“Should we collect the weapons? Some of these are steel… an’ freshly forged.” Cutter eyes some of the polished steel weapons, not quite daring to touch any of them.
“On your guard, Cutter! Now’s not the time for plunder.”
“I don’t know what happened here, but I can sense great magic coming from the stone.”
“More mist tricks, then?” Cutter tears his eyes away from the weapons and turns his attention on Naimar.
“The magic coming from the stone to the best that I can tell is unrelated to The Mist.”
“An’ how do you know all that?” Cutter is clearly becoming unnerved by everything that’s happening. “What kind of tricks are you up to, witch?”
“How can you know this? Do you hear female voices continually around us?”
“I know this because I’m a mage, not a witch, and I can feel it. Yes i can hear the voices.”
Sir Harrow keeps a distance from the clearing. “Faramonds, this is what happens when you travel in indecent company! Your mage has led us to this! The Mist, the wolves, this foul green!”
After the fight is over, after the adrenaline starts to fade and an uncomfortable silence falls on the party, he walks over to Walter’s body. He softly sings a folk ballad about the mountainfolk. His voice rings out calm and clear through the woods. Near the end of the song, Týr comes out of hiding from Baldur’s pocket. He jumps down beside Walter’s lifeless body and prods it gently with his paw. He looks at Baldur plaintively, his large squirrel eyes glistening with the light of the moon.
“Yes brother, I’m afraid I’ve told you a terrible lie. There really were mistwolves, and they have slain our friend Walter.” Týr climbs back onto Baldur’s shoulder. “What, you knew I was lying all along? …Thank you brother.”
Once more, he turns to Walter. “Rest in peace, friend. May we meet again, someday.”
To the party - “He’s got one thing right. We shouldn’t be here.”
During their traipse through the forest, Baldur and Týr engage in idle small talk. Baldur laughs in a low voice from time to time, but his voice rings shallow. The mood is tense. “You really should go back to bed now, brother.” Týr chitters at this. “You can’t sleep? I understand. I too feel unnerved. Oh, how I long for the woods of home.” Baldur bemoans.
Upon reaching the strange clearing, Týr becomes extremely agitated. He jumps frantically onto Baldur’s head and screeches in a high pitch, his tail arched and fluffed out. “This place reeks of Fae magic” Baldur declares nervously. He draws his sword. “Don’t worry brother. I won’t let them do anything else to you.” Týr calms down only slightly.
On full alert, Baldur listens silently to the ongoing conversation. Upon talk of voices, he says out loud. “Whatever they have to say, we do not need to hear it. I think we should be leaving this dread place.”
Naimar approaches the stone and slowly reaches out and presses his palm onto the stone.
“What are you doing?!” Baldur shouts out to Naimar.
Cutter is incensed. “You’re a damned fool!”
“I’ve made contact with a fae spirit. It’s offering a deal to me, Sohan and Hrothgar”
“We may each take a single weapon from the clearing. These weapons are not of fae make but they have been blessed and will serve truer than normal weapons.”
“However, there is a price. These weapons will “claim” the weapons of any they kill. Those claimed weapons must be returned to the clearing or they and those who claimed them will become cursed.”
Cutter is outraged. “Now yer makin’ pacts with fae?! And how come just the three of you get weapons?!” It’s hard to tell if he’s angrier about Naimar communicating with fae or the fact that he might not get a weapon. “What’s to stop me from takin’ one, huh?”
“I wouldn’t do that.” The Ironhall soldier’s voice is barely above a whisper. “They say those who wrong the fae are spirited away with changelings left in their place.”
“What nonsense!”
Naimar walks around and looks at all the weapons. He finally decides on a steel short sword and picks it up an examines it.
“I shall name you Caliban.”
All of the NPCs are disquieted by this. A light breeze kicks through the clearing as Naimar lifts and names the weapon.
:Sohan places her hand on the stone: