Session 17.6: The Hunt

Anwen speaks her fears to Vahid. The Seeker stirs the storm. The party faces evil on the Flats.

Last episode, the readers voted to have Vahid still the storm in Anwen’s heart, sparing—however briefly—the assassin Tagh. Tagh revealed much about the sorcerer’s forces, and gave clues to Cirl-of-the-Storms’ greater designs, and soon Vahid will be forced to reveal more about his and the sorcerer’s connection to the ancient Maker known as Stormcatcher. But first, the Dawn Shield have a grim duty to attend to, and our heroes have resolved to help them.

The hunting party rode out for the grazing grounds, and on the herd’s trail they found a fallen king — a great bull, gutted and fed upon, that no scavenger would touch — and at the trail’s end, amid hundreds of placid, grazing cattle, the Dawn Shield’s quarry: A huge bull aurochs shot through with corruption, terrible-jawed, wreathed in a soporific miasma. A lord of the grasses made into an abomination, which must be slain, lest it feed a greater evil.

We’ll dive back into the fiction with Anwen and Vahid, having a brief, quiet moment before the fight. This functions as a bit of a Keep Company scene—Vahid and Anwen haven’t had a chance to talk since Vahid manipulated her anger and then used the Azure Hand to shut her down over the last couple of sessions, so it seemed right to put them in a scene together as a lead-up to the action:

Scene 10: The Hunt

From the top of the rise, Anwen watches the hunting party ride out, keeping wide of the vale, dropping into a dry gully where the land will hide them from the herd. They will wait on the far side of the herd, where the grass slopes down to the dark water, a gap of open ground half a league across. Riding hard, a horseman crosses it in the time it takes to sing a hunting song. A herd at full stampede would cover it just as quickly. Padrig waits there with the Dawn Shield to bend the herd away from the water. But that will be a doomed errand unless Anwen can cut the bull out of the herd.

Mado is working his way across the grazing grounds toward the herd through the tall grass. Shadows are growing long, and the young warrior has a talent for going unseen. She sees only glimpses of him—a shiver in the gwead, a flash of his tonnerhorn fleece. I can’t ride alongside those old bow-legs. And I won’t let you and the Seeker have all the glory. He had smiled when he said it, but she’d seen his face when they first laid eyes on the bull, pale and wide-eyed.

Below, the abomination is picking at the bones of its feast, the smell of blood and carrion carrying to them whenever the wind turns. She makes herself watch.

“You know what must be done.” Vahid is speaking; in her ears, he sounds far away. “What I stoked in you at the hunters’ camp, you must stoke yourself. Think on the hdour burning Gordin’s Delve. The reckless evil he has wrought. On Ronhl, another senseless death. Whatever serves. The storm answers your wrath — you must learn to make it come when you call.”

Stoked. As though her heart were a forge, and he the smith who commands it.

Now, he stands at her side on the hill’s crest with the Azure Hand planted before him, looking up into the sky. Her eyes are drawn to the staff — she can still feel its cold fingers around her heart from when it robbed her of her fury and stayed her from murder. Once the storm left her, she could barely stand on her own. She remembers Mado catching her before she fell to her knees, his face lined with worry. You are the only one who could stand against him, Anwen, he had said to her as they stood on watch the night before Pad’s wedding. But can she, when he can stop her short with a gesture?

He is still speaking, but she cannot mark him—her mind is far away. She remembers finding him at the ruined tower, broken among the stones. You are Vahid. You are my brother-in-arms. She had believed it with her whole heart, and demanded Padrig and Mado believe it too. She longs to be so certain of him again.

“...Anwen.” He is looking at her now. “Something troubles you.” He knows. Of course he knows.

For a moment she studies his face — the branching white scars, the pure-blue eye and the scarred, empty socket. “Mado said I might have to kill you, one day soon.” There. It is spoken.

If the Seeker is discomfited, he does not show it. “His mother speaking through him, no doubt¹.”

