Session 6
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Summer 1220
With the holy sword finally in hand, Sir William receives a vision from St. George to return to Ireland and seek the demon in the hills south of Dublin. Aesa gets lucky and discovers a cousin on a ship heading westward and negotiates passages for the party. In Dublin, they look for rumours and find the hills are filled with wild Irishmen who answer to no English lord and are warned to stay away. They take a path down to Wicklow about 25 miles south along the coastline, where they get to experience the wild hills themselves and see that it will not be an easy passage.
Once in Wicklow, Godwin, a "relic seller", who has joined with the party to escape his last adventures, finds a group of English pilgrims who have been looking for one of the 'Tears of the Virgin'. They went into the southern hills, but were attacked by bandits and fled. They do reveal that a forester is willing to be hired by anyone with money and who knows the hills. Godwin then tries to sell a 'relic' but the pilgrims' piety refuses to accept such a godly gift.
After 3 days of hard marching, they find a camp with a castle being built and approximately 300 men encamped outside. The forester indicates that the men have been gathering for weeks for something, and that the southern hills have actually been relatively safe due to this. He then leads the party a mile or so back and promises to wait for a while while the party heads into the camp. There, they discover that there are a series of 'games' being prepared to find out who is worth to serve the great 'Cu Culainn' of legend.
The party enters both knights and Aesa -- who is jeered at -- but they make a good showing at the first contest, the feat of strength. Godwin also passes the first contest, but deliberately fails the next one, a 10 mile-long run with obstacles and plenty of cheating. The rest do fairly well showing that adventurers will swim, climb, and jump across chasms in order to keep their edge. Approximately 100 people are weeded out during this process. Finally, there is the melee contest to the death to weed out a further 100 people, leaving only the 'truly worthy'. The knights and Aesa defeat their enemies (2 Anglo-Norman knights and an irish mercenary) and receive a tour of the castle from the outside. There, they find out why the castle looked red -- it is covered in blood of some kind. And to make the point of this, dead bodies from the contest are hung outside to drip down along the walls.
The palisade of the castle looks less than secure, and they can see several ways to breach it. Also, one of the castle wings is unfinished, with scaffolding that allows easy access to the second floor. They resolve to go in that night and confront the demon. During the night, they see only one guard at the palisade main gate, who is nodding off to sleep. They make their way to the north-west half of the palisade, climb over it, and mount the scaffolding to the second floor. A quiet prowl finds sleeping guards, a storage room, and finally a prison with two tortured individuals. Neither are Aed, the apprentice glassblower.
From the main hall, they hear the booming voice of the demon who seems to be taunting and torturing Aed with his plans and demanding to know what he knows of the 'meddlers' (the magi). The party splits, with the two knights running downstairs to burst through the front door while Aesa and Adria stay up on the galleys to rain down their justice from above. In the Main Hall, the demon sees the knights and transforms from his human form to full demon form, which (at size +3) fills a good portion of the room. He summons two smaller demons, while the mysterious magus watches, expecting the demon to make short work of these two fools.
However, the knights demonstrate that being armed with relics and True Faith, are more than a match for the demon and are quite successful at whittling down the demon whose liquid iron blood spurts around the hall. Aesa begins peppering the magus with arrows, who retaliates with crystal darts that fly back. The smaller demons attack Aesa and Adria, given that the knights are surrounded with holy auras that would likely destroy them. Eventually, the knights injure the demon so much that it collapses to the ground and its form turns into a blob of molten iron, melting a ten foot deep pit into the stone. With a horrible cry, it falls back to Hell, providing the knights a brief glimpse of damnation. The smaller demons are dragged back in, leaving the diabolist magus on his own. Before he can run, another arrow sinks into him and Sir William runs him through with his holy blade, killing him instantly.
Sir William then turns the blade on the two 'tears of the virgin' which destroys the demonic objects at its touch. Then, as if time stopped, he receives a vision of St. George who congratulates him and informs him that the sword needs to be hidden somewhere in the area in order to cleanse the taint caused by the demon. Sir William thinks to hide the sword in the unconstructed part of the castle by laying it down, mortaring it, and covering it with more stone so as to make it a part of the castle itself. The party then quickly raids the diabolist magi's sanctum and discovers several books. They leave, taking Aed and the two tortured prisoners. However, they discover that all the guards have been killed in the meanwhile and that an omnious message was left, in German, for Sigmund: 'I will not brook interference from other demons. You are mine.' Sigmund chooses not to share this information.
The next morning, the death of the entire castle is discovered, and the bandits disperse before their natural rivalries reassert themselves. The party takes a longer trip back, to deal with the wounded, and eventually return home. But not before Adria persuades Aed to come to the covenant to practice his craft under their protection as he is unwilling to remain in Ireland near his horrors.