OOC – Author’s Note:
Following the events of “Where Webs Whisper” session 14 (which can be read in summary here), the group took to writing some intervening RP over discord, as a way to supplement the story between live sessions.
I’ve included the larger plot points relevant to the story from these discord exchanges, and go on to summarise for sessions #15 and #16 respectively.
I just want to give a sense of events which connect all threads together, but am unlikely to do my co-participants’ writing justice (so I’ve avoided trying to directly repost or paraphrase them in the doing).
(Click on the links to jump down to the appropriate part):
- Intervening RP - 'The Rising Storm'
- Session 15 - 'A Plea to Power'
- Session 16 - 'The Breaking of the Marsh'
- Intervening RP - 'Draining the Swamp'
Additionally: This piece was shaped with a little help from AI. It provided help on things like the structuring, some names, shortening some verbose language/ideas as I'd written them, and it gave me the odd turn of phrase here and there. The heart and shape of the story are my own, but I realise it is important to be transparent about my use of AI assistance in the final piece.
The following comes after Session 14 – ‘The Pilgrim’s Tower’ ……
In the quiet after the chaos at Ost Guruth, and the trials in the Brown Pilgrim’s Tower to help stabilise Rothlung, Captain Rolan found himself stepping outside for some air and finally let the feeling of grief catch him. Tivlyn followed soon after, and their conversation became one bound in the emotions both felt. She confronted the guilt she’d been carrying since the explosion, and Rolan pushed back against it, reminding her that the destruction of the market had been born of darker forces… not of her choices, nor of the Company’s – that the opposite was true, that without the Company’s efforts, the rest of Ost Guruth would not now stand.
Their exchange cut down to what each was afraid to voice… that Anduval’s sacrifice weighed on them both, that Rolan was grief-stricken for having had to take the life of his nephew in the course of saving another’s life… that the Stranger was already preparing his next strike, and that waiting would only worsen what was coming.
Rolan then revealed the truth he’d been wrestling with: the threat was too great for the Eglain or Rangers to stand against in a straight fight. They would have to hit the enemy before the enemy hit them, and he had begun to shape a plan, a dangerous one, that could tip the balance. Relying on a philosophy he believed could be their only hope – to hit first, and hit hardest. Tivlyn insisted it be shared with the entire fellowship, not just her. Their decisions had to be made together. Rolan agreed to this, though he felt Tivlyn might already have made up her mind to join him.
♦
Later, upstairs in the tower, Daewen had recovered enough to gather Rothlung and mak ready to leave. Their path led toward the Last Bridge, and beyond into the Trollshaws, where Rothlung could receive the healing that the Eglain could simply not provide. They slipped out ahead of the main group, moving fast and as quietly as the wounded man could manage, locked as he was in a marble-like state. She was determined to reach the watch of the elves quickly.
♦
As the fellowship in Ost Guruth planned their next move against the Stranger, trouble was already unfolding far to the east.
Daewen, escorting Rothlung toward the healers of the Hidden Valley, had expected a quiet road. Instead she found the path to the Last Bridge was very wrong. Something was moving along the riverbanks, funnelled toward the crossing. By the time the pair reached the final approach, the truth showed itself.
A blockade. Not a formal one, no soldiers, no sentries, but a living obstruction of spiders, massed in unnerving numbers, spilling across the bridge supports and stone arches. The way east was in the process of being sealed.
Rothlung was in no state to fight. Daewen was in no state to linger. So she made the only choice left. She abandoned the road entirely.
Guiding Rothlung’s half-conscious weight, she had her mare force a crossing in the forded waters by the bridge itself, while she in turn created a distraction and approached the spiders. The marsh-born creatures favoured open ground and had little taste for the river’s cold foam, which Daewen knew would be her only solution – to get to the water as quickly as she could. But the effort was challenging, and she suffered bites along the way. When she finally reached the eastern shore, and regrouped with her mare and charge, she was relived to find the spiders did not cross the river.
They were jittering and restless, but unwilling to follow beyond some unseen boundary. Whether that was the edge of Lord Elrond’s protection or the edge of the Stranger’s command, or simply the limit of their nature, Daewen did not question it.
Rothlung lived, for now. The road to the elves lay open before them. She could not even rest to think of the troubles coming before the fellowship as she rode on, weary and injured herself.
