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Dunmari Frontier - Session 130

Council at Three Wells: in which the defense of the Heartroot is sworn

Featuring: Delwath, Kenzo, Wellby, Seeker
In Taelgar: Aug 07, 1749 DR
On Earth: Monday Aug 18, 2025
Location: Three Wells

At Three Wells, the Fellowship exposes the Empress of Chaos’ plan to corrupt the Heartroot, learns its secret from Cateline Malras, receives a favorable omen, and commits the Alliance to defend the hidden valley while harrying the Iron Fang and hunting the Empress.

Session Info

Summary

  • Szoltár’s boasts and seized thoughts reveal the Empress’s design to pierce the land’s heart, marching with a 4,200‑strong army of Iron Fang Hobgoblins borne by the magical warbeast known as the Iron Scourge.
  • The party returns Szoltár to the Mirror, floats a containment-treaty idea with Revaka if the Empress falls, then flies to Three Wells and joins a heated Alliance war council.
  • At the war council, Cateline Malras discloses the guarded secret: the Heartroot, last pure remnant of Isingue’s soil-magic, hidden on the Aurbez Plateau—too frail to move safely and the Empress’s true target.
  • Strategy crystallizes: forts and Aursenbourg’s walls won’t stop the Scourge’s climbing; Stoneborn aid is ~7 days out while the Iron Fang arrives in ~6; a favorable divination prompts the Alliance to mass at the Heartroot within five days.
  • Interrogation and scrying refine the plan: the army halts 6–10 hours midday; the Scourge serves as transport and food; the Fellowship will harry and sabotage the column, isolate and kill the Empress, and coordinate Vindristjarna’s aerial strikes.

Timeline

Narrative

Our session begins in the morning sun on a hillock in the marshes of the upper Aursen River, where Szoltár, a hobgoblin warrior captured by the Dunmar Fellowship and beguiled by Delwath’s magic, boasts that the Empress of Chaos’ decades-long plan is now finally coming to fruition. The Empress will pierce “the heart of the land” with the Chaos Spear, seize the Vertex of Limbo, and thereby command the titanic ooze beneath Isingue. With that power, the Iron Fang host will ride to conquer the good farmlands north and west of the Plaguelands.

Pressed for specifics, Szoltár boasts of the great numbers and power of the Iron Fang. The Iron Fang army is 4,200 strong – only the weak and old remain behind – and their warbeast, the Iron Scourge, will lead the assault. The Scourge is a centipede-like engine of living chaos metal, not truly alive: glowing plates crawl over its body, vast dorsal cavities boom open to vomit ash, then slam shut again. Szoltár claims the attack will fall in six days, at whatever hour the Empress deems advantageous.

Amid the tension, a cluster of local children edges near. A Lizardfolk boy, Leizar, blurts a nervous question—“Is it dangerous?”—and Szoltár immediately tries to posture for blood. Delwath steps between blade and child, and Seeker quietly turns the moment into wonder: he charms a scrap of moss to life, “Mossy,” which toddles about for an hour to the boy’s delight before an older lizardfolk woman arrives to herd the children away and offer the travelers what little hospitality the huts can spare.

With questions exhausted, the party returns Szoltár to the Mirror of Soul Trapping. While it is out, they call Revaka. Though she has little relevant information about the current situation, and has never heard of “chaos metal,” she seems intrigued by Delwath’s bold offer: if the Empress’s leadership fractures, would Revaka step in and make a treaty to keep the Iron Fang contained in the Plaguelands? She asks for solid intelligence on the Iron Fang, and signs of a true power vacuum, but appears open to the idea. Interrogations done, the party shifts into birds and flies upriver to Three Wells, where Marcella had spoken of an upcoming war council.

Winging northwest as eagles, the party leaves the marsh huts and hidden refugee camps in the Aursen Marshes. A few hours later, the party arrives at Three Wells, to a scene of intense activity: hundreds of people gathered, cookfires, tents, banners snapping, arguments everywhere. Whispers ripple as five eagles glide in, not something Three Wells sees every day. As the party transforms back into themslves, Marcella meets them, hustling towards the officer’s tent, pressing green ribbons into their hands to tie around their weapons, a peace sign used among the people of the Refounded Alliance of Aurbez.

Inside, the war council is in the middle of an argument, standing around a map sprawled across a central table. A lizardfolk archer urges skirmishing in the swamps until Stoneborn aid arrives; a red-haired militia captain counters that lives can’t be squandered off the plateau; a portly older man demands the walls of Aursenbourg be held to protect the refugees already crowding the city. Martin Strongbow, a Ranger captain, calls the room to order and asks the party from news, while Cateline Malras, an older dark-skinned woman wearing a beryl stone at her throat, pours water and passes a bowl to drink from, murmuring “Water before words.” The party drinks, introduce themsevles (Seeker and his simulacrum drawing murmurs), and report the news of the Empress of Chaos’ plan to pierce the heart of the land and bind Isingue’s magic.

Cateline Malras stiffens at the mention of the land’s heart, clutching her beryl. She glances to the Stoneborn messenger Zimkala, then asks for oaths: this next secret must not leave the tent. Zimkala swears by Entamba; Delwath by old and adopted gods; Seeker by the honor of his people (awkwardly mirrored by Seeker IV); Wellby by the songs of his people; Kenzo by his gods and the stories of the living and the dead. Satisfied, Cateline Malras names the hidden heart of the land: the Heart Root—“the last surviving relic of Isingue’s magic.”

Leaning on her staff, Cateline Malras addressed the council and the party with the tale of what they guarded. Long ago, the city of Isingue was knit together by a living blessing in the soil, a rootlike magic that spread unseen through earth and water, turning vineyards, fields, and families prodigiously fruitful. When Cha’mutte shattered the land during the Great War, that blessing was wounded and partly corrupted. At Beryl’s command, the The Rangers cut free an untainted fragment and fled into the mountains, protecting this fragment of the living soil in a narrow hidden valley on the Aurbez Plateau. Through the Three Kin’s War, through the decades of hobgoblin raids and other dangers, through the years of peace and plenty, the The Rangers have guarded this valley, where this fragment of living soiling, called the Heartroot, now lives. The Heartroot, however, lives thinly; it no longer spreads as it once did. The The Rangers charge now is to guard it until it can be restored to Isingue: if the Empress of Chaos finds and corrupts it, Cateline Malras warns, the last pure remnant of Isengae’s magic will be lost. In its current weakened state, moving it might kill it, though in a desperate hour, transporting it could be considered.

Before the room could sink into despair, Marguerite la Rousse, the red-haired militia captain, argued for resistance: muster was already underway at the plateau stairs and watch-forts. They had survived the War of the Ashen Horde thirty years prior, when deadly ash-spawn ravaged the land; they could stand again.

Maps were unrolled and debate began. Given the Iron Scourge’s climbing ability, the walls of Aursenbourg and the fortifications on the plateau stairs would be irrelevant. The enemy would strike straight for the Heartroot. Zimkala of the Stoneborn reported their main force was a week away, likely too late to provide aid unless the Iron Fang could be delayed or the Stoneborn army sped up. Daisy Lightfoot, a halfling Ranger and scout master, ran the distances, and calculated the Iron Fang would reach the plateau in six days time, at least 24 hours before the Stoneborn could arrive.

The Dunmar Fellowship joined the debate, and argued for concentrating defenses at the Heartroot, while they worked to isolate the Empress of Chaos and end the fight by her death. Perrin du Bois, the straw-hatted delegate, a beekeeper and speaker for the scattered homesteads on the plateau, broke the hush with a hard truth: banking everything on the Empress’s death scattering theIron Fang might doom the civilians if it didn’t. The party answered that, scatter or not, the Empress had to fall; the real problem was separating her from the host.

