A Return to Town and a Looming shadow

Miscellaneous

The group spends sometime putting themselves back together in town and find some shadows behind the town's pleasant demeanor.

After the exhausting and harrowing experience in the Deep Run the rest of the party, Nox, Snarlsburg, and Seek, return to town following after Belomar, Aegis, and Morgan who had traveled through the night before. On getting to town they find Morgan and Belomar laid up for the next few days and decide to take some downtime themselves. Seek managed to pay the local cleric, Kaylin Fawcett, to heal the disease spreading through him.   During this time the group sorted their various found treasures including the Hardstone heirloom, a strange dark gemstone, and a heavy iron token. While investigating these items in particular a strange voice referring to itself as the Iron Matron/Agnes made itself known to the group through the token and laid claim to the heirloom claiming it actually belonged to her family line along with a stolen doll from the Hardstone clan.   Also during this time, hoping to get find more information regarding the demonic energy that affected her Morgan left the group in the night. After a day or two of downtime however, Rainna returned to the inn troubled by seeing a strange orcish woman near the town. Ina'vi was discovered to have been tracking the party seeing their skills in combat and was hoping to get help with finding who had attacked her clan.   The group convinced of this Iron Matron's plight decided to return to dinner with Markus leaving Aegis and Snarlsburg to infiltrate the upstairs of the residence while the family was distracted to try to find more information along with the stolen doll. After some shenanigans regarding the dinner and convincing Markus that they had not found his family stone, the party fled the homestead after their hidden agenda was discovered. Going through ALL of the toys SvG managed to grab, unsure of what they were looking for exactly, found the missing doll but overheard a concerned Markus and Olma panicking that their daughter couldn't be separated from the toy. Managing to skirt Tevlin and the Harvest Guards who were now actively searching for them, the group made their way to the Ironweld Forest nearby.