Return to the Desert by Volminia Stonethew

The spirit of my father, Torvek, started to fade as if we were losing and therefore I used the life energy in the room to strengthen the ritual. Just a little, as we preservers never take more life energy than can be easily replenished.

After the casting I asked, "Father did anything unusual happen on the journey through the desert to the obsidian mine?"

The spirit seemed took on definition and replied, "For a desert journey it was mostly routine. There was one point where we, uh the Unforgiven, were scouting and we saw some of those salt zombies in the distance.



They seemed to be attacking some travelers and so we attacked as quickly as was safe. We opened the battle with ranged attacks. Rolen and Rhogar cut into them and by the time they got to Jorvak and I they had been mauled and were easily cut down. We were too late to save the victims and that was a shame but at least we survived. After that, the journey to mine was as easy as the desert ever gets."

My father's spirit paused unable to continue without directions. Therefore I continued my chronological line of questions, "Father, what happened when you arrived at the obsidian mine?"

"At first we came upon what seemed to be some sort of a check point that controlled access to the mine. There was one human beastmaster on the ground with a pair of jakhars and two unarmed humans in a tower of sorts. I pegged them to be users of the Way but in fact the two unarmed humans were defilers.


Rhogar tried to use his slaver haggling tricks to get us past the checkpoint but they were on to us and attacked. Jovak and I tore into the beastmaster and his pets while Rolen and Rhogar exchanged fire with the two defilers. Fortunately for us the defilers were doing almost as much damage to each other as they were to us and they were taken out before they could drain the life from us. The beasts and their master went down almost as quickly. Another victory at little cost."

"After that we entered the mine. The mine was actually a big pit with stairs and landings that spiraled to the bottom. Given the situation the first thing I thought to do was to prepare a fire at the top in case we needed to leave while being pursued. If we lit up the stair case any creature below would not be able to pursue for days and a small group could use the pit mouth as a wall in a siege, with enough supplies anyway. I never had much skill at book learning, I did not even learn to read until much later, but fights make sense to me. Might have been the gladiator training in small unit tactics but whatever it was I started come up with a plan of attack."