Day 11
Having bridged the river, we have been met by dozens of wolves from the great forest to the south.Young Percival was nearly trampled to death in the first waves but forced my last journal into a wolf’s jaws before it crushed his neck. A foolish thing for an apprentice to do, it’s coming from his coffers. Only bits of paper left now. Still… a bit shaken, but he lives and together, we will record these days.
… days we fought them, and their number seems to grow by the hour. The forge fires do naught but glisten in their fangs. And the howling. The howling is draining us. I am not sure there is much left to wring out.
… more of my pages are now ruined, soaked in blood … we cannot seem to escape them.
… silence. The howling has stopped. Is that a distant whimpering I hear? Others are reporting the host retreated further south and they wish to pursue them and cut off the head before it can strike again. A wolf always strikes again.
… the forges have been rekindled and new spears have been assembled. Some of us have decided it best to stay behind and build the defenses. I told Percival he needed to stay and help build a place for us to gather our thoughts. I have joined the rest in pursuit of the host.
Half a day’s journey south, through deep, thick woods, we have finally reached a stark line where the trees have stopped. We found some ruins and in a box under the floor boards, an intact journal. Its pages are blank so I will fill them up.
A wasteland has opened before us. Was there a plague here? The trees are all dead, is it still in the air? The trail has been picked up, and its winding through the hills further south.A deep fog seems to be stalking us. I am not sure when, but the howls have returned. No… no they are less feral and more haunting. More like the moans of a dying man. Wulfgar says he’s seen smokey shapes in the edges of his vision. Sometimes it is just a tree, but other times we all see it. As if someone else is out here, and they simply vanish.
Finally. We have arrived at the mouth of a great cave, and the trail leads further in. Only deafening fog and the sound of breathing. We stink as much as they do, so they don’t seem to know we have come. My writings may be less frequent now, we go to finish this.
It appears that as we humans have started to reclaim the barren lands, the wolves have been forced to retreat to the dens in the mountains. A smaller pack was here than we left at the water’s edge. These dens are not entirely of natural make as well. Somebody, or something, has dwelled here many years past.It seems they built a temple and that perhaps the priests that served at it lived within the carved homes in the earthen walls of the nearby passageways. Perhaps the plague that seems to have gripped the land above took them all. Maybe it was natural causes. One thing is for sure. They are all dead, and only we and the wolves stalk these shadows now.
Valkyre
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