“No. He told me what happened in the barrow. What the Thrice-Betrayer said about what you are becoming². He could’ve told Cerys, and he didn’t. He could’ve turned the whole village against you that night, but he came to me instead.”

“And now you believe I am becoming Stormcatcher?”

“I don’t know what to believe. But you have changed, Vahid.”

“You have changed as well, my friend. Were we still but a goatherd and a scholar, belike we would both be dead, thrice over. And Padrig, and many others besides.”

“I know. I was there.”

“So what do you fear, then?”

“I fear… I fear you will forget your friends, as you chase after this great power. That it has already begun.”

“That matter between Padrig and me? It is nothing. I spoke in haste, too unkindly, and overstepped the mark.”

She turns towards him, her voice growing louder. “Vahid. You know it is more than that. What about your storm above the Delve?” Padrig had described it to her—the terror of Vahid’s storm, falling on friend and foe alike.

The Seeker is silent. She searches his face for some sign of regret, but there is nothing. Does he even remember? What if Rheisart had died? Or Padrig? Could I have forgiven him?

In the vale below, the herd stirs. When she turns to look, she sees Mado’s head above the grass, looking back at them. She spoke louder than she intended, her voice rolling across the grass like distant thunder.

The hunt begins // Source: Midjourney

Vahid still does not look at her. “We are both wielders of great power, now. We must both learn to control it. Prepare yourself.”

With that, the wind gusts around them, and he ascends into the sky. She has seen it a handful of times, but it still leaves her in awe. He rises until he is just a dark speck against the clouds, and in his wake, the clouds grow grey and full of wroth. He stirs the skies above them, calling forth a storm they hope will panic the herd and weaken the creature’s hold on them. As the skies darken, Mado quickens his pace and Anwen sets off in a slow run, descending to the grazing grounds.

As she runs, she does as Vahid counseled — she works the bellows of her rage. She thinks on Cirl-of-the-Storms, their enemy, and all the lives he has broken on his path to power. She thinks of Kirs’ broken body³, his handsome face and clever eyes lifeless as she beat against his chest, begging him to live again. She thinks of her mother, still locked in Marshedge’s gaol by order of folk she once called family.

Anwen triggers Storm’s Fury: 5+5+1+2 Constitution = 12, Strong Hit

She gained advantage from Vahid’s Sage Advice move — he gave her some tips about how to stoke her own fury, and as a result, we have an auspicious beginning to the hunt. Anwen holds 3 Fury. I’ll also rule that she holds 3 Resolve from Anger is a Gift — the overlap between the Storm-Markings arcanum and the Would-Be Hero playbook is very satisfying.

Each footfall strikes harder and swifter than the last, and in a few moments, she whips by Mado, who breaks into a sprint in a vain attempt to keep pace. Above them, the sky is black, and lightning flickers in the clouds, answered by a roar of thunder. The herd hears it, raising their heads from their grazing and bellowing into the sky, as though they could entreat the storm to stop. The bull’s roar carries above them all, and the sound of it is fearsome — an unearthly rumble that shivers through Anwen and puts a throbbing pain at the base of her skull.

Two moves here — the first triggered retroactively, with us envisioning Vahid making use of his third eye to see just how cunning the bull might be, whether it has the intelligence of an animal, or something greater. He triggers Seek Insight using his The Eye, Opened arcanum:

Vahid triggers Seek Insight: 5+1+1 Wisdom = 7, Weak Hit

He gets one question, and chooses ‘Is something controlling their mind, actions, or emotions, and if so, what?’ This is a dangerous question to ask, delving into an abomination’s mind, and if it had been done in-line with the fiction and rolled a Miss, we might’ve had a grand old time with poor Vahid. But lucky for him, he scored a weak hit, and so he gains advantage on his next, pivotal roll:

