D&D: Belle is Laid to Rest

Tragedy last night in the land of Abhaile. Here's last time.

Our heroes have won their battle against the demon-horses. The villagers start to emerge, beginning with a strongly-built older gent, clearly a village leader of some kind. He approaches the characters and introduces himself as Uilliam, and thanks them for their assistance. A moment later, a young teen boy arrives with a basket of fruits and nuts harvested from the are. The adventurers thank them and start to shake off the aches and wounds from battle. 

Uilliam tells them that yesterday, a man in robes rode into this village, called Rí Na Bláthanna. They thought he was an adventurer at first, but then realized he was covered in blood. When they approached, he cast some kind of spell and blew them all backwards with a thundering crack, and then raised up a stone tablet and said something that they couldn't hear. His horse became that obscene creature with the saddle half-merged in its flesh, and it galloped around and infected all the other horses in the village. The villagers had been holed up in the lodge since, keeping the monsters back but trapped. The man ran off to the north, up into the hills. 

The heroes go and round up their own horses, and then stay the night, and Uilliam arranges for some hot water to wash off the horse goop. They learn that the village grows flowers on the hills, as well as fruits and nuts, and herds sheep. In the morning the villagers provide breakfast and the heroes mount up - Uilliam's grandson has brushed and tacked their horses. Zook and Aisling have a quick conversation, and then Aisling gives the boy a small bag of gold so that they can start to replace their horses. The boy, overwhelmed, hugs her and thanks her tearfully. He tells them that the village grows flowers and brings them to Cian, and the hills around the village looked really beautiful, "before the otherness came." Dara casts a spell to repair the damage the demon horses did to the flowers, and the heroes set out.

The terrain gets rocky and difficult pretty quickly, so Dara turns into a goat to scout ahead, figuring that even if the wizard sees her, he's unlikely to suspect a goat. She spots him sitting on a flat plateau with a big, rocky outcropping above it, just staring out over the valleys. But as she watches, a huge insect-like creature with a long, sharp proboscis crawls out of a hole in the rock. 

This, but bigger than a person

Dara knows that the others are riding up, and figures it's better to get a shot in quickly. As soon as the others are in sight, she changes back to elf form and calls down lightning on the bug! 

Lightning crackles down and strikes it. It buzzes its wings angrily, and to Dara's horror, two more of them crawl out of the rock. The battle is joined, but right away the heroes realize that they are in danger. The first bug swoops down and skewers Dara with its proboscis, draining the life from her. She remains conscious, but acutely aware of how close to death she suddenly is. 

The others ride into the area. Zook, riding up, hurls a fireball at the area where the wizard was standing and catches him and two of the bugs. He hears a yelp of pain and the wizard runs back into the cave. Zook also notes that while the fire does burn the bugs, it kind of sluices off their chitin a little more readily than it should - definitely creatures of demonic origin. Dara, realizing that the others are going to take a bit to get here, turns into a panther and bites at the bug attacking her.

Clara leaps from her horse and runs for the rock face, thinking she'll climb up and get to the wizard before he sees her. Zook, noting her intent, casts haste to speed her up. Fearg rides up the hill, and then jumps off and rages, charging up to the creature trying to eat Dara and whacking it with Shol, his magic ax. 

The other two zoom down towards the other group. Belle hits one with an arrow, but it lands on her horse in front of her and stabs her, drinking her blood. The third one attacks Keenan, and Zook watches in horror as Keenan's skin becomes taught. Keenan panics a bit ("TOO BIG BUGS") and hurls a spell at one of them, shrinking it to about the size of a person, which is still far too big, but better.

Aisling throws some healing at Keenan, and beats on her drum to inspire the others. Clara scampers up the rock and sees the wizard at the back of the cave, nowhere to go. She runs up to him and pummels him into unconsciousness, and quickly ties him up, figuring they'll want to interrogate him later. She turns and runs out of the cave, but things aren't going well.

These bugs can take a frightening amount of punishment - Fearg strikes with his ax, Dara sinks panther-fangs, Aisling fires crossbow bolts and Zook throws magic missiles around. But they aren't able to get the one on Belle's horse away, and it stabs her through the chest. She collapses off her horse and falls to the ground, unmoving. Aisling leaps off her horse and tries to heal her, but her skin remains pale and bluish. She is gone.