The Stranger was not waiting to be hunted. He was moving his forces to choke the Lone-lands from all sides. The rising storm was about to crash upon those who remained.
♦
As the dawn broke, the Stranger’s influence would continue to creep outward from Harloeg. The Lone-lands would not fall in a single tide, but across three simultaneous fronts, each testing the Eglain in different ways:
1. The Eastern Front — The Road to the Last Bridge
The eastern fields were the earliest to feel the pressure: scattered sightings of spiders near the East Road turned into a thickening mass of brood drifting westward. Patrols sent to scout simply did not return. When Daewen reached the Last Bridge, they saw the truth, not a random migration, but a bottleneck, as though the brood were trying to seal the Lone-lands off from the world beyond. They had fortunately made it through before the net was closed entirely.
The Eglain tried to hold the approach and the hills by the bridge, but they were outnumbered and quickly forced back. The entire east of the Lone-lands became a dead end. No reinforcements could enter. No evacuees could leave. They set fire lines along the hills to slow their retreat, but few made it back to Ost Guruth alive.
2. The Southern Front — Minas Eriol
Minas Eriol was never meant to withstand a siege. The ruins were defensible against orcs or brigands, but the spiders came not in ranks but in waves, slipping through cracks, climbing walls, dropping from broken arches. The defenders lit fires at first, pushing the brood back with smoke and flame, even laying oil traps in narrow corridors to slow and burn… but the numbers kept rising. Every wave slain seemed matched by three more crawling out of hidden warrens beneath the hills.
By midmorning the southern outpost was lost. No Eglain would survive to flee north. Minas Eriol’s fall confirmed a grim truth, the Stranger had bred a considerable army of spiders – bent to his will.
3. The Western Front — The Fields Beneath Weathertop
To the west, near the crossroads and the slopes under Weathertop, the Eglain dug in quickly. Here the ground was open, fire could be spread wide, and the wind favoured them. Lines of burning oil and brush hindered the brood’s advance, and mounted archers circled the perimeter to pick off stragglers. This was the one place where the spiders could not slip through cracks or crawl beneath wall… they had to charge across open ground.
Even so, the fighting was brutal. The Eglain held the line only through sheer grit and the advantage of terrain. The western front didn’t win so much as endure, buying hours the rest of the Lone-lands no longer had.
But even here, even at their strongest hold, the defenders could feel the tide building. The west could not hold forever. It could only hold long enough to buy Ost Guruth time to prepare. What few survivors there were managed to find refuge with the Dwarves in Iorvanas when the time came to fall back.
♦
At Ost Guruth
The spiders struck first from below, exactly as the Eglain had been warned and still feared they would. The old tunnels trembled. Stones cracked. A rush of skittering limbs echoed up through the earth. The defenders had prepared for it though: with oil poured down the portals, torches dropped, a roaring bloom of fire that lit the forgotten underways of the fort from times long past.
In some sections, there was a mighty BOOM as parts of the tunnels collapsed with the heat and force of the fire. The first wave burned. The second burned... the third hesitated and burned. But the fourth, simply crawled into the flames, bodies blackening but still moving, still clawing upward. OBEY ringing loudly in their minds.
Then they came from the ruins. Amon Ros spat forth its own brood into the plains; with great shapes rising from the ruins where the fellowship had first crossed paths with them in these lands. Arrows fell in coordinated waves along the approaching paths to the walls, but it only scattered them for moments before the swarm reformed and pressed onward, a dark row streaking toward the fort’s western flank. And from the east and south, across the wide fields where the land dips gently toward the roads of Cardolan and the Last Bridge, the horizon itself turned black .
Not in a tide, but in layers. Wave after wave, each overtaking the last, their numbers so vast the ground seemed to shimmer beneath them. When they hit the old walls the stone shook. Dust drifted from ancient cracks and timbers groaned under the strain.
Inside Ost Guruth, women and children had been earlier ushered toward the northern caves. The wounded were carried to the brown pilgrim's tower. Everyone else... everyone who could stand... took to the walls with spear or bow or whatever they could hold.
The Stranger had tightened his net.
And the assault on Ost Guruth had truly begun.
♦
Now we turn to live session 11, which took place as the preceding events of the rising storm were being written collaboratively.
