A Puzzling Find

The navigator puzzled for days over the meaning of this document he had his ranger translate. He found it at a ranger hide, hastily abandoned with a few other minor personal effects of elf manufacture, including a whistle that the navigator kept with him for all his days thereafter.

A month into the journey and I’m the lone survivor. There are not words for the rage that has not diminished in the days since the battle. That rage drives me forward to continue the mission to find what doom comes to these fools, and might threaten the vale. I have failed as the mage guard – the mixed men and dwarf unit wisely took him first, then our priest and our translator who made the blunder that set them off in the first place. I’d like to say it was my skill at arms that won the day but I only killed three of them before they got took me down.

I spent weeks languishing in their prison before they were satisfied that we were operating with permission of the King of Keoland and for their mutual benefit. I think they held me longer fearing the embarrassment, but once I survived my wounds they thought it best to release me on my word not to embarrass their idiot captain by reporting their stupidity to the king. I never said I would not take my revenge though, nor did I promise not to report this to the Exalted One.

I reached the Suss with little trouble after that, traveling alone without the mage and his supplies, the priest and his gimpy leg I was able to run most days resting on rainier ones in hides the Uleki ranger’s think are so secret. If they only knew my people showed them where to put them many of their generations ago. I marveled though at the speed at which the parasitic humans and dwarves can change a landscape – so much of the land I could not recognize from previous trips here as a child. Quarries had been cut and forts erected where beautiful groves and orchards once stood, they were places you could hear the music of the wind through the leaves and the birds above while enjoying a day in reverie.

Not today – these filthy mushroom and pig farmers squat in their own muck and filth they’ve even muddied the beautiful Jewel of the Suss, her River. I trek up to the Handmaiden River that feeds the Jewel to see that my spiteful cousins from Celene are holding that line against the human and orc encroachment. How I despise them too for lording their pure blood line over us, tolerating the orc neighbors and men but not even acknowledging their cousins existence in the vale. I spit in the Handmaiden and relieved myself on its banks before moving south. I’m moving slow with caution now having seen evidence of goblin kind, sensing the orcs are stirring and not finding any friendly rangers I expected to assist me. I dare not venture into a village or town again, I was nearly discovered by that sailor near Havenhill, and I don’t want to risk being discovered again.