Another of the bugs stabs Fearg, and he falls and slides down the hill. The third buzzes its wings, and Zook falls unconscious from the noise. But Clara leaps off the rock and pummels one of them, and Aisling throws a healing word at Fearg and he awakens. He charges up the hill and rages again, cutting one of the bugs in half!

The fight suddenly seems winnable! Dara calls down a moonbeam onto a bug, while Keenan smacks the other and shocks it. It tries to stab Zook, but his lingering shield spell protects him, and the others weaken it until Fearg gets down the hill. He strikes with Shol, and cleaves it in two. Meanwhile, Clara punches the last one, burning her hand on Dara's moonbeam but crushing its head. The fight is over...

...but Belle is beyond help. Clara tells them that Pól is up on the plateau, and Fearg wipes the goo from his ax. Aisling says that they need to question him, but Fearg makes it clear that he's not walking away from this. 

Dara, Clara, and Aisling climb up the hill (Dara quaffs a potion of mind reading she'll been saving). They find Pól trying to get free, but they put a stop to that - Dara calls up a shillelagh and he calms. They ask him about the tablet and why he did all this. He says that the tablet showed him horrible and beautiful things, and let him call on blessings he never imagined. Dara peers into his head and sees an undercurrent of black murder, but no possession, no magical influence. Clara asks when this all happened, and he claims that these demonic entities have been here in Abhaile forever. "Why should we deny the truth?" he asks, and the murder in his brain grows engorged. 

Dara looks closer, and she realizes something truly disquieting. Something made him like this, but not magically. If Pól were a stream in the forest, something didn't alter the content of the water, it changed the course of the stream, which is just as weird as it sounds. The three of them press him a little more about his motives, what he was hoping to accomplish, here, what truths he learned from the tablet. He claims he used it to make contact with entities from the Nine Hells, and seems unafraid and unconcerned. "It's worth it," he says. "It's divine."

At this point Fearg climbs into the cave. He walks to Aisling and cups her cheek with his hand. "I love you," he says, "but I need you to leave the cave and go back down the hill." Aisling nods, and she, Dara, and Clara leave. They tell each other that there's no point in letting him live, even if Fearg could be convinced.

They hear Fearg's cry of rage behind them, and then a series of blows, starting with the ax hitting flesh and eventually changing to the ax hitting rock. Fearg emerged, covered in blood, but the ax oddly clean. 

Keenan, meanwhile, tells the others that he and Fearg need to go to Belle's home village of Osclaimid. He says that he can't ask them to go along, but Zook says that as far as he's concerned, they're all the same party at this point. Aisling asks if they're taking Belle back there, but Keenan laughs and says she hated her home village. Dara suggests laying her to rest in Rí na Bláthanna, and Keenan says she'd like that - on a hill, able to see for miles, is where she'd want to stay.

The heroes retrieve their horses and ride in silence back to the village. Uilliam comes out to meet them again, but his face falls when he sees the empty horse and Fearg carrying a body. He is, of course, quite willing to let them bury her on the nearby burial hill, and at sunrise the next day, the six of them gather around her fresh grave.

Keenan starts, and explains that his mother was a witch, and his village decided she was evil and drove the two of them away. They traveled east and met up with Belle, and found a nice little town for his mom to live in. But then he and Belle met Losh, the bard, and the three of them traveled north but met Fearg coming out of the north. They didn't want to go further north since Fearg had just come from there, Belle was from the east, Keenan from the west, so they headed into central Abhaile until they met a group of adventures losing a fight to an ogre. Keenan says that Belle was quiet, but competent. He says that she's the one who was likely to know things that were helpful, whereas he tends to know things that aren't helpful.  

Zook agrees - with Belle being competent, anyway. She was stoic, but a skilled ranger and clearly had the same regard for others and desire to do right that brings any adventurer into this. Dara notes that as an outdoorsy sort of person who generally keeps things inside, she felt some kinship with Belle.

Aisling does not offer a eulogy, but instead sings a funeral song common to her region. The heroes stand around the grave for a moment, listening to her song, and then quietly walk back down the hill. Keenan carries Belle's bow and boots to return to her family in Osclaimid.