Session 16 –
At first light, the fellowship assembles at the milestone by Ost Guruth’s gate. The market square is still scarred from the day before, Eglain mustering around them in numbers not seen in years, preparing for what all know may be a final stand. Rolan greets the group with exhaustion in his eyes, confessing the danger has worsened, not eased.
Tivlyn, who had spoken privately with him in the night, echoes to the group what Rolan had bluntly said last night: that the Stranger will strike again and so we must strike harder and first…
Rolan reveals news from dawn: spider movements on three fronts, east by the bridge, south toward Cardolan, and west toward Bree-land… enough to drown whole roads. Time it seemed was already against them.
The Eglain cannot face this head-on. Instead, Rolan has formed a plan: their warriors will ride south-east as bait, drawing the Stranger’s attention while the fellowship cuts straight for Haragmar to try to make a plea to an ancient power. One that even the Brown Pilgrim, Radagast, had warned them never to seek, for a plea to such power will always come with a grave price… but to Rolan, any price is worth paying to protect his people.
Before leaving, Tivlyn asks to know whether Daewen and Rothlung made it through the eastern crossings. Rolan reassures her: there have been no signs of fallen riders, and that no further news is likely good news.
Outside the walls, the Eglain depart in a long, quiet column… dust rising like a pale banner behind them, no cheers, no drums, only resolve. The fellowship watches them go, then mounts up to ride north-east.
♦
They travel through the red marshes of Haragmar, where the land shows signs of renewal, clearer waters, calmer air, and the sense that some ancient power has awoken once again, its purpose restored. The broken arches of Agamaur rise like the ribs of a long-dead creature, and it is there the marsh reveals its keeper: Naruhel, the red maid, rising in a bloom of red-lit water to them.
Her presence is overwhelming to many. Her judgment is sharp and cold, a product of her previous forced corruption at the hands of fouler forces.
The fellowship argues their case… the Stranger’s threat, the rising brood, the danger not only to Ost Guruth but to all lands. She listens with cold, ancient scrutiny, demanding an oath before she will lend the power of the marsh. Sacrifice is her price; strength must be anchored in one who can bear it without breaking.
Tivlyn offers herself if needed, but it is Rolan who accepts whatever burden she names, without expectation or fear. Wittkun and Benjenn stand unflinching and Meltharian and Tiv plead for Rolan’s sake that it need not be an end to his life.
Only then does Naruhel relent. She will consider their words, and when the hour comes, she will name the charge. For now, she will walk with them.
Together they leave Agamaur and head south, the air shifting back toward the rot of Harloeg. Their steeds are left behind as they enter the marsh on foot, knowing the Stranger’s brood waits ahead.
♦
The first spiders came in probing strikes rather than a charge; a vanguard. Lean, fast shapes slipped through the shallows, testing the fellowship. Tivlyn and Wittkun met them head-on, steel clashing with chitin. Benjenn barrelled into the water as a bear, crushing two under one swing. Mel held the flank, her doubled voice disrupting their rhythm long enough for clean kills. It became clear these were only scouts meant to measure their strength.
Then the Stranger’s voice rose through the fog… mocking, amused, echoing across the marsh without revealing its source. His silhouette flickered upon broken ruins ahead in a clearing, with green light curling from his hands. He taunted their wounds, belittled their progress, and dared them to take another step. When they refused to be cowed, he unleashed a heavier wave of spiders, dozens breaking through the swampy marsh in a sudden rush.
The fellowship held as the tide hit. Rolan and Tivlyn anchored the front, Wittkun cut a path, and Benjenn carved a clearing in the mud with sheer force. Mel fought through exhaustion, stabbing and stepping with resolve. Still, the Stranger watched with smug expectation, convinced their strength would buckle before they reached him.
But Harloeg itself began to shift. Naruhel advanced through the reeds, rose-light spreading across the waters as the land answered her presence. The brood recoiled. Even the Stranger’s green fire faltered for a breath. His amusement thinned into irritation as they forced their way closer.
By the time they reached the clearing and the full shape of the Stranger finally appeared, the first true battle of Harloeg had begun… the fellowship pressing in, the brood swarming thicker around them, and Naruhel rising like a storm behind their line. The Stranger had expected fear. Instead, they met him with steel, stubbornness, and a power to rival his own… it was he who felt the fear.
