2024-05-23 # 05: For the Queen
We made our way down the Goldleaf River in our newly bought canoes, lead by Thaddaeus the river guide. A Santa Cora native, he had a telltale ouroboros bicep tattoo of a winged angelic snake, that promised Raxus he was a trustworthy follower of the Priestess. Old Town authorities had watched us leaving the city and embarking on the river. They interfered with neither us nor the Rustlers behind us. "They were bought," Thaddaeus said.
We followed the river southeast, deeper into the Queen's Wood, toward a confluence where we might begin to uncurse Endra's shillelagh, on our way to Bobbin's family. Many never returned from seeking that magical place, Thaddaeus told us.
The river widened into a bog, filled with dead and cursed trees. A foul miasma choked us. Bobbin spotted a green crystal near the shore, the seeming source of it. He shot it with a single arrow. It disappeared. The miasma jetted into the sky, and the air was clear again. But Thaddaeus seemed to have noticed only fog, nothing more.
As we approached the confluence we sought, we found another foul fog in the river canyon. Artemis conjured light elementals to aid our search. And finding the river branch, we traveled up it, to a kind of stone garden in a cylindrical canyon - a blessed place but tainted.
Then the green crystal rose before us, and three spiders attacked. Raxus hewed one spider, and Bobbin, finally clearheaded, shattered the crystal with a glancing blow. The other two spiders, released from the crystal's control, fled.
Then the Elf Queen arrived. She thanked us: she'd been blocked from traveling here or even being aware of this place for an age. But just now it called to her and she came. She took an interest in Artemis's wand, saying it "matters more than the Greaves." She warned us to keep them separate and not to store them together. She said she was seeking her own lost magic item: the Armor of Shards of Ice. All the major icons had a signature item, she told us, and the Archmage stole them to summon the Plane of Light. "Keep an eye on us," Artemis asked her. She agreed and granted us each one uncursed magic item.
After she left, Endra thrust her shillelagh into a magical rock. And the shillelagh told her a name, the name of the person she had to kill to break the curse: Speagol, an evil follower of the Priestess.
We spent icon benefits to:
- Raxus / Priestess - to find Thaddaeus the river guide
- Endra - to aid with uncursing her shillelagh
- Bobby / Dwarf King - didn't write it down
- Artemis / Lich King - to distract and make vulnerable the spiders
The session ended with invitations to take a full heal-up and an incremental and choose a magic item (uncursed!) and run it past our GM.