Arodus 5, 4719

Breachill

Night

I don’t know who decided Guardian’s Way needed to be six miles outside of town, but I’m fairly certain that if I had known them, I would have hated them. Yes, I know that speaking ill of the dead is considered disrespectful, but I am not going to let that stop me. It is a five and half hour walk, round trip, every time we go out there. Today was the second time, and tomorrow will be the third. I have cause.

Iskaryn pointed out that I did a lot more walking than this just getting to Breachill. My answer to that is, the whole point of putting down roots is not having to travel this much in a day. I didn’t have a choice before. Not unless you considered starving to death a viable option (which she might, given that she bullied me in to buying this fucking journal instead of food before we even got started).

Personally, I blame Voz. The whole reason we had to make this trek again was because of her and her Magdh-be-damned skeletons. Once we caught up with the woman she couldn’t just properly die. She had to go and pass out on us, barely clinging to life. That meant hauling her back to town and handing her over to the guard. She has a remarkable talent for turning six miles into twelve.

Not that I’m not relieved that we aren’t becoming the sort who will casually execute a helpless prisoner just because it’s more convenient.

Even more annoying is that I suppose I should thank her. Voz kept a journal, and she went on at great lengths about all the vile things she has been up to, and her even more vile plans for her future in Breachill. Much of what is in here is pretty damning, and you could literally just tear out a page from it and hand it over as evidence for her trial (as her journal discusses a number of things we are not ready to share with the town yet, that is exactly what we did—”And here is what appears to be an excerpt from a journal she was keeping, where she discusses animating the dead,” etc.) It was a reminder that I need to be careful about what I write down in my own, lest someone do to me what we just did with her.

Granted, I don’t give people reasons to be suspicious of me (fine, anymore, and shut up, Iskaryn!). And I’m not planning to murder a tribe of goblins so I can start an assassin’s guild in the citadel (we gave the guard this one, too—”And here’s where she writes about a financial backer…”) and then gloat about it on paper. But, still, the lesson is clear.

For all her character flaws, she was good at research. This thing is filled with details about Alseta’s Ring, and its existence was gleaned from soldiers’ accounts during the Goblinblood Wars. The access to it through the network of caves here was apparently accidental. A soldier’s journal describes a breach in a cave that led to a “ring of strange archways”, that was “protected by a construct which takes the form of a door”. As that all came about through an interrogation with goblins, it’s worse than hearsay—a journal that describes what was written in another journal, wherein they write down what they heard from someone else—but the presence of the Cinderclaws is enough to convince us that this is real. It’s just a matter of finding it.

Which Voz has yet to do. For someone working essentially alone (a bunch of mindless skeletons hardly count as companions) she’s accomplished quite a lot in just the last couple of days, as evidenced by the map she meticulously created. But she is still short of the prize.

We’re all too happy to finish the job for her.