Skara Braens

Part 3

Part 2 Vote Tally

Option A: 3
Option B: 2
Option C: 0

Onwards!

You turn left, and start to walk.  The wooden path creaks beneath your feet, and you notice that it's thoroughly rotten in some places.  Careful where you place your feet, you make your slow way around the muddy, pocked field that greeted you when you exited the stone chamber.  Though you avoid the worst of that field, it doesn't look much better anywhere else.

Dead grass, without life for so long now it's grey, sticks up in sad tufts.  Bones litter the ground between the tufts.  Some you can easily recognise as belonging to livestock - sheep and cattle and the like.  Others are so cracked and aged, they could be anything.  At the base of the hill over which the path you follow roams, you see a human skull, stuck fast on the end of a spear planted in the ground.  Sun-bleached ribbons tied to the spear and jaw bone of the skull flap lazily in the morning breeze.  They must have been colourful once, but are now a grimy tan colour.

You pause to examine the skull.  There is nothing that unusual about the thing itself, but it does pose a number of questions.  Was this a territorial marker of some kind?  Did it warn travellers that danger lay beyond?  Was it meant to threaten or to help?  Your curiosity now piqued, you move forward.

Cresting the hill, you pause to give your lungs and legs a rest.  The landscape before you also gives you pause.  The path you walk descends the hill into what looks like an old battlefield.  There are corpses everywhere.  Many of them are wearing the exact same thing, clothing of green with green, round helms.  Some were carrying tan-coloured packs on their backs.  Many of the corpses wore those packs still.

You see an enclosed four-wheeled wagon of some kind, tipped on its side, a massive hole blown through the side facing the sky.  How that wagon moved you cannot tell.  There is no yoke for attaching horses or oxen, though, given the state of the vehicle, it may well have been destroyed. 

Scanning the battlefield reveals nothing except that a battle was fought here, and the deaths numbered in the hundreds.

You sit down a moment and bow your head, offering a quick prayer for the souls lost here.

Upon standing, you find your legs unwilling to work.  Your feet hurt and the muscles in your thighs protest as you force yourself down the hill.  Crossing the battlefield is an eerie experience.  No birds sing.  Insects also make no noise.  There aren't even any flies buzzing over the corpses.  There should at least be flies.

Swallowing back your discomfort, you creep along the wooden walkway, unwilling to make a din in this oppressive silence.  Every time the wood creaks beneath your feet, you wince.  A very loud creak stops you in your tracks.  Tense and unsure, you look around yourself.

Nothing.

Nothing stirs.  There is no sign of life anywhere but on the sighing spring breeze.  Your skin prickles.  Even the rising sun seems sinister in these surrounds.  Unable to do aught else, you continue to creep forward.

As you approach the end of the field, you hear a deep rumbling.  The wooden path beneath your feet trembles.  Earthquake?  No, the sound is coming from a specific direction, and it's fast approaching.  As you look around, you spy a cluster of jagged tree stumps, as pale grey as the earth they stick out of.  They are only a little way off the path.

With the rumbling getting closer, you feel you have no choice.  You jump from the path and, keeping to the slightly higher parts of the ground - provided by the dead tufts of grass - you bound your awkward way to the cluster of tree trunks and hunker down.

The rumbling is slow, and deep, and terrifying.  You can feel your heartbeat become wild as the awful tumult approaches.  The jagged tree stumps begin to rattle.  Keeping low, you peek out between two of the stumps.

A large, horseless carriage, rolling not on wheels but belts of metal tread, crests the small hill in the south.  It sports a long barrel of some kind, which swivels around, as if it was a great cylindrical eye scanning the land.  It is this vehicle that is creating the rumbling, giving you the impression that it must be extremely heavy.

Marching along side this great metal beast are a dozen or so men.  At least, you think they are.  They walk upright like men, but their faces are covered in a bizarre helm, which has a full-faced visor or mask attached.  A thick cable attached to the front of their masks to a pack they carry on their backs.  They carry strangely shaped sticks that you assume to be weapons of some kind

 Also marching along are strange arachnids.  They appear to be made entirely of bone at first, until the sun hits them, and you notice a metallic sheen, along  with all kinds of tubes and cables.  Not organic then.  What magic could compel metal to move?  Was it the same magic that drove the hulking metal vehicle on treads?  Why are there bodies everywhere?  What hell have you woken up in?

So many questions ring through your mind as you watch the men and metal on the crest of the hill.

They all stop to survey the field.  There are too far away to hear anything, if they speak at all.  They must be communicating somehow, however.  At least it seems to you the manner in which they move and gesticulate indicates a conversation.

It occurs to you that you now have three options at this juncture.  Do you:

a) Sneakily sneak away
b) Stand up and let yourself be seen.
c) Remain hidden until they move on.

Voting ends midnight 9 June at midnight (Ottawa time).  Get your votes in!

Good luck, Adventurers!