Wyvern Frenzy

In the morning we set off across the desert to Calimport. Captain Jimmy had plenty of cargo to sell, so we accompanied his caravan as "guards". And it was a good thing we did.

There were many caravans crossing the Calim Desert, and individual caravans would travel fairly widely spaced so as not to interfere with one another. It helped to protect them from robbers and bandits along the way. On the third day, we realised that the caravan ahead of us had stopped. We halted our caravan and I flew on ahead to see if I could work out what had happened.

Well, what had happened is that the caravan ahead of us had been attacked. The carts were overturned as the road passed through a gorge between two cliff faces, but none of the goods had been taken, so I knew it was not bandits. There were some dead caravanners and guards strewn around that appeared to have been rent as though by wild beasts. I returned to my comrades to report what I had found, and a plan was drawn up.

In retrospect, it could have been a better plan. I continued my aerial reconnaisance, while Caine and Buff took opposite sides of the road - each at the top of one of the bluffs. Ilyich and Joan (mounted on a lion) took the road up the middle. I saw the attack as it came, but there wasn't a lot I could do to prevent it.

One of the wyverns attacked Caine on one side of the road, while another attacked Biff on the other. A third came up the middle and landed in front of Joan and her leonine mount. Unfortunately the mount did not survive the attack - vanishing mysteriously and leaving no corpse. I figured that Buff was perfectly able to handle himself, so after loosing a few magical darts at the wyvern that had attacked I moved to the aid of Caine. Unfortunately for me, that wyvern decided that I was a tastier snack than a vanished lion, and took to the skies. Turning, I blasted it with more darts, which fortunately seemed to be enough, sending it plummeting to the ground.

I was just about to set down to assist Caine when he killed the wyvern he was fighting, and we looked over to the other bluff to see how the great gladiator Buff DeBuff was going. Horrified, we saw the Wyvern dragging his limp body away.

The others made a heroic effort to cross the gorge, and we all arrived on the other side at about the same time that my spell of flight wore off. The wyvern had dragged Buff to a cave that they had apparently been using as a lair. We fought it in the cave, and I think Ilyich dealt it the final blow, though with all of us hacking at it, it was hard to be sure.

Fortunately Buff was not dead, merely unconscious. There was a very strong smell, which I traced to a broken bottle that had previously contained an extremely aromatic rag. I tore a little of it off as a sample, sealing it in a bottle until I could get it analysed.

Returning to Captain Jimmy, we continued our trip, arriving at Calimshan a few days later. After exchanging some more of my heavy coins for gemstones, I took the smelly rag to an alchemist. Apparently what I had was wyvern bait. The creatures had been lured to that location, possibly in order to attack and kill caravans so that bandits could come by later and collect the discarded goods. I can't remember who it was that was paranoid enough to suggest that they had been lured there specifically to try and stop us from reaching our destination. I couldn't think who might know about us, apart from that Shark fellow back in Memnon.

The talk in Calimshan about the blockade was not much more informative than it had been in Memnon, though we did hear that there was a war going on out east, and a lot of traders were shipping weapons in that direction. However, this war did not concern us.

We pored over a map of the region, trying to decide what we were going to do. There were several ports on the southern coast of the Shining Sea that we might be able to get passage to, but rumour was that these ports were largely closed, and we would be unlikely to dock there. We would have to buy a small boat and make our own landfall if necessary.

The last thing I did before retiring was visit the city guards. I figured that they might like to know that someone had been baiting wyverns to the road from Memnon, and I left them the container with the scrap, hoping that they might be able to find the perpetrator.