The Shadows of Falcon's Hollow
Earlier, the group had moved through the haunted, abandoned village of Falcon's Hollow, finding little in the way of concrete signs of what had happened there. What you did find, though, was troubling. A children's storybook, open to a tale about a wolf and a clever child who trapped the beast in a pit, with the ending pages ripped out of the book. A logbook, left by the Andoren army contingent that had previously gone into these woods to find answers, detailing the way that they were being called to the northwest of the village by dreams and visions that had come to haunt even their waking hours, and expressing an intent to die rather than be taken by the being sending them. A house, with the only dead remaining in the village - a family, father and mother with two children, all dead by the father's hand. In that house, a chest that held far too much coin of a Taldane minting, an adamantine dagger that seemed to have something sick about it, and a cryptic handwritten note describing visions, monsters in the woods that belong to "her" as do the villagers themselves, and a final sentence of "We dealt with demons, and the demons won."
By this time, the sun was setting, and you set up a camp in the temple of Erastil, where the army contingent had made their stand before you. Shadows and animals both living and undead came and watched you, from the edge of your circle of light, and two of the shadows moved in and attacked but were dispatched. The rest left you in peace, though you each had haunting nightmares in your sleep, visions of suffering that all featured a pale woman with red hair and green eyes watching with a smile.
The next morning you had moved out to the northwest, into the forest, through shadows that were too dark and too real for comfort. You followed the trail left by the creatures that had moved this direction before you, and found a hill, with a statue of a paladin from days gone by standing atop it. It's a bad place, they say, where that paladin fought a monster and they both died, around the time that Darkmoon Vale was first settled. Halson's Grotto, they call it, after the knight who died here.
Within the cave, there were repeated manifestations of haunts, accompanied by the voice of a girl - Annabelle Ravan, who lived in the village. In fact, she lived in the same house with the family you found dead, because they were her family. Now, though, she manifested here as a haunt, speaking about suffering that she had been through - moments, it seems, captured in time. She was brought here, cold and alone and hungry, and she was tormented. There were signs of a group of evil werewolves here, who worshiped the demon lord who is the patron of such lycanthropes. You destroyed the altar you found, and moved forward, finding a way deeper into the cave's depths.
Down below, you found a deep, rapid underground river, and undead werewolves standing watch. The werewolves Bristle seized, finding another mind controlling them, but one that was not exerting control actively. Having destroyed the undead, you moved further, following the river past a waterfall and to a large lake. The water of the lake is filled with corpses, of humans and animals and other things that are not easily identified in their current state of decay. The ceiling is obscured by countless undead shadows, making it difficult to see above you. And at the center of the lake is an island, on the shores of which is the corpse of Annabelle Ravan, horribly mutilated and bearing the marks of her suffering openly, but not rotting.
Standing over it, a ghost, of a girl...
