This was definitely our most action-packed session of this campaign to date, and a good kick-off to what promises to be an extended quest. The story opened with a quick scene of the four heroes traveling, two days after the events of the last session. They are being led by the strange blind old native woman, marching ever forward toward the northwest. As a chill breeze runs through their path, they think back to the events of the previous days, and how they got here.

The focus immediately shifts to the moment they returned from their adventure in the previous session. Atallah takes the strange new girl-child into the colony in secret while the rest of the group heads in together. The body of the girl they were sent to find (Hanna) is returned to her now soul-scarred mother, and the heroes find the rest of the town seems to have forgotten them for the moment. Instead, they are all trying to find out just who the strange old woman is that was found unconscious outside the town just an hour ago! (queue dramatic music)

Ulrik moves to learn what the meaning of this is, but is halted pre-speech by the Wizened, who shoots The Stare Of Doom (that look that only a 150-year-old godsworn mystic can even manage) at him, freezing him in his tracks. The two wizards and the lady vanish into the Wizened's hovel. Healers are called upon to attend the wounds of Rassmus and Atallah, and look after the little girl. The Vizier and the Wizened spend the evening together in the Wizened's hovel, meditating with the non-conscious old woman in a creepy spiritual trance. Ulrik (who is increasingly more shifty and under-handed than you would expect a great general to be) tries to learn more, and while he manages to get the guard (who is truly terrified of the Wizened, as he should be) to let him inside, he is blasted unconscious when he tries to shake the Wizened from his trance. Milly tells her "handler" (Murik, the dwaergan agent of the Company) of the days events and findings and then retires for the evening, Rassmus gets patched up and spends the evening with Ulrik's daughter (queue raunchy bass music), and Atallah eventually passes out from the crazy stresses of the day.

The night doesn't end there, though. The rest of the events of that night move forward in a wild blur of chaos and tension. A storm rolls in, sudden and unexpected, and lightning sets the skies ablaze with energy. Screams rise as a massive bolt of heaven's fire strikes the ship anchored in the harbor, setting it ablaze! As the men rush to the boats and row out to it, all of the colony's sleeping women, Northwardik and Ahzali alike, wake from terrible dreams and scream for their lost husbands and sons, and daughters for their fathers and brothers. Atallah tries to rally the healers and calm the womenfolk while Milly and Rassmus try to sink the ship and extinguish the flames, so it can be salvaged afterwards. Ulrik wakes in the hovel to find the three older folk chanting together, in unison uttering a strange flow of words both Northwardik, Ahzali, and something else entirely, something almost bestial. He gets out fast and joins the fray, and that was around the time everyone noticed the half-dozen or so man-beasts out in the woods, just at the limits of vision allowed by the storm (which had blown out their watchfires, all howling in unison.

As Milly and Atallah struggle to calm the citizens and organize against a possible unknown attack, Rassmus strikes the final blow that ruptures the ships hull and starts it sinking, and Ulrik braves the outsides of the walls alone to re-light the watchfires, there are four great flashes of light on the northwest horizon, so bright they fill then entirety of the skies. Then... the wind subsides, the rain thins to nothing, the clouds dissipate, the chanting fades, the howling stops, the man-beasts withdraw, and the womenfolk escape their delirium and go back to sleep. After a short bit of locking up and checking things out, the heroes do the same.

The next morning, the town is awoken with a shock: the Wizened of the northmen has killed himself, giving his soul to Odin in the ancient way: a noose around the neck and a spear through the side as he fell. This sent ripples through the small community, and the Northwardik half was particularly devastated. While funeral arrangements were made, the Vizier of the Ahzali contingent met privately with the heroes and asked them to go on a special mission outside the colony. The night before, he and the Wizened spoke at length with this woman by way of the spirit lands, the spaces between life and the netherworld. She spoke of an ancient danger in this land, and while they conversed they felt a surge of chaotic forces in the spirit lands, and fought to contain them and prevent them from destroying the colony. That surge subsided, but was definitely from somewhere in the Northwest. The strange old woman was here to help, he said. She would lead them to the northwest, to find the source of the great dark forces that they all felt last night - the dark forces whose very existence drove the great Alvejard to kill himself. In accordance with the ways of Fate's Numbers, there must be four of them that left on the mission, one for each flash of light in the skies. How fortuitous that there were four heroes right there!

