On Maloria’s urging, the party heads out of the inn and waits patiently outside as the stableboy for the Welcome Wench brings out the group’s mounts. Once all the animals are saddled and ready to go, you head east along the road out of Hommlet. As predicted, the day is unseasonably warm, already reaching the mid-eighties, and muggy as the rain from the previous day gradually evaporates from muddy roads.
For a while Spugnoir tries more or less unsuccessfully to strike up conversation, but those who have returned from the ruins are silent and grim, knowing what horrors lay in the bowels of the dungeon. Those new to the party are equally untalkative, nervous with apprehension, having heard Gilly’s detailed tales of what her and her companions have survived already.
As the party passes the rock outcropping with the cave, there’s no sense of the soul-chilling cold they had once experienced. Likewise, the cairn of stones that once covered the body of a fallen pixie remain near the river slowly babbling to the party’s right, though the group can see that the stones themselves have been disturbed and lay strewn about on the ground. The pixie they once concealed underneath is nowhere to be found. Perhaps the body was taken by her own kind for whatever rituals pixies may practice. Perhaps some hungry beast smelled an easy meal to scavenge and took the pixie for it’s own purposes. In any case, the party ignores the stones and continues on.
The scrub of thorns, thistles, weeds, and shrubs encroaches towards the recently cleared road for a while, but after an hour of traveling, the wicked foliage suddenly opens up to the ruined and now makeshift drawbridge leading to the moathouse gate. In the swampy marshes nearby, frogs and toads croak aggressively at one another, and insects buzz their pleas seeking the affections of their own kind. It’s around noon as the party sits atop their mounts, sweat running along their temples and soaking into the clothing underneath armor as they gaze across the moat at the ugly building towering menacingly before them. Once more into the dreadful ruins they prepare to delve.
