The Curse of the Nentir Vale (closed)

It has become a rare thing to find a merchant caravan leaving Daggerdale to head north along the old King’s Road. Years ago, the Road had been a safe route, connecting the great coastal port city-state of Neverwinter to the Dalelands. The King’s Road starts at Waterdeep, and bisects the Dalelands as it heads west. At Daggerdale, the Road heads north, through the woodlands of the Harken Forest and into the sparsely populated Nentir Vale, before heading west again, crossing the Stonemarch Mountains and descending into Neverwinter.

In the Dalelands, the Lords and Ladies have a long history of bickering, backstabbing, and political intrigue, and tensions between the houses have been rising of late. They turn a blind eye to maintaining security along the Road in the Nentir Vale, as they have recalled their troops and civil war amongst the houses grows imminent. Meanwhile, Neverwinter’s presence in the Vale has dissipated, and it is rumored that the great city-state has been laid low by a vicious plague. Monsters, bandits, and warlords have laid claim to more and more of the Nentir Vale, and travel along the King’s Road has grown treacherous.

The recent assassination attempt on Lord Cyril Darksteel of Daggerdale was a marked escalation of tensions in the Dalelands. War is coming, and a number of merchants know that great profits could be reaped if the trade route to Neverwinter is reestablished. They are offering very good pay for anyone good with a sword and willing to brave the three hundred mile journey.

The old wives’ tales warn folks to do no harm to the trees of the Harken Forest, and to never stray from the King’s Road. The cursed druids of the woods do not take kindly to axes.

There are three towns along the King’s Road in the Nentir Vale: Harkenwold, which is really more a grouping of small villages; Fallcrest, at the intersection of the King’s Road and the Nentir River; and Winterhaven, at the foot of the Stonemarch Mountains.

Arastina Hardwood

Arastina Hardwood leapt nimbly up the last few flights of stairs towards the observatory at the top of Master Uevareth’s tower. Master Uevareth himself was no longer spry or energetic enough to make the climb to the top of the tower unless he absolutely had to, so the observatory had become Arastina’s retreat when she wished to be alone with her thoughts, which seemed to be more and more these days now that her apprenticeship was effectively over. She’d passed her exams for journeyman wizard nearly three months ago, but the few settlements of the Nentir Vale, which was the only thing remotely close to “civilization” nearby, were the ass end of nowhere as far as Arastina could tell, and not big enough to have a Wizard’s Guild Hall. So she had been waiting for certification of her test results to come since late autumn. Now spring was right around the corner and here she still sat moldering away in this moldy old tower. At least up in the observatory, the air would be fresh, if still cold with winter’s last bite. The Master felt winter’s chill far more than Arastina and kept the inside of the tower almost stiflingly warm. As she pushed open the door to the rooftop platform that housed the observatory a chill breeze burst down the stairway and pressed her cloak tight against her body, revealing curves that were not at all typical of elven women.

For years Arastina had been told that she was ugly by nearly every elven woman she knew, except her mother, who doted on her. “Your hips are too wide!” a seamstress had first told her before she even started adolescence. A few years after that it would be her classmates pointing and giggling at her ass, comparing it to an apple or a peach for the way that it thrust itself out in a near half circle from the line of her back. The final indignity had been her breasts, which grew to immense size when most other girls her age were still flat-chested. That had really gotten them muttering, always just loud enough for Arastina to hear, that there must be some human blood in her family’s ancestry. That had led to a couple of fights between her and the other girls and eventually they learned to keep their comments amongst themselves. Though Arastina could still hear the laughter that resulted from whispered comments amidst them whenever she passed by. Her mother told her the other girls were just jealous. But jealous of what? Arastina had always wondered, until she started to notice the boys. Their reaction to her seemed to be totally different than the girls. The boys seemed to get all flustered and tongue-tied whenever she was nearby, sometimes even breaking off their conversations with other girls to just stare at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. The other girls would shoot venomous daggers at her with their eyes whenever the boys ignored them to look at her. But she’d never really had time to figure out what that was all about, because it was quite coincidentally at that time that her father arranged for private tutors for her instead of the public classes that most of the other elven children attended.

Finally out in the fresh air, Arastina sighed with relief. The tower was not especially tall as such things go, but it was tall enough to elevate her above even the tallest trees in the surrounding Winterbole forest. Which is not actually saying very much, she thought. Because to her the trees in the forest below looked gnarled and stunted. Certainly not like the trees in the forests back home. As usual, thoughts of home brought a frown to her lovely face as the wind teased out a few ringlets of copper colored hair that had escaped her braid. Why her father had sent her hundreds of miles north through wild, nearly uninhabited country to apprentice to the ancient wizard, Master Uevareth, was entirely beyond Arastina. When she had put her foot down and declared her firm intention to train as a Questing Wizard despite her father’s objections, there had been plenty of much closer and much younger Master Wizards who had offered to train her. In fact, she reflected, many of them reminded her much more of the dashing young Questing Wizards in the stories her mother had read to her as a child. Her mother had been enamored by such stories and had made sure that Arastina became so too. It had been the romance and adventure of those stories that had enthralled the young elf even if the stories seemed far too vague about what happened when the young wizards returned to claim the joyous elf maids they had left to impress in the first place.

