#dnd;dia

“Don’t worry Elowen, we’re almost there,” Diantha assured her, and Elowen decided not to answer as she kept an eye on the horizon and the heat waves off in the distance.

Within the hour a large caravan full of merchants of different types, different families, and even different races could be seen heading away from Shade. Elowen kept her ears open as they passed, listening to the grumbling amongst the families and their intention to be anywhere but Shade. She could feel her stomach drop into the pit of her stomach at the grumbling. “That’s not a good sign,”  Elowen told her group quietly, turning to Ciaran and Jelani as the two also watched the caravan of merchants pass by them. “My father once told me that when the merchants move on you know a city has died. They won’t stay somewhere that won’t generate any profit.”

“How does he know that?” Ciaran asked skeptically.

“Because he’s a merchant, and it’s what he would do,” Elowen answered sadly, her eyes following after the caravans as they came into Shade. After an encounter with a wonderfully mothering innkeeper in which their group was able to supply her with several days worth of water they set out to inspect the marketplace for some answers on the cult that had moved into the town and was said to be abducting people.

It was there that Elowen made a friend. The old man who ran the only remaining stall offering only a few meager dried up vegetables was friendly despite having lost all of his family members to the cult. First they had abducted his son when they promised to provide food and water for an entire family in exchange for their work. Then his wife had been abducted within the last week, and all of his grandchildren had been taken by his daughter-in-law to escape the threat of the cult that was slowly killing this town. The party made sure to eat with him and give the old man as much water as they could despite his assurance that, “Oh no, don’t worry about this old man, it’s much easier to feed one person than it is a family.” He gave them a fierce smile before pulling Elowen to the side and handing her a sachet of some of the spices he had used to flavor their shared meal. “Dear I want you to have these-”

Elowen reached into her purse to try to pay him for the spices and he put a gentle but firm hand on hers, making her keep the money she had offered. “No dear, this is to say thank you for giving me something that I had almost forgotten - what it feels like to have a family. Besides, I think the big guy really liked them!”

There was a moment of pause as the little halfling stared up at the elven man, her eyes shining with unshed tears before she gave him a hug. “Please stay safe,” she whispered to him as he hugged her back and gently pet her hair.

“I’ll survive, especially if we have heroes like you here to help us and chase out this cult.” The old man promised as Elowen pulled away, even gently wiping away her tears and giving her a brave smile. “Now go on, you have things to do!”

“We’ll do what we can to help,” Elowen swore, “I promise we will.”

“I know,” he smiled at Elowen as the group called for her to hurry up so they could get to the pond that supplied water for the entire city. She made sure to wave to the old man on their way out, smiling and keeping an eye on him as they travelled to the pond...

What they found there was not something that Elowen would ever be able to forget. There was a horrible smell as they approached the water, one that Elowen did not recognize, but that caused Diantha and Jelani’s faces to harden and for Ciaran’s face to go blank, guarding her emotions once again. The little scholar didn’t quite understand the tenseness in the air, her mind working with magical formulas and scientific knowledge as she tried to think of any diseases or contamination that would cause water to produce a foul smell. Unfortunately the real cause of the smell was not something she could have predicted, and almost caused her to lose her lunch.

The pond that supplied the town with water was all but dry, producing only enough water to create a wet patch and about an inch of water trickle down the river that it had once filled. Surrounding the pond and staining the sand red were bodies. Dozens of bodies. Some had been there at least a week simply rotting in the sun, left there by the cultists either as a warning or just merely as a dumping ground. Others were merely days old, and some of them had even been tortured based off of the ways their bodies were bent, broken, and slashes to ribbons.

Elowen could hear Diantha start to pray for the souls of the dead and Jelani’s normally hard face had taken on a hard anger, his lips snarling in distaste as he observed the bodies of children that had been left behind with the dead. Even Ciaran was upset, the blank face that she had kept through most of the ride broken as she stood there with a hand held over her mouth, her capes rippling around her in the breeze.

There was nothing that Elowen could do for these poor people’s souls, and nothing that she could do to bring them back. Her eyes drifted over the bodies and she spotted a guardswoman who had been stabbed so many times that her entire torso was covered in dried blood, but the one thing that stood out was the purple piece of fabric that she had clutched in her hand.

