Larissa's diary

[cellio]

January 6 (Friday)

Mairead and Seamus are sure nice people. Not only did they let us stay in Oakhame for a week, but they gave us gifts! They gave me a wonderful reading glass that lets me understand magical and foreign writings. It didn't shed any new light on Dorl Tavyani's journal, but that would probably require greater magic.

I gave Mairead my delicate silver chain and gave Seamus my braided silver arm ring. It seemed appropriate.

Today we travelled back to Kozel'sk and found the caravan. It's being led by a prickly woman named Trina, an apprentice of Theodocius. It would be great if she could introduce us, so we hired on as guards for the trip to Durgam's Folly. That should take about two weeks, she said. (We didn't tell her that we were going there anyway.)

January 7 (Saturday)

We left this morning. Trina has about twenty other guards, along with us. Eight wagons. That's an awful lot of supplies, but I didn't pry.

January 8 (Sunday)

Trina is a real pesimist. The trip has been completely uneventful so far, but she's constantly worrying and checking up on people and stuff. I'm glad she's not on my watch.

January 10 (Tuesday)

Hrolf says that Trina's raven familiar is only slightly less surly than Trina is. Like attracts like, I suppose. It works for magic; it ought to work for interpersonal relations.

It's snowing again, so hunting was a little better tonight. Better contrast. Hrolf brought back some sort of rodent. The raven didn't.

January 12 (Thursday)

The reading glass doesn't help on Myrddyn's treatise on magical force. It's not just me. I think that bookseller in Covanion took advantage of me.

Tonight was a crisp, clear night, though kind of dark. I went out flying with Hrolf. He was hunting; I was just tagging along. I wonder what it would be like to actually be an owl -- the small size, the perfect wings, the sharp vision. Hrolf has taught me a lot about fabricating wings and flying with them, but I feel like I should be able to take this farther.

January 14 (Saturday)

Hmm. Murdoch's treatise on fire is starting to make sense. It's not that you summon an entire fire from elsewhere, but that, given a fire, you can augment it with energy or fire from elsewhere. I can see that. So you need to have the fire to start, and then you can open up a connection to a better fuel source to make bigger fire.

Trina makes fire but isn't very educated in manipulating it. She is not as advanced as Prolix and I are. I wonder why Theodocius hasn't taught her more -- or, for that matter, why he's sending his apprentices out on supply runs instead of hiring folks to do that so he can teach his apprentices.

January 15 (Sunday)

It rained all day.

I heard Trina muttering about how she is out here in the rain while Bellek gets to stay with the master. Aha. Maybe Theodocius doesn't have much more patience for Trina's whining than we do.

Turok asked me how I do the magic that dries and cleans our clothes. I tried to teach him, but he couldn't do it. I took pity on him and dried his clothes for him.

January 18 (Wednesday)

We came to a walled village today. It was empty, except for the blood. Based on the tracks (and patterns of damage), it looks like ogres attacked a couple days ago. But since when do ogres take prisoners (or corpses)? This is very peculiar. I wonder what prompted ogres to attack a fortified town, anyway. It doesn't look like anyone here was rich.

It was nearly sunset when we got here, but we were too creeped out to stay in the village. We camped outside the walls.

January 19 (Thursday)

Last night we were attacked by a roc! Eek. Fortunately, Prolix was able to mesmerize it with some sort of light show, and Trina's guards shot crossbows at it while Turok attacked it with his sword and I attacked it with fire.

This left a huge carcass. Hrolf feasted on it, and reports that it tastes much better than chicken. I took some wing feathers and an eye, because these are rumored to be good for making magic items. (I also took some smaller feathers, with the distinctive roc coloring, for my hat.) Some of Trina's people carved off a drumstick and put it in one of the wagons, though I'm not sure I would want to eat roc myself.

This morning we came upon a dazed ogre by the side of the road. He seemed to be drunk, and it looks like his friends left him behind. We asked him where he was from and he referred to "the fort". (Durgam's Folly?) He was part of the raiding party in the village; he said Grimulak told him and his friends to capture the humans, but he doesn't know why. Grimulak is a magician and all the other ogres are afraid of him, especially because most of the time they can't see him. Oh joy. And to make matters worse, it sounds like the ogre-magician is crazy; this ogre said that Grimulak goes into the tunnels under the fort, talks to something (or himself), and comes out with new orders.

Naturally, Trina is frantic about this. She's convinced that the ogres have taken over Durgam's Folly. For once I am inclined to agree with her. This sounds bad. I can only hope that Theodocius has managed to escape somehow.

