Lauren Christ
Stories from the Axe and Thistle is a bi-monthly serialization that details the exploits of a D&D 5e campaign as they troll their way through an open-world wilderness. Often outlandish and good for a laugh, these vignettes are told by the Dungeon Master of said campaign, because sometimes humor is the only way to cope with tragedy!
Click here to see the previous installment.
A shadow falls over you as an older man approaches the bar. He is incredibly tall, with a bushy black beard flecked with grey. His weathered face breaks into a broad smile as he greets Luddy and orders a drink. She pours him an ale in a metal tankard, which he takes between two large, calloused hands. With a parting nod to you, he heads back to the corner table where he sits with his companions. The sheer size of the man in comparison to the others at the table is comical; even seated, he towers over them. He laughs a booming laugh, loud and self-assured.
“Who is he?” you ask, your curiosity plain.
“That’s the town blacksmith Galen,” Luddy replies, “And he’s got an interesting story to him. Galen gets metal for his business from a quarry to the east of here – the path is well-worn from the loads he’s been hauling out of there for years. He’s never been bothered by anything that lives in those woods, or at least, nothing out there has been more than he could handle. There was this one time, though, that he got into real trouble with a creature called a hag. Ever seen one?”
You shake your head no.
“Hags are nasty things. Picture an old woman, except now she’s six or seven feet tall, has green skin covered in moss and boils, fingernails like black needles, and teeth like splintered wood inside a tree trunk.”
You picture this. Your face twists in disgust.
“Not too many people have seen a hag and lived because people are sort of their favorite food. Galen is one of the lucky ones. He crossed paths with a hag in some old castle ruins to the north of his mine, wound up in her territory by accident. Instead of eating him, though, she wanted to have a little fun. Turned him into a bear. You might have noticed he’s still suffering from some lingering effects of that.”
You chance a look back towards Galen’s table. His beard did seem particularly wild to you, taking up much of his face. And his arms, so large and also covered in thick, black hair like his head, did remind you a bit of an animal.
“He isn’t still a werebear, obviously. The curse was broken by a group of adventurers a while ago, but he still looks a little bit more bear-like than he used to.
He was found wandering in the woods, uprooting trees and roaring so loudly it would scare off all of the other wildlife in the area. When the adventurers came upon him, he was in such a frenzy that he couldn’t tap into his humanity at all.
He was a complete beast, no intelligence left in him. They had no choice but to fight. There were so many close calls, from what I’m told – Galen was an uninhibited fighter with no concern for his own safety. He as if his only goal was to kill them all as viciously as possible. They brought him down at a great personal cost, and I’m not sure that everyone made a full recovery from that battle.
But Galen owes them his life, and he paid out his gratitude many times over in the years since that day.”
You look back at the blacksmith again, laughing cheerfully with his friends at the table, sharing food and drink together. You try to picture what he must have looked like, transformed into a bear. You picture him with blood in his teeth and foam on his lips. The thought is chilling. “What about the hag?” you ask, “Did the adventurers get her, too?”
“The hag had made her lair, like I said, in the ruins of an ancient, abandoned castle. And she saw the adventurers approaching even when they were very far away, so she put a spell over the area, to confuse them. They didn’t see the warning signs as they explored the ruins: the deer bones, broken and littering the floor, the shredded and discarded animal pelts, and magic runes painted on the walls in dark red blood. Hags have powerful illusory magic that’s pretty hard to break through. The castle appeared as it would’ve had there been no hag at all. The floors looked like a blanket of wildflowers, no animal bones or guts in sight. There were even butterflies gathering around the heather bushes that grew from the cracks in the old, stone walls. It was idyllic, actually.
The party continued on into the heart of her lair, not suspecting they were being tricked until it was too late for them to escape. That is where they faced the hag.”
To be continued…
Stay tuned as we upload a new chapter of the campaign every other week right here on DorkDaily.com!
