3 Praedus 1120

Fury of the Hunter

In the waning days of autumn, the Torchwood party was approached by Sagan, a swashbuckler seeking to join their group. He bore a letter of introduction and recommendation from Grimaldi, and the party could certainly use his sword, so they accepted him and briefed him on their adventures to date.

As it happens, the addition came just in time. The next day a messenger hailed the party and asked them to appear at the Temple of Aegir to meet with the Archcleric's assistant, Moira. The group agreed to return to the Temple right then.

Moira, a mid-level priestess, greeted the party and thanked them for their prompt arrival. Two weeks before, she explained, the Church had sent another humanitarian mission to the Tumari coast similar to the one the heroes had escorted some time ago (No Good Deed). There had been no word from the group yet, which was becoming mildly disturbing. Then, that morning, the early shift workers at the northeast dock had found a chest bearing the symbol of Aegir sitting, apparently abandoned, on the dock. They had delivered it to the Temple, where it now sat on Moira's desk. She opened the lid and showed the party its contents, a severed head.

The head, she explained, was that of one of the clerics sent on the mission. The chest was one of several originally containing supplies that had been sent with the mission aboard their transport ship, the Fair Wind. Moira was not powerful enough to cast raise dead but had used speak with dead and learned that the cleric had fallen victim to a sahuagin attack.

At this point Tika volunteered to cast raise dead, as the circumstances seemed very different from the sahuagin attacks of months before. Moira produced the necessary material component and Tika raised the dead cleric, a young acolyte named Lindar.

After getting over the shock of finding himself suddenly alive and naked in Moira's office, Lindar told a more complete story of the mission's fate. The group had sailed as planned for the Tumari coast on a similar course to the one used by the Daybreak in the heroes' earlier mission. As then, the clerics were in the process of rowing to shore on rowboats when those boats were capsized from below by sahuagin with battering rams. Lindan had been among the first killed, and he recalled seeing a swarm of sahuagin clambering aboard the Fair Wind as he went into the water for the last time.

To Tika's mind the return of Lindar's head made no sense. In the earlier attacks the sahuagin had simply killed people and either eaten the bodies or left them lying. The deliberate return of Lindar's head seemed out of character and bore investigating. The group agreed and readied the Torchwood for the journey.

With Sagan moved aboard the group set sail for the Tumari coast. On the morning of the second day the lookout spotted a caravel on the horizon, apparently adrift. As the Torchwood approached they were able to confirm that the ship was the Fair Wind and that it seemed to have gotten fouled in a sargasso mat.

It wasn't safe for the Torchwood to approach the sargasso too closely, so the party switched to the rowboat for a closer look. Loki and Vondran swam alongside while the rest of the group rowed in.

The Fair Wind was listing slightly to starboard and had clearly been involved in a battle. The rigging was in shreds and there was no sign of life on board. The heroes noted blood stains on the decks as they climbed aboard, and the Arm of Telomir alerted Vondran that there were aquatic monstrous humanoids within its detection range. That put the party on full alert.

The mainmast was intact, but Vondran noticed a piece of muslin fastened to it with a dagger. He moved in for a closer look. When he pulled the muslin aside to check for writing on it he exposed a glyph on the mast. Instantly he and Ash were gripped by wracking pains that wouldn't go away. Tika recognized the symbol of pain and knew the only cure was to get out of the spell's range and wait for the agony to subside.

As the party entered the water, however, the aquatic monstrous humanoids Vondran had detected earlier made their presence felt. In a familiar scene, the rowboat was bumped sharply from below and rocked wildly to port, dumping Ash and Karu into the water. Vondran also found himself under attack from a sahuagin in the water.

Tika responded with a recitation to counter some of the affects of the symbol fo pain and Ash launched a magic missile volley at her attacker. Karu turned ethereal, moved around his opponent, and delivered a ghost strike.

Sagan made his entry by executing an impressive arching dive that placed him behind the two sahuagin with the battering ram and enabled him to pierce one immediately with his rapier. The sahuagin responded by applying the ram to Sagan's body and doing impressive damage with it.

Ash began to cast her blackwater tentacle spell but either gravely miscalculated or offended Pelor with the evil spell: the tentacle lashed out at her, landed a devastating blow that knocked Ash unconscious, and then winked out of existence. Tika, who was in the midst of summoning a water elemental for aid, had to reach for the cure critical wounds wand to keep Ash from dying.

Meanwhile, the fighters engaged and held their own against the sahuagin enemy. Vondran traded blows with one warrior while Loki killed one and engaged a second. Sagan proved his value to the group by taking on two sahuagin simultaneously and landing critical hits with amazing regularity. With three strong fighters holding back the enemy Tika was free to use the cure critical wand to keep everyone on their feet. Soon the party had four sahuagin dead, one unconscious, and one held by Loki in a grapple.

With the enemy subdued, the heroes returned to the Torchwood to interrogate their captives. They seemed young for sahuagin warriors and were easily intimidated into explaining themselves.

They attacked the clerics and the Fair Wind, the warriors said, because they needed the supplies and food for their village. The recent deaths of two sahuagin barons at the hands of an adventuring party (The Hunted, Remembrance of the Fallen) had angered the new prince so that he sent his soldiers to raze the villages. Able warriors were taken or slain in the act, and the women and children had been left to die.

Into this chaos had stepped a priestess, Ikthicalia. She had gathered the refugees together and trained the older boys to fight and defend themselves. But without seasoned warriors, they were forced to scavenge for their needs by attacking poorly defended ships. The goods from the Fair Wind had gone to feed and equip the remnants of their people, who were in hiding from the half-sahuagin army that prowled the depths.

The sahuagin's plight did not excuse savagery, of course, but it did move the party toward gentler treatment of the captives. Tika expressed a desire to speak with Ikthicalia, to offer help or other options, and the warriors readily agreed to show the party where the sahuagin had been encamped.

They moved the Torchwood a few miles north to the settlement area. To avoid provoking a confrontation, the party divided. Tika, Ash, and Sagan went with the sahuagin warriors to the settlement while Vondran, Karu, and Loki remained on the ship. Tak, Ash's weasel familiar, also remained on the ship so that Ash could use her empathic link to the animal as an alarm.

As the party descended they noticed that the water seemed cloudy with debris, as if a battle had taken place nearby. The cloudiness grew more pronounced as the group approached a small cave system with a ledge. They could just make out through the muck perhaps a dozen humanoid figures lying down on the ledge in postures that suggested they were wounded or dying, and three additional figures tending to them. It certainly looked like the aftermath of a battle.

The party reached hailing distance and called out to the sahuagin on the ledge. At that moment their guides suddenly bolted and a pair of huge fish-like shapes rushed at the party from cave openings: dire sharks. A shark closed its jaws around Tika and tried to swallow her whole, but Tika called up all of her strength and broke free.

Ash called out to the sahuagin that the party was friendly and to call off the sharks. For response two of the sahuagin on the ledge -- of the four-armed mutant variety, no less -- charged at them with greatspears each. One wounded Ash and the other just missed Sagan.

Up on the Torchwood, Tak sensed Ash's injury and became agitated, prompting the rest of the party to dive down to assist. Vondran and Loki swam at a full run, leaving Karu to catch up as soon as his limited swimming ability would allow.

Ash swam out of immediate reach and cast a sonic fireball against the sharks and sahuagin warriors, then followed that up with a scorching ray on her sahuagin pursuer. Tika cast freedom of movement to avoid being swallowed by a shark and then called on ring of blades for offensive and defensive help. By then Vondran and Loki had reached the battle and engaged the enemy.

Vondran concentrated on the last sahuagin, a female wielding a trident. He charged at her and impaled himself on her trident, partly from bad luck caused by a curse of ill fortune from the female. He absorbed a deific vengeance and then saw his enemy grow to Large size as she cast righteous might on herself. Meanwhile, Loki came to the aide of Ash and Sagan against the four-armed warriors and a dire shark. Loki's psychic strike ability was instrumental in his felling a sahuagin and a dire shark soon after joining the fray.

The priestess absorbed a cometfall from Tika but kept on the offensive against Vondran. A mightly blow from her now-large trident put Vondran on the ground. Tika called out to Pelor for assistance and her deity came through by granting her a mass cure moderate wounds spell in place of the single-target heal, giving help to everyone in the party while getting Vondran back on his feet at the same time.

With the battle going poorly, the party adopted a new tactic: they swam straight up, as a unit, clearing the way for Ash to let loose another empowered sonic fireball that did major damage to several enemies at once. Two of those left several enemies dead. The cleric retaliated with a steamy flame strike that again put Ash near to death but was then felled by Vondran with a charging throw of the Arm of Telomir. Loki dropped the last warrior with a psychic strike to end the battle.

The party found no evidence of a sahuagin settlement, but they did discover the cargo from the Fair Wind and possibly another ship in the caves beyond the ledge. Their sahuagin captives were gone, as were the "wounded" they had seen before the battle. The heroes were forced to conclude that the scene had been an elaborate set-up to lure them unprepared into battle. Ikthicalia's motives would remain unverified, at least for now.

Karu arrived just in time to help load the discovered valuables onto the Torchwood for return to Marhaven.

<MR>
5/7/2008