59. The Poetry of Zura Dhakaan (1)

Therendor 10 - Therendor 11, YK 1001

After months of adventuring separately and following their own agendas, each of the Wolves on Khorvaire received an urgent summons from Breyten d'Cannith asking them to come to Fairhaven. They arrived separately, and William, Pel, Lysander and the newest Wolf Delano were reunited for the first time in months.

Breyten invited them to his manor and told them that his wife had been kidnapped. She had been traveling on the Lightning Rail to Sharn, and it was ambushed by warforged when it got near Passage. They killed her entire entourage and bodyguards and spirited her off the train. Research done by House Cannith investigators and the Tharashk inquisitive Breyten had hired lead him to believe they had taken her to the Eldeen Reaches.

He also explained that he was afraid that forces within the House were not so keen on having her back, and that his Tharashk investigator, a half-orc named Telde Velderan, had hit something of a wall in his urban investigation. Growing fearful for his wife's safety, he put out a call to the Wolves, knowing of the long relationship they had with Lady Elaydren.

The Wolves quickly agreed to help, then hit the streets to find out what they could about the House Cannith investigator. William, using his newfound skills of interacting with Dragonmarked nobles and guild members, found out that Berec d'Cannith, the investigator on the case, was generally regarded as a bit old for his job, and rumors were that he was an alcoholic to boot. Many investigations had opened recently, leaving only Berec for Elaydren's disappearance, and all signs pointed to his assignment coming from Baron Jorlanna d'Cannith herself.

Next, the Wolves went to meet with Telde Velderan in a private room to talk about the investigation. Velderan explained that he was more skilled at wilderness tracking, not urban investigation, and that he and Berec had spent some time in Passage but had hit dead ends and returned to Fairhaven to get a fresh start. He expressed frustration with Berec, explaining that they hadn't done much of a search of the Passage docks, which is where Telde expected the warforged would have gone to escape with their prisoner.

They determined to split up, with Lysander and William keeping Berec busy while Pel and Delano broke into his apartment to investigate him. Lysander tried mightily to talk William into playing a woman, but he was having none of it, and finally Lysander used his veil to cloak them as Chantal and Porthos, a sister and brother, and they went to find Berec at an inn called The Dead Fox.

In out-drinking Berec, William got a little over-zealous and became a bit drunk, although he did get Berec so drunk he passed out. However, William had to be convinced to leave the tavern by Lysander. Fortunately, Lysander's charms were up to the case, and the two of them, accompanied by an unconscious Berec, went to a nearby alley. They took his case notebook and his money and left him in the alley and then returned to the Twin Spirits Inn, where they had been operating since arriving in Fairhaven.

At the same time, Pel and Delano snuck into the Aundarian villa that served as the Cannith enclave. They got into Berec's room and looked through his notes. Amongst the other secrets Pel and Delano found, they found the relevant information that Berec had written Elaydren off as dead, most likely at the hand of the Lord of Blades, and that he had been sending copies of his reports to Baron Jorlanna. Perhaps most importantly, they learned that Berec had never investigated the docks in Passage because he had gambling debts to several crime bosses in the area.

With most of their suspicions confirmed, the Wolves hopped on a lightning rail to Passage alongside Telde. While traveling, Pel noticed something "off" about the half-orc, but he couldn't quite place it, and wrote it off to the Tharashk having some sort of secondary motivation relating to Lady Elaydren.

Once they arrived in Passage, they went straight to the docks to investigate. Delano talked to the dockworkers and found out that the crew of a fishing boat, The Little Dwarf, had turned up dead on the shore a few days ago, and that their boat had gone missing.

After calling in their new airship and its pilot, they flew low over Lake Galifar looking for the wreckage. Delano spotted it, and when they set down, Telde easily found the trail of several warforged, heading into the Gloaming in the Eldeen Reaches.

Unfortunately, they soon found out what had struck Pel about Telderan. He was not a half-orc... in fact, he was a Rakshasa assassin, sent by Ttemmal, and he lead them into an ambush made up of a pod demon, Abyssal Hulk and Abyssal Eviscerator.

The assassin didn't live to savor his ambush for long, however, as Pel opened the battle by firing a crossbow bolt into his eye, and was then drawn into battle with William and suffered a withering burst of killing flames from Delano. He tried to flee, but Lysander cut him down with his vicious mockery.

The demons proved more tenacious, in particular the pod demon, whose spawn kept appearing and exploding in acidic and poisonous goo. The Abyssal Hulk, meanwhile, used his gaze of chaos to try and turn the Wolves against one another, and the Abyssal Eviscerator cornered Pel, grabbed hold of him and began raking him mercilessly with his claws.

