Our four adventurers, Lucien, Tyke, Elanor, and Nakk had been trudging up the road into the Serpentcoil Mountains for two days.

The road was finally cleared of enough snow to make it navigable. It was a beautiful spring afternoon in early April. Birds were chirruping happily in the fir trees that lined the parts of the road that were not sheer drops or rising walls of rock. Nakk, two days away from his last drunken stay at an inn, still seemed oddly tipsy. Elanor was disapprovingly aloof, and kept to herself. Tyke was awfully hungry, only having eaten four meals that day. He rummaged curiously through his backpack in the hopes that it would produce something tasty.

The adventurers came to a bend in the road. Both sides of the road were lined with rocks from what must have been a great avalanche years before. They discovered that they were only 5 miles away from Duvik's Pass, a town with a population of about 1300.



Just then, a little boy appeared on one of the stones and eyed them solemnly. He asked them if any of them had come to help his mam, who was sick with the Burning Plague. Lucien, moved by the pathetic little urchin, strode towards him, only to watch the poor child topple forward with an orc arrow embedded in his back. Unseen behind the bend of the road and the rocks, came many howls of success as the orc and his friends closed in on their victim to retrieve the arrow and gloat over the corpse.

Nakk hid himself, as did Lucien. Both drew their weapons. Elanor cast a spell on her wolf to make him even more dangerous, and stood and waited calmly in the road for her adversaries to appear. Tyke looked up from his rummaging to see the boy collapse, and ran to his aid.



The orcs came into view, and the first of them was met with a dagger, thrown by Nakk, flying overhead. The adventurers, new to skirmishes, at first were unsure and unsteady, swinging wildly and missing. The orcs were more seasoned, and within seconds, Lucien, who had bravely stepped into the center of the fray, was felled by cruel blows by the vicious orcs.

It was Elanor who came to his aid, weathering a beating by an orc, and casting a healing spell even as she suffered injury herself. With the revival of Lucien, the tide seemed to turn, and within a few moments of bloody battle, the orcs all lay dead. One last orc tried to flee, but was set upon by Elanor's wolf companion, Rasa, and his awful brutal life was ended.

The adventurers were left, shaken at their first skirmish, with the carcasses of five orcs staining the snow and mud around their feet with blood, and the pathetic tiny corpse of a boy cradled in the Halfling's arms.