As the sun approached the far horizon and the light steadily began to fade from the skies, the folks of the colony gathered to see the funeral of one of the most powerful sorcerer's in the world, and the heroes gathered to leave on what portended to be the greatest journey of their lives. As they checked their supplies and said their private good-byes, Ulrik's tearful daughter, Saga, gave Rassmus a hand-carved pendant of Mjollnir, the Hammer of Thor, to protect him from the dangers of the unknown wild. Ulrik noticed some weirdness there, but was still none the wiser as to the girl's pregnancy.

With their goodbyes said and their gear in check, they trudged forth into the darkening wildlands.

Back in the present, a day and a half after the above events, they follow the creepy old blind woman, whom they've taken to calling "Nymrite," the Northwardik word for "wild woman," as they still know not her name. Despite her blindness and the apparent frailty of her age, she pushes ever forward, and as we return to their journey in the present day we see them emerging from a chunk of the forest to look down from a jagged hill towards an odd cylindrical valley, carved into the rocky earth as if a great giant had hammered it into the rock from above. A gigantic multi-tiered waterfall dominated the far side of the pit-shaped valley, and the mists it created concealed almost the entirety of the valley's bottom, several hundred feet below them at the bottom of nigh-sheer cliffs. After a bit of scouting they found two paths, one hidden and apparently dangerous, one obvious and easy-looking but in truth trap-riddled and deadly. They climbed down the former, and at the bottom found a small lake, from which flowed the river which heads back to their colony several days away. From the bottom of the valley it was possible to see the sky through the constant mists, but they knew that they had only a handful of hours until nightfall.

In a naturally-hidden nook of the valley, shielded from the mist, they found a small village, little more than a dozen low huts built partially into the ground. While it appeared to have been abandoned for at least a decade, there were a few signs of recent activity, from both a handful of human-sized folk and another handful of the awful man-beasts. However, the most eye-catching feature of the village was the central shrine, a raised structure with an open roof and a central pedestal, eerily similar to the one they had helped construct so recently in the center of their own colony. To make matters weirder, the walls of this shrine were supported by plates of forged steel - steel Milly identified as being of N'Parthan construction, and at least a half-dozen decades old, most likely more!

A closer inspection of the inside of the shrine revealed two major features: a posed skeleton on the central pedestal, and a detailed mural on the upper walls around the entire inside of the structure. The skeleton seemed ancient, the bones petrified to rock-hard consistency. The ribcage was partially-crushed, and a piece of an old metal spearhead was lodged inside one of the ribs that remained. The skeleton itself was man-sized, a bit larger, and with some features that didn't quite seem right: the skull was just a tiny bit larger, the fingers just a bit longer, the spine slightly twisted, the teeth a bit sharper, etc.

The mural was another marvel, telling the story of the people born from the great fish, who gave its body to those it birthed. The people it depicted split into two groups, one group that used the fish's bones as weapons, another group that used the fish's bones for shelter. The weapon-people left the shelter-people and went into the forest, where the evil forest-people appeared and corrupted them. The weapon-people were turned into the beast-people in an orgy of blood and fire, and then came out of the forest to eat the shelter-people. The shelter-people came and found this hidden valley, and that's where the story ended.

The heroes tried to find more information or hints as to the story behind this place, but dark was falling and they needed to find shelter, so they settled in for the night, resolving to look into the matter again after a night of rest and recuperation. Atallah spent the night mostly meditating in the Shrine while the rest stayed in a nearby hut, and after a watch schedule was set they went to sleep.

In the darkest hour of the night, Atallah was woken from his trance by a voice just this side of the edge of hearing. The voice was vile, twisted, and quite painfully familiar to Atallah, one heard only twice before: once when reading the page from his master's book years ago, and once again during the great storm in which the third ship was lost. The voice called him, beckoned him to follow it into the night... and he got right up and did so, deliberately avoiding Rassmus, his currently-on-watch companion. He followed the voice to a dark cave, hidden in the thickest part of the mists, near the rockiest part of the waterfall. Rassmus caught him before he went in, though, and pointed out a certain feature of the cave: the darkness inside looked almost alive, breathing in a pulsing way just like the darkness in the cave of the beast they slew the other day.

At that moment, back at the village, Ulrik and Milly became besieged by a different sort of monster, beastly humanoids with savage goat-like heads. Rassmus and Atallah heard the ruckus and ran back to help, and after a few heartbeats the "beastlings" were slain, and the session came to a close with the sounds of nearby fighting. Everyone seemed accounted for, so who could that be?