirs. Smoke thinning, underlings fading, two dead cavern trolls in the fog.

---

Summary:

Major Events (9 – 10 Lamashan 4710):

• Djacques asked the iruxi for allies against Hargulka; Xiat agreed to come north and Vesket promised what warriors he could
• Xiat offered smoke bombs as cover for an infiltration rather than a frontal assault
• Travelled north from the village to Hargulka’s fortress the next day
• Found a purple worm’s bore on the slope below the fortress — an unguarded way in that the trolls avoid because of what made it
• The bore forked; the north branch reeked of troll piss, the south climbed straight under the fort
• Fought and killed a pack of trollhounds and a stone-throwing cavern troll in the southern branch
• Found a larder full of animal carcasses, and at the far end the decapitated bodies of halflings, gnomes, humans, and elves — a head-taker lives down here
• Pulled back down the bore to rest and refit before pushing into the fortress proper
• Heard their own voices — Leonardo’s and Kairos’s — being mimicked from a room further up the tunnel

Combat Highlights:

• Kairos opened with a one-shot Spellstrike kill on the lead trollhound; the whimper carried and brought the troll master down the tunnel
• Leonardo took a critical bite that put him on his back and held the front through it, plate and Fortitude both
• Djacques muddled the pack’s flanking with Horde of Underlings, then cracked the troll with a Demoralize about “the big flippo”
• Kairos Spellstruck the troll into the air with Dimensional Drop, then finished the strike after a Magus Analysis read of its weaknesses
• Acid Splash from a Cantrip Deck card, cast by Leonardo, stopped the troll’s regeneration when nothing else would

Intelligence Gathered:

• A purple worm (or something like it) bored an unwatched entrance straight under Hargulka’s fortress; the trolls don’t guard it because they don’t want to meet what made it
• Cavern trolls are Darklands scavengers that eat anything, rock and mineral included; they tunnel through stone with iron-hard claws, and older ones grow crystalline fangs
• Cavern trolls petrify in sustained sunlight — “boulders” in the wrong places sometimes aren’t
• Their regeneration is shut off by acid or sonic damage; fire only hurts them, it doesn’t stop the healing
• The southern branch is a larder for something that eats humanoids and keeps their heads
• Whatever lives past the larder can mimic voices it has heard — it played Leonardo and Kairos back to the party
• The three voice-mimic head-takers past the larder are seeking “the grace of Hargulka” — petitioners for his favour, not just squatters
• Two of them are named Leu and Crot; they left for the Drakenpotermeer after Djacques talked them out of the petition
• Leu and Crot warned of an angry iruxi to the north and a talking mudpile to the east
• They agreed to visit Hexpan one day so its scholars could study their mimicry — “linguistic academic endeavours”
• Iruxi from the village will support the infiltration with smoke bombs, and Xiat will come north in person

XP Gained:

• Cavern troll and trollhound pack: 460 XP
• Talking down Leu and Crot: 100 XP
• Two cavern trolls in the smoke: 110 XP
• Total: 670 XP
• Session total: 319 XP → 989 XP (Level 7)

Gold Summary:

• Beginning gold: 306 gold, 353 silver, 813 copper
• Ending gold: 306 gold, 353 silver, 813 copper

Loot:

Found/Acquired:

• Nothing worth carrying out of the larder

Resources on Hand:

• 3 iruxi smoke bombs remaining (from Xiat)

Next Steps:

• Rest and refit in the bore before pushing on
• Continue up the southern branch into the fortress proper
• The northern branch remains unexplored
• Follow up on Leu and Crot’s warnings: an angry iruxi to the north, a talking mudpile to the east
• Look out for Leu and Crot returning to Hexpan for the scholars
• Xiat and the iruxi are readying smoke bombs and any warriors they can spare