Session 37

Cormags View Of course I should have known that the trek to the refugees, a mere 2 days travel, would not go smoothly. It never does, there's always something and this time something hunted us. We could feel its presence in the woods around us, a watchful hunter scoping out its quarry. It wasn't until we looked behind the stables that we found its first greeting, a grotesque scene of a ravaged corpse staked to the wall. Nevertheless we continued on through to woods seeing more signs of our ghastly stalker as we traveled through the woods. The first few miles were smooth as I communed with the forest and eased our path through the twisting paths and dense overgrowth, but in this particular dark forest Kara found a connection. I believe she unintentionally proved herself to the great spirit of this forest and bound herself to it as a kindred predator of these wild ways. Her will dominated the forest for a time and she was able to lead us through with much greater ease than i assumed and with Arya keeping watch for spiders with her…… spider sense….. Sure let's go with spider sense, we made good progress. On the second day on this venture we started to get an idea of what was following us. We came across a grievously orc named Gurribash, and I am ashamed to admit the old anger sprang forth once more. I thought i had put this anger behind me but the memory of my people and the hatred of the orcs that slaughtered most of them still burns as hot as the Red Rage at times. While it was not my proudest moment and that old anger seethed through me, his words of wanting to die for his failure angered me more. Such a foolish notion, to accept death simply because you have been beaten instead of rising again and accepting the healing or help of others to give you a chance to meet that foe again to hell with dishonor. So anyway I started healin.
While I made a fool of myself my friends spoke to this orc to find out what had happened to him. He told them that he had been sent to slay a great wolf spirit that was plaguing the forest, killing indiscriminately and leaving the corpses desecrated. We put two and two together and realised that this same beast must have been the one following us for the past few days as well. Hearing the bit about the wolf spirit me and kara had a thought and I reached out with my own totem containing my former beast and was able to confirm that this beast was Kara’s. After releasing it to get away from the giants we faced previously it must have begun to seek out power for it had managed to form itself a physical form. It must have gained a large amount of strength for it to do this and that worried me. If left alone this spirit would only grow in strength it needed to be dealt with. With Garobeshes aid we tracked it down and confronted it. It seemed to be toying with us, promising that it was not the time and that it was savoring its hunt for us. After a short “conversation” and the banishing of several will o wisps who showed up, to cause havoc one assumes, the spirit tried to leave. And to be honest we just were not having that. We jumped into battle attempting to weaken the creature and to destroy it once and for all. As we fought I noticed that the physical form had an umbra of spirit energy protecting it and on a hunch I tried to rip the protection from him but instead entered into a battle of wills with this creature. After what seemed like an eternity but in reality lasted only a second I prevailed and managed to strip the soul from the creature's physical body. Fortunately I stripped most of its power from it leaving it extremely weakened. Unfortunately it's spiritual form managed to escape. Garubesh swore to find it and banish it from this plane, and even through my hatred I could trust him on that. He set off saying he may meet us in Caer Callder after and will message us once the hunt is complete. We on the other hand return back to our goal of saving these refugees.