From Nobbie’s Diary:
We reached the southern foothills of the Zinkos Desert with the caravan and found the ruins of Zinkheim. Once a great city, today only parts of ruins protrude from the sea of sand. We set up camp near a spring and watched the Magister construct a permanent portal to Tarkerheim. It felt good to see that the information about the teleportation stones we had brought home from Castle Gray resulted in something so useful. From now on, you no longer have to travel through the desert if you can afford the 100 gold to use the portal. Less than half an hour after the portal stone was set, workers with building materials were already coming through the gate. An outpost is now being built inside the crumbling ruins of Zinkheim. Tomorrow we set off for Hornforrest, the former hunting forest of the nobility back when the empire still existed a thousand years ago. I wonder what awaits us there?
Our journey to Hornforest took five days. From a distance, we can see smoke rising from the forest. The source of the smoke seems to be in the southern part of the woods. We enter the forest at the spot where the remains of the Northern Gate stand. The arch of the gate is no longer intact, just like the wall that once surrounded the entire forest. Now, everything is overgrown and decayed. There are said to be two more stone archways leading into the forest—one in the east and one in the west. The forest is unusually quiet in the north. We see and hear no animals; the woods seem dead here as far as animal life is concerned. The trees tower high into the air everywhere, some even up to sixty meters tall. Beneath the dense canopy, it is often a bit gloomy, though enough light still reaches the ground here and there.
While gathering firewood, we find a bare deer skull hung high up between the trees with vines. Two dead birds were tied to the antlers of the skull. The birds look like they have been hanging there for a week. So, someone was here recently. To us, this looks like something religious, a sacrifice or some kind of trophy. We remain vigilant.
Last night was beyond eerie. A humanoid figure appeared in our camp twice, seeming to emit a greenish light from within. Leandra and I were marked with a red dye by the creature. We couldn’t wash it off. When trying to remove the mark with a spell, our mage lost the spell entirely. The runes of the spell simply vanished from the inside of her arm. A short time later, a hunting horn sounded, and I was somehow able to know the location of every huntable creature nearby, including my companions. Sorcery! Overwhelmed by the urge to hunt, I grabbed my crossbow and set off until the spell and the urge to hunt faded.
The next morning, the mark was gone. We travel deeper into the forest, towards the south. We are looking for the Old Hunting Lodge, which is said to stand in the southwest of the forest, if anything is left of it after a thousand years. Eventually, we hear animal sounds again, and the forest feels normal once more. We encounter strange creatures. There are sheep-sized spiders with orange fur here that communicate with sounds and seem to be intelligent. They eyed us curiously. We were not attacked. We left them in peace, and whenever we heard them, we steered clear of them. There are also large ants in the forest, about a cubit long. Hundreds of them roam the woods. Once, we saw an entire deer being carried to their nest by them. Another time, we saw them shearing one of the “sheep-spiders,” stripping it of its orange fur and carrying it away. There seems to be a kind of symbiosis between the spiders and the large ants. We can recognize ant territory quite well in the forest; wherever things look “cleaned up” and small “compost piles” are visible, that is their domain. From afar, we heard the hunting horn again today.
Last night, we saw another kind of ghost. In the form of a translucent horse burning with green flames, it circled our camp. This forest is truly sinister.
The next day, we stumbled upon Spinebeasts—large, four-legged reptiles that shoot horn spikes. Luckily, I was wearing armor. With arrows, bolts, and a loud racket, we managed to drive them away. Shortly after, further south, we came across a swath of destruction that smelled of death and decay. Tracks of a huge boar were visible everywhere. We all agreed that none of us fancied crossing its path. Then, a fight did break out after all. But not against Spinebeasts or the giant boar, but against a phase spider that could teleport. A sneaky beast—we had made the mistake of severing one of its alarm threads.
On the fifth day in the forest, we find the ruins of the hunting lodge. Not much is left of it. A cellar, built at a later time, can be found next to the house, but it is also mostly collapsed. We find one thing here and take it with us: a wooden carved statue with what used to be a green-painted cage inside its ribcage. The statue reminds us of the ghost that marked us with sorcery in the northern part of the forest. On the forehead of the statue, we see remnants of red dye, a kind of mark like the one we received from the ghost. We take the statue with us.
We can piece together a little bit about the statue: it represents a spirit of the hunt that is worshiped here. One can ask for a hunting blessing from the spirit by marking the statue’s forehead with blood. A bit further east of the hunting lodge, we come across scorched earth, as if something had burned fiercely here. Upon closer inspection, we recognize bull tracks where the forest floor is burned. It’s as if a bull lives here that burns much like the ghost horse at night, but with real fire.
Eventually, we encounter the bull. It is a magical apparatus made of bronze, completely engulfed in flames. It seems to challenge us but does not attack. We finally ask the spirit of the hunt for its blessing, which is granted to us, and we face the flaming bull. We almost didn’t survive. Fortunately, we still had a healing potion left. Inside the bull, a fire elemental was trapped. We managed to capture the fire elemental and its essence in a fireproof vial we had obtained during the Kobold Days. We dismantled the bronze body of the magical bull and took it with us on our wagon.
Today (three days after the fight with the bull), on the ground floor of an old hunting lodge, we meet the spirit of the hunt, which radiates an unnatural cold. We ask for its blessing and give it the vial with the trapped fire elemental inside as a sacrifice. The spirit opens the bottle and inhales the fire elemental as if it were some kind of delicacy. Without a word, it then hands us a hunting horn and lets us leave unharmed.
At this point, we’ve had enough of the forest. With the bronze bull and the hunting horn, we leave the woods through the eastern gate. We feel like we have only seen a fraction of the things the forest still harbors.
Zinkheim! We made it back. In the meantime, quite a lot has happened here. We were gone for three weeks, and the first buildings are already going up. Through the magical portal, we travel back to Tarkerheim and celebrate properly after giving the bronze bull to our blacksmith. She has displayed it in her forge, and it’s supposed to attract new customers. We leave the magical hunting horn to Arin. I am just glad to have made it out of the forest alive.
