16 Neth 4709 AR
Carpenden

Candal stuffed the evil items into his haversack, intent on looking at them closer when we were not in the temple ruins. Salma was starting to wonder when and if Rogar was coming to find us, as he had missed quite a lot of excitement, so I yelled his name a few times, which seemed to help him get to us quickly. While the dwarf got up to speed on what we had been doing, we took a look at a huge runic circle carved in the floor where the bloody skeletons had waited. It is obviously a summoning circle, but we were not sure how to destroy it without accidentally activating it, so we opted to just alert local townsfolk of its presence.

We began our ascent out of the ruins, coming back to the corridor where I had nearly been eaten by the gibbering mouther, when I heard a strange squelching sound sliding down the passageway, the now-clean bones of the dead peasant visible just beyond our light; apparently, we had not actually killed the thing. I am unused to fighting in close quarters, but did my best to hold it off from the rest of my party. Unfortunately, I do not think anyone was aware of my intentions, as they all rushed forward. I was able to “rescue” Tythe by throwing and lighting oil on the creature; Tythe got splashed in the attempt, but she was able to get away from the mouther. Salma was smart enough to stand back and provide healing where she could, but Rogar and Candal needed to get close to damage the creature, which resulted in both of them getting caught in its numerous mouths. In a fit of rage, I was able to yank Candal free, though I pulled much too hard and our resulting momentum carried us through a closed wooden door into an unexplored room while the dwarf apparently spent some time inside the amorphous creature. The mouther shrieked at us each time it was hit with fire; this time, the fire killed it, and Rogar was soon free from the monster’s corpse, although he spent an unusual amount of time digging through it. While he did that, we checked out the room the paladin and I had landed in. It had a cold campsite, and we found a small sack in a bedroll containing jewelry that was most certainly robbed from the ancient graves outside the temple. With no way to identify where it had come from, we took it with us.

We returned to the caravan and learned that Deaglan (and his wolf) had joined the town guard, which was odd, as the town did not have a guard prior to our arrival. He had always wanted to be a town guard though, so we wished him well. We rested for the remainder of the night. Once the sun was up, we moved out, traveling north past fields of olive trees and vineyards, and fourteen uneventful days later, we arrived in Carpenden, and collected our pay from the caravan….