Chapter 2, Day 11

You wake to find the elves have prepared you a simple breakfast of local flora, fruits and dried meats. Not just enough for breakfast, but a care package of the same for a meal later in the day. When you get yourselves sorted, Killian shows you to a small canoe and teaches you how to portage it safely and to take care of the vessel. When your meal and lessons are finished, you are set on your way to Rhest. It's a long, but relatively uneventful, ride down the river towards the ruins of Rhest.

A large, dark lake broods in the marshland here, measuring nearly two miles wide. The cloying reek of decaying vegetation and swamp ooze is thick in the air, and countless frogs and insects and marsh birds chirp and croak and call to each other. Out near the middle of the lake, dozens of decrepit stone buildings just from the black waters. In most cases, these buildings sag and lean treacherously, the windows of their upper stories now even with the still lake's surface. Two buildings that seem to have survived relatively intact draw your attention-- one a large stone tower, about a quater-mile from the southern shore (2), and the other a large stone building near the lake's center (3). Both structures have rickety wooden walkways ringing them at water level. These look like recent additions, it would seem that someone has made an attempt to settle down here.

You can see a variety of streams lead into the lake. At each intersection point there appear to be huts on stilts above the black water (1).

Pawetha narrows her eyes and examines the huts... they are rickety, and clearly not made by craftsmen. She notices a couple figures milling about the hut nearest the group, one of the two that is built where the stream they had been following meets the small lake that used to be the city of Rhest. She identifies them as lizardfolk, and they appear to be preparing nets and harpoons - probably readying themselves to go hunting in the lake.

Pawetha notices some activity within the huts as well. There's more than just the couple preparing for a hunt, maybe six or seven per hut (on the map each "1" is a hut).

Zaris recalls reading about lizardfolk in his time at the academy. They are a sentient species, hunters by nature. Usually they live in tight knit tribal societies, and clans don't tend to cooperate with each other. They are, rumour has it, fond of dragons, and are willing to overlook their natural distrust of other lizardfolk clans if the other clans also serve, or more likely worship, the same dragon.

By now, the two lizardfolk who were preparing nets and harpoons have climbed into a reed boat with their fishing tools and pushed off into the lake. Two more lizards emerge from the hut and sit on the shore, feet in the water, and start mending and making more nets.