I am writing now from within our quarters in the Center, the investigation has proven that there are certainly outsiders at work within the world of Sharron. The town of Hollowguard had been taken in the past by the effort of a necromancer and now that necromancer had reached out to the outer powers for greater power. Apparently there is a coalition of sorts of necromancers within the world and this one had felt constrained by their restrictions and so he sought extra power to defy them. When we arrived the initial necromancer had already been slain by a one of the members of this coalition who was now engaged in a half of a siege.
That city is filled with skeletons and screaming ghosts that until recently had been engaged in battle with the horrors that had ambushed us upon the road. Now, with the necromancer leaving the area behind I hesitate to think what all the ghosts might do left to their own devices. It is likely that they will simply linger and prove a hazard to the next group of bandits or the like that set up within the bounds of the ruined city.
Our first encounter with the undead certainly didn't go well and we were forced to put them down. We must have been beset by a wandering patrol of the creatures around the edge of the city. Banshees and skeletons of various natures and powers. The scream of the banshee very nearly took us all down and it was an effort to work back from that. The conflict left me honestly a bit shaken and on the next morrow I wasn't honestly very well prepared for further travel, but we had to continue or risk further assault without use.
Fortunately the next meeting went much more amicably. The necromancer I spoke of earlier, an orc, met with us after a brief stand off with a large force of undead which fortunately did not break out into violence. He informed us of the information pertinent to the situation and then we agreed to help him close the gate that had been opened at the heart of the city on the next morning after I was better prepared for an operation.
On the next morning we took the opportunity to interrogate the rogue necromancer's corpse, but our attempts produced minimal benefit unfortunately. The necromancer's spirit was recalcitrant and somehow still assured of victory. From that we moved forward into the streets as our ally pushed a major offensive with his forces. In the streets of Hollowguard we encountered a new sort of horror, a small, skittering creature that had a dangerous ability to set up a cascading screech. Along with them were more of those flying horrors and the shadowy horrors.
We took a brief rest in an abandoned store and while there Wyndelly's lantern of revealing uncovered a hidden inventory room full of a number of magical items. This included several potions of healing and a shield which we decided I would use. There was also a very interesting gemstone, an ioun stone, which we loaned toward Bittersnap as it would make her even more difficult to take down.
With a brief rest over, we pushed from there heading for the center of the aberration invasion, a walled keep within the center of the city. Getting to the keep was itself not that difficult, but once we arrived we found ourselves facing a new beast the likes of which we hadn't seen before. It was massive, a creature designed to be a weapon wielded like a catapult or ballistae only so much more dangerous. It simply walked over us and that is no hyperbole. The entire keep fell to its strength before it came after us.
We layered damage upon it until finally breaking it down under a barrage of radiant arrows from Kelmar. The beast had a handler as well, a creature with a head like a squid which died swiftly to Kelmar well before I first had sight of it so I'm not entirely sure what the original creature looked like. The radiant energy had done significant damage. However I do think it is safe to say that it had some sort of psionic capability through which it was controlling the siege horror.
The gate was at the center of the keep and getting close to it made all sorts of troubles. Wyndelly became incapable of coherent speech for a long while and Bittersnap was filled with fear such that I had to chase her down and use a spell to cleanse her of the influence. Our necromancer friend arrived and told us we'd have to hold for 3 minutes for him to contain and destroy the gate.
In that time we were struck by wave after wave of creatures. Kizzy had cast a sphere of daylight but ventured out beyond it, apparently trying to catch the beasts far out on the edge of the area we were guarding. She went down first, swarmed by skittering horrors, I was starting to move to reach her side, but Kelmar ordered me to stay down and tried to reach her himself, I don't know precisely what happened because I went down sometime later to one of the shadow beasts.We won, however, and a force of undead had come to reinforce us apparently. I had this from report as both Kizzy and myself had to be resurrected in the Center after the fact. Istryx telling me that I wasn't yet ready to end my services to her. At this point we still have two tasks to look into on Sharron, looking into a set of catacombs and look into the temples of of my own goddess and they're possible connection to the outsiders.
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