Still, the stories had left Arastina convinced that the life of a Questing Wizard was the one for her, not that of the waiting maiden. She just wished that she knew a little bit more about the world at large. The fact that she didn’t was not exactly her fault, she reflected. Her tutors had been amazingly evasive whenever Arastina wanted to know about the nearby realms and Master Uevareth had been isolated in his tower for so long that most of his information about even the immediate neighborhood seemed woefully out of date, based on the little Arastina had seen on her way here. Master Uevareth talked about a bustling community of dwarves off to the east, but Arastina had not seen a single one on her way here. And when he spoke of the human communities in the Vale, he spoke as if they were much larger than any settlement she had seen. It might have been centuries since Master Uevareth had left his tower as far as she could tell. She didn’t know what had happened to the Nentir Vale in that time, but it didn’t seem that it could have been good. It’s almost like my father wants to keep me deliberately in the dark about the world. Then she shook her head and smiled. But that’s ridiculous, father loves me and only wants what’s best for me!

Arastina looked out towards lake Nen, lying east of the tower, still showing ice around the shoreline. The Vale didn’t get much snow during the winter and most of what there had been this year had already melted, leaving the forest an ugly combination of brown mud, the gray boles of slumbering deciduous trees, and the dark, yellowish-green of the local evergreens. It would be completely transformed in a month or so, with spring-bright green leaves on the trees and wildflowers and other plants blanketing the ground, but for now, the forest slept. Except that it didn’t. Arastina wasn’t really sure what she was seeing at first, just movement among the trees, a lot of movement. And a smell... wood smoke. Both utterly familiar and yet totally out of place up here. The Master’s fireplace vented far below, allowing the wind to carry off the smoke so it would not rise to obscure observations of the night sky. The closest settlement was Fallcrest about three days travel to the south, past the Gray Downs and the joining of the White and Nentir rivers, so there was absolutely no way there could be smoke up here unless... suddenly it dawned on her in a cold rush, some large group of… men? orcs? something, was camped and moving through the forest! Arastina might be wildly naive about a lot of things, but even she knew that very few things caused fire-using races to move in large groups through otherwise uninhabited land. She raced for the stairs and started barreling down them in a very unladylike manner, her breasts bouncing almost obscenely in her haste, shouting for Master Uevareth. “Master, Master, there’s… there’s an army out in the woods!”

Master Uevareth was snoring softly in his armchair across from the fireplace, an ancient tome open across his lap. The elderly elf’s eyes flew open at Arastina’s shouted warning. Slowly, he pushed himself up from the oversized chair and grabbed his staff, the crystal at the top warming to life at his grasp. “Don’t be ridiculous, child,” he scolded as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “There hasn’t been an army in the Nentir Vale in a hundred years.”

Still, he knew his apprentice was hardly the type to jump to conclusions or invent stories out of the blue. He slowly made his way towards a wall lined with shelves, which held all manner of jars and bottles containing his many collected spell components. Arastina had harvested many of them herself as part of her education. He pulled down a glass jar filled with eyeballs, opened it, and pulled one out. He raised the slimy eyeball to his mouth and whispered for a moment before tossing it up in the air.

Up in the air, the eyeball floated for a moment, defying gravity, and then sprouted a pair of leathery, bat-like wings. It flapped the wings a few times, and then promptly flew out of an open window. Master Uevareth then made his way to the center of the tower, where upon a dais sat a pedestal covered in a black velvet cloak. The ancient elf removed the cloak, revealing a crystal ball beneath; misty, dark purples and reds swirled within. Another few whispered words, and the cloudy colors within the globe retreated, replaced with a vision of trees, and smoke, campfires.

Arastina had only seen Master Uevareth use the crystal ball a handful of times during her years here, but it was clear that what they were seeing in the crystal ball was whatever that flying eyeball was seeing. It swept through the forest around the tower. They were surrounded, it appeared. It was too dark to make out just what types of creatures comprised this host, but then the eye came upon an imposing figure, clearly the chief of this warband.

His armor was like black ice, shimmering menacingly. His helm was shaped like a human skull. And then, suddenly, he snapped to attention, and turned his gaze directly upon Master Uevareth and Arastina! He raised a gauntlet towards the flying eye, palm open, facing upwards. A terrible purple glow emanated from within the skull-helm, where eyes should have been, and then he closed his hand into a fist, and the crystal ball shuddered for a moment and suddenly began to glow brightly with that same purple energy!

“Get back!” Master Uevareth cried, reaching out towards Arastina and trying to push her back off the dais.