As Delano moved around the battlefield, aiding William in his battle against the Hulk, Lysander tried to keep the Pod Demon busy with arrows.

William finished off the Abyssal Hulk with his rain of steel and then moved in on the Eviscerator, finishing him off thanks to the damage Pel had inflicted. The group then turned on the Pod Demon and killed it, although by the end of the fight they were somewhat battered and bloodied, and they took a brief rest to recuperate.

They discovered that the warforged tracks were easy enough to follow without their "Tharashk" guide and continued tracing them, and before long, they came upon an abandoned bandit camp that the warforged had clearly appropriated. They could see the bandit camp in the distance, behind a twenty-foot high wooden fence that was guarded by a handful of warforged and... a warforged titan.

The battle against the Titan was a memorable one, with William essentially taking on the monstrous weapon one-on-one, aided by artillery fire from Delano, as the other warforged kept Pel and Lysander busy. Lysander used a song to enchant the Titan, which led to him helping to eliminate several of the other warforged while battling William.

With the other warforged down, the Titan finally managed to inflict enough damage to knock William out, and things began to look a bit grim for the Wolves. Pel moved through the trees using his shadow stride and staying hidden, and Lysander placed one of his sticky clockwork bombs on the Titan's legs before turning invisible, leaving Delano the only obvious target, and he fired off a hellish rebuke and began fleeing into the woods, with the Titan hot on his heels.

The Titan, scarred from William's many blows, on fire from Delano's attack, crashed relentlessly after Delano, but as it raised its hammer for a killing blow, Lysander's bomb went off, blowing it's leg off and sending it tumbling, inoperable, to the ground.

With the advance guard loudly defeated, they knew that the rest of the base would be on alert. Pel woke William and the group took a brief rest to refresh themselves before going in after Lady Elaydren. They decided to try a tried-and-true tactic of posing as prisoners, and Lysander used his veil to make himself and Pel look like the warforged guards, bringing William and Delano in after their "unsuccessful" attempt to defeat the Titan.

Unfortunately, when one of the Warforged guards inside the walled bandit camp called William "the most dangerous" of the Wolves, Lysander was unable to resist pressing the point and in so doing revealed himself and Pel to the surprisingly shrewd warforged guard.

The warforged mages used a variety of spells to keep blasting William away from the walls so that he couldn't climb over, but Delano simply teleported inside and began firing on them, and they couldn't hold off the Wolves forever. Two of the warforged were casting priestly magic using the Lord of Blades' holy symbol, causing Pel to repeatedly yell that "he's not a real God!"

After Pel and Lysander finished off the two mages using ranged attacks, William, Pel and Lysander climbed in to more directly engage the rest of the forces. While the warforged guards were formidable, they were not as dangerous as the advanced guard with the Titan, and when the captain of the warforged realized they were losing, he ordered the others to execute the prisoner.

Lysander leaped across the courtyard and into the pit where Elaydren was being held to defend her, and with the aid of Delano, they managed to destroy the warforged who were attempting to kill her while William and Pel dealt with the rest of the forces.

As William finished off the last Warforged Flamepriest, he saw something he hadn't seen since the very first mission they had undertaken for Lady Elaydren. A small metal ball disengaged from the Flamepriest and flew off, dodging an arrow fired by Lysander and a crossbow bolt from Pel. The Lord of Blades would be getting a report from the dead Warforged, thanks to his final messenger.

The shaken and clearly roughly treated Elaydren was very relieved to see the Wolves. She told them that she had been investigating the theft of the Xulo pattern, and that she had realized that her Uncle Merrix may have had something to do with its theft. She hadn't been able to talk to him since he had disappeared over six months ago. She also revealed that in her research into her ancestor Kedran d'Cannith, who had first discovered the pattern, she found the name Zura Dhakaan, a legendary Duur-kala (Dirge Singer) from the Dhakaani Empire who had broken Xulo after it was infected with the abberant taint of one of the Daelkyr.

She had reason to believe that Zura Dhakaan's tomb might hold a vast amount of information about Xulo, hopefully including the means by which he could be defeated and broken again. Unfortunately, finding the tomb in Darguun was so difficult that only one person had reportedly ever gotten close. And that person was Halas Martain.

Lady Elaydren also confided that she had always been an operative of Merrix, although her surface loyalties were to Baron Jorlanna, and she believed that Jorlanna now suspected the truth. She asked if Pel and Lysander could help her to ingratiate herself back into Jorlanna's good graces, and agreed in exchange to become Pel's operative inside House Cannith.