Hey, y’all!
How have your holidays been? I'm still writing like crazy and I love it! ❤️
And here we meet again for my dearest Mary’s adventures!
Last time, her party just fought a group of ghouls in the outskirts of Raxstrad. They came out of this fight alive but not unscaved. Mary got her first battle wound (a bigger and scarier ghoul plunged his axe into her shoulder) and Aurum actually almost died. We’re joining the adventurers right after the last ghoul fell and their awesome dwarven cleric took care of the wounded.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Mary protested weakly.
“Hold still and it won’t hurt as much.” Bruno said, finishing the bandages on her shoulder. “Ord’s blessing can only do as much, the rest is your body’s job.”
He turned to Aurum.
“And this one needs to rest. Let’s take him to his tent for the remainder of the night.”
He looked for Jared. At this moment the fighter was surrounded by a group of people praising him for “almost single-handedly” having saved them from the ghouls. He was holding two young women by the waists and telling them with great details about every hit and slash he did on the creatures.
Bruno called him up and he reluctantly excused himself. They took Aurum’s unconscious body and started walking towards the camp.
“Mary?” Bruno turned back.
“I’ll stay for a bit.” Mary said. “I want to ask around, Maybe someone saw where those ghouls came from?”
“Be careful.”
Mary was careful but also curious and maybe a little bit worried. She went around the burnt properties, looked through the rubble and talked to the survivors.
There was a woman, the owner of one of the houses. She was the first to raise the alarm. She spoke of a dark figure appearing on top of her house’s roof (the same from which the creature with the axe had jumped on Mary), then something hit her head from behind and the next thing she remembered was the fire.
As for the ghouls… Nobody knew how they got there. There were no ghoul-like tracks coming from any direction. No recently dug out graves. No summoning circles.
It was like they just… appeared.
Finally, Mary tried out her newest ability. She’d gotten it only a few days earlier, a gift from her Patron. She closed her eyes and concentrated, moved her lips to say the word and did the gesture, and when she looked again she was supposed to see every bit of magic lit in a different color. Nothing glowed, not even a little bit.
She went back to the camp. Disappointed as she was by the lack of information, at the same time she’d just had her first actual fight and she was excited to write about it. She opened her notebook and started the next chapter of "The Adventures Of Imre Stormbringer, The Mighty Enchantress Who Would Save The World From Evil (A Working Title)". Imre was going to fight ghouls and Mary managed to write eleven pages before she ran out of reliable information about the creatures. She needed more research. And probably some sleep. It was a few hours before dawn.
The morning found her a bit tired but altogether fine. Her arm was doing a lot better. Bruno changed her bandages and they went to see Aurum. The bard was grumpy. He had heard Jared’s boasting and murmured something about his Bane spell having saved that fool’s ass.
Bruno looked at their companion's forearm and frowned. A ghoul, it turned out, had bit him there, and a dark circle was slowly spreading up towards his torso. The dwarf didn’t have the right kind of medicine to cure it. They needed to find a healer.
Aurum seemed tired and weak but his eyes glinted at the opportunity to check out the local pubs on the way. Mary thought she could find a library of some sort for her ghoul research, and so the three of them got a permission from lord Dwendel and went into town.
Raxstrad was a large place, a trading center between Pamagos on the east, Myth Adofhaer on the west and Belfast on the south. The streets were full, and not only with humans. Dwarves and elves also walked around freely. Not many gnomes, though, Mary noticed. She always noticed the lack of gnomes in places like this.
Rumors had spread and some people recognized them as the adventurers who helped with last night’s attack. A few passerbys asked about Jared which made Aurum fall into a silent rage. When the locals learned about their search, they pointed them to a higher building in the distance, a temple of Ord.
“Hey, isn’t that your God?” Aurum asked and Bruno nodded.
Entering the temple, their nostrils filled with the smell of many herbs and potions. The walls were covered with vertical growth and the ceiling high above glowed with the sunlight of the growing day.
On the far end of the room they found the oldest person Mary’d ever seen. Even gnomes who could grow really, really old didn’t look as shrivelled as this dwarf! He was reading a book that was as big as his whole body.
He wasn't too happy about their visit and Mary could understand why. She, too, hated to be interrupted while reading.
Even though he was grumbling and complaining, he examined Aurum’s arm and found evidence of “ghoul fever”. People who were bitten and infected, he explained, waned and died very soon and became ghouls themselves. He quickly made a cure (a small plant called Lone Blossom which Mary had seen but never read much about) and sent them their way.
The last thing Mary saw when they were leaving was him sinking into his book once again. She wished she could do the same.
Sooo, I was going to post the down-time chapter all in one post but it turned out to be almost 2 000 words so I had to divide it in two. Sowwy! Good news is that you won’t even notice the time passing until I post it because it's going to come just before New Year's Eve! Yay! I hope you have a wonderful time!
I also hope you like Mary’s adventures so far. And, can I tell you something? Yes? OK, come a little closer. Closer. Good, good.
((with very small letters, as if whispering))
I really like reading and replying to comments.
Aaaanyway!
Thank you for reading!
Take care and be well!