Vahid triggers Borrow Power: 6+2+2+1 Wisdom = 9, Weak Hit

Recall that Vahid uses the Blessed playbook move Borrow Power to represent the abilities of the storm-spirit bound into his flesh — in this case, the move Fling lightning from a raging storm, which is drawn from the move list from the Flying Cloak arcanum (the cloak was destroyed, but the spirit resides now in Vahid). A weak hit means he ‘loses’ the power — in the case of the Blessed, this loss is permanent, in Vahid’s case, it’s just a temporary depletion, but it does mean no more flinging lightning bolts during the fight. His intention here was not to deal damage, but to panic the herd so that Anwen and Mado can separate them from the bull.

As part of the preceding sequence, I also called for Defy Danger rolls for the whole crew to resist the effects of the bull’s unearthly bellow. This is a little bit of dirty pool on the GM side, since it wasn’t foreshadowed as a monster move, but the heroes are powerful and loaded up with deadly arcana, so sometimes a GM has to surprise them! Vahid and Mado rolled Weak Hits, and Anwen spent a Resolve to bypass the roll, leaving her with 2 Resolve remaining. We’ll envision that Vahid and Mado are a bit rattled and lose the initiative, keeping Anwen in the spotlight.

Vahid answers it with a bright, white lance of lightning. The bolt strikes the grass, leaving the smell of smoke and ozone in its wake. When I strike, the herd will stampede, and belike the monster will go with them. Despite its corruption, it still has a beast’s mind, he had told them, and it seems he was right.

The herd breaks, shattering outward from the strike, like ice on a spring pond. The cattle nearest the bolt wheel and slam into their neighbors, and Anwen watches the panic run through the mass as a wave, backs and horns heaving up out of the dust like a surging flood. Then the whole vale is moving. Hundreds of beasts, and the din of it swallows the storm’s thunder—not the drumming she had imagined, but one long roar out of the earth itself, rising through her feet and through her bones. Dust climbs off the churned ground in a wall, red-gold where the last of the sun cuts beneath the clouds, and the storm’s wind drives it across the vale in a vast, swirling cloud.

Anwen dives into it, heedless of the flood of bodies. She catches a glimpse of Mado, moving with the herd, dodging between charging beasts until he finds a moment of respite behind a granite outcrop which splits the stampede around it like a river rapid. She looks up to find Vahid above, but the dust has swallowed the sky whole.

But she has no need of his wind—she has her own now, and the gusts tear the dust curtain open ahead of her. Through the gap she sees it: a knot of beasts in the flood that does not run, cattle packed flank to flank around their master, a wall of horn and hide with the black bulk at its center. Their eyes roll white and they scream like beasts in a burning byre — and still they press inward, crowding closer to the thing they should be fleeing. And above the wall of flesh, half again the height of any aurochs, the bull’s head is turned. Through the dust and the running bodies and the failing light, its dark eyes are fixed on her.

This is the first of the monster moves we’re using: Alexander Williams’s ‘Panic the herd. Take them from calm grazers to a chaotic wall of meat who’ll trample anyone and everything in their way, including each other.’ The party has pre-empted this a bit by stampeding the herd on their own terms, but the bull still controls them, so it’s using this move to create a shield of terrified aurochs between it and Anwen.

In turn, Anwen is going to spend another held Fury to fuel her Storm’s Fury move, activating the option ‘bellow like the storm itself, drawing no small amount of attention and making craven foes cringe in fear,’ in an effort to clear the path to the bull. In general, I look at spent hold as a substitute for a Strong Hit, allowing her to quickly overcome an obstacle thrown up by a monster move.

The wall of flesh looms ahead, and she fills her lungs and answers the bull’s challenge with her own — a shout that is Tor’s own thunder, flattening the grass and rolling across the vale like the sky falling. The wall parts before her—the fear for a moment snapping the hold the creature has on its thralls— and they scatter, bawling, shouldering one another aside in their haste to be anywhere else. And in a widening circle of trampled ground the bull stands alone, the stampede parting around it to give a wide berth. The thing sets its feet in the broken grass and swings its scythe-horned head low. This close, she can see the rust-red staining them, and the dried flesh and offal hanging in scraps.

