Chapter 5 - Session 6

Elves in the Hills

Events and Actions

The party camps for the night at the base of the large stone pyramid they discovered, under a clear, moonless, starry sky with a warm breeze blowing in from inland. Someone floats the idea of testing whether the deer and goats they'd seen watching them are being magically controlled, but casting a working capable of detecting it would mean investing two hours in a ritual for only a 50-50 chance of even managing to cast it, and the herd has already wandered off by the time anyone could attempt it.

During the night, while Cosimo and Noddy are keeping watch, they hear a distant, muffled, irregular thumping echoing up from the valley below — like a slow drumbeat, with no flash of light to match it. Pressing an ear to the ground brings no clearer sense of it. Werner is woken to listen, and drawing on his family's knowledge of naval ordnance, identifies it as cannon fire, though the rate of fire is far too fast for any real gun crew — either an implausibly large number of guns or an unnaturally fast gunner. Pocket flies to the top of the pyramid to look but sees nothing. Werner then tries to triangulate the source with a compass and dead reckoning, walking some distance along the ridge and lining up stones to mark the bearing, but the sound stops before he can get a fix, leaving the mystery for morning.

Morning turns up no smoke, no fire, and no other trace of whatever made the noise, and breakfast is a simple meal of beans Batu Batu had left soaking overnight. The party then descends a meandering game trail — clearly never maintained for human travel — down into the valley. At the bottom, Leela finds boot prints in the meadow: one or two days old, and possibly belonging to a single person who passed through twice, though she can't be certain which. The party follows the trail across the open, lightly wooded meadow toward the far side of the valley.

They come upon a man calling himself Arnum: a sailor-turned-homesteader splitting wood beside a crude log-and-leaf hut, with an unlit fire pit nearby. He claims to live here alone, visiting town only now and then in an unsuccessful search for a wife. He's curt and denies noticing anything odd about the local wildlife.

Noddy approaches Arnum alone and casts Charm Kind on him, feeling something try to interfere with the spell before it takes hold anyway. A charmed and suddenly friendly Arnum offers him a ladle of water, invites him closer, and advises him to head back to town. Watching from above, Pocket notices that the hut looks unnaturally shallow for its apparent depth — a facade — and relays the impression to Noddy, who returns to the group and casts Detect Illusion, confirming the hut isn't real.

Back with the group, growing wary, Arnum seems to concentrate on something and edges around to the far side of the woodpile, leaving his axe behind but keeping hold of his musket. Cosimo casts his own Detect Illusion directly at Arnum, but the spell is forcibly and deliberately blocked — the first time any of them have felt magic actively resisted like that. Around the same moment, Knick Nab hears a voice in his head — "I wasn't expecting relief for another year" — and, alarmed, calls for the group to seize him. Weapons are drawn and the standoff turns tense, but Noddy talks the group down, pointing out that people with pointed ears have done them a good turn before (recalling the Elf A'Wood, who once taught Noddy and Cosimo the fundamentals of their magic), and the group stands down.

Chewing on his Bitterroot, Noddy alone can now see that "Arnum" has unmistakably pointed ears, and that the hut has resolved into stacked piles of stone, atop one of which sits a second, naked Elf holding a rolled sheet of paper. A third Elf, Hortaf, then walks out unarmed and sits down to negotiate, introducing the other two as Abedneith and Coralon — visible to everyone now, since he wears no glamour of his own. To let the rest of the party see what only he can, Noddy shares a piece of his Bitterroot around; Riu chews some and notices the same faint numbness and sharpened focus it's given him before. The illusion over Abedneith and the hut persists for the rest of the party until, near the end of the conversation, Hortaf lets it drop.

Hortaf confirms they are the "spies" the council is concerned about. He explains they have a secret arrangement with Isla 'The Weaver' Vargo: they feed her up-to-date intelligence from the mainland in exchange for being allowed to watch the port, an arrangement the rest of the Drowned Council does not appear to know about. Pressed on their origins, he says only that his people come from a land beyond the mountains, in the Highlands, and that his group's relief isn't due from the west for about another year.

Amid the exchange, the party shows Hortaf an old map bearing a reference to "Gildenhome." He recognizes it as the name of an ancient city but knows nothing more, and offers to try to learn more, though it will take time. Asked about the black obsidian totems the party has encountered, he describes them only in the vaguest terms — buried pillars of great power — and claims no deeper knowledge, deflecting further questions. He's equally dismissive of the Pygmy people, saying his kind pays them no attention.

Going around the group for questions, Cosimo asks whether Hortaf's people built the stone pyramid the party camped beside the night before. Hortaf confirms it: raised many generations ago by a single family or group of his kind as a deeply personal place, used to perform certain acts of magic at its peak. That family is long gone, and beyond that he claims to know nothing of their history. Pressed further, he confirms that Elves are a true, distinct people — not, as Church doctrine holds, mere abominations born to parents who failed to honor the Two — and his talk of Elven legend touches on "the old crone," one of three revered elders and a symbol of fate, luck, and happenstance, echoing the unease A'Wood once showed on learning the party's Bitterroot came from an old woman.

Questioned about her own people, Leela explains that her mother and father served as shaman-like figures who bless every newborn by bathing it in mud drawn from their totem; she has never known a child to skip the ceremony. Asked whether her people worship the same gods as the party, she says no — just the earth itself.

