The Maiden
After meeting with the hermit in our Pendragon campaign, we have blessed bread and wine, a dog and some vague directions on how to get to Dunwich. The Saxon witch is meant to be there, who we think is responsible for the silver blight which is destroying crops and people.
We are heading into Anglia, which is inhabited by the Angles. The Angles aren’t entirely Saxon, but they are sort of Saxon, so we might have to kill them anyway. The new Angle king is said to be a warlock, and his people might not like knights of Arthur wandering through his territory.
The best route might be to follow the River Stour down to the main road, and then head up the coast. There may be less chance of running into local knights compared to following the roads.
As we travel, we notice that the peasantry are looking gaunt, and the sheep and cattle are in poor condition. The further we go along the river, the worse things seem to get. It’s almost as if the colour is being leached out of the land.
Talking to the peasants, the sickness started at the harvest last year. They think it may be because of the new king, though I suggest that I heard that it was caused by the Saxons. One of them had been to Yarmouth, and said that the forest around Eye is blasted. At the edge, the trees are like ash. In the centre. There used to be a church where the nuns used to make a lovely honey mead.
Now it is completely sucked of all life. The church is overgrown with briars. And the nearby village has been afflicted, sitting in the middle of a weeping thicket. It was not completely deserted, but the inhabitants weren’t quite right.
There were also animals which were attacking him.
We head onwards, and the river becomes scummy and nasty. We quickly stop drinking from it, and rely on rain water to refill our water bottles.
Talking to more peasants, things are bad. Even their beer is manky and smells bad. The woods were always uncanny, but they have got worse according to our host. There have been spirits in the wood – ghostly warriors and draugr. There are old things in the forest of the giants and things that came before. Unclean buildings of stone. The lambs this year didn’t have hooves, but instead had twisted claws. They sent to their King Incel son of Eomar, but haven’t heard anything back. I mention that we have been sent by King Arthur to try and fix things.
He knows someone who met a witch on the road. She cursed him, and now his entire village has become afflicted. They are like they have turned to goblin-kind. He was always greedy and miserly, and now he and his village are always sniffing out gold and money.
As we head towards Eye, the land becomes grey. The trees are dying and the water is stagnant and green. There is a region of blighted animals, so we try to go around them. We hear a bizarre, liquid howling noise that comes from things which are no longer wolves. Deciding to deal with the wolves, we end up running into the silver blighted animals anyway.
The wolves are flesh and bone, and look like they should have been dead in the ground weeks ago. I ride down one of the wolves, rendering it unconscious. Sir Lupinus strikes his, and it seems to explode into pieces with the force of his charge.
The wolves defeated, the blighted sheep are moving towards us in a threatening fashion. But we ride off and ignore them.
Riding through the forest, Sir Madog starts singing to try and raise our spirits, but his singing isn’t great. Myself and Sir Lupinus start up, and we both manage to drown him out.
This may raise our spirits, but it also seems to raise other spirits. Ghostly forms of ancient knights rise from the ground. They are banging on their shields in time to our singing. Our stirring martial sound about the round table, and possibly dancing, seems to cause them to decide not to attack us. Instead, they vanish into the forest.
We come to a small, ramshackle village surrounded by willow trees. As we approach, a man stumbles out of one of the houses, grubbing at the ground. He looks somewhat demented, with long clawed fingers.
He says he is the headman of the village, and claims nothing has happened to him. He seems to be seeing gold and silver everywhere though, clutching at bits of dirt as if it were of great value.
He tried to charge a woman on the road for the toll. She ‘gifted’ him and his village with gold and silver. She did something to the women as well, though his burblings aren’t clear.
The maidens serve the great witch. They have toads on their head, which possibly control them. One of them comes out of the buildings towards us. She looks rotted and diseased, and has snakes twisting around her and a toad on her head.
Sir Madog charges at her, leaping from his horse onto her. He grabs the toad from her head, throwing it into the bushes as it hisses at him.
I find the toad, and stab it with my sword. It writhes and turns into a mass of worms that twist and fall apart. The maiden turns into a young woman, and starts sobbing and clutching at Sir Madog. It appears the maidens of the village were taken to the ruins and turned by the witch.
She only speaks Angle, so it is tricky to understand her. The headman though speaks Cymric as well, so we are able to translate through him.
What she knows: The village used to be quite a nice village, and even Weormund, the headsman, wasn’t too bad. They had cows and sheep and were well off.
Then a lady came through, and Weormund tried to double charge her, and then things went bad. The lady lives at an old place of the ancients, which is surrounded by twisted thorns. The maiden was forced to serve her as a servant. She can show us where the place is, or at least the start of the path which leads to the place.
She doesn’t want to go back there, and also doesn’t want to stay in the village with Weormund.
We though have no choice. It is our knightly duty to deal with the witch. Fortunately we have the magical raven charms which Merlin gave us, as well as blessed bread and wine from the hermit. We pray that it will be enough.
