Given how much closer we’ve grown over the past couple of weeks—it almost feels like it did when we were growing up—you’d think we’d be awake\u00a0until some ridiculous hour talking, but nothing could be farther from the truth. In all honesty, I am a lousy roommate and have been for some weeks. I am exhausted most\u00a0evenings, and what time I do have before falling sleep is spent on research, study,\u00a0or (like last night) copying spells from scrolls. Fortunately, she’s also been buried in books and maps on Tian-Xia and Minkai, and she knows we’re extending ourselves—overextending, really—for her, but it still feels like I am ignoring her.<\/p>\n
In case we needed a reminder of what we have gotten into, one arrived last night around two o’clock in the morning, just as our watch was changing. Both Ameiko and I would have slept through it had Sparna not awoken us. Someone sent an arrow laced with poison into the side of the wagon where we were sleeping. We were lucky that it hit the frame\u00a0instead of\u00a0piercing the canvas. Or perhaps they were intending to send\u00a0a message rather than trying to hit one of us (though that would not make a lot of sense). Whatever the reason, they spent a small fortune on the delivery. Etayne said it was coated with deathblade, a poison which is notorious for both it’s lethality and it’s expense. This admonition cost them nearly two thousand gold.<\/p>\n
Admonition? Attached to it was a note, written in Tien.<\/p>\n
It was foolish of you to wake a sleeping dragon. Return what was stolen. Abandon your hopeless quest now or you and your friends will be destroyed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ameiko looked lost in thought, staring blankly into the darkness\u00a0after reading the note for herself. This was her life, her family, and her heritage so it seemed appropriate, if not prudent, to ask her opinion.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t expect this journey to go unopposed. This is…grim, but not unexpected.”<\/p>\n
These Frozen Shadows? We have rattled them. Yes, they\u00a0started big that night at the Skalsbridge, but now they’ve been reduced to paying blind beggars to deliver\u00a0spooky messages in alleyways, and sending warnings attached to arrows coated with exotic poison, all to convince us\u00a0how scary\u00a0and powerful\u00a0they are. Because we have gotten close to them; hit them somewhere very personal. They are trying to bully us because they don’t know\u00a0what else to do.<\/p>\n
I dealt with bullies for much of my life, and they are all the same. They talk a lot, they intimidate and posture, they threaten, and occasionally they bloody your nose. But mostly? They posture and threaten. It’s how they make themselves feel better, and how they build their power base, convincing those around them how terrible and frightening they are. But really, they are just insecure and scared.<\/p>\n
The people you really<\/em> have to worry about?\u00a0They don’t send messages. They don’t warn you in the middle of the night. They don’t play the game of appearances. They simply\u00a0act, and that’s precisely how we’ll respond to\u00a0this\u00a0affront.<\/p>\n
I spent some time this morning drafting\u00a0a short letter to\u00a0mom and dad. I promised them\u00a0I would write, and that I would not hide the truth from them when I did.\u00a0This has been far more difficult than I imagined. Over a decade of experience-turned-instinct screams at me to not say anything about what has happened in the past week, or what we are about to do, because no good ever came of\u00a0it when I was a child. Things were better when they didn’t know.<\/p>\n
Mom and grandma fought a lot back in those days (dad’s relationship with dadi and dada has never been strained to my knowledge, for whatever that is worth). They’d probably fight even more now<\/em> if they saw each other as often as they did\u00a0when I was growing up. It was years before I finally understood why, but now I know that, deep down, grandma does not approve of how mom chose to live her life. She wanted mom to be the scholar, the noble, the aristocrat, the what-have-you in the gilded city of her birth. Mom threw away a life that had been carefully crafted for her along with her savings to, of all things, work<\/em>. And\u00a0touch the world with her own hands. The horror.<\/p>\n
Maybe part of my fear about sending this letter is that mom (and dad) won’t approve of my<\/em>\u00a0life. That I, too, am throwing away everything that was carefully laid out for me, only I am upping the ante by making the risk to my life a literal one. I am worried I am destined to quarrel with my mom\u00a0the way she\u00a0does\u00a0with hers. I’ve seen my parents\u00a0twice since this all began, and the first of those led to an ugly fight over concerns about the exact sort of thing that is happening\u00a0right now<\/em>. It does not bode well.\u00a0But I promised I would tell them, and for better or for worse I will see it through.<\/p>\n
(noon, Thanelands, south of Kalsgard)<\/h4>\n
T<\/span>he road we are following isn’t so much of a road at this point as it is a lightly-traveled dirt path. Wagon tracks and hoof prints\u00a0are our guides.<\/p>\n
It was here, about half way\u00a0to Ravenscraeg where the path ran through a bog,\u00a0that\u00a0we apparently missed a turn. As we passed one of the stagnant ponds, a pair of slimy pseudopods\u00a0shot out at us from the water’s edge and struck at Etayne and Ivan on their horses.<\/p>\n
This skirmish would have been unremarkable except for what it was that we were fighting: giant, amorphous blobs, yellow-brown in color, that oozed and flowed as they advanced, and burned flesh like acid. Attempts to harm them\u00a0with edged and pointed weapons merely split them\u00a0in two, each half functioning as an independent, albeit smaller, blob.<\/p>\n
According to Etayne they are called ochre jellies, a name that is as literal and descriptive as it is unoriginal.<\/p>\n
The bog seems an appropriate home for them. Bogs are stagnant wetlands, with pools filled by rainfall over peat-layered soil. Very little grows in them save for the trees, moss, and fungus. Like a\u00a0swamp, only without a source of running water. And in contrast to a marsh, which is a swamp only with\u00a0grass instead of trees.<\/p>\n
Bogs, marshes, swamps. We’ve spent far too much time in wetlands.<\/p>\n
We have another five or six hours ahead of us.<\/p>\n
(evening, Thanelands, Near the Grungir Forest)<\/h4>\n
T<\/span>he crags from which Ravenscraeg gets its name\u00a0are a line of cliffs among the rocky hills that form\u00a0the border\u00a0between\u00a0the southern edge of the Thanelands and\u00a0the Grungir Forest beyond. The hills, and the sheared northern faces of the crags, rise and fall along their\u00a0length.\u00a0We can see the small fortress nestled in\u00a0a fissure where two neighboring cliffs meet, sitting slightly lower than the surrounding rock but still a good hundred-plus feet straight up. A series of wooden stairs form switchbacks with landings, climbing to meet what we assume is the main entrance.<\/p>\n
We are not going that way because we are not idiots. Half of our\u00a0cache of scrolls, purchased yesterday evening\u00a0in Kalsgard, will allow us to literally walk up the vertical rocks as easily as spiders climbs walls and walk on ceilings. We’ll have\u00a0thirty minutes to make the ascent to one of the neighboring cliffs and then drop down into the dell which Nihali tells us lays just behind the structure. This is more than enough time, even with delays.\u00a0We’ll go after dark, when the quarter moon has disappeared behind the ridge to the south west, because we also don’t want to be seen. This is where the second half of our cache of scrolls comes into play: the spells on them will allow us to see in the dark.<\/p>\n
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