♦
Now we turn to live session 16
Session 16 –
Naruhel steps fully into the clearing, her crimson radiance rolling across Harloeg like a rising tide. The brood recoils before her, their legs curling and scraping as the Stranger’s sickly green command over them falters. His earlier confidence drains at the sight of her. Even through his hood, the shift in his posture betrays him… surprise, then fear, then a thin, stubborn fury.
She confronts him without raising her voice, stripping away the veneer he hides behind. With every word she speaks, the marsh answers her; threads of water coil upward around her feet as if the very land judges the intruder. The Stranger tries to rally the spiders to surge, but she has already severed his hold on the weaker broodlings. Confusion ripples through them instead of obedience.
He lashes out in desperation, forcing raw green power through his cracked skin until dozens of spiders convulse and fling themselves forward. Tivlyn, Rolan, Benjenn, Mel and Wittkun surge to meet them, buying space for the Red-maid to advance. The Stranger tries to turn the swarm again, but panic fractures his control. When his fury spikes, he detonates part of the brood outright… limbs bursting in acidic sprays that lash across the clearing. Mel is nearly taken by the corrosive spittle, her shield dissolving in places where the impact burns through.
As the battle tilts, Naruhel names him… Zhaurlok… and the revelation strikes like a physical blow to him. His light flitters. Shame cracks his stance. But insult turns quickly into rage, and with his remaining power Zhaurlok summons a monstrous apparition: a towering spider-form stitched from shadow, venom, and stolen magic. It crashes into the clearing, its limbs ripping trenches into the swamp.
Naruhel meets it head-on. Her rose-light surges, the marsh erupting in columns of water and radiant force as she duels the conjured horror.
The fellowship scatters around her, dodging crushing limbs. Wittkun is not quick enough though. The apparition’s leg slams him into the mire, armour buckling, ribs snapping. The swamp swallows him whole, pulling him beneath the reeds and down into the deep.
♦
Below the surface, we find that Wittkun has survived, partly due to his stubborn self, but also aided by the strange magical resilience imparted to him under Ost Guruth, though he only assumed it was a drumming in his ears. Wittkun crawls blindly through churning mud until his hand finds an ancient wall of webbing, he finds himself in sunken tunnels and finds his way to a cocoon wrapped around a familiar dwarf. It is Vratni. Though barely conscious he is alive. Wittkun tears at the silk even as his injuries scream.
♦
Above, the battle turns. Naruhel pierces the apparition with a spear of crystallised water, shattering it into a shriek of green mist. Seeing his conjured weapon destroyed, Zhaurlok turns to flee. Mel hurls her spear with all her strength, managing to pin him to a twisted tree by his beak-like beard. It halts him long enough for the fellowship to close in.
But Zhaurlok’s desperation ignites again. He calls the deep tunnels beneath Harloeg, dragging Vratni’s entire cocoon, and Wittkun clinging to it, up through the peat and mud, and uses it as a shield. He wrenches himself free by severing his own beard, tearing the spear from the tree in the same motion. With the cocoon as his shield, he buys himself time to flee and is seen heading eastward, vanishing into the webs.
The apparition is gone. The swamp is in ruin. And the Stranger has escaped… but this time without Vratni in his grasp. The fellowship have recovered him, and are equally pleased to see Wittkun still breathing.
♦
Now we return to discord RP.
The following comes after Session 16 – ‘The Breaking of the Marsh’ ……
With Zhaurlok driven off and the brood shattered, the fellowship stands amid the wreck of Harloeg, wounded and shaken but alive. Naruhel appears weakened though still radiant. At the sight of the remaining brood, here and across the Lone-lands… now uncontrolled… she makes her offer to Rolan. She can scour the spiders from the Lone-lands entirely, pull them into the deep places of the marsh where they can no longer threaten the land, but the marsh will demand a sacrifice.
Rolan accepts the burden without hesitation, offering his life. Naruhel corrects him: the cost is not death, but devotion. A binding of purpose. A fate he will carry for the rest of his days. She names it as him becoming the marsh’s warden in exchange. He agrees.
She raises her hands and the marsh erupts.
Columns of water roar upward, dragging centuries of rot and webbing into a deep spiralling void. Pools collapse into sinkholes. Webs tear loose and vanish. From every corner of Harloeg, and even farther afield, rose and gold mists drift toward the vortex as the land itself purges the infection Zhaurlok spread. The spiders shriek before being pulled under and smothered by the rising waters and falling earth. The fellowship can only cling to one another while the land reshapes beneath them.
