Chapter 6: The Bandit Camp¶
Prologue - Dravyn
Smoke climbs the boles of the Thorn and the trees answer with quiet cracks as sap boils in the fire Grotdor loosed. I watch the shadows tilt in the flames and lay a veil of my own—an illusory bulwark to break sightlines, a neat seam of misdirection for our approach. The eye of Nethys over my heart stares where I stare; steel rules on one side, wild magic on the other. Balance holds, if you grip it hard enough.
Kressle’s camp smells of cheap oil and wet rope. I note the tower blinds, the mud-drag of a broken cart, the traps the river makes of short legs and heavy armor. Rust’s quiet blessing gathers at our backs. Elroy plants himself where trouble will fall. Perry calculates. Grotdor cracks his knuckles and answers the timber with fire. It is all very simple. We pull on the correct thread and the weave comes loose.
I test my own ward and, yes, attempt to doubt it into breaking—a habit. It holds. Then the blind catches, a bandit leaps, and their alarm ripples through the camp. I mark angles, edges, and the temperature of wrath. Cold is best. Cold preserves the proof.
Oleg’s Trading Post | 2 Pharast 4610 AR¶
By the time the palisade of Oleg’s Trading Post fell behind them, the party’s work had become a kind of ritual: tally the favors owed, weigh the dangers ahead, and move before the frontier had time to grow comfortable. A brisk wind worried the yard’s hanging tack and carried woodsmoke along the rails as Rust stood with Dog at heel—small goblin and obedient wolf watching the gate like they belonged there.
A wary stranger approached with a spear, then visibly relaxed at the sight of the wolf’s discipline. With a theatrical bow, he named himself Vekkel Benzen—local fisherman and, by his own introduction, a “constant arsehole.” He scoffed at talk of bandits and the Stag Lord, insisting the real terror of the Greenbelt had bristles, twin tusks, and a talent for taking legs. His story spilled out in stormy-night fragments: a hollow tree, an ambush, and Tuskgutter—monstrous boar—coming in like a living battering ram. The bargain that followed was simple enough to remember: bring back the boar’s head, and Vekkel would hand over his prized longbow and special arrows; Svetlana even promised boar’s head cheese from the trophy.
They folded the boar into a growing ledger of errands—fangberries, moon radishes for soup, a missing ring, a tatzlwyrm head—then turned to the work that mattered most: cutting the Stag Lord’s reach at its roots. Elroy, as ever, made preparation feel like fortification. He explained the steadying presence he’d learned to project—a quiet bulwark that helped those near him stand firmer against fear, as if courage could be hammered into shape like a shield rim.
Southwest, then—toward the Thorn River, toward the suspected bandit camp. The Greenbelt swallowed road and horizon alike. Under the canopy, everything turned slow: damp leaves, thick understory, and the constant sense that every step was an announcement to unseen eyes. They moved by careful cadence—measure, listen, watch—accepting that the forest made even simple travel costly.
The first true sign came in mud: small clawed footprints, scraps of leather, and a trail that didn’t bother to hide. Rust crouched over the prints, Perry and Grotdor lending their eyes to the pattern until the conclusion settled like a stone—kobolds. Following the marks led them into a clearing that looked, at first glance, like someone had tried to harvest the ground itself. Fluffy greens carpeted the soil; bright red-tipped moon radishes lay uprooted everywhere. Five kobolds sprawled among the plants—alive, bloated, and spectacularly drunk, rolling on their backs and occasionally heaving into a bucket as if the radishes had fermented into joy.
They could have treated it as an ambush site. Instead, they treated it as a conversation. Rust spoke in Draconic, gentle enough not to startle creatures already drowning in their own excess. The kobolds, suspicious but unarmed, confirmed what the party suspected: they were Sootscale foragers, and moon radishes were near-mythic temptation. Between hiccups and slurred insistence, they offered more than dietary confession. Their tribe lived in a silver mine near the meeting of three rivers. Mischievous fey haunted the region—“tooth-stealing” nuisances—and worse, a newcomer named Tartuk had wormed into the tribe’s hierarchy. Their chief, Sootscale, still lived… and must not be harmed. They praised him in a single drunken list—“good, brave, wise, cunning, and very good at biting Tartuk”—as if repeating the words might make them truer.
Elroy turned pleading into terms. One basket of moon radishes now, as an “upfront fee,” and later the party would return to help uproot Tartuk—without killing Chief Sootscale. Perry’s calm logic made the bargain sound inevitable rather than risky. Grotdor, blunt as a clenched fist, simply took the basket when the kobolds finally agreed. The party withdrew without bloodshed, leaving five radish-drunk kobolds to flop back into their ecstatic feast and whatever consequences came with it.
