Murdoch (Thomas) I

The Shrines By Murdoch Brooks Hello, I’m Murdoch Brooks from the adventuring party of Orizan, here to speak of our findings the week before All Hallows. In short, we destroyed shrines; 3 of them, filled with wretched zombies. We have had trouble with a shrine before, and even got captured twice, once while adventuring, and the other trying to save our party members. It took a lot of valiant soldiers to save us, and now we must get them back. But that is beside the point. These shrines have been causing much trouble, and the more shrines, the more frequently the creatures of the forest attack us, which leads me to believe that they are connected, all one, but all apart –wolfwers, vine trolls, fairies, and zombies– all mutated by the forest. On the first encounter, we found fairies. Red and green-black fairies, fighting each other. We downed all of them, but one of our party members was killed, as he killed a fairy himself. This will come into play later in my next chronicle. After downing all the fairies, some of us bottled and bagged them for later tests (nothing important, just for fun). Then, we reached the first shrine. It was in a forest. The shrine was in a corner, surrounded by zombies of many crafts; diviners, pyromancers, healers, etc. They were mostly mages. When one of our party members took a piece out of the shrine, the zombies downed him and moved it back into place. After downing all the zombies, I picked up a skull laying on top of the shrine. One of our party members used his ability to speak with the skull. The skull said “I am death. I will kill you. Bring back my people.” in a whispery voice. Sometimes the zombies acted like the shrine was a shrine, and sometimes they didn’t. The second shrine was much like the first, except now in addition to being a forest, it was also surrounded by swamp, making us unable to run. The zombies on this shrine were much more focused, as if they had better connection to their leader, whoever that is. They were previously our allies, but now zombified. We carried them back after downing them all, with a lot more effort then the previous one. This time, I stole the skull and walked away, and the zombies all followed me. I was downed after but we managed to win the fight. This time, the skull said something different than before: “Why are you here?” The third shrine was very different. It was back to forest terrain and we were in the middle of ruins. In addition to there being zombies, there was now a skull spider which the zombies seemed to worship. They were surrounding the spider, protecting it. This led us to believe that the spider was their leader. It was similar to the second one, and once we killed the spider, the zombies became disoriented. We did not have enough time to talk to the skull, so therefore we got no information. After destroying the shrines fully, we then took apart the blocks and made it so the zombies couldn’t just rebuild it. In the inn, someone used their ability and sensed that the skull felt malicious. That’s it for the week. For the visions we saw later on that day, see my next chronicle.