The beast presents itself. You can see two warped goatish heads and numerous stout legs, but it is misshapen, pustule-ridden and maybe not even maintaining a shape. Its forequarters are grossly bloated. It lets out its ghastly howl. Elaria screams and runs to the edge of the woods, hiding there until it’s all over.

Shrett steps up ready to smite it as it closes in, and he does smite it, but also gets smitten, taking a good horn-bash to the head. Fraud tries a Curse Chaos but it defies this. Boamund closes in. Then Bog brings it down, and it’s well he does because it was rejuvenating from some of its wounds at an astonishing rate. The fight is over quickly, but a new and more frantic struggle begins as Shrett feels the welt on his forehead burn. He tries to be bold, wanting to check the scene to ensure safety, but the scarlet hue around the welt visibly worsens at alarming speed, which Fraud can see and soon enough convinces Shrett to sit still for treatment. That treatment pushes Fraud’s skills to their limits, and for a time it seems that it will be to no avail, as Shrett slips into unconsciousness after some minutes of delirious fever in which he babbled of fires and red-robed women and demons and such. But, as desperation closes in, Fraud finds his moment, inspired to try a new treatment using some herbs he’d found in the woods. It works! The Burning Malady cools. Shrett remains insensate, and Fraud knows he will remain so for quite some time, so Bog builds a travois to haul him back to Heathers Edge with. And so you do. You rest there overnight with him and the beasts, and by morning there is one mule less, with Bog having taken it into an abandoned shed for unspeakable acts of devotion to his baleful god. You put Shrett in a safe spot in the stable.

The next day begins the final week of Earth Season, and the feeling of impending winter is in the air, with chilled winds casting fallen leaves about and nipping at extremities. The village of Heathers Edge looks terribly unprepared for this – they are doing some useful tasks suitable to the autumn harvest time, but too inefficiently and too late.

Elaria leads you back through and past the woods. The land turns boggy in due time, with vegetation reducing, giving way to a clay mire, like a shallow, turgid lake. Elaria says, “It be dead, ‘dis land. Adults say nothing grow.” Soon she points to a mound within the mire, and shrugs. You see some sort of standing stones atop its gloom. Behind the mound, past the distant edge of the mire, the ground rises into wooded hills. She doesn’t know what it is, but says it’s “adult stuff” and she stays away. You approach. The mire is grey, 1m thick, sucking and stinking, sticking to your legs as you slop your way through with much effort. The mound is 6m diameter, with six carven stones surroundind a central one. You see a lump on a stick outside the mound and approach the scene. Impaled on a stake, there is the shrunken, shrivelled body of a child; as small as a foetus. There are obvious fresh and old tracks around the mound: barefoot and booted, and also giant cloven-hoofed, but Boamund sees that these trails vanish only a few steps into the viscous mire. You opt not to investigate, as you do not see it necessary at the moment.

Elaria leads you past the mire up a path into the wooden hills. There is some kind of settlement ahead, with crude huts and tents amidst the trees of the forest. There cannot be many people here. Elaria has no idea about this place, but keeps back, and quiet. Bog sneaks up to investigate. There are less than two dozen people here, all hideous, filthy and emaciated. They have the look of malnourished lowly serfs, but do not act as feebleminded as the Heathers Edge peasants. The settlement appears rather new and the people have only improvised tools and whatever they could eke out from this harsh land. You choose to approach. Boamund and Fraud greet them, and soon are greeted by a tall but very thin, grey and wild-haired, toothless man named Dannet. He explains that they left Heathers Edge for a simpler life in the forest, and have been fortunate that the fire of the Devil has reached none of them here. They offer hospitality; food and shelter. Boamund though knows that there are many lies behind his simple demeanour. You’re not sure how to press him on that, but he has said that there are no mines, he knows of no Blue Stone or wagons or Unn or such, or the Sixgoat, but after a while he blanches, moves aside, and motions for Boamund to follow him outside the settlement. There, he whispers that he has seen the Sixgoat, “just once, but took it as a delusion from the madness of the fire of the Devil. What could it mean though?” Curiously, Dannet tells that the fire of the Devil has spared this little community and it does seem so. While the people are not fair to look upon, they do not bear the scarring of the Burning Malady. Boamund and Fraud, and Bog via translation, try to get more out of Dannet and speak reason, that his settlement is doomed once winter comes, but he claims that Makan has spared them so far and they have faith that some boon will carry them through the winter. You realise that reason and logic have abandoned these hapless people, so you leave.

You spend about 3 hours hiking toward the black Treak Cliffs, so it is nearing the day’s end. Closing in, you spot a dark tunnel opening leading into its depths, slanting downwards from the south side of a cliff wall. The ground is muddy but the mud is not deep. Elaria says “This place be not for me. I go hidin’ here until you come out, or if you doesn’t, I runs.” She hides behind some rocks and brush, with a vantage point to the tunnel’s mouth.

The tunnel tends to be about 2m in diameter, and its muddy floor clearly bears large, misshapen hoofprints and also some boot-prints. It winds into a natural cave that is about 10m wide and 3m tall. A dead body of what looks like a peasant, terribly bloody and ravaged, lies in the centre, near a few bones. There are three large, very heavy bronze chains attached to what look like collars at the southern wall. They look strong enough to hold a horse or cow. A rancid stench pervades the place and you quickly know why, as around the corner looms another Sixgoat! It seems to be made of Blue Stone, weirdly, but still coated in foul mucus and bubbling pus. Fraud is there to fend off its blows while Boamund and Bog close in. Boamund cripples a head, and nearly another, but Bog smashes the front torso twice with his maul, shattering the monstrosity into many pieces and it is still.

