Before we started out for Adenyan and the river, Throg the orc wandered off with nary a word. So we heighed off to Adenyan without her. Three days out, just before we would have reached Adenyan we chanced upon two children with bindles obviously worn out with travel. They asked for water, which we provided, and as they drank, their story came out. Their names were Jenna and Jason, seven and eight years old respectively, from Gnarles Barkley. It seems that the horror there is not at an end. Apparently, just after we left., a horror ate their parents and all of the kids at the orphanage where their mother worked. They were very frightened, and fled carrying what they could, and without much foresight, hence no water bags.
After discussion among the party we decided to go back to Gnarles Barkley. Jenna and Jason, after some coaxing, agreed to come with us back to Gnarles Barkley and to show us where the horror lurked. They went on to describe a grain field that was sown with seeds that originally came from their great-great grandfather (or somesuch). It seemed that their ancestor who had been a slave on a Theran cargo ship before “the troubles” had stolen some seeds from a shipment and since settling in Gnarles Barkley their family had planted successive generations, but that something had gone wrong with this latest planting.
When we arrived in Gnarles Barkley the children showed us their house and the nearby field in which the horror lurked. There did appear to be something eldritch about the filed of corn, with cobs too long and kernels too large. Azreal , the T’Slang, said that in her experience the only recourse would be to burn the field. I asked how we could get accelerant (oil or alcohol) on the field without getting within range of the horror’s powers. There was much discussion of bottles and jars with lighted rags being thrown at the field. I expressed my opinion that holding a lighted container of oil sounded quite dangerous, but my companions assured me that we were adventurer heroes and that we had to expect danger as part of the job.
I left the others to get the jars of oil and some rags from the general store. I got a very good price of one silver each with the rags thrown in free. (I guess that the townsfolk were glad that we were back to face this new incarnation of horror.) I returned with six jars of oil topped off with rags, only to find Dob, my fellow dwarf, lying unconscious , wounded and bleeding, no one had even taken care of his wounds, or tried to stop the bleeding.
While I bound his wounds the rather clouded story came out from Okira and Azreal. Azreal had kept getting closer and closer to field of corn (She said she was looking for a good place to throw the oil jars.) until she prompted a response and a child with two sickles ran out from the field and attacked her. Dob and Okira came to Azreal’s defense. And the three of them dispatched the possessed child, taking some hits. But before they could retreat to a safe distance (or so they said) a second similarly armed child spewed forth from the corn. Again, the child, who was easy to hit, was dispatched, but Dob has taken several hits. Pleading with Azreal, the hero, to retreat was in vain, she continued to taunt the field and dance around the attacking children. It wasn’t until Dob lay unconscious and both Okira and Azeal were seriously bleeding that Azeal relented, being reminded that it was her perception that the field could only be dealt with by fire. In all they had killed four of the sickle-wielding, possessed children.
After Dob’s wounds were tended to and he was resting as well as could be expected, I distributed the jars of oil stuffed in the top with rags. I gave two to Areal and two to Okira and kept two for myself. I then proceeded to approach the field from upwind and at what Okira said was a safe distance, so that I could throw my jars and ignite the field. Although I have a good throwing arm, in the excitement I forgot my training and I missed with my two jars with flaming rags when I threw them at the field. Okira was more focused and she hit the field dead on with both of her jars, bursting it into flame. Azreal seemed transfixed by the sight and kept her two jars unthrown.
Flaming children (23 as it turned out) ran from the field and ended up setting fire to a number of buildings. But what captured our attention was that the field reared up rising some forty to fifty feet above our heads in its flaming “glory”. I don’t know what possessed us, in retrospect, we should have retreated to a safe distance and watched it burn or taken off after the fleeing, possessed children to stop their depredations, but instead Azreal attacked the field with her sword and Okira and I followed suit taking flame damage as we did so. Our attacks seemed to have little effect on the field until in one great burst of flame, which threw us back, the field was entirely consumed. I was knocked back, badly wounded, but still conscious. Okira was lying unconscious, and Azreal because of the earlier hits that she had taken from the sickles of the children, lay dead. (The two jars of oil that she still had at that point may have contributed to the damage.)
I pulled Okira and Azreal further from the last of the flames, and fortunately Okira soon recovered consciousness. Okira and I along with a wandering orc, named Laerzag, helped the town’s fire brigade put out the burning buildings which the 23 flaming children had lite. All of the possessed children fell dead when the field exploded and was consumed in that last burst of flame.
For the next three days we tended our wounds, healed and discussed what are next steps might be, hoping at first that this time we had gotten to the root of the horrors in Gnarles Brakley, but that was not the case.
On the day after the fire, Jason came to us and said that his sister, Jenna, was missing, and that she had gone down a hole where the field had been, because “someone” had told her there was candy down there. We examined the hole, it looked deep. Other children began disappearing down the hole mostly at night. We tried putting out candy at a spot away from the hole, Laerzag tried scouting lessons and games for kids far from the hole, but still more children disappeared. We finally discovered that the children were being told by “voices in their heads” that there was a mountain of candy in the hole.
The hole itself was a meter in diameter and about 30 meters deep. I tried for a couple of days to dig an access ramp to the hole, but it was too deep. We couldn’t obtain a rope – we didn’t have enough money. I thought that I might trade my ruby for a rope, but found that I had lost the accursed thing. My companions were disinclined to trade down using their rubies in exchange for a rope. They were about to search Azeal’s husk which has remained unburied at the fire site, when our inquiries about ropes bore fruit. It seemed that Charles D. Ward (who we though was “on vacation” far away) had recently purchased a large quantity of rope and had made a 300 ft. rope ladder. It seemed that he had heard that a well equipt adventurer hero always had a rope, and figured that a rope ladder was even better. (I guess that he never thought about the weight of carrying a 300 ft. rope ladder on an adventure.) He readily agreed to join us to the extent of standing at the top of the hole while we used his ladder.
…..It was five days after the fire when we at last descended into the depths below what had been the field of horror corn. Under the floor at the bottom of the hole, Okira found the secret entrance to a dungeonesque series of rooms, stairways and tunnels. A bare room led to a larger room with a large chest on the righthand side surrounded by a mass of skeleton parts (bones!). In each corner of the room was a statue, all very similar, of a dwarf with his hands raised and his face replaced with by the sculptor with carved worms.
Fearing that the skeleton parts were the result of the statues coming to life and defending the chest, we took one of the 1200 lb. statues up to the surface. Dob remarked that all this effort on the statues was wasteful and declined to participate any further. I used a sledge hammer to try to separate the statute head from its torso, and the resultant wound bled! Laerzag, the orc, reduced the statue to rubble, but still it bled. We tried burning the rubble, but to no effect. I tried taking a bleeding piece of rubble in my tongs to the local forge, but the townsfolk ran in fear and locked up the forge. Dob found out that it was because they feared “blood magic”.
Eventually, we returned down to the “dungeon”, moved the other three statues and all the bones into the “pit of the winds” that we discovered just beyond the chest room. I carried all of the rubble from the first statue down and threw it in the “pit of the winds” as well. When we opened the large chest, it took Okira several swings with the sledge hammer to break the lock, the chest was empty. Nonetheless, we hauled the chest to the surface.
The next day we found a further room with three of the worm faced dwarf statues, they didn’t move right away, but radiated evil. Okira managed to kill two of them and Dob finished off the third. They didn’t bleed but shattered when they fell over.
Added later: A secret hallway behind the righthand wall of the three statue room was a trap. When Laerzag opened the door at the end, the entire floor collapsed. Okira was killed instantly and I was knocked unconscious and taken topside to “picnic” with Charles D. Ward.
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