March 22, 2026
4 Khordrak
As the Torchbearers were bedding down for the night, they heard horses screaming. They went to the edge of Broken Shield’s bluff and looked over. On the other side of the frozen river, the bright moonlight revealed a handful of horses. Every few moments, a horse would dart toward Broken Shield, rear, and plunge back into the dubious shelter of a line of hillocks.
The Torchbearers geared up and slid down the bluff to cross the river. A pair of wolves darted out of cover behind the hillocks. As they drew their ranged weapons, a second pair of wolves crawled from the concealment of the river bed and leapt upon them.
With desperation, the Torchbearers dispatched the wolves. They hurried forward to retrieve the horses. As they returned, they saw a fifth wolf standing on the crest of the hillock, watching them. At Ormar’s command, Hilda killed it with a fire bolt.
5 Khordrak
The Torchbearers set out for Holbeck, a longer leg of the journey that would require doubling back for part of the distance.
In the afternoon, they came upon a bridge over a gorge. The bridge was blocked with a wrecked wagon that bore the sign of an anchor with a lidded eye over its ring. Disassembling the wagon to make the bridge passable to their sleds, they found that a message had been carved on the underside of the cart. Weathered by age, they reconstructed it (including their raw guesswork) as:
THEY LOOK LIKE WOLVES
THEY TALK LIKE MEN
THEY TOOK US **ST
where the last word was either west or east, but the first two letters had weathered away.
Unwilling to divert their existing mission on a 50-50 guess, the Torchbearers put themselves on guard against strange voices and continued to Holbeck.
At Holbeck, they heard that the wolves had been hounding villagers back into the village whenever they tried to leave.
6 Khordrak
In the light of the morning, the Torchbearers found that the village was built on a perfectly round hill with a ditch around it. They asked the local vicar about the history of the village, and he told them about several stone sculptures that had been found when the root cellar for the pub was recently dug. The sculptures were about the length of a forearm and shaped like slender teardrops. They had been driven point-down into the earth. The top of each depicted a different sort of stock character with a corresponding emotion. The vicar said that they had found many more stakes, but kept only one of each design and replaced the others as neatly as they could.
Smelling a barrow full of treasure, Gunter led the party on a circuit of the ditch, looking for an entrance. He found nothing. Bribing a barmaid to let him investigate the pub cellar, he pried up a flagstone or two and found frozen earth beneath them. Asking the vicar about landmarks that predated the village, they learned that the fountain at the center of town was built on a slab of rock jutting from the crown of the hill. They investigated the fountain, drawing a crowd. Finally Ormar asked for permission to dismantle the fountain and excavate the barrow, which was not forthcoming; the headman said that whatever eternally rested down their had been perfectly neighborly so far and he wouldn’t let a bunch of rootless adventurers provoke it.
7 Khordrak
The Torchbearers departed Holbeck for the village of New Holbeck. Their path took them through the abandoned village of Sharnwick, which had lain empty for years.
Walking the streets of Sharnwick, they found wolf prints in the powdery snow of the streets. An unrecognizable body hung from the tree in the village square. A tall watchtower stood in the highest part of town.
Ormar climbed the watchtower to take a look around. There were wolf prints in the snow atop the tower. Looking over the snowy landscape, he saw little movement but the smoke from chimneys of isolated farmsteads and Holbeck, which was just visible on the horizon.
But down just a short way outside of town, on a broad slope that led to a gully, he saw a figure in blue lying in a patch of scarlet snow.
As the Torchbearers approached the body, they heard a child screaming from under a bridge that crossed the gully. They lingered just long enough to flip the body over and see that its throat had been torn out.
Sliding down into the valley, they found that the voice was issuing from the mouth of a burrow just wide enough for a child to enter comfortably. Steeling themselves to face a wolf mimicking human speech, Ormar, Smee, and Hilda slid into the burrow. The floor was covered in bones.
On guard outside, Gunter and Moran heard the clicking of four paws upon the stone bridge above. Moran turned himself invisible and slipped away from the bridge, seeing a wolf’s head peering over the balustrade.
Hilda lit her matchlock as the voice lured them forward. In the lead, Ormar slipped and plunged into a pit. With a blur of motion, a furred form leapt from beneath the bones and knocked Ormar out of the fight, smothering his light. A similar form emerged and leapt at Hilda. Smee said, “That’s not a-” as Hilda blindly fired her blunderbuss in the direction of the noise.
Gunter followed Moran out of cover and drew his bow on the visible wolf’s head. The head lifted into the air, proving to be attached to the bipedal body of a creature that drew its own bow.
The body she had just shot slid past Hilda, a weapon clattering from its grip. Hilda yelled, “They walk like men!” as Smee leapt onto the head of the one about to butcher Ormar in the pit.
Outside, the creature loosed an arrow, then dropped its bow and leapt down with an axe and shield. The owner of the other pair of paws, a second such creature, also leapt down, and the pair began to chase Gunter.
Gunter dropped one of them and then began climbing out of the gully, but the second creature ran faster than he could climb and began snapping at his feet. Moran made his way onto the bridge and killed this second.
Hilda and Smee finished off the final creature, and Smee gave Ormar first aid in the dark.
With the party regrouped under the bridge, Moran identified the creatures as a type of beastmen, alchemically melded from wolves and men by the ancient wizards of Felstad in the far north. Once used as shock troops, they escaped into the wild and now kill for sport anything else that goes on two legs.
Hilda placed one of the carcasses on the sled.