“Look,” Elowen pointed out the guardswoman to the others and to the purple fabric in her hand.

“We should speak to her,” Ciaran offered, “she’s most likely to know what happened.”

Diantha nodded and started to set up ingredients for a spell while Jelani stood watch nearby. Elowen wasn’t quite sure what was happening but stayed nearby to watch this magic unfold. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck raising as the body inhaled the magic Diantha had cast, the woman’s soul returning to her body momentarily as she then opened her eyes and looked up at the sky.

“Does this mean we can speak to her now?” Elowen asked.

Diantha nodded, “Yes, but we only get five questions.”

“We should ask her who killed her,” Ciaran supplied.

So it went, Ciaran offering questions that would supply their party the answers it would need in regards to the murder that had taken place, what had happened to these poor people, and anything that the guardswoman might have known about what had happened to the well. On a few questions Ciaran and Diantha discussed the wording of the questions to make them as accurate as possible, with Elowen chiming up when she noticed something that might work better. In the end they found out that the guardswoman had come here with a dozen of her friends to investigate the pond and at sunset had been set upon by the cultists, each of them attacked and killed with their bodies left to rot in the sun. The guardswoman was still not sure why they had killed her, only that it had happened and that it had not been a pleasant death.

When the unearthly breath that had animated the woman’s corpse left her the group was left with an uncomfortable silence. Jelani’s normally stern face was livid with rage, Ciaran looked both disgusted and angry at the carnage that had happened here, and when Diantha knelt down to resume her prayer Elowen turned away from the sight of the bodies she could not help and focused on the one thing she could do something about. Ciaran accompanied her while Jelani stood watch over Diantha, and between the two of them they were able to get down to the pond without Elowen slipping and falling on her face.

Elowen did a few preliminary spells and was able to detect that the water had been drawn here magically at least a hundred years ago, and that something was siphoning the magic that animated it. There was nothing wrong with the water other than the lack of output from the water. “Well… at least they haven’t poisoned it, but I’m worried that leaving those bodies up there will end up leading to it getting contaminated.”

“It’s safe?” Ciaran asked, waiting to see Elowen nod before she carefully scooped up a handful of water to sip at once she had pushed the sand she also gathered out of her hand. After that the rogue looked towards the dimming sky and then over at Jelani with worry. “Didn’t the guardswoman say that they were attacked at sunset?” The group looked at one another and then began to find places to hide. Ciaran climbed her way up a palm tree around the oasis, Diantha hid behind one of the trees, and when Jelani tried to lay down and pretend to be a corpse Ciaran hissed, “Jelani! They’re going to remember that they didn’t kill a big orc.”

“I can’t hide behind the trees,” he protested, “they’re too small!”

“Just hold still!” Elowen hissed, using color spray to dose Jelani in red fake blood before she hid behind a tree herself.

It wasn’t long until the party began to hear the sounds of the approaching cultists. Elowen put her darkvision goggles down over her eyes and watched as the group approached, her stomach churning nervously as she noticed that the cultists were dragging something behind them.

“They didn’t even cry,” the shortest one complained, “it’s not worth it if they don’t cry!”

“Heh, yeah these ones were too easy,” the next tallest one answered, his voice sounding much older than the young punk.

“I just wanted to have some fun!” the smallest one started to stab one of the bodies they had dragged with them, laughing as he maimed the poor person further.

Elowen and Ciaran shared a murderous glance and turned back to see the largest of the three cultists take charge of the situation. “Enough!” he barked, “We’ve got to get back, we have work to do.” The younger one looked chastised for his actions and slumped his shoulders, making some statement of apology that Elowen couldn’t quite hear. When the halfling saw Ciaran’s knives go in towards the big leader she let forward a ring of a witch bolt to surround the smallest one. Then as she saw Jelani begin to rise from the ground after her witch bolt illuminated the darkening sky. As he began to rise Elowen used a minor illusion to make it sound like the corpses around him were shrieking with rage and pain from the murder that these cultists had brought down upon this city. The small cultist crumpled, succumbing to Elowen’s witch bolt and the final remaining cultist froze in place.

The group cautiously approached the sole remaining cultist, and only after Ciaran stabbed him in the calf without a single reaction did they sweep back his hood to find out that he was an old man, and that the fake screaming from the bodies and Jelani rising from amongst the corpses had been too much for his heart and he had died where he stood.

