Mini-Adventures

After fighting off Brother Durham, and returning to the sunlight fields of the monastary, the characters tended their wounds for a day or so, and rested. After Sunrise prayers on Moonday the 16th, Abbot Martine approaches the boys, and asks of them a favor.

As Brother Durham is no longer among the living, the monastary is in need of a teacher for the alcolytes - would some or all of them be willing to take on a few classes, in elementary theology and self-defense?

Jericho and Karmann agree; Kimo and Perrin prefer to see what else there is available to do, and the boys split up for a while.

Kimo leaves first, taking a horse and most of the party's magical gear. He is headed to Corvis, to see if he can find anyone there who might be able to tell them what the magic does, exactly. However, as he reaches the entrance of the valley, he sees a large plume of black smoke coming from the west.

Riding out to investigate, he comes across the remains of the caravan with which the boys had earlier been traveling. One guard is left alive, and tells of an ambush. Although not much is left of the caravan, there are tracks leading away from the road - pretty obvious, even to Kimo's untrained eye (all those years spent traveling with Perrin, and still he hasn't learned to track.)

Following the tracks, they catch up with the remaining bandits - some had been killed in the assault - and return them to their maker in short order.

After spending a few days burying the dead and saying prayers, Kimo sets out again for the nearest place he knows to receive any kind of healing - the monastery he just left. Wounded guard in tow, he returns on Saeday, in time for Sunset prayers.

Meanwhile, Perrin wanders down to the farming village in the valley, and asks around to see if he can help anyone recover from the recent earthquake. A farm woman tells him of her son's lost cow, gone now for quite some time. Perrin agrees to help her son, Jeb, find his cow.

Walking out to the farm, he finds the space in the fence where the cow obviously escaped, and leaves Jeb behind with stern instructions to fix the fence - this is a farm and that should have been done some time ago. He follows the cow's tracks up into the hills.

After following the tracks for nearly the whole day, Perrin sees something in the distance - which doesn't look much like a cow. He continues to follow the tracks, which now seem to be more like deer tracks than cow tracks - although he never saw the change, and he hasn't seen any other tracks cross the cow's. After a whole day and most of a night of tracking, Perrin (who by now is beginning to wonder if he is lost, or if he really cares that much about the cow) he sees that the tracks enter a cave in the side of a great mountain, covered in small white flowers.

Entering with some trepidation, he sees in from of him a great white stag - with more points on his antlers than he can count. The stag speaks, and introduces himself as the Greatstag of Whiteflower Mountain. He tells Perrin of a cow he found wandering in his woods, and thanks him for coming to retrieve the cow. As a gift, the stag gives Perrin a small section of his antlers, which have great martial virtue. He also gives Perrin back the cow, and gives him directions on a shortcut back to the farm.

Shortly after Perrin returns, bearing an armful of corn from the grateful farmers, Karmann finds himself in a sticky situation. One of the acolytes, by the name of Derrin, asks him if the rumors are true - did the party actually kill Brother Durham? Karmann, knowing that Derrin is thought of as a hot-head, glibly lies to him, thus narrowly avoiding a situation in which Derrin challenged his honor in a formal duel.

Although Jericho doesn't approve, generally, of lying, particularly to clergy (or future clergy), he can't help but agree with Karmann's decision. He does, however, ask the Abbott to tell the acolytes the whole story - after the party has left. He suggests framing it as a moral tale of how even the mighty can fall to great evil.

After patching up the caravan guard, Kimo again leaves for Corvis, with an agreement to meet the rest of his friends at the Laughing Falcon on Harbor street, Saeday, 5 Second Month - about two weeks.