When the storm finally ends, Harloeg lies bare and quiet… a drained basin of mud and ruin where the old swamp once stood. Rolan stands at its centre, still and silent until the rose-light begins to sink into his skin. It flows into his hands, his cheeks, the line of his jaw, marking him with Naruhel’s power. She names him the Red-Warden of the Marsh, and the earth seems to lift beneath his feet in recognition.
With the spider threat to the Lone-lands pacified, attention turns to the cocooned Vratni and the battered Wittkun. Tivlyn, Mel and Benjenn gather around, bruised and spent, while Rolan steadies himself in his new role. Vratni finally speaks through the webs with something deeper than bravado… shaken by what the others endured to reach him, humbled by Mel’s injuries, Wittkun’s near-death, and the fellowship’s refusal to leave him behind. He calls them ‘friends’, thanks them in his own stubborn way, and even offers “hazard pay”, only to falter when sentiment breaks through his usual bluster.
There is relief, laughter, tears.
The drained marsh begins, slowly, to refill with clean water.
The danger is ended, but the cost is etched plainly on all their faces.
The Lady of the Marshes offers those who’ve received magical traits from the rune-columns below Ost Guruth a release from them, quicker than the pace at which they will fade of their own accord… but it seems many decide to retain their gifts a time longer.
By the time they are ready to move, Rolan stands not only as captain of the Eglain, but as the sworn Warden of these marshes. Naruhel’s presence lingers like a blessing and a warning both, and the fellowship gathers themselves for the road ahead… wounded, but victorious, and bound now by something stronger than simple need. They look east to where their friends have gone, and make ready to find them as soon as possible.
♦
Now we return to ‘The Rising Storm’ discord RP:
It was early afternoon when the assault on Ost Guruth shuddered to a halt.
The spiders that had crawled up the broken walls or had made it inside the battlements froze, legs raised mid-climb or penetration of Eglain warriors... as a strange light crept across the land. It began as a thin whisp in the air, a rose tint slipping between stones and broken carts, between the cracks of walls or over them altogether... then deepened into sweeping rivers of rose and gold that drifted like dawn mist.
The Eglain lifted their weapons, expecting some new terror, but the mists slid gently past them and wrapped themselves around every spider in sight. The creatures twitched once, as if caught in a sudden current, then stiffened. A moment later they began to move, not by their own strength, but pulled backward along the ground as though the earth itself was reclaiming them.
From the battlements, from the roads, from the scattered hills beyond, spiders rose in thin spirals of vapour. They twisted softly in the light, carried into the sky in long ribbons before turning south-east, drawn across the empty plains toward Harloeg.
Warriors dropped their swords. Archers lowered their bows. Even the wind seemed to listen as the last of the brood left the stones of Ost Guruth behind, drifting like leaves toward the distant marsh. When the mists finally thinned and the glow faded, the walls were quiet again.
Only the fallen creatures remained, and the stunned breathing of those who had so narrowly survived this day of slaughter in the Lone-lands.
It was too late for many... but just in time for many more to breath a sigh of relief. Few in Ost Guruth understood what they had witnessed. The Eglain whispered of spirits, of lost wards awakening, of some hidden grace passing over the land. Others said nothing at all, too shaken by the sight of spiders torn from the very walls.
In the days that followed, rumours spread in quiet circles. Some claimed the great power had risen in Haragmar once more and saved them. Others insisted a doom had merely shifted its shape and it was the Spiders' time. Others mentioned the passing of a Company of fools... But no one truly knew the reason for the sudden calm that settled over the Lone-lands. Not until Rolan returned.
When he walked through the gates, marked by a faint rose glow at the edges of his silhouette and a calmness that did not belong to any mortal who had survived a battle, the Eglain fell silent. Only then did anyone begin to understand that the marsh had claimed a warden, and that the peace they now stood in had been bought by an oath spoken far from any wall or watchtower. And though few words were said aloud, the folk of Ost Guruth knew that whatever had saved them had walked back into their midst in Rolan’s quiet step; and they stopped asking, for they did not need to know more of it.
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The story continues in the chronicle: "Where Webs Whisper"...
