Urfengar: Stranger in a Strange Land

I can't say that I was very happy about this development. Instead of quickly tracking down the Baron's sister and her kidnappers, we were stuck staring at a stone door with odd markings on it. It had a couple lines written in common on it: "Three keys to unlock the gate/ Three races to reveal thy fate." It had more writing below that, in what appeared to be abyssal, the language of the Nine Hells. Rath and Azraiel assured me that it said the same thing as the lines in common. Below all the writing were three indentations in the stone. One was shaped like a cog from a clock, one was shaped like a lizard's footprint, and the third was shaped like a skull. I could only presume that they were the "keyholes" for the keys mentioned.

Jackle impetuously reached forward to shove open the door, only to be thrown back into the air about twenty feet. So much for brute force. Little Max put on his slippers of Spider-Climb and began to scale the tower. He noticed some windows about sixty feet up and tried to pry one open. Clearly, the owner of the tower didn't want just anybody bursting in on him, since Max began to fly backward away from the building. Fortunately for him, he'd picked up a magic cloak from amongst the items we recovered in the dragon's hoard. This particular cloak can sprout wings at the wearer's command, so Maxwell began to flit around up in the air. He shouted down that he'd noticed something off in the distance and began to fly towards it.

As he was gallivanting about, Rath explored the area around the tower. We were standing on a bridge of sorts over a moat. Beyond the moat was an area of patchy grass, enclosed by a stone wall that ran the circumference of the tower. There were three evenly spaced gaps in the wall, and one of them led off in the direction that Max was flying. A second gap was directly behind us and led into a forest of very large trees. Or rather, it led onto a path that was straight as an arrow for as far as the eye could see, and on both sides of the path lay a forest of very large trees. Walking out directly from the third gap would lead through miles of grassland and what appeared to be a lake far off into the distance.

By the time we'd figured this much out, Max flew back down saying that the shimmering he'd seen was a lot farther off than he'd thought. Since we didn't have much else to go on, we began to march off in that direction.

We travelled for the rest of the day and eventually set up camp for the night. We continued the march in the morning, but at some point, a few of our more keen-sighted group sighted a dust cloud off in the direction of the lake. After a heated discussion, we decided to change plans and try to catch the dust cloud. We spent the rest of the day trudging off after that. The next morning we decided to try a much faster march in hopes of actually gaining ground on our quarry. About mid-day, Maxwell thought to give his legs a break and put on his wings again. He flew after the dust cloud at about twice our speed.

About three hours later, he returned to report that the dust cloud was a herd of large lizards being shepherded by men riding somewhat smaller lizards.