Chapter 1: Bloody Portents

Session 1 of my solo Cairn campaign

The blood moon bathed the swamp in a hellish light. The trees ripped at the moonlight and twisted all the shadows into sickening, hyperextended angles. Every cracking branch sounded like more breaking bones to Reed. He'd suffered his fair share in The Marchguard and broken more than he could count. Unconsciously, he adjusted his kettle helm and watched the mirror-still water watch him fidget with it. It felt wrong somehow to disturb the water, and Reed couldn’t help but whisper to his guide Cobb as they trudged on.

“We’re going the wrong way.” Reed marked his guide’s guttering torch bob up and down in the dark ahead.

“S'the blood moon,” Cobb whispered and Reed noticed it — Cobb was scared too. Marchguards noticed things like that, especially out on the frontier. Swampfolk speak half-truths, Reed knew, but if they’re nervous, you should be too.

Cobb slipped and spilled into the mud but managed to keep the torch out of the water. Reed muscled through the muck to catch him up. He took the bird-thin man up under his shoulders and helped him to his feet again.

“Thank ye,” Cobb said, spitting swamp water.

“You alright?” Reed steadied the old man as he wiped the mud from his nose and eyes.

“Aye.” Cobb coughed. “The moon’s blood hides the path.” All the swamp folk talked like that. The Wenderweald was alive to them — a body that birthed them, fed them, and buried them.

Reed was about through with the old man and the bloody swamp — The Marchguard too for that matter. He’d been chasing rumors in the rain and mud for two days now, with no one but Cobb to light the way and lie on about how “it’s not much farther now.”

The old bastard.

“We should have just done like I said and waited for first light.”

“It’ll be gone by then.”

“What will be?” The old man was too cagey by half about it. They all were out here. A superstitious lot who saw bloody portents in every whisp of cloud.

Cobb righted himself and pressed on ahead through the sucking mud. “You Marchguards don’t believe in The Old Ways," he said. He pressed out each word as he lifted his mud-soaked leg out of the mire and plunged it back in with a muted splash. You have to see it to believe it, don’t ye.”

He was right, being fair. The captain would want to know for sure if this was just the moon riling up the swampfolk or if it was something more…problematic. Reed didn't believe all the folktales out here — he didn't believe most of them. But somethings he'd seen that he couldn't explain. Somethings he didn't want explained.

“How much farther?” Reed asked, not really wanting to know.

“Not far, now," Cobbs said. The old man was a few paces ahead now. Far enough to turn the torch into a firefly again.

The two carried on, walking closer at Reed's insistence. And at Cobb's insistence, they picked their path more carefully. "The water listens here, mind," he said. Whatever that meant. True to his word, though, the ground hardened before long and soon rose above the water like a barrow.

Cobb clambered up over the greasy burm and held his torch up. “This is it,” he breathed. He rounded with the torch to help Reed up from the mud. When the Marchguard found his footing, Cobb offered him the torch.

Reed drew his sword before taking the torch from the farmer’s gnarled hand. He pressed through thickets and brambles crowning the rise. The mud stink faded and gave way to burning meat and smoke.

Uphill and out into an opening, Reed found the corpse tree waiting for him.

Lightning struck it — recently. It splintered the wood where it struck and burned its way down to the ground. Coals smoldered within the coughing hollow near the ground where the corpse lay nailed to the trunk. Someone had driven irons through the wretch’s hands and feet, pinning them to the tree. The irons glowed faintly red. The blackened corpse looked up at the bloody moon through empty, smoking eye sockets.

Trudging through the mud

“What the hell is it?” Reed asked.

“A warning,” Cobb whispered. He ambled closer to the corpse, close enough to touch but never did. He knelt beside the exit wound on the tree where the lightning found its victim.

“They’ll come for this,” Cobb said, pointing at the burl. “They'll make a spear shaft from it. A bow maybe. And iron from this one here.” He nodded at the corpse. It gave no reply.

Reed moved closer to inspect the burl for himself. He set the torch down in the sandy loam and leaned his sword against the tree. He slid his leather gloves off and pressed his bare hand to the still-warm burl.

A riot of pain and terror burned inside his mind. The swamp was aflame in white fire. Stygian things hunted in the shadows left by the fires. They slaughtered stags with blades of smoke and bound them to quartered men who begged for death.

“Reed! Reed!” Cobb was shaking him. His vision swam. He tasted blood. He felt it drooling from his nose and ears.

“What happened?” he asked, fighting the urge to vomit. Cobb only stared at him.

“I told you Marchguards. I told you — I warned you didn’t I!”

Reed pulled himself up with his sword, remembering not to touch the tree.

"You saw it — didn't you!" Cobb backed away from the tree and crossed his brow to ward his soul.

“I saw something — a stag and a…man”

“A todorats,” Cobb spit. “A demon!”

“There’s no such thing as…” Reed felt it before he saw it. A shadow passed from the trees out into still water with a grace that was just so…wrong. "There's something out there."

There it was, out beyond the tree in the swamp: his vision. A putrid, half-flensed stag sharing its corpse and spine with a grey-fleshed man. The man was fused by heat to the stag’s back where he might have ridden it. He gripped rusted blades with his raw-boned hands. Damp, white hair spilled over his face like a funeral shroud, but Reed knew he was watching him somehow. They watched each other.

The Todorats with with stat block for Cairn

It charged. Its hooves tore up the mud and water as it took the hill where Reed stood half-drunk from the vision — the terror, the real nightmare bore down on him.

The stag head gored Reed in the belly. He felt the prongs pierce his gambeson and fill his guts with air and blood. The head shook him loose and sent him down the hill into a muddy slump.

Cobb lunged for the torch and thrashed it about at the stag’s head. It reared and kicked, wheeling round where the half-man windmilled his rusted sword and axe.

The sword notched into Cobb's torch.

The axe notched into his head.

Both flew off into the dark.

Reed watched Cobb's body fall at the base of the tree, heels drumming. The todorats trampled the last of the life out of him, charging toward Reed.

His belly burned. Blood poured from his gambeson. Every breath felt stolen from acid-filled lungs.

Reed waited. Waited until the todorats was on him. Waited until it was close enough to cut. In a blink, the flailing mass of antlers and irons was on him. In half a blink, Reed knelt and cut the todorats forelegs out from under it.

It crashed into him, and the two-and-a-half bodies rolled down through the brambles in a vortex of limbs and blades and sharp edges. Reed punched and stabbed all the way down, screaming in pain and fear. They broke over the muddy bank like corpses tossed into a mass grave.

The todorats tried to stand, tried to run out into the water, but its forelimbs were useless. One was cracked and another was back on top of the hill.

The stag half thrashed and bellowed as it began to drown. The man half slashed at Reed uselessly before the mud took it too.

Reed watched them both drown before dragging himself to his feet again.

The swamp water had set his belly wound on fire. Every step was agony. And there were thousands more between him and Fort Greymist.

Reed The Marchguard