On the Road to Shystone Pillar

Continued from Wrapping up Business in Inez Borin

After the battle with Klayt Varie, I buried her body in all respect and put her spirit to rest. We found her journal inside, in it she mentioned that she has had the memory of 2 decades of her life removed and she urged herself to not pursue that knowledge. She also mentioned that they should expect retribution to come at some point and that she shouldn't resist it, even though she knew that she would. I stashed the journal in my backpack.

As the day was now getting on, we decided to spend the night at Klayt Varie's cabin.

The following morning I excitedly gave Yuri his birthday present, it seemed to make him very happy.

After a quick breakfast we shuttered up the cabin, and headed back to the inn where we left Rowan. Gathering our carriage and everything we continued down the road, keeping an eye out for the bandit ambush that we ran across the last time we traveled this way.

We spotted the location before they were able to notice us, so Rowan and I snuck off the road to try to flank them, while Yuri and the rest of the party took a more straight-forward approach.

Yuri confronted them straight-away, demanding that they tell him who they are. They responded that they are the Knights of Horatio.

We engaged in battle and through some well-planned strategy defeated them without too much trouble. Yuri was determined to make an example of these guys, so took some time to string them up from a nearby tree with a warning to others.

Searching around a bit, we found a sign that had been broken down showing that the village the bandits had taken over was known as Garven. We went toward the village to check it out, doing a bit of scouting we found that there were at least 20 or so bandits in the village. Deciding that this wasn't a problem we were currently equipped to deal with, along with the lack of motivation to clean it up, we decided to just move on. As we passed back by the site of the ambush Yuri left a note with them that the crown was offering 10 gp for every Knight of Horatio brought to the city.

Traveling for 4 days down the road without any impediments, we passed the time in various ways:

• Roshani Folkor studied with Nocana to learn as much Sylvan as possible.
• Nocana enjoyed the ride, did some wood carving, and his mood swung between some pretty extreme highs and lows.
  

On the road I asked the group if they had done any adventuring before they joined the war effort:

• Yuri mentioned that he didn't really, though he did quite a bit of exploring in the underground, finding and fighting monsters.
• Nocana did a lot of exploring and camping, and finding creative ways to avoid his responsibilities.
• Roshani Folkor hadn't really done much adventuring, but mainly just stayed in her home town of Iliseth
• Rowan was a game warden that had to leave the area that he worked in due to a superior getting into trouble.

Finally we arrived in the town of Freemantown. And arriving we asked about the Knights of Horatio and found out that Horatio is the black sheep of the Govann family. We immediately began spreading our anti-Knights of Horatio propaganda. We spent a couple of days in town, Nocana and Roshani Folkor started working making some paper. I went off to see what else I could do around town. To kill some time I went about seeing what information I could gather on the Govann family. I found out that Horatio Govann is considered to be the black sheep mostly because of behavior issues and an unwillingness to participate in the aristocracy.

I went around looking for any sort of work that I could do in town and, to my surprise, there was a job posting to assist in a turtle census. I quickly ran to get the Turtle Gong from Nocana, then I took it to the man requesting assistance. As I chatted with him I rang the gong. As we were chatting then, a turtle walked in. It turns out the gong doesn't quite work the way that I expected and decided that I probably wasn't the right person for this job, so I went on my way.

I picked up a set of dice set and playing cards.

Apparently we had about a week's worth of travel to make it to Westborough, so we got on our way.

On the road Roshani Folkor did some work on the Turtle Gong and was able to make it summon 2 turtles at a time.

After a week of travel we arrived in Westborough, greeted by a grouping of people in uniform, as this city was liberated by the army.

The guard at the gate stopped us to ask our business, on mentioning that we're passing through, up into the swamp, he mentioned that the next caravan traveling that way would be leaving in about 2 days. Apparently there are a lot of ne'er-do-wells in the area, decommisioned/runaway soldiers had set up their own banditry practice in the area. They mentioned that they were maybe worse than the Knights of Horatio. Apparently it's a real problem.

We started asking around town to gather whatever information we can about Lumis Boneforge. We found a man that confirmed the rumor that he owned cats, and not only that, but really _big_ cats. Nocana asked if the cat could teleport, probably thinking back to the blink dogs that we met... This led us down a bit of a rabbit-hole playing this poor man for a bit of a fool, and convincing him that his horse could talk and possibly teleport... Good times.

We went about town gathering more information on Lumis Boneforge, finding that the people of the town could get us at least part of the way to finding his tower.

Deciding to wait for a caravan to travel with, we settled in for the night.

The following morning we saw the man we spoke to trying to urge his horse to teleport...

Continued in The Shystone Pillar