That thought was on my mind this afternoon when we spotted some small cats that did not seem to be moving entirely naturally. Most of them ran away when we spotted them, but we managed to capture one by entangling it in the grass. On closer inspection, it's not a cat at all: it's a mechanical device with a cat's skin added on. Trina said these looked like Theodocius's "little smart golems", so we tried to talk to it and tell it we're coming to help. Then it shut down, and I haven't been able to figure out how to reactivate it. Weird.

Well, with luck, Theodocius knows we're coming, though he's going to have to find some way to communicate with us if he wants us to know what we're walking into.

January 20 (Friday)

We got attacked again last night, this time by a swarm of ogres. That was grim; they just kept coming and coming. Turok and Slade were knocked down, and a couple of the guards were killed. Eventually we killed all but one, and took that one prisoner. The prisoner told us that they were sent by the ogre-magician to attack the caravan. Well, I guess they know we're coming.

We are not far from the fort; in fact, we spotted it mid-morning. We decided to spend the day scouting it out so we can decide how best to attack. We got Trina to draw us a map (as much as she knows), and then sent her, the guards, and the wagons back a bit to hide.

Hrolf and Liandra (in eagle form) did an aerial survey mid-morning. They didn't see much activity; I guess ogres are late risers. Liandra swooped down and captured a rat, which Prolix then interrogated about the tunnels underneath. Rats are dumb, according to Prolix.

We also interrogated the ogre some more. His band of ogres was summoned here by Grimulak; the ogres who attacked the village were a different band, but they're all at the fort now. It sounds like there might be about 50 of them, give or take (a lot, because our captive is pretty dim). They don't know what Grimulak wants, but the eating is good so they don't care. Typical. Feed an ogre and he doesn't care about the effect his actions have on anyone else.

Liandra had better luck with the rat, after feeding it. It said that one of the big creatures smells difrerent than the others, and that it smells like humans have been in the tunnels below, and that the newer tunnels aren't safe.

Kyle scouted the fort in more detail this afternoon, aided by an invisibility spell. We thought he would return before the spell ran out, but he didn't. That worried us, so Hrolf and Liandra flew over to check up on him. He seemed to be fine, but wanted to stay for a better look. Eventually, around twilight, he returned with a report of what he could see through windows and so on. There are a lot of ogres, and it looks like they've trashed the place pretty thoroughly.

I spent some of this afternoon trying to figure out how the mechanical cat works. No luck, though.

Tonight I noticed many more owls than usual in the trees. They seemed to be here to visit Hrolf. I asked him about it later and he said that he had "maybe" bragged "just a little" to some of his friends about the roc. These were fans. One of these days he's going to get in trouble when someone asks him for a demonstration of his mighty warrior skills. On the other hand, to an ordinary owl a zapping grasp must be pretty darn impressive.

January 21 (Saturday)

Yikes. That was exciting!

We attacked the fort this morning. Turok, Prolix, and Kyle were invisible; Liandra and I flew in. (I'm using the spell, not the wings, thanks to Prolix.) Prolix also gave some of us the ability to see invisible creatures, and he prepared some bags of flour to throw if needed. (They were needed.)

We set up around the main hall, where scouting suggested that most of the ogres would be sleeping. Unfortunately, we woke up the magician on our way in, so he was starting to wake up the others as we burst in. He managed to throw a bag of goo at my feet that he'd cast a "silence" spell on; fortunately, most of it stayed on the ground and I was able to fly away and speak again.

Still, we managed to open with a fireball and Liandra's flame strike, and after dislodging the goo I was able to throw more fireballs. And, it turns out, Turok can breathe fire! Wow! I'll have to get him to do that for me under better circumstances so I can study it.

Enough ogres survived all of this to give us trouble, and Turok and Prolix got beat up pretty badly. The magician tried to escape by turning gaseous, but Prolix cast a wind spell to push him back into the hall. Later he escaped outside again (still in gaseous form), but I was outside by then and I threw my final fireball at the gas cloud, causing a very large and pretty explosion. That seems to have been the end of the magician.

We found some human prisoners, though not nearly as many as the fort and the village would have produced. More surprisingly, the ones we found were captured before the ogres showed up. They said that Theodocius had been working on building golems but they managed to somehow take over. This was a couple weeks ago, just after the new year festival. The ogres showed up more recently.

There had originally been about thirty people at Durgam's Folly, but the ogres have been taking away the prisoners one at a time. None of the prisoners knew what happened to Theodocius.

We know that the real danger is not the ogres but what lies underground. But we're in no shape to tackle it today, so we made sure the door is locked and then led the prisoners back to our camp.