After-Action Report (Session 5)

Location: Northern Shoreline, Wildermarch Frontier

Date: Year One of the March

Subject: Investigation of Coastal Cavern and Retrieval of Arcane Materials

I submit this record in the hours after our return, my armor still drying from sea-spray and my mind turning over visions granted to me in the deep. Tyr’s judgment echoes clearer with every expedition. If I misstep, let this document show my earnest attempt to walk His line.

We convened over supper - Lorvial, Kouzlo, and myself. The camp served a massive crab creature which another expeditioner had nicknamed “Old Bay,” and I watched Kouzlo attempt the meal for the first time. He struggled with the claws until I helped him crack them open. I note this not for sentimentality but because the man continues to remind me of green squires I once trained: high potential, uncertain footing, and in dire need of someone to nudge him toward confidence. His “Coffee Cartel,” as I called it, could bring structure and morale to the camp. I encouraged him again that night - perhaps too forcefully. But order is built on small foundations. Even a cup.

After dinner, I found myself contemplating the cliffside where the Great Tree nearly took my life. I have not forgotten how close death came. I choose to believe Tyr placed His hand over me then. I believe He still does.

I rose before sunrise to run drills and offer prayer. Kouzlo soon joined with a pot of steaming arcane coffee - strong enough to wake the dead. Lorvial arrived last, disheveled, apologetic, and earnest. He warned us that recklessness nearly cost him a party member previously, and he would not see it happen again.

He said: _“All of us go, and all of us return.”)

I carried those words with me.

Our route to the northern shoreline wound through gullies and shifting terrain. No clear paths. No markers. Only the rising fog ahead - a sentient sort of mist, thicker and older than the haze hovering near the Great Forest.

Lorvial used a spell to part the fog, shaping it with a strange, delicate motion - like a loom weaving frost. The mist pulled back in a tight orb, crystallizing into ice that pattered around us and providing just enough visibility to continue our trek. Kouzlo saw something through the parting, a brief glint of direction. We followed his lead.

The land fell away to rock, then to tidepools glimmering like eyes. And beyond them: a chasm.

A cavern mouth stretched open beneath the cliff, swallowing and spewing seawater in six-second intervals of violence. We judged it too dangerous to time the sprint, so we searched higher along the rock face.

Kouzlo extended his senses into the cave, revealing handholds and a narrow tunnel carved by time. I tied rope around my waist and began the ascent first. The mist swirled like living breath, but Lorvial’s spell carved a pocket of clarity around me.

Kouzlo nearly slipped on his climb but Lorvial steadied him, and I hauled him the final few feet. Once all three of us reached the tunnel, I secured the rope at the entrance for future expeditions.

I have been thinking often about that rope.

The next will go farther.

That is what an expedition is - not heroics, but legacy.

Inside, glowing fungi cast the path ahead in an eerie light. I invoked Divine Sense, ready to feel the cold sting of undeath as in the Great Tree - but found nothing. I allowed myself a rare breath of relief.

Lorvial led us toward the left-hand passage, ascending toward shallow water gleaming with hexagonal pods of the same fungus. Kouzlo identified it at once - Noctiluceum. A light fungus requiring no air. He collected several vials, muttering about underwater breathing potions.

The water stirred around us. Something brushed Lorvial’s leg. Something tugged my boot. I tightened my grip on my sword and raised my shield.

At the end of the chamber, a single clam rested atop a bed of fungus, cradling a large pearl and emanating strong magical properties. When Kouzlo touched the shell for a spellcasting ritual, the surface broke.

The creature that rose from the water was a twisted imitation of a man - barnacles crusting its torso, scales clouding its eyes, and fins cutting its silhouette. It struck me first. Hard. Harder than any dockside brawler or undead light.

Kouzlo conjured a blade of shadow and gloom - one of two blade-spells he wielded in that fight. I admit I briefly considered renaming his future enterprise the Coffee and Cutlery Cartel. The thought carried me through a blow that might have otherwise knocked me senseless.

Lorvial blessed us mid-battle, calling down a vision that stopped my breath.

Perfect order. Not the battlefield. Not the cave. The capital.

I saw myself walking through those marbled halls again, but not as an exile. As judgment incarnate. Tyr’s scales in my hand. Valleren brought to his knees. Every lie unmade.

For a moment I felt invincible.

We shattered that illusion only by surviving. The beast was soon followed by smaller creatures - a swarm of octopus-like creatures. The cavern became a churning melee of ink, ice, and steel. I severed the creature’s arm; Kouzlo struck the final blow; Lorvial froze the water into barriers that saved us all from being overwhelmed.

After the last creature fell, Kouzlo lifted the pearl - glowing softly now. A Stone of Good Luck. I trust him with it. He will need it.

We explored the right-hand path next. It opened into a vast circular chasm filled with black water and lit by countless crystalline clusters. A massive flat wall on one side rose into open sunlight far above - who knows what awaits us above. We were not the first to set foot here. We may not be the first to die here.

Lorvial removed a crystal for study, but doing so awakened the chamber. Mist poured forth in dense waves, swallowing the cavern by the second. We retreated through the cliffside tunnel, each grabbing a “mist stone” - a small crystal capable of teleportation magic. Useful. Troubling.

We left the rope for the next explorers. May they go farther.

Return and Reflection

Chef Simon was delighted by the octopus we brought back. The camp ate well. Spirits rose. The outpost survives another day.

As for me, my next expedition approaches swiftly: the cave near the Great Tree - the source of the necromantic blight in the river. I nearly died once in that forest. Perhaps I will again. But if Tyr spared me before, then He has purpose yet for my blade.

I tighten my gauntlet as I write this.

Soon, I descend into corruption’s heart.

By Tyr’s judgment, I will cleanse it.

Addendum: Reflections on Identity and Purpose

The Wildermarch is shaping us into something new, though none of us seem aware of the form yet. N.O.D.E. calls us “pioneers,” “explorers,” “the vanguard of the frontier” - fine titles for proclamations and parchment. But titles are not identity. A unit earns its name the same way a man earns his reputation: by surviving what should have killed him, and by deciding afterward what part of himself he refuses to leave behind.

We have not reached that clarity. Not yet.

I have served in organized ranks my entire life - companies, battalions, regiments shaped by tradition older than I am. Here, there is no standard to salute, no code of arms, no shared oath beyond “stay alive.” We are fragments - scholars, mages, hunters, renegades, the exiled and the idealistic - held together only by the wilderness pressing in on every side.

Perhaps it is not my place to define who we are. Perhaps the land will do that for us.

But I know this much: Those around me carry sparks worth fanning into flame.

Kouzlo, for instance - no warrior by training, but inventive, grounded, and capable of shaping spirit from ritual. I push him in ways he does not yet understand. Not because I expect a coffee business to save the frontier, but because purpose grows best in soil tended by others. If he finds identity here - if any of them do - it strengthens all of us. Strength is order. Order is survival.

And yet I question my own purpose.

Was I sent here to disappear quietly beneath the tide of monsters and forests? Or did Tyr guide me here to carve something new - an identity not given but earned? I no longer know what the court intended by my exile, but I know this: the men and women beside me are not pawns. They are not expendable. They are the only allies the Wildermarch has chosen to give me, and I will sharpen them into a force the Kingdom cannot ignore.

If we must become a company, then let our deeds name us. If we must become a brotherhood, then let the dead we bury be our chisel and stone. If we must become a reckoning, then Tyr will decide when the scales tip.

For now, we are only an expedition.

But I feel something stirring - some identity taking shape between the danger and the dawn.

I do not yet know who we are.

But I intend to live long enough to find out.