Chapter 1 - Ashes to Ashes
It was a gloomy and somber day in the small, wayward town of Ravengro, a dour little hamlet already predisposed to gloom and sobriety. The climate was typical for Ustalav's southern provinces. Grey and drawn, with wan, insipid sunshine often marred by lurking cloud cover that at the slightest provocation tended to drizzle a depressing and chilling rain. Once a boom town, Ravengro was now a tiny agricultural backwater. What in any other land may have been a sleepy farmer's town instead seemed suspicious, insular, and contracted.
The town had originally sprung up around a massive prison, now burnt out and decaying, that squatted on a hill overlooking the town like a great corpse. Many years ago a fire had destroyed the prison, and with it the town's main economic base, but the stubborn townsfolk hung on as only Ustalavians could, eking out a living from the rough soil.
The general air was only made more tragic by a sad procession that gathered at the entrance to the Restlands, Ravengro's large and inordinately well tended cemetery. If there is one thing that Ustalavians observed above all else it was the due to the dead. That it was a funeral procession was made clear by the large and lavishly carved casket resting on runners before the gate. Inside lay a teacher, a scholar, an adventurer at heart, a man who had traveled widely the lands of Golarion ever in search of knowledge. The dearly departed Professor Petros Lorrimor.
It was an odd funeral procession. Virtually none of Ravengro's native towns people made up its number. The group was an eclectic bunch. A pair of solemn faced nobles and a scholar in a creased cap, a trio of dwarves in boiled leather jerkins, an aging priest, a grief stricken young woman weeping into a black lace kerchief, and six adventurers newly arrived to mourn the passing of a dear friend.