1237, Winter 4

After I spent last night modelling another person’s body, we are now planning on heading south to the wall. As usual, Allistor flies on ahead once we are out of sight of the village, whilst we trek down on foot. It’s a long walk, but we are all quite fit and healthy, so hope to get there before the end of the day.

An hour or later, he flies back to us, and gives us directions to where the Earthquake damage was located. He finds a small stone circle, consisting of four small stones. One of the stones has some depressions in the top, where there are signs of dried blood. He also finds a stone from which handle of the knife was possibly taken.

He returns to us, passing on the information, and gives us further directions. By nightfall, we get close, and find a suitable barn to stay in overnight. 

The following morning, we arrive at the stones. There is a blackened, chared hole in the middle of the circle. Maedbh casts her usual spells, and determines that there is a a faerie aura of 5.

I spontaneously cast Tracing the Trail of Death’s Stench, which isn’t hard in the strong faerie aura, using the dried blood as an arcane connection. It seems that the body is really close, since my finger on our map of Scotland doesn’t move off where we are. Which doesn’t surprise me too much.

So I begin sketching a new map in the dirt of the local area, whilst the grogs start looking around for a body. Before I finish that, Allistor finds the very overdone burned remains of a body. Maedbh detects the lingering scent of very powerful magic on the corpse. The magic is pure magic – not faerie magic. I cast a spell to prevent the remains from decaying further.

One thing I did notice while studying the maps, is that if I draw a line from these stones, to where the Three Kings stones are, it would run pretty much through Horsingas covenant.

Not far from the stones, is part of the wall which has suffered a lot of damage. There are the ruins of some ancient temple here, so we head there to investigate. Maedbh begins to get a headache and strange visual artefacts as we get closer. To the rest of us, it all looks fine. 

Maedbh creates an illusion of what she sees. It’s a jumped mess of different seasons, fragments of the region, bits of people etc. Between them all is a nothingness.

Whilst Maedbh is concentrating on her spell, Allistor notices the body of a Roman soldier ‘oozing’ out of a nearby rock. It appears to be dead, and just drops to the ground. Allistor steps over towards it, and gives it a prod.

Donald suddenly cries out, and gives Allistor a push, shoving him out of the way as a tree root slithers out of the earth and tries to snap at Allistor. He then yells out, and points at a group of skeletons crawling out of the ground. It looks like three skeletons all merged into one creature. And it is coming  direct for me. Maedbh stops concentrating on her spell, but it doesn’t go away. It starts trying to knit together the images into one whole.

I cast a spell on it to hold it still, at the same time that Allistor casts a spell to hurl it into the air. I hold it’s rib cage in place, whilst it’s limbs and one of its skulls gets blown off. I stop concentrating on the spell, and the remains fall to the ground.

We start to move away from the area, and another skeleton starts to move out of the ground. It is partly armoured. The ground begins to tremble a bit more, and a skeletal fox begins to crawl up out of the ground. The shaking of the ground seems to be centred on Maedbh, and follows her as she moves.

As we move further away, the animated corpses collapse. 

Allistor throws a small stone into the region around Maebdh. It stops in mid-air, begins to change into the shape of a bird, then falls to the ground. A couple of trees begin to grow rapidly. One is all pustulous, the other looks more healthy. Both eventually collapse under their own weight.

Strange dust clouds form around Maedbh. I suggest that she puts her sword away, and then the strangeness seems to stop. The rippling in the ground head back towards the ruins, and subsides.

Maedbh heads back to the ruins, and gets the feeling that something unfriendly is lurking there, so backs off. 

Allistor walks into the ruins, and tries to cast some spells. They fail – there seems to be some aura here which is making magic hard. There is a trembling in the ground, and he spots some shadows on the ground, which don’t seem to be affected by sunlight. He does find a coin, some jewellery and a cup that feels magical. There are some Latin writings on the cup, “May the light bring you to friendship”. It has a picture of two men drinking and toasting each other. In the background, there is maybe a bull, with a man maybe jumping over it.

The cup is silver and good quality. He brings these items out to us, and Maedbh is able to cast some spells on it. 

The effects here seem to be a lot worse than what we’ve seen at other stone circles after the earthquakes. This may be because it was a more powerful than previous years, or it might just be because we got here a lot quicker than before. We decide to stay here the night, though a little bit away, to keep an eye on the place.

Allistor conjures a hut for us to sleep in, but I sleep outside under the stars. We take it in turns to keep watch.

Sometime during a night, a badger wandered into the ruined temple and fell into one of the cracks. Allistor goes in to take a look, and sees that the front half of the badger seems to be swallowed in darkness – even though sunlight is falling on the crack.

He conjures a spell to pull out the badger, loses control and the back half of the badger is pulled out too hard, and smashes into his face. There is no front to the badger.

Allistor covers over the temple with earth.

We head back to Fire’s Heart to check on the surviving magi from Horsingas, They are still unconscious, but do seem to be recovering. So we head back to our covenant.

Checking up on the covenant of Dun-naemhaig, there are known to be two twins residing here, along with a couple of other magi, both Ex Miscellanea – Peigi and Fionnlagh. It’s a new covenant, and we don’t know too much about what they’re up to. But they do seem to be somehow involved in what has been happening.