Go ahead, sing it, get it out of your system. Here's last time.
Our heroes rent some horses (not bad ones) and head out after Pól, the wizard apprentice who apparently murdered their friend Luch and fled with the Madoc Tablet. He's got a two-day head start, but that's no problem for Belle. Tracking turns out to be not difficult anyway, as he mainly sticks to the road. He seems to be heading north, and of course as the characters travel, the terrain gets hillier.
They ride their horses hard, but not hard enough to hurt or overstress them. After a day and some change, they arrive at the foot of a hill on the top of which is a village. The hillside is covered in flowers, but Zook notes that there are furrows in the flowers, like paths maybe? But they seem irregular. Weird.
The adventurers ride to the top of the hill, and see a few houses and a larger, central building - maybe a communal kitchen. They also see a dead horse lying on the ground, a bunch of arrows sticking out of it. No people are evident, and there's a general air of dread.
Dara, who's been just galloping along as a horse herself, changes back into elf form. Aisling hops down off her horse and calls out, and someone opens a shuttered window in the main building and sticks his head out. He asks after their horses, and Aisling says they're fine. The man says that the horses here are infected.
Aisling doesn't have time to ask what he means - a group of horses charge them! Four of them are ugly, green-grey things with running sores and wild looks in their eyes, but the fifth is even worse. Its mouth is distended into a vicious maw, its big chompy teeth cracked into pointed fangs. It is wearing a saddle, but the saddle seems to have melded with its flesh. Aisling smacks her horse on the butt and sends it away - if this condition is infected, she doesn't want her horse getting it. Fearg, Keenan, and Clara follow suit.
The infected horses slam into the characters! Clara, Aisling, Dara, and Fearg all take hooves to the noggin, and all but Aisling are knocked to the ground. A fifth horse charges Belle and kicks at her, but she keeps control of her own mount and isn't as badly rattled. Zook throws a firebolt at the "leader" horse, but the fire just licks around it harmlessly. "Demons," he mutters.
Clara gets up and scampers to a rooftop, taking a breath to regain her composure (and a Second Wind). Dara stands up and calls down a moonbeam on the leader horse, and Aisling follows that up with a cloud of daggers. Fearg picks himself up and rages, lashing out with his ax, and Belle dismounts and starts shooting arrows. The horses lash out - the main one biting at Zook, but its teeth stopped by his shield spell. Clara leaps back into the fray, trying to land on a horse, but misses and lands next to it. She shrugs and punches the beast in the head, knocking it down.
Others aren't so lucky, however. The horse Clara knocked gets back up and kicks her into unconsciousness, and then rears up and continues kicking! Fearg and Dara are likewise downed. Aisling throws a healing word at Dara, figuring that she can then heal the others, and shoots a horse with her crossbow. Keenan reaches out and smacks a horse on the snoot ("BAD HORSE"), and casts a shocking grasp spell, and Zook throws magic missiles around. The leader horse falls dead, but the others are still alive and kickin', literally!
Belle surveys the battlefield and sees the horse kicking Clara to death, and puts an arrow in its head, killing it. Aisling notes that Fearg is down and yells a healing spell at him, and he gets up and rages again, chopping madly at a horse, while Keenan fires crossbow bolts (he's realized that his offensive spells basically all involve fire, which doesn't seem to work on these things). The heroes manage to keep themselves alive and conscious long enough to fell the horses, one by one, and soon they all lay dead.
As for what infected them (and, indeed, what's become of their own horses), we'll find that out next time!
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