IC Story Thread: Ch.1,Ad.1 - A Sensitive Matter

Eothain figures that getting any closer, to try to discern their exact nature any better, would just as likely allow them to discover you.

Cirion notes that you're all going into a dip in the road, and you will have the cover of hill for several minutes in which you could get away from the road. If you all are to avoid them, now is the time to do it.

Cirion leads the company off the road and follows a wash-out a good 200 meters to the bottom of, and around, the hill ahead.

It's impossible at that point to make any sort of visual contact with the approaching contingent, without affording them the same opportunity to observe you, and so he does his best to match the pace they were making and tries to mirror their progress down the road with the company's progress around the hill, keeping the mound in between the two parties the whole time.

And he must do a fine job of it because by the time you all re-emerge back onto the road you can see the contingent must be a kilometer past the dip where you went off road, along the way north.

And they either don't look back, or they don't notice your passage if they do, or perhaps their business was such that they wouldn't care to double-back upon you if they did.

And so it is you are able to move beyond them without further trouble and really without lost time.

From there the days become progressively warmer as you continue south, and you draw closer and closer to the true southern border of Harondor and the North - the Harnen River. And it is upon the seventh day, after you've began a slow decent into the Harnen River valley, when the landscape begins to look as you had always been told the Harad would look.

The soils of tan or gray silt and loam give way to hard and cracking ruddy clays and stone and blowing sands. The mesas and canyons still carry a foreign type of beauty, but as you leave behind your familiar land, that foreign-ness may begin to feel more like isolation and the simple threat that resides within anything that is an unknown.

And it is in the Harnen valley that you first begin to encounter the hollow remnants of ancient wars fought between North and South.

Towers with foundations of northern granite arranged in familiar northerner's ways, but now with limestone materials and the structural style of the South standing upon their architectural bones. A reminder of past victories and recent defeats - and the deaths of the many that paid for each. You move past them, but it seems there is always another such ruin around the next bend.

When the day is nearly done, and the heat is at it's peak before it must relent with the setting sun, and the city of Tharven - the last city before entering the true Harad - is in sight... the road passes through what appears to be a great graveyard.

No doubt the site of some old battle ground. And around you in all directions stretch small stone monoliths, and cairns, and in some cases carved statues marking the thousands of spots where someone died. The implacable stone figures standing like thousands of spectres-made-real, watching you pass, jealous of the life you still have, and unforgiving and unyielding with their gaze.

The weight of the Shadow presses upon you all here, and some in the company are better able to handle it than others. Even though no great amount of time is spent there, the expansive grave site and it's stone sentinels claw at your minds and your hearts, and threaten to pull them into their darkness.

Even after moving beyond it, physically, and into the relatively vibrant town of Tharven, it's feeling remains with you for some time, dragging at your thoughts.In the following days, you move out of the Harnen River valley and it's ruddy canyon walls and into the true desert of the Harad.

The road gradually becomes of a lesser quality here, cobbles are cracking and turning to dust - never having been replaced in what must be centuries, low and long drifts of sand snake across it at irregular intervals, but it is at least still far better than traveling through the trackless wilderness.

The sun and the wind become unrelenting, and it taxes your resources as they have not yet been taxed.

If there is one good thing about it, perhaps it is that as the land becomes more and more barren it becomes harder and harder for any potential threat to conceal itself from you all. Although you know you all are similarly exposed... You see virtually no Northerners now, upon the road. Or at least none that you can tell by their dress. And so it is easier for the feelings of isolation and exposure to grow.

And so it is, in the second week of your journey, that you find yourselves overlooking a likely camping spot for the night, a ways off the road down a steep embankment.

It is a wide, flat area encircled by a ring of large rectangular stones arrayed around it's perimeter at several points, with an inner circle of smaller rectangular stones inside that, of which there must be more than twenty.

Indeed the spot seems ideal for a camp!

Level ground, good drainage around it, sheltered from the scouring winds, there's even a spot in the center to hold a fire - although there hasn't been one there in probably a couple weeks by Duinhir's estimate. There's no buildings or fencing or signage to be seen around so it doesn't even appear to be anyone in particular's property. None of the shaped stones seem to bear any symbology, nor writing, so there's not even anything vaguely sinister about the arrangement.

It may very well be a purpose built camp site for weary travelers!?

And so there you're all able to make your evening meals and other preparations and bed down for the night, with no trouble and even some degree of comfort!

However... a bit before dawn, and before you're all well rested, a group of Southron folk walk up into the camp site.

They're not armed, and indeed they appear to be relatively simple villagers. Many are of advanced age walking only with the aid of tall sticks, or younger helpers.

But they do seem to start insisting that you all must leave the area. They speak in the Southron tongue so it's perhaps hard to know exactly what they're saying, but they gently wake each of you, wrapping on the hard ground with their walking sticks and making soft but firm exclamations to get your attention (Eothain is perhaps able to recognize some formal greetings in there), and they're certainly making some sort of polite explanation with their words and gestures to the clearing, but they also make vigorous shoo-ing motions.

A few of them break off the hard heels of a bread they have in bindles, and hold those out, beckoning you to take the meager sustenance, before you get on your way.