Midsummer and the Silver Ravens
Arc 7. Midsummer to the 61st of Summer.
Voren's counsel
Before the festival the party asked Voren the Green whether the womp womp had a pattern. He gave them what he had:
- Mind flayers are probably involved
- Portals are probably not the direct cause
- His tower is warded — a safe place if another pulse hits
- Limit your interactions with dragons. Even the good ones.
He handed out emergency teleportation tokens keyed to the tower.
The festival
Contests, feasts, celebration, and — notably — no womp womp, at noon or at any other time.
- Zarah took second in the strength contest
- Kvothe won the storytelling contest, earning ten silver and a small brass key
The key has never opened anything.
The Silver Ravens
That evening a man named Elias approached Jocelin and said he worked with a group that had similar enemies. Jocelin and Zarah followed him out of town — with Rindle in raven form and Kvothe invisible — to a grove of standing stones south of Fallcrest.
There they met the Silver Ravens: Serena, Morgana, Jasper and Cedric.
What the Ravens knew:
- The Iron Circle is staying in Fallcrest for a reason, and is not yet strong enough to take the city
- They do not understand the womp womp, but suspect the Iron Circle is either being paid or stockpiling for something larger
- They know Markus is dead, and his allies are furious
They meet on the 30th and 60th of each month, leaving messages at the stones when they cannot. Elias gave Jocelin a silver raven pin, and she joined.
Securing the keep
The party fetched Leander and brought him to Broken Spire Keep, where he began the twenty-four hour Hallow ritual on the shrine to Asmodeus.
Meanwhile Rindle, Jocelin and Belthorne talked to the spiders and learned the arrangement: the "small ones" bring them food. A large spider agreed to lead the party to the goblins in exchange for more.
Agatha and Kvothe assessed the keep: Grade 3 stronghold, 5,000 gp and thirty days with a proper crew to repair, twenty staff to run once restored.
The night attack
Mid-ritual, a guard died on watch. Goblins and a bugbear were inside the keep. The party killed the goblins, captured two, and subdued the bugbear — Vargath. Belthorne came away with a good bow. Horace was the guard who died, leaving only Clem and Eric.
Leander kept casting, and finished.
The captured goblins talked freely — Vargath's name, and an offer to lead the party to Goblintown. Vargath refused to cooperate, faked being held, attacked Kvothe, and tried repeatedly to escape. The party eventually delivered him to the spiders.
Araniax
The party requested an audience with Araniax, the Spider Queen — twenty feet across, and she speaks Common. The goblins had been feeding her humans.
The party offered a new arrangement: goblins instead. She accepted.
In practice they would end up paying in Iron Circle mercenaries.
Goblintown and the Red Hand
The party released the captured goblins with a message: tell your chief we're friends.
Days later a goblin delegation arrived under a not-very-white flag. Their leader — Hand Solo — spoke for the Goblin King and wanted to know why the party had returned his people. A meeting was set at the keep for the 58th of Summer.
Trapping the Iron Circle
Back in Fallcrest the Iron Circle's camp outside the walls was looking permanent. The party:
- Commissioned five sleeping arrows from Assassin Thornapple for three vials of spider venom
- Scheduled a meeting with the Lord Warden for the 61st of Summer
- Met Kane Forge, whose brother Kettle is a mason with family who could work on the keep
They buried Horace properly. Then they hired Iron Circle mercenaries as guards, drugged them in their sleep — it turned into a small fight — and staged an ambush scene.
In the morning Freya revealed she had captured two more and stuffed them in her travel trunks.
All five went to Araniax as a peace offering.