Scene 2: The Trail
This scene is dragging badly, so let's wrap it up. Here comes the inevitable conclusion.
The spirits retreat. They fly away, not to their own home world, but into the deeper wilderness to regroup and seek out easier prey. The adventurers may take pride in the fact that they managed to banish one of the entities and destroy another before running off the survivors.
Kalista and Nyx both regain their full wits after having won their struggles to control their own thoughts. Doc didn't fare as well, but he feels the phantom experience fade away into a hazy but still unpleasant memory. He emerges from his security blanket with a sore throat from all of screaming and shouting he has done in the last couple of minutes.
Doc will to make a Save vs. Insanity roll. If he fails, he may develop a phobia of crows from his experience.
What really happened: The group was jumped and attacked by a specific species of entity called the Scaring Crows. These creatures possess living creatures like their cousins, Possession Entities, but these monsters are limited to specifically possessing crows and ravens. Scaring Crows feed on fear. Four such entities were hunting in the area when they were attracted to the fear that the horse was experiencing from Polkitain's presence. Four such entities were working together as a pack and mind controlling a larger flock of crows. Scaring Crows prefer to isolate a target and gang up on her, but they couldn't do that this time. The four began haunting the group, beginning with the horses and moving onto the two-legged critters, to see who was vulnerable. Their paralyzing fear is a form of attack with no lingering damage, and it requires a target to first be scared or at least alarmed. This attack sets up the target for the Murdermare psychic assault which creates the Scaring Crows' honey pot of delicious fear. Due to some dice results, only Doc fell victim to the full force of the Murdermare, and that only lasted for a couple of melee rounds instead of the hours that Scaring Crows prefer. The first entity to be defeated was moving from one possessed crow to another when it failed its possession attempt and was booted to its home world as a result. The second entity was destroyed by Polkitain. The third was wounded by Arulas. The third and fourth flew away just now. The mind-controlled crows (those few which survived the hacking and the explosion) recover slowly from their poisoning and disperse during the following few minutes.
Scaring Crows come from the Beyond the Supernatural article written by Stephen Dawes in The Rifter, Issue #44 if anyone wants to look them up.