In which the story finally advances

Party: Tiffy, Dvethen, Ellira, Crom, Jaleese

Olemcorro and the Borehole

• Characters return to town, and seduce a priest of The Daghda into providing them with a free divination on how best to fight and damage shadows.  The reply is "Neither flame nor my pure influence - alone - will destroy them."  The characters respond by creating and acquiring some holy water.
• Using the holy water and magical attacks, the character manage to dispatch two shadows and an allip, and reach the top of the borehole.
• There, they find a cabinet.  After disarming a mysterious trap (which unleashes a staggeringly loud bird-of-prey shriek) and picking the lock on the cabinet open, they find only a few scraps of paper . . . and a blue shield of energy, floating fixed in the center of the cabinet.  After examining it for a bit, Crom reaches into it.  As he does so, a strangely accented voice says, "Companion, the Map of the Truss is yours."  He withdraws a crystalline sphere of cloudy black.
• The sphere turns out to be a literal map.  But it requires a blue light to see.  When they realize this, they manage to draw a map of bright blue lights that correspond to the locations of the orulins, and little color-changing ones around them.
• When they turn the map at an angle, they see that there is a huge red wound, apparently in the ground underneath Olemheiden.  It is wrapped in bands of blue light in the map, and these bands connect all the orulins except Jeraslan.
• When the party leaves the secret blue archives, the elves are in an excited state.  PCs investigate and see, in the distance, a battle of white lights flickering from the sky to the ground, and purple lights from the ground to the sky.  The lights eventually cease, and a reptilian scream echoes through the air.
• The characters learn that a human army is present in Olemheiden.
• Panicked harpies blunder into the orulin, and the characters kill them, but Jaleese dies in the battle, killed in stirge form by a harpy.
• After some dithering, the characters decide to rest again, and hear that the human army has encamped and is not leaving.

Olemheiden and the World of Moss

• They descend to the forest floor, despite the guards warning them that elves are being captured.  Then they cross it quickly, and uneventfully.  They notice a human skirmisher patrol crossing their path from south to north, but the group does not stop them.
• They reach the place where the Map of the Truss shows some kind of color-shifting dot near Olemcorro.
• Investigating, they discover that bringing the Map near a certain place causes it to become visible as a flickering red-purple-blue globe, suspended in the air 8 feet up.  The closer they bring the Map to it, the more constant it becomes.
• They decide to try to climb through it.  They manage this by tying a rope to the tree and descending into it.  First Crom, then the rest of the party.  Once inside they see a mossy cage 60 feet in diameter suspended from a chain in a nearly infinite expanse of green in all directions.  There are other mossy green globes suspended around them off in the distance.  They notice an (apparently huge) black flying creature that has reptilian rear claws, wings and tail, but no forward torso or head, nothing forward of the wings at all.  The creature disappears, then a cry of something gigantic and angry is heard.  Then the flying thing returns, grabs one of the globes, and begins flying into the air with it, straight up.
• Crom attempts to summon the flying creature by making imitating the noise it made with ghost sound.  In response, another cry off in the distance, and then the globe they saw being carried away suddenly drops to the end of its chain, jerking and bouncing off its momentum.  A moment later, a dismembered body of the black creature falls and hits the globe, then bounces off into the green void.
• Their final observation in the green world was another cry, this one much louder, followed by something black and ropelike snaking down the chain and toward them in the globe.  They escape by dangling a rope from the top of the cage into the portal, and climbing down through it, just as the tentacle pulls the rope right through their hands and into the other world.
• Their rapid escape draws a patrol of humans from the army, who attempt to detain them, but the characters defeat them and capture the sergeant.  They bring the sergeant back to Olemcorro, to be interrogated by the elven leaders.

Camp of the Catamese Army

• They go out again and attempt to encounter another patrol so they can follow them back to the human camp.  The first time this happens, the patrol demands they drop their weapons, and meets a swift end.  The second time, the party convinces the patrol that they are mercenaries looking for work, and are taken back to the camp.
• On their way through the forest they discover the humans are rapidly deforesting a large circular area, where they are encamped.  A pavilion tent is surrounded by many smaller tents.
• The characters sign up for officer wages in Xabier Lubo's army after observing a line of elite guards guarding one exit to the administrative area of the tent.
• Leading up to, and then at the banquet (at which they are served authentic blue dragon meat, cut from the massive corpse of the blue dragon), the characters talk to the other soldiers and learn several things:
  

• Facts:

1. The western towns of Catam must rebuild the damage Egar Geza caused
2. The general leading the army is named Xabier Lubo
3. Zuchar is the name of a powerful wizard who stays near Xabier Lubo
4. Many weapons were left in the body of the dragon, unclaimed by the now-dead soldiers

•   Rumors:

1. Zuchar launched the attack because he wanted to acquire the dragon's skin
2. Xabier Lubo launched the attack because he hates these elves
3. The elves are angry because the dragon was their pet, and now it's dead

• Crom and Tiffy cull the pile of weapons that were pulled from the dragon's body, finding a flail +1 and Ungarik Greatbleeder.
• Dev searches the outside of the tent by secretly making slits in the fabric and peeking through.  He gets caught on only one occasion, and Tiffy bluffs they they were looking for a place to tryst.
• Dev steals a map from a table in the tent.  They return to Olemcorro to provide the maps to the conclave.

Another game session

Just want to get down some notes about what happened the last game session:

- Ellira was near death.  The party waited for her to rest up enough to heal herself.
- Crom climbed down to the main branches and got taken into custody by elven officers of the law.
- They interrogated him.  Eventually they let him go.
- Crom apparently failed in his goal of convincing the elves that a paladin had fallen fighting the blue dragon, and of warning them that monsters were inside their tree.