Percy's Journal Entry 2

My Dear Isabell

I hope this letter finds you well. I dearly miss your comfort at this time. I have just begun my watch for the night and I have a bit of time before I pray to my god, Pharasma, the Great Judge. The past day has been strange but nothing my party and I could not handle. We were following tracks left by what we think was one of the abducted children. We came to a bridge which we thankfully recognized as rigged to fall as soon as a full grown man attempted to walk across it. As we were determining the safest way to cross the creek, a pair of shambling mounds attacked my ally, Baradesh.

I'm sure you've never seen a shambling mound before, and truthfully neither had I, but my friends Tom and Baradesh identified it as such and their word is as good as platinum on such matters. Anyway, a shambling mount is like a hill of refuse and rotten matter and dirt that has taken a life of its own and wishes nothing more than to kill you. It is quite unsettling in that after encountering one, a person then cannot help but to question every lump of dirt that person sees in the future. Were I alone this surely would have been the end of me. I called to Pharasma to judge me worthy of aid and She blessed me with FOUR water elementals (essentially agents of Pharasma formed purely of water). The elementals helped to block the mounds from ravaging Baradesh while Pyralis, Tom, and Baradesh laid waste to the freakish beasts.

Later in the day, as we continued following the same footprints, we came upon the unmistakable sound of war drums. This is a terrifying sound if you have never heard it. It takes a great passion and bloodlust to play war drums in this manner and when you hear the drums, in your bones you can feel the yearning for carnage, the desire that the player has to see you destroyed through violence. It would have been easy to let this get to me but I steeled myself and reminded myself of my capable comrades and the might of my god Pharasma and continued forward. When we finally found the source of the racket, it was a tribe of lizardfolk attempting to roast a man in a giant fire.

We rescued the man, or rather he rescued himself as we slew the lizardfolk. I might have felt wrong about slaying an entire tribe of people, if they can be called people, but they made an attempt at our life on site and they seemed of a barbarous kind. Yesterday was the first day that I called on Pharasma for aid and she sent down a group of albino panthers. I was quite in awe of her power. It has begun to seem as if She is finally showing me favor and has judged me to have earned forgiveness of my past transgressions. I can only hope that this is the case.

My dear love, I have decided that when I return, I will buy off your contract using whatever gold is necessary so that you can be mine. I have an intense dread about what is to come for my party and myself but if we make it back alive, I want to truly be alive.

May the bones fall in a spiral!

Percy Blyssh Godwin