The group of wanderers, sell-swords, bounty hunters, dancers, and a Courtesan, accepted a contract to protect the caravan of the Trader Davos Renn for the final part of the journey from Willowford To Ravensreach, finishing at the establishment The Velvet Lantern.
Two days after the actual date the group witnessed the battered caravan stagger into Willowford at desperate speed, pursued by what first appeared to be mere roadside brigands, the party quickly learned the threat was more dire. Another band of hired mercenaries had attempted to hold the line—yet they had been badly mauled in the skirmish. One warrior limped with blood soaking his bandages, another slumped against the wagon with half their armor shattered. The sense was clear: whoever was pursuing this caravan was not a rabble of common thieves. Their ferocity and coordination marked them as something more dangerous.
Recognizing the peril ahead, the caravan master wasted no time. The party was provided with horses to increase their mobility and charged with ensuring the caravan’s survival on the road north to Ravensreach. With little time for rest, the company left Willowford behind, carrying with them the unspoken weight of responsibility—the safety of the goods, the survivors, and perhaps something more hidden within those wagons.
The journey itself was far from uneventful. Shadows trailed them. Scouts and trackers followed at a distance, testing their resolve. The party, a diverse assembly of adventurers, proved more than capable of rising to the threat. The tiefling sorcerer’s raw power, the changeling bard’s cunning, the half-drow soulknife’s precision, the tabaxi drakewarden’s primal bond, and the half-elf psi-warrior’s strange mental discipline all played a part in holding their foes at bay. Twice, bands of pursuers attempted to harass the company, and twice they were scattered—driven back more by the group’s show of force than by the clash of steel. Yet the sense of being hunted did not fade.
Tensions heightened when the drakewarden’s companion lashed out at one of the supposed bandits, tearing through flesh with unmistakable finality. What the party discovered unsettled them—these were no ordinary brigands, but something stranger, their motives obscured.
More troubling still were the visions haunting the psi-warrior. In restless sleep and in brief flashes of waking trance, he beheld a tall, faceless figure garbed in white. Chains of radiant light coiled and uncoiled around its form like living things. Though the figure did not speak, its presence carried both a warning and a weight, as if it were tethered to the fate of this journey.
By the dawn of the fifth day, the road brought them to the desolate clearing known as Old Mill Hollow. Ruined stone walls and moss-choked timbers marked where a village once stood, long abandoned to decay and silence. The air hung heavy with expectation, for the party knew this place had been chosen not by chance but by design. An ambush was coming. The “bandits”—whoever they truly were—would not allow them to pass unchallenged.