She raises her weapon — the heavy, bronze-headed aurochs-spear that Jakez placed in her hands when she pledged to slay the beast.

Anwen triggers Clash: 5+4+2 Strength = 11, Strong Hit.

Anwen spends a Resolve to add +1d6 damage and forceful to her strike, and deals 8 damage in total, leaving her with 1 Resolve and 2 Fury remaining. The bronze-tipped spear bypasses the creature’s resilience—bright Bronze being the bane of the Things Below and their corruption.

She goes in low and fast, the crossbarred spear couched at her hip, and the bull answers—the great head sweeping sidelong, scythe-horns hissing through the space where her ribs would be, if she still moved like a mortal. But the storm is in her heart now and the world moves so slowly; she watches the red-stained horns pass by her, leaving the beast’s whole flank open to her, close enough to smell the rot beneath its hide, and she drives the spear home with all the strength she can muster.

The bronze leaf punches through the wet black hide high on the shoulder — and into one of the swollen galls. The thing bursts like a lanced boil, and a gout of ichor sprays across her chest, black-purple and steaming, reeking so foully her eyes stream with tears. The bull screams again, and she feels it in her jawbone. It wrenches sideways, nearly tearing the spear from her grip, but she holds fast and rips the blade free as the beast staggers, dark gore sheeting down its foreleg and hissing where it patters into the grass.

Here, we’re triggering another one of the monster moves written by reader Alexander Williams: “Acidic boils. When struck, the growth across the beast splash outwards, not just searing skin but blinding and burning. It makes men cast off their armour, even their clothes, to get it off of them.”

Anwen triggers Defy Danger w/ Constitution: 4+2+2 Constitution = 8, Weak Hit

Anwen takes 6 damage (leaving her with 20 HP) and we’ll use the weak hit as an opportunity to hand the initiative to another PC by putting Anwen in imminent danger. To do so, we’ll use another monster move from the comment thread last week: Myles’s “Single out an opponent and pursue him/her relentlessly.”

As an aside: In theory, Anwen could spend a Resolve here to shrug off these effects. But instead, I’m letting the spotlight pass to Mado, so that he can participate in the scene. This also has the effect of saving Anwen’s resources for later in the fight: At the gaming table, players might metagame like this, even though the characters themselves are not thinking along these lines.

The burning comes first, everywhere the spray touched, gnawing, biting heat that seems to seep into her flesh. Then the reek of the stuff rises off her own chest and claws up into her throat. Her eyes flood and feel like they are bursting in her skull, the battle runs together like spilt dye — the bull a black blur, surrounded by the red haze of the dust storm.

Somewhere close, too close, she hears the beast’s breath — a thick, wet bellows-sound — and beneath her feet the ground begins to drum. It is coming, and she cannot see it. She plants her feet and levels the bronze blade at the sound, shouting her defiance.

To reach her, Mado rolls, gaining advantage from his Free Running move:

Mado triggers Defy Danger w/ Dexterity: 6+2+1+2 Dexterity = 10, Strong Hit.

And he attacks, using Ambush⁴:

Mado triggers Ambush: 6+2+2 Dexterity = 10, Strong Hit

He chooses two Ambush options: Deal +1d4 damage and create an opportunity, giving Anwen advantage on her next move against the monster. He deals 8 damage, but the monster’s armor reduces it to 4⁵, meaning the creature has suffered 12 damage.

Then, Mado’s voice cuts through the din, closer than she thought possible: “DOWN, Marshal!”

She heeds him, throwing herself to the earth, and she feels the wind of a scything horn above her. Then, in her blurred vision, a flash of steel and a bellow of pain—Mