Divination and Dreams

The Feywild part of this forest is decidedly better⁠—and that’s not only because I’m partial to the Feywild. It is objectively less terrible. I do think it is catching everyone off guard any time I start telling a story or seeming remotely excited about something.

Tara

Thankfully she seems to have recovered fully from the crystal shard incident. We briefly stayed near Tara’s main home, which from what I saw, was lovely⁠—there was a giant zen garden that reminded me a bit of Oghma’s space, she had several lofts, and the place was clearly kitted out for someone to live there properly. She packed things from that home like someone not planning to return. Seksgar’s earnest appeals seem to have gotten to her.

Tara later confirmed for us again that she is dream-kin, for lack of a better word. She can read Quori, she has demonstrated her innate connection to our dreams several times already since we met her, and she was clearly raised with a deep fear of Dream Eaters. (More on that later.)
 
Forest Effects

Disappearances
One problematic aspect of this forest is that people have a proclivity for disappearing unceremoniously. It reallly freaked me out at first, but Tara didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest, which led me to believe it’s not as horrifying as it sounds.

Fern and Roscoe came back pretty early in the morning. Neither of them claimed to remember anything about their time away, despite it being 9-10 hours for each of them. Both also reported not having seen anyone else or experienced, painful or otherwise. Blackthorne returned quite a while after the other two, and reported facts consistent with Fern and Roscoe. Duraz hasn’t been around in at least a day, now.

Since it seems that people will continue disappearing willy nilly, I need to design a set of questions to try to get more information from them about what’s happening and where they’re going.
 
Spring
We encountered a spring that felt to me like how a portal feels sometimes, but not exactly. It was dark⁠—we couldn’t see to the bottom⁠—and I was curious, but Fern stood as the voice of reason to not mess with it at all, so we went around. It’s really hard to shake childhood habits, though, and I wanted to see where it went.
 
Silence and Bubbles
During one of the stretches of time Fern was carrying me,* she passed through some magic energy that silenced her… and then pink bubbles came out her mouth for a while. It was pretty funny, and Keenor and Theodora played for the duration.
 
Dream Eater

A while into the travel day, we saw a line of smoke rising from the forest, about five miles off. We chose to head in that direction, since we already were, but I was on Team Don’t Go There. While we made our way, Roscoe saw a small orb, which I was confident was someone scrying. We briefly had a conversation with people back home via mirror (see below for that), and confirmed Myri hadn’t scried on us.

We eventually got to where we could see the hut nestled in the trees, and it looked, for all intents and purposes, inviting and warm. Which in my experience means it should not be fucked with. But Fern decided she wanted to go talk to whomever lives there. I’ll spare this journal the long version, but it seemed to be an elven enough person named Hilde who had lived in the forest for 560 years and “dabble[d] in a little bit of the arcane,” enchantment and divination especially. The light bulb moment for me was right then⁠—this must have been who scried on us. Now we doubly shouldn’t be here.

Hilde offered us stew (no) and to come inside (no) or even to camp in a specified place (no). In an astonishing lack of self-preservation mindedness, Blackthorne waltzed right in, and he was lucky that whatever Hilde tried to cast on him didn’t work. After some unnecessary faffing and some ill-advised acceptance of stew to go, we left and did not stay where directed. Seksgar and Blackthorne ate the godsdamned stew. (Note: They’re sleeping currently, so I will keep an eye on them…) Also the bowls of stew had tea leaves at the bottom (weird). I didn’t do anything with the contents of the bowl given to me, so I don’t know if the leaves even counted for me. But also Blackthorne knocked it over and made up some bullshit about a peg leg and me getting hit by the boom of a shit so I’ll never know.

Blackthorne had memorized a book title from Hilde’s house, and Tara seemed freaked out when she saw what he scratched out. That was when we learned that Hilde was a Dream Eater, and the divination and prophecy angle made more sense, too. Fana had told me stories about creatures that I think were the same, and they weren’t great stories. Right when I was having a thought about how she must have known I am Chosen, I felt splitting pain in my head. Keenor burst out of the bag and screamed, stunning a few people, including Hilde⁠—that’s who had attacked me. Keenor also multiplied and covered the entire domed shelter.

So… we killed Hilde. Well, sort of, but the body seemed alive still, and so Seksgar ultimately but the body in his bag.

It seemed okay at that point, but Tara realized Seksgar had some black… ooze? slowly seeping from his neck, and she was panicked about it. She demanded me to ask my god to fix it⁠—I wonder if she knows I’m not a cleric⁠—and seemed to expect impressive religious things from me so… I asked. And that didn’t work. So I got pretty close to what I think praying is, then that didn’t seem totally right either, so I used some holy oil from the Temple of Oghma in Waterdeep in a farcical representation of what I’ve seen clerics and priests do, streaking some of it across the part of Seksgar’s neck that was affected and… it worked?
 
Waterdeep Update

When Roscoe called Myri via mirror, she was doing an interrogation for Force Grey. We found out that in Rue’s absence (and to a lesser extent, Raven’s, too) they’ve been… less judicious in the killing, shall we say? Or, as Saxon put it, they’ve been “murking a lot of people” lately. There is some serious priority realignment that needs to happen, or else there’s going to be a Force Grey problem with a rift along religious lines.

Also, Saxon is not winning any favors lately, because he apparently called Holly heartless and got his ass handed to him. (Myri said it was “pretty epic,” and that it went down very publicly in the middle of the druid enclave.) Apparently Force Grey had found an orphaned child and brought it back to the temple, assuming he could just hand the child off to Holly to take care of in addition to Kumrag.

Also the tavern has been doing largely well, from what I’ve gathered, but recently some dwarves tunneled into the basement and caused a bunch of damage. It cost a little over 2/3 of the profit we had made all month, by my count.
 
Margin notes in Sylvan and a cypher, for Rue

*It was really weird getting a piggy back from your sister, by the way. Not because there’s anything inherently weird about that, but because until you, the only time I had been carried was when I was dying, so I guess I associated shoulder rides with ma’len.

I also feel like you would want me to tell you that I managed to ~ ~ ~ see the bright side ~ ~ ~ to being hobbled. The way it just forced me to adjust my foot positioning really seemed to impact my destructive force.