Marguerite la Rousse, the red-haired militia captain, shifted the room’s focus to the greater terror: the Iron Scourge. If they could slow or disable the centipede-engine, the militias and The Rangers, with the Stoneborn coming soon, could fight a mortal battle instead of a supernatural rout. Eztain, the younger lizardfolk leader, bared her teeth in agreement: she, too, feared the machine more than the hobgoblins.

A flurry of plans followed. The party proposed guerrilla harassment and sabotage at range, to draw the Empress off the column or at least slow the army down, then a decisive strike against her—ideally on ground of their choosing. With Vindristjarna due in roughly four days, they could add an aerial bombardment, and even contemplate using Seeker’s magic to transform hundreds of soldiers into an army of beasts.

Seeing secrecy had likely already failed to protect the fragments of Isingue, Cateline Malras sought guidance. Calling on the Fox and Hunter, she cast a divination: Should the Alliance commit to defending the Heartroot in force? The omen returned favorable, and orders quickly followed. Martin Strongbow, Marguerite la Rousse, and Eztain moved to order their forces and converge on the hidden valley protecting the Heartroot within five days; Zimkala pledged the Stoneborn as soon as they could come, likely about a week. Delwath offered his lynx messengers to carry summons at speed; beacons and ravens would handle the rest.

The civilians remained nervous at the plan, weighing the peril of leaving the approaches undefended. Guilhem du Pont, of Aursenbourg, feared his walled city, swollen with refugees, would be helpless if the enemy veered; though Perrin du Bois argued the risk was acceptable if the Heartroot was truly the target. The Dunmar Fellowship committed interrogate their hobgoblin prisoner privately to glean what could be learned about timing and movement of the Iron Fang army. Cateline Malras closed with a brief prayer and a final cup of water from the wells as the council broke to draft messages and hurry to mobilize.

The Dunmar Fellowship, meanwhile, withdrew to interrogate Szoltár in private. Delwath, cast Detect Thoughts, and Kenzo intimidated and questioned the prisoner. While Szoltár tried to stonewall, his mind yielded what his mouth would not. He revealed that the Iron Fang army halts for 6-10 hours in the middle of each day; travels as a disciplined army of five battalions each 800 strong and supplemented by battle mages; the Iron Scourge is primarily a transport device and a source of meat that grows from its body and is hacked off to feed the troops; the army is trained to dismount in lines for battle. Delwath also read a fragment of the Empress of Chaos’ speech from Szoltár’s mind: reach the secret heart of the land, corrupt it with her spear, let the darkness and chaos flow, and then take the cities and homesteads of Refounded Alliance of Aurbez at leisure and divide the plunder.

With the spell fading, the party shoved the hobgoblin back into the Mirror of Soul Trapping, merging his cell with Revaka’s so she could work him for deeper intelligence. Then they briefed Perrin du Bois and Guilhem du Pont: all signs point to the Empress prioritizing the Heartroot over sack and plunder, buying the Alliance clarity on where to mass their defense and where the heroes will focus their strikes.

After a short rest amid the chaos and bustle of the war camp leaping into action, Delwath scried the Empress of Chaos. He found the column sheltering beneath a roiling lid of ash while most hobgoblins slept; the Empress paced the perimeter, armor flowing like liquid metal. She sensed the sensor, flicked a glob of metal that sealed its “eye,” and, through the blindfold’s afterimages, Delwath glimpsed unsettling flashes—a stone becoming cloud, then liquid, then ice in a swirl of prismatic mist—before the magic faded.

That evening, the party shared a quiet bench with Marcella, who spoke of her gratitude for their return, and eagerly sought news from Chardon, excited to hear that Hektor was arriving with Vindristjarna. She also spoke of her own steadier life among thenThe Rangers, and the life she had found in the Refounded Alliance of Aurbez. She offered back the boots of false tracks Wellby had given her long ago to aid in her escape from Kadmos; Wellby told her to keep them. Our session ends as they toasted once, then broke for sleep—plans set, nerves steady—ready to start the harassment campaign of the Iron Fang at first light.