The World of Avlis

Evil-Wizard wrote:*Sitting in his quiet inn room, Victor finally finds some time to relate the events surrounding the tremors in the Little Falls Canyon area of Ferrell.*

I do not spend a great deal of time in the land of the Halflings. Oh I have been there on occasion in the past, but generally it is a specific purpose that warrants a visit, either conducting business with the merchants or a job that needs to be completed. Yet on this particular day, I had already acquired the supplies I was looking for and had concluded my business. Since I had some free time, I decided to look around. I am familiar with Port Eridanus, so I chose to venture towards Kitanya Hill, having only been there once before. After awhile I made my way to an area known as Little Falls Canyon, a little ways to the north. Finding little of interest and not wanting to be stung repeatedly by bees, I was just about to leave when a rope dangling over a steep ledge caught my eye. Not knowing what was down there, I made my way back to the Port to see if anyone knew anything about it.

I spoke with a few locals who knew nothing about the rope, but did mention experiencing tremors believed to come from that area. One individual did say something about a group going to explore the area, but they have not been seen since. Perhaps I stumbled upon where they made their descent and there is something interesting in the canyon after all.
As I was waiting to see if anyone would show interest in investigating the nature of the tremors, I met with an associate mage, Elradra. We decided we would climb down the rope and take a peek. As we were heading to the canyon we met another associate of mine, the Blackguard, Tris. We talked for a few minutes and made introductions with Tris agreeing to accompany us, just to be on the safe side. As we entered the canyon, we found another individual, a shifter by the name of Brano, I think, who was also interested in investigating the canyon and the tremors. We made our preparations, completely uncertain of what we would find and descended down into the darkness.

We found ourselves in a semi spacious cavern, with a tunnel leading down. We came to another cavern and found a huge floating eyeball, with tentacles coming out the top which had additional eyeballs on them. Surrounding it were other eyeballs that looked similar to the huge thing, but were much smaller in size. They reminded me of the thing that follows the Violet Order mage, Zachael Anchises. (I later learned they are called Beholders). As we progressed through the tunnels and caverns we noticed some very large boulders bunched together, blocking intersecting paths; the tunnel had caved in. This is likely the reason for the tremors that were felt. We also encountered more and more of these large and small beholders. There always seemed to be several of the smaller ones in the vicinity of a larger beholder. The beholders were vulnerable to a variety of attacks, coming from melee weapons, ranged weapons and our spells, all of which were efficient and effective. The ones who had greater arcane capabilities were more difficult to deal with. Almost immediately they would remove all the protection spells we had in place, making us increasingly vulnerable to their own form of attacks. There were several times after encountering one of these beholders that we had to stop and tend to our wounds and reapply our means of protection.

After descending for quite some time, we came to a very large cavern. The room held several of the large beholders and even more smaller ones, but in the middle was the largest one I had ever seen (granted I have not seen many). It was scary huge! Our shifter engaged the large one on the right, while Tris engaged the large one on the left. I kept the insanely huge beholder in the middle busy, until the others were able to converge on it as Elra was busy blasting away at the smaller ones, dispatching them quickly. Once we were sure they were all slain and seeing as no one was grievously injured, we searched the walls of the giant cavern to see if we could determine where they had come from and if more would be able to access the area. We found two more paths leading into this large area that had been collapsed as well, leaving the way we came the only means of entering or exiting. This could be another explanation for the tremors.

Out of the way, by one of the blocked paths, we found some items that I would guess, by their nature, belonged to the missing adventuring party; however, as I do not remember seeing any corpses, other than the ones we made, that is just an educated guess. If it indeed was their gear, left behind was a shield, a cloak, a hood, a pair of boots and by a rough count 20,000 gold coins. Finding nothing left to do or kill, we made our way back to the rope and climbed up the ledge. We divided the gold evenly and laid out the gear as each person took what they could use. Satisfied we had uncovered the reason behind the tremors and dealt with the creatures causing it, we each said our farewells and left on our separate ways. Hopefully there will be no more trouble in the region.

Signed,

Victor Swift

*Victor sets his quill down for a few minutes, allowing the ink to dry on the parchment before he rolls it up and tucks it into a pocket of his robe. He then sets off for Port Eridanus again to post the document where others can find it if they wish.*