After a much needed rest, the band of marooned heroes – Malkar, the swordmage; Geralt, the Sulajji rogue; Theothia, the human druid; Sol, the half-Dracaj warden; and Joar, the half-Doj warlord – resumed their pursuit of Lucan Keth, an escaped Bloodspeaker terrorist they’d agreed to capture for the warden Argus; in return for this service, Argus would help the larger body of survivors from the crash of the Black Wing pass safely through Dracaj-controlled territory.
The blood eye that the party had acquired from Argus told them that Keth had continued on to the remote mountain-based trading settlement of Tain. However, the blood eye also indicated that Keth had taken a minor detour to a small abandoned building at the bottom of a narrow valley; since he hadn’t stopped there long enough to take any significant rest, the party surmised he had some other purpose there, and their deigned to uncover it.
The building, as it turned out, was an abandoned but stocked monastery and library, one of the last remnants of a long-dissolved cloister called the Brotherhood of the Carfex. And it was not empty: a small force of Gorgoloth, led by a pair of Gol sorcerers, desperately searched for something among the thousands of books. (This unit, it seemed, was part of a larger Rathian military force apparently intent on wiping out all civilized life in the area.) After a lengthy and confusing battle – one that saw more than a few painful falls from the upper level of the building to the ground floor – the villains were scattered.
Piecing together the tomes, scrolls, memory stones and notes the Gol had gathered granted the party some important facts. Apparently, a diabolic adventuring couple named Bloodmoon and Callador, who’d been tempted to the ways of evil by “a demonic source of otherworldly power” called the Scourge, had been defeated by the Brotherhood some time before the Black War. The lovers and the Scourge had then been interred in a chamber east of Tain called the Bloodwinter Tomb. The Brotherhood had not been able to destroy the Scourge, so they hired the best arcane engineers, demonologists and binders they could find to seal it and the lovers into the Tomb permanently. Unfortunately, some unexplained event led to the downfall of the Brotherhood and the Tomb’s premature sealing: while Bloodwinter remained a powerful oubliette, its wards were incomplete, and could be broken.
The information hinted that the Scourge’s influence was such it could compel beings who’d come too close to Bloodwinter so that they would return and break the seals…and Geralt guessed this might be the case with Lucan Keth, a frightening notion since another scroll indicated that the means to actually open the Tomb were located in a Brotherhood bookshop in Tain.
With renewed concern over what it might if Keth were to escape them, the party set out for Tain…but not before they were attacked by a squad of hostile Dracaj hunters and magi, part of the local tribe that laid claim to the area. After dispensing with these troublesome foes, the party renewed their pursuit.
Any questions over Tain’s fate were dispelled as the party approached the town: it was abandoned and in ruin, devastated by more Gorgoloth mercenaries and the Scourge madness seeping from Bloodwinter Tomb. Though the town was now largely abandoned, it quickly became apparent that scattered mercenary units still prowled Tain’s streets, one of which – a Gorgoloth squad led by a dangerous human mage, a pistoleer and a fully operational Motorgun Walker – challenged the party as soon as they arrived at the city gates.
Once these enemies were vanquished, the adventurers decided to take to the streets of Tain in order to pass through the city as quickly as possible, since the breadth of the settlement meant that to circumvent the city would take far too much precious time. After all, it seemed that Geralt was right: the blood eye had revealed that Lucan Keth had passed straight through Tain, and the party now intended to do the same, and catch up with him before it was too late.
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