Night fell heavy beneath the boughs. Camp became a circle of heat and shadow, a makeshift ring of safety in a forest that didn’t promise any. It was then that Linzi, Valerie, and Amiri arrived from their own scouting—wide-eyed and loud with energy. Amiri declared she’d killed “sixteen bandits” that day; Valerie corrected her with the flat patience of someone used to this, pointing out they’d actually been mosquitoes and flies. Amiri, undeterred, insisted it counted—after all, they started with “b.”
Elroy shared what they’d learned and what they’d done—the uncomfortable kind of progress that comes from hard choices and harder violence—and the companions confirmed what the party already felt in their bones: the Stag Lord’s influence ran south along the Thorn River. The bandit camp was real. Somewhere. Waiting.
Rust hunted and gathered while the rest settled in, returning with small game and ingredients like proof that life still existed beyond steel and spellfire. In the firelight, they layered precautions the way they layered blankets—Rust’s magic reinforcing Elroy’s armor, Dravyn ensuring his weapon hummed with a promise for tomorrow. Then the forest answered those preparations with movement—silk in the dark, skittering legs, and the sudden certainty that the Greenbelt did not care about plans.
Rust came sprinting out of the trees with Dog at his heels, yelling about giant spiders. Four hunting spiders—each the size of a wolf, all long legs and hungry patience—poured after him into the edge of firelight. Webs hung in the surrounding dark like half-seen curtains. The moment snapped into violence.
Grotdor moved first, as if forward pressure was his native language. Heat rippled off him as he surged through the campsite on a jet of fire and hurled a blast into the nearest spider, charring its chitin and leaving it burning. Dravyn stepped into a clean line and carved sharp angles through the air; a concentrated bolt of brine-salt force slammed the same target with wet, stinging impact. Linzi—visibly horrified—lashed out anyway, flinging viscous ink that splattered across too many spider eyes at once, and then she forced courage into the air with her voice like a hand on everyone’s shoulder.
The spiders answered with practiced cruelty. One skittered close enough to spit a web that wrapped Rust tight and hardened fast, pinning the goblin in place before retreating back toward the trees. Valerie rushed to help rip strands free, her urgency blunt and protective even when her blade found only air. Elroy waded into the space between monsters and allies, shield up, testing spider armor with a swing that scraped instead of bit. Rust, immobilized, whistled Dog forward; the wolf weaved through tents and bit down hard, buying time the way wolves always do—by making themselves a problem. Perry, eyes narrowed, studied the spiders’ movement and anatomy with the calm of an academic in a slaughterhouse, refusing a bad shot until the line improved.
More webs came. Rust was bound again, and the danger sharpened: if the spiders decided to swarm him, he’d be buried under venom and silk. Valerie doubled down, tearing at strands and putting herself between Rust and the worst of it. Elroy cut a groove into a spider’s carapace and dared it to choose him instead. Grotdor’s fire rolled again through the camp, worsening the blaze on the already-burning spider until its legs twitched erratically. Dravyn followed with force and frost, battering another spider toward collapse. Perry took the opening his earlier study promised, driving a shot into a weak point with ruthless precision. Amiri charged in and made the fight personal—greatsword cleaving through spider limbs in brutal arcs that left the monsters reeling.
Then the tide broke. Dravyn finished one spider with a barrage of force and cold that left it crumpling and twitching in the dirt. Linzi kept her courage-thread running, ink and song working together to keep the next target off balance. Under a coordinated storm—fire, steel, arrow, and fang—a second spider collapsed. Rust finally tore free and immediately turned his strange, life-warmed power outward, knitting puncture wounds closed as if refusing the forest its due. Dog kept biting at anything that dared come close. Grotdor repositioned and dropped another spider to the brink with a devastating burst of flame. Perry, half-hidden in smoke and shadow, set up one more perfect line and helped finish the third. Amiri ended the last with a heavy, final blow that left the campsite ringing with sudden quiet.
They cleared webs, dragged bodies away from bedrolls and horses, and watched the dark with new suspicion. Dawn came like a reprieve rather than a promise. They broke camp and pushed on toward the Thorn River and the bandits waiting there.
The Bandit Camp | 3 Pharast 4610 AR
The Thorn River bandit camp announced itself by the shape of obstruction: a broken cart sunk in mud, felled logs thrown into roadblocks, and tree blinds raised high—twenty feet up—behind rough palisades. Woodsmoke plumed lazily from within. Wet banks glistened. The river crossing was shallow, but not kind; for Rust, three feet of water was nearly a drowning depth, and the opposite shore promised archers with elevation and time. Worse, the party could see the camp’s rough layout without seeing its eyes. The blinds looked down into the clearing; the clearing could not look back up into the blinds.
They stopped to decide what kind of fight this would be. Perry suggested the simplest lever: burn one of the platforms, force the bandits to react, and turn their prepared defense into chaotic movement. Elroy agreed—chaos would split attention and reduce incoming fire. Grotdor, not subtle and not interested in being, was happy to be the spark. Dravyn prepared an illusion to break sightlines—a barrier of false certainty—and, with a strange private habit, spent a few heartbeats testing his own spell as if trying to doubt it into failure before accepting it would hold.