Next there came the next round of necromancy from Diantha, creating a zone of truth as they questioned the bodies of the leader and the smallest cultist for information on their cult, and this Leader of All the Hells they were following. Elowen knew very little about religion, devils, or the Hells so when she couldn’t think of who that could be she turned to the most logical person to ask out of their party, and the only tiefling amongst them, Ciaran. “Do you know who that might be? Maybe from some history teaching or something from your people? I haven’t the faintest clue who that could be-”

“No! No I don’t know who that is, and it’s not my history.” Ciaran snapped back, causing Elowen to raise an eyebrow in surprise at the venom she received in return to what she had thought was a very simple question. Clearly she had struck a nerve, but as Ciaran went off to help Diantha with more questions about religion, cults, and gods Elowen didn’t at all understand Elowen decided to put herself to better use by looking through the cultist’s things. She took their robes, their identical gold rings, and their daggers, hoping that might be able to get them access to the cult without having to lie too much about themselves or causing more bloodshed… though with what they had seen of the cultists so far Elowen highly doubted any of them were worth saving.

It didn’t take long for Diantha to finish interrogating the deceased cultists, and when she was done she returned to Jelani’s side, curling into his arms as Ciaran went through the bodies of dead villagers and Elowen went to examine the bodies that the cultists had been dragging through the sand behind them. One of them was a woman Elowen didn’t recognize, who seemed to have died of blood loss from the multiple stab wounds left on her body, and the other…

“They killed him,” Elowen’s voice was somewhere between a sob and a snarl as her eyes turned towards the body of the kind and lonely old man they had shared lunch with that very afternoon.

“Who are you-” Diantha asked and then the group turned to see who Elowen meant. Diantha covered a gasp behind her hand, Ciaran looked as if she had been kicked in the gut, and Jelani’s jaw twitched angrily, one fist clenching at his side.

“They’re not worth saving,” Diantha said almost to herself as she looked down at the cultists with disgust, “at least these ones aren’t.”

“I hope their leader’s soul enjoys the torment of being trapped inside Soul Carver,” Ciaran snarled, her hand returning to the enchanted dagger she had used to kill the largest of that small band. Jelani rumbled with agreement to Ciaran’s statement.

Elowen just stared down at the frail old man’s body, kneeling down beside him as she closed his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, “but please know that they’re not going to get away with this.” When she stood up it felt entirely mechanical, as did the next bit she spent using a giant spectral hand to move the corpses into a pile for the villagers and another for the cultists. She didn’t have the strength or the time to bury them all at the moment, and she couldn’t chance that one of the bodies wouldn’t somehow end up in the pond and infect what little of the town’s water supply was left. So once the bodies were arranged she used a fireball to set the piles ablaze, leaving them to burn well into the night as the group prepared to return to the inn.

It was nearly midnight by the time they returned, and Ciaran made some sort of statement to the innkeeper about their tardiness before asking for rooms for the night. They were offered two keys, Elowen numbly took one, and Diantha took the other, but instead of last time where Elowen and Ciaran had shared a room the tiefling made sure Elowen saw that she turned her nose up at sharing a room with her, instead opting to sleep on the floor in Diantha and Jelani’s shared room. It wasn’t hard to see that Elowen had upset Ciaran earlier, but she was too tired, and too numb to get into what she was sure would be a rather loud fight. She decided to let Ciaran have the night to stew in her anger, and to confront her in the morning about whatever Elowen had done to offend her.

“Goodnight...” Elowen said quietly, Diantha giving her a look that mirrored the numbness she felt before Elowen returned to her room by herself. As usual she put an alarm spell on the window and then she changed out of the clothes that reeked of death. She threw them in the corner, making sure to scrub herself with soap and what water was left in her drinking canteen to get the smell off of her before she put on a nightgown and fell into the bed.

The little scholar laid in the bed on her side, looking out the window into the starry sky too tired and dehydrated shed more than a few tears for the kind old man she had only met today. After so long without any real family connections that weren’t strained Elowen had understood his loneliness… at least as much as she could. His smile had been more than payment enough for anything that they would have been able to do to help this town, but once again she was seeing just how much the use of necromancy and darker magics polluted and corrupted people the longer that they used it.