You see nothing of further interest in the first cave so you continue down the tunnel, soon seeing that the tunnel wall opens on its west side [the map is rotated so south is to the left/west] to a place where natural steps of rock lead to an overlook along a sludgy, muddy, stinking stream. You ignore that and continue, passing little piles of glowing blue stone along the way; and some still embedded in the walls. A cart, mining tools and supplies, and so forth. It leads to another modest-sized cavern with more mining supplies. A 3m cube hole blocks the tunnel past it, to the north. A rank stench rises from the pit, and something shuffles and snuffles below. Bog sneaks up and sees that it is another malformed Sixgoat, with a third, scintillating eye on the end of a stalk attached to its forehead. You communicate this and approach.

The beast bleats a gurgling challenge and leaps out of the pit, tossing its horns toward Fraud, who again defends himself as the others aid. Fraud casts Curse Chaos yet the eyestalk catches the spell and sends it back to him. But another figure steps forth from just past the pit. It is a woman in iron ringmail, incredibly tall and muscular of stature, and glowing with magics, with a lead mace in one hand. She completes an incantation and hurls a blast of blue magic at Fraud, who is struck and frozen in a defensive pose as a statue of Blue Stone! Shocked, you press the fight. Bog concentrates on the Sixgoat and Boamund tries Disrupt but she has some sort of protective magic. Yet she throws one more spell then ducks back around the corner, while Bog finishes the Sixgoat off. Bog has invoked Darkwalk.

Boamund slowly climbs across the top of the pit, seeing that the pit itself, while easier to climb through, carries with it the threat of exposure to the Sixgoat’s noxious excretions. Bog soon follows.

That stream you saw earlier flows through natural tunnels here from east to west and south to north from a central junction. There are two far shores that stand above the stream, and are dry unlike the muddy tunnels to the east. One to the south looks like a storage area. One to the north has a a sharp slope heading into a tunnel. Two rickety, corroded wooden bridges lead down into a cave, crossing the stream. You go that way, and Bog sneaks ahead. The floor of this dark and foul cave drops over 1m below the level of the tunnels. There are bones around the rim and scattered on the floor, and puddles of ugly blackish fluid, and remnants of some barrels and boxes. And a horribly mangled corpse. And two ugly things like the spawn of chickens and snakes, toward the back of the cave, with Unn standing before them, watching the bridge.

Bog uses his Darkwalk’s concealment to slip behind her and knock her out with his maul, ignoring whatever threat that the two smaller creatures might pose. He times this as Boamund crosses the bridge, coming into view of the cave’s three occupants. Boamund feels that withering death-gazes of the basilisks and closes in as fast as he can manage, but still has to endure their terrible soul-destroying glare as he comes. Meanwhile Bog utterly devastates Unn’s head with a second blow, and she dies. Magic that was active on the two little monsters pops away. So he turns to that monster which Boamund had been trying to warn him of, exchanging attacks. Boamund slices one’s head off but finds his blade gets terribly pitted and corroded by its blood; Bog soon finds the same for his maul. But the menaces are dead. You search Unn’s corpse: she has the mace, the iron ringmail (but oversized for any human), a ring with a Movement rune embossed on it, a book in Safelstran, and a black crystal that glints strangely.

You cross the other bridge from here to what appears to be Unn’s Chamber: A roughly 10m diameter dome-like cave dimly lit by an eerie glow from two 30cm diameter crystal globes positioned inside cavities on the west wall. There is a strange smell to this cave, fruit-like yet rancid. The walls are entirely covered with carved signs of unfamiliar nature, except for a huge green carving of a stylized serpent biting its tail, which fills the northern wall and reaches half-way to the cave’s 10m apex. On the east side there are desks and crates and other containers strewn with all manner of apparati. On the west side there is a wet mound of muddy vegetation [a bed], and a bronze-bound chest near it, and more boxes. In the corner before the serpent carving, there is a large circle of worked stone. Bog approaches it, seeingit is carved with runes of Disorder, Death and Magic. The serpent carving itself is 4m diameter, elaborately carved and jade-inlaid, with a draconic-like head. There are none of the carved signs (on other walls) around it, except Western script, which Boamund notes as an “S” in the centre of four other Western letters, clockwise from the serpent’s head to tail in a circle outside it: M, R, U, and Q. The rest of the cave’s walls, you see, have Darktongue inscriptions but Bog isn’t convinced– he thinks they’re Firespeech, and turns away in disdain.

Amidst the desks and such are gear for alchemy, including some vials and bottles. Some mortars contain mostly powdered bone, and there are jars of milky fluid plus a phial of dark fluid with a label in Safelstran. There is a book of sundry pages (in Safelstran). You use a key you found on Unn’s body to open the chest near the bed, finding it to be full of documents in Safelstran, so you toss the book and phial in there and leave for now. You begin to retrace your steps to Fraud, who is shaking off the after-effects of the sorcery that petrified him. [I said you didn’t want that Critical Unn first rolled against him to stand, and I meant it- while it’s a temporary spell and non-lethal, on a Critical I’d have played that its duration continued after her death and there might have been side-effects too; it’s a nasty spell!]

Bog and Boamund come back to a fungus cave they’d bypassed before: The elongate cave is warm and musky, dimly lit by multitudes of different phosphorescent fungi. There is a veritable garden, from floor to ceiling, of fungi; from tiny to over 2m high or wide. But there also are things here that have alien malign intents for you. Your nice soft warm flesh will be good food for them. Just lie down and be good food, or they’ll have to make you lie down. Nevermind any feverish burning sensation you may feel.

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