August 30, 2026
7th Thelkhastix
The Torchbearers returned to the mountain. They scaled the cliff face without difficulty and made their way across the mountaintop.
11th Thelkhastix
The party arrived at the far side of the mountain, looking down the cliff face above the eyrie. They rigged ropes and pulleys for the siege toboggan, and then rested to assault the eyrie with the horizontal morning light.
12th Thelkhastix
The loaded siege toboggan moved slowly at first, but it picked up speed. As it matched and then began to outpace the pushers, they leapt aboard. The ropes whizzed through sockets on the toboggan. Then they rode over the edge, becoming weightless as the toboggan arced across and down, down; then the ropes thrummed taut, and the party were pressed into their seats, then light again as the vehicle arced back up toward the cleft in the wall.
One orc, squinting into the morning light, saw the broad shadow of the siege toboggan and cried, “A great eagle!”
A short wall with two towers stood across the lip of the eyrie. Ormar threw a grenado at one tower, and the party’s archers picked off all but one of the orcs; Viraesse leapt from the toboggan and cut him down.
Save for the explosion, the party had landed quietly and without an alarm raised. At this late (to the nocturnal rukkator) hour, none were out and about in the camp.
The rest of the party disembarked the toboggan. One orc exited the commander’s tent, and was silenced with an arrow. The party crept forward, staying within the broad beam of sunlight projected through the mouth of what proved to be a broad and shallow cave.
A group of orcs exited a supply tent, and the party went loud. Gunter and Ormar set the supply and commander’s tents alight, and orcs began to stream out of the tents.
The party fought in an arc formation at the center of the sunlight. The rukkator struggled to strike them, but some archers hanging in the shadows peppered them. A great armored serjeant struck Vira a couple of grievous blows, but he fell.
At the last, one archer remained. He upended a pot of oil or spirits over his head and muttered a prayer to the effect of pledging his life’s blood to the Ironhand’s earthwetting. Gunter shot him dead before he could charge through the fire at them.
Vira staunched the wounds of the serjeant while the others tossed the commander’s tent and a supply hut. From the flames they pulled a set of encrypted messages, and from the supply hut weapons, including a magical handgonne barrel inlaid with copper depicting a storm giant. When affixed to a haft and the giant’s name was spoken, the barrel electrified bullets that were shot from it. The supply hut also held the payroll for the camp, including gold and silver bars (the latter marked with symbols of the dark elves, another underworld empire) alongside the usual iron chits.
Gunter began interrogating the revived serjeant. Throughout, the orc made clear his opinion of humans as citified, emasculated unter-orc-en bred into compliant lapdogs by long association with the elves. He answered Gunter’s questions with a readiness that suggested to the party that they weren’t asking anything of real strategic value. Eventually, as he was a prisoner and patient under Vira’s care and therefore sacrosanct, they released him to carry a warning back to the other orcs.
15th Thelkhastix
The party returned to Vira’s lair and cracked the encrypted messages. They used a simple rotation cypher where every other word was encrypted based on the date of the message; they didn’t find the pattern to the remaining words, but they were able to find the rotation value by working backward from encrypted proper nouns.