When they were set, Grotdor sent a sheet of flame into the nearest tree blind. Wood caught fast. The bandit stationed there panicked—hurling alchemical explosives in frantic arcs before leaping from the burning platform with a shout that ripped through the camp like a bell. The explosions and the screaming did what fire always does: it made sure everyone looked.
Only then did Dravyn allow himself the cold clarity of the moment. Smoke climbed the Thorn’s boles. Sap popped in the heat Grotdor had loosed. The camp smelled of cheap oil and wet rope, and in the shifting light of flame and illusion he marked problems the way a scholar marks lines in a text: tower blinds, broken cart, river traps that punished short legs and heavy armor. Rust’s blessing gathered behind them. Elroy planted himself where trouble would fall. Perry calculated. Grotdor cracked his knuckles and answered timber with fire. The thread was in their hands; now they had to pull.
Perry had the first clear chance to act—and refused it. From his vantage, the burning blind still hid its occupant, and revealing himself too early would only feed the archers. He held, crossbow ready, letting the bandits commit to the open. Rust edged forward under cover of trees, anchoring a quiet blessing that would widen with time; Dog stayed close, coiled to spring. Across the water, bandits moved toward the riverbank and the broken cart, scanning for shapes that weren’t quite there. Kressle—the leader—strode toward the alarm with twin axes and rising fury, closing distance with intent even when Dravyn’s illusion denied her certainty. A leaping bandit fired from the burning blind at Elroy, then threw himself down to safety. Somewhere in the southern trees, a dagger-wielder slid into position—silent, patient, and pointed at Grotdor. Elroy stepped out deliberately, shield up, making himself the easiest answer to every bandit question.
When Kressle finally showed herself through smoke and shifting false light, Perry’s patience paid. He mapped armor gaps and movement rhythm in a single breath, then put a bolt into her side and vanished back into cover before anyone could return the favor. Rust widened his blessing and sent Dog across the shallow water; the wolf circled, setting his teeth and his body where flanks would matter most. Kressle closed on Elroy and tested him with steel—landing a solid hit that his shield and armor turned from catastrophic to merely painful. The dagger bandit sprang his ambush on Grotdor, missing the first strike but trying to clamp down and drag the fire-kineticist into stillness. Grotdor answered with a close-range blast that seared the attacker and made the grab feel like a terrible idea. Dravyn shifted for position and began to cast lightning—only to realize, mid-shape, that the target sat beyond his reach; he aborted, corrected, and accepted the brief ribbing that followed as the cost of discipline.
The fight settled into its true shape: Kressle trying to break the line, Elroy refusing to bend, and the rest of the party carving away the support that made her dangerous. Perry kept firing only when the angle was right, each shot a calculated subtraction from Kressle’s momentum. Rust’s blessing expanded until it covered the heart of the clash, and Dog bit deep whenever Elroy’s presence forced openings. A frontline bandit managed a hit somewhere in the chaos, but it didn’t change the geometry of the fight. Kressle swung hard at Dravyn—twice, at least—only for Elroy to step in and take the blow meant for the wizard, absorbing it with sheer stubborn protection. Arrows came from awkward angles—some from across the river, some from the remaining blind—but trees, smoke, and Elroy’s stance made clean shots rare. Grotdor continued burning the dagger-wielder down toward rout, and Dravyn switched to colder, closer magic—force and frost chipping away at bandits who suddenly realized they were losing.
Then the moment that turns a skirmish into a collapse arrived on a whisper of movement. Perry slipped deeper into smoke and shadow until Kressle’s furious attention couldn’t find him. From concealment, he took one high-risk shot—and the bolt struck like inevitability, a devastating hit that badly wounded the bandit leader. Rust widened his blessing again; Dog’s flanking bites worried Kressle like wolves worrying an elk. Dravyn’s cold magic slammed into a wounded bandit at the edge of the melee, leaving him barely standing. Kressle, bloodied and desperate, swung again at Dravyn—and again Elroy intercepted, taking the punishment that would have gutted someone less armored, less stubborn, less committed to being the wall. Grotdor forced one more crucial blast through sheer will and timing, fire catching Kressle when she tried to press forward. And above it all, the tree-blind bomber’s luck finally snapped: through missteps and his own chaos, he ended up sprawled on the ground, deafened and disoriented—an archer turned liability.
By the time the riverbank was slick with churned mud and blood, the bandits’ morale had started to fracture. Kressle still stood—barely—but her cadre was singed, rattled, and failing to break the party’s hold on the crossing. Elroy was bloodied; the party was battered; the fight was not finished. But the line held, and the bandit camp—so carefully built to punish intruders—was beginning to unravel from a single burning blind and five adventurers who refused to be moved.