The conversation circles back more than once to the party's anxieties about their standing with the church. Riu recalls a specific childhood memory: two clerics of the Divinity of Two once blessed a choice of breeding horses on his family's ranch, and it's that same unmistakable sense of divine presence he recognized in the animated figurehead of the Father's Fury — a figurehead that, tellingly, turned and pointed at Cosimo specifically when it named him a heretic, not at anyone else nearby. Pressed by Knick Nab about an earlier incident aboard a rice boat, when the skies opened in apparent blessing after his prayers, Cosimo admits he "made it happen" himself through prayer — and is visibly shaken by the thought that what he takes for illusion could be mistaken for divine favor, or the reverse. The party also weighs a harder question: none of the outlying communities they've visited practice anything resembling the church's birth-blessing rites, yet none of them suffer for it with a higher rate of abominations either.

Hortaf, for his part, admits he'd have preferred the party say nothing of the encounter at all, and settles for their proposal to simply tell the council that Isla Vargo already knows the whole situation. Mani then sums up their situation for Hortaf: three years lost and entangled in events tied to the Divinity of Two, the Shatters, the Maelstrom, and the Three, and the party is willing to share what they've learned in exchange for anything he can tell them of his people and the totems. A deal is struck: the party will share what they know of the Shatters, the Divinity of Two, and how the diad works, withholding only the matter of the medallions, and in return the Elves will use their resources to learn what they can about Captain De Guzman and the ship "Advance" first, then Captain Barrows, then Captain Maynard. The party agrees to return in one week to exchange this information.

NPCs & Creatures

Abedneith: An Elf spy, initially disguised as a human sailor named Arnum, tall and slender with pointed ears like the others of his kind.
Coralon: An Elf spy, first seen naked and sitting on a pile of stones, holding a rolled sheet of paper.
Hortaf: An Elf spy who acts as the group's negotiator; unarmed, calm, and the first to show himself openly.
Leela: Accompanies the party; tracks the boot prints in the valley meadow.
Batu Batu: Accompanies the party.
Pocket: Noddy's seagull familiar; spots the illusory hut's telltale shallowness from the air.

Locations

The Hills outside Drowned Man's Port
A valley near the stone pyramid, a bowl between two wooded hills reached by a meandering game trail
Arnum's homestead clearing, with its woodpile, unlit fire pit, and crude hut

Conflicts

A tense standoff broke out when Knick Nab, hearing an unfamiliar voice in his head, ordered the group to seize the disguised Elf. Weapons were drawn, but Noddy talked the group down by invoking their prior good history with an Elf mentor, and the situation was de-escalated in favor of negotiation.

Learnings and Discussions

The spies watching Drowned Man's Port are a small group of Elves who use illusions to disguise both themselves and their camp.
They have a secret arrangement with Isla 'The Weaver' Vargo, trading mainland intelligence for permission to observe the port. The rest of the Drowned Council appears to be unaware of this deal.
The Elves are capable of long-range telepathic communication, and can actively block detection magic cast on themselves — Cosimo's attempt to cast Detect Illusion on Abedneith was forcibly resisted.
The Elves say they come from a land beyond the mountains, in the Highlands, and that this outpost's relief is expected from the west in about a year.
Hortaf recognized the name "Gildenhome" from the party's old map as an ancient city, though he claimed no further knowledge and offered to look into it.
The Elves know the black obsidian totems only as vague, powerful buried pillars, and were evasive about anything more specific; they consider the Pygmy people no threat and pay them no attention.
The stone pyramid the party camped beside was confirmed to be Elven-built: a deeply personal ceremonial site raised by a single family or group many generations ago, used to perform magic at its peak. That family is long gone, and Hortaf claims to know nothing more of its history.
Hortaf confirmed the Elves are a true, distinct people — not, as Church doctrine holds, mere abominations born to parents who failed to honor the Two.
Elven legend speaks of three revered elders, among them "the old crone," a symbol of fate, luck, and happenstance — echoing the unease A'Wood once showed on learning the party's Bitterroot had come from an old woman.
Leela's people bless every newborn by bathing it in mud from their totem, performed by shaman figures they call "mother" and "father"; asked if her people worship the same gods as the party, she said no — just the earth itself.
The strange booming sounds heard during the night were identified by Werner as cannon fire, though coming faster than any real gun crew could sustain — suggesting either an implausibly large number of guns or an unnaturally fast gunner.
Riu's conviction that the Father's Fury figurehead channeled real divine power stems from a childhood memory of clerics blessing breeding stallions on his family's ranch — and from the fact that the figurehead turned and pointed specifically at Cosimo when it called him a heretic.
Pressed about a past incident on a rice boat, Cosimo admitted he engineered an apparent divine blessing through prayer, leaving him shaken about whether his own illusions could be mistaken for — or mistake themselves for — the work of the Two.
The party engaged in a deep discussion about their status as heretics, questioning whether their condemnation is purely political or if they have genuinely offended the divine powers, and noted that none of the outlying communities they've visited practice anything like the church's birth-blessing rites, yet none show a correspondingly higher rate of abominations.

Items Gained

None.

Items Lost

None.