Hrogar Journal: Days 1-7

Day 1

Today a new chapter of my life began. After saying final farewells to and getting some last words of advice from my parents, siblings, uncle, and the Knights who helped train me, I went to stand before The King with my new comrades. The King spoke of the journey ahead of us, and of the good we will do. After offering us his wisdom, The King graciously offered us some final supplies, and sent us out to prove ourselves in the world. I shall do everything I can to not disappoint my family or teachers.

Of my new companions, I recognize seeing some of them during my years of training, others I have never seen before. They seem like a diverse lot, and I look forward to getting to know them. We are a good-sized group, consisting of nine paladins and two clerics. I’m sure we’ll all be needed for the tests and trials we are to face.

Already it seems like our services are needed. Along the road from City of Origin, we’ve heard tales that a group of Paladins, likely the group similar to ours that left our city a year ago, disappeared without a trace some months ago. No sign of conflict has been found, but they’ve not been seen or heard from since. And we’ve seen numerous gnarled, black trees that seem to have been warped by evil. No one knows why or how.

It seems we have our work cut out for us.

Day 2

We’ve made more troubling discoveries today. We found the corpse of an orc, in a place far from where we know of orcs to live. It is possible he may have been murdered, but by whom and why, I cannot say. And just a little while ago tonight, one of the black, warped trees glowed red. It gave off a definite aura of evil, and when cut, it bled. When I approached the tree while holding fire, the glow dissipated, and it returned to it’s normal, albeit black and gnarled, state. A disturbing turn of events, indeed.

Day 4

We have been doing some investigating of late, and have discovered the following:

Of the black trees, they’ve been a problem for some time, roughly 10 years. They are resistant to burning and cutting, but can be uprooted, and eventually the ground they were in recovers. No one knows anything about glowing or bleeding trees, and no one knows why or how this is happening.

Of the missing Paladins, we only know that they disappeared one night. All their equipment was left in the domicile they had been staying in at the time, and the proprietor has since sold said equipment.

Of the orc we found, we’ve learned quite a bit more. He was apparently married, and came from a town far to the south. We learned of a group of orcs from that same area, and spoke to their leader: an aged, blind, but obviously powerful shaman. He seemed to know of the dead orc, but claimed to not know what had happened. However, I got the feeling he was blatantly lying to us, this in addition to his aura of evil, and I suspect foul play. We didn’t press the issue, but we may want to go to the southern town the orc was from, at some point in the future.

In addition to all this, we have yet another mystery! Earlier this morning, we heard the sound of fighting in the street, and followed it into an alley. But we did not see any fight, even though the sound surrounded us. We found a rune nearby, and also found no-one but us could hear it, or even see or go into the alley! With the aid of a Cleric of Thor, the group was able to dispel the rune, but also discovered down a different alley, a recently murdered body! It would seem the sounds we heard were merely a distraction from the true crime. He seemed to be a traveler from a northern port-city, and like the dead orc, had many of his possessions still on him, thus implying cold-blooded murder, not mere thievery. Upon informing the local guards, we learned that such things had been happening occasionally for some time to seemingly random travelers. Could this be related to the dead orc, or the missing Paladins? Only time and investigation will tell.

Day 7

We left a few days ago to find the orc body, which we had buried, but later were told that orcs burn their dead to keep them turning undead. Whether a real threat or not, we wanted to insure this did not happen. One morning when we woke up, we found the camp surrounded by wolf and humanoid tracks. The orc shaman we had met earlier had been wearing wolf pelts and had been particularly surprised that the dead orc had some silver on him that we buried him with. This has lead us to wonder about the possibility of werewolves. Either way, they had been right outside of our camp without our knowledge!

We eventually found where we thought we’d buried the orc, but found the spot dug up, with some old bones and a skull covered with some dirt in the grave that we had not noticed there when burying him. While I suspect the orc shaman and his group, both with respect to the murder of the orc and the digging up of his corpse, I have no idea why they would do such a thing, nor do I have any proof.

We also found a gnarled tree in the area, and cut it down to see what we could discover. It appeared to be normal, beyond being twisted by evil, but nothing further seemed to be learned.

That night, another glowing-red tree was discovered. This time, the torch did nothing, but we found holy water caused the tree to sizzle. Fflam tried cutting off a small branch, and upon pulling it away, was paralyzed! After unsuccessfully trying to pull it from his death-like grip, we poured holy water on his hand, and were able to remove the branch. The next morning he came to, but with memories of screaming in his mind while he was out. Whereas the trees were merely nuisances before, we now know them to be truly dangerous.