war table mission: project haven

[libratus]

WHO: Petrana, Marcus, Edgard, Silver, Athessa, Isaac, Leander
WHAT: A Summer's End festival weekend
WHEN: Kingsway
WHERE: Cubentquium, an isolated mountain village outside Perivantium
NOTES: The plan is 3 top-levels, one for each section of the plot, RP however you like and I'll chime in with any additional info as needed. Will update warnings as we go. So far: cults, hair, blood.

The Riftwatch agents meet their guides outside a run-down little Chantry in Perivantium. Donata, a wide-smiling and plain-speaking human woman of middling age, is accompanied by two gangly youths to help her corral the assembled few dozen devotees. It's not quite the kind of group they'd been prepared to blend in with — the assembled faithful certainly seem pious enough, but where most pilgrims are the sort who've enough spending money to afford the travel, threadbare clothes and near-empty rucksacks are more the norm here. A pair of siblings are just in from Trevis, is easy enough to overhear; another family from Nessum, but they're the skittish, quiet sort and seem to expect the same from everyone else.

Not among them: the man with the red scarf and sunburst pin the team was told to look for. But then, they're hardly at the rendezvous point yet.

Honored to receive you, is the greeting that goes round with a tin of simple oat cakes from their guides; Blessed are those who give, before the group sets off into the mountains.

For a stretch of space that is, as the crow flies, not so terribly far, the path to Cubentquium is a difficult and winding one. Sharp columns of stone rise pale into paler fog, echoes of their hundred cousins to the north, and between those tight walls twists a labyrinthine path that is in places more rocky crag than walkway. Soft sand gives way to sudden drops; byways that might look a little easier to trod are, on confident assurance from their guides, decidedly not. Moving forward seems to mean doubling back as often as pushing ahead, and none of them would be blamed for forgetting which direction is which — not to worry, their guides know the way.

But when the sky cracks opens above them midway into the afternoon, pissing rain turns their precarious footholds to rushing streams, and Donata calls the group to a halt in the shelter of an outcropping until the storm passes. It's a full night and morning of waiting, wet-shoed and crowded close, before they're able to travel safely again. Thankfully, the last leg of the journey seems to be a straighter shot, and as their shadows begin to get long, the group finally reaches their destination: a deep black lake rimmed in white cliffs and tall, thin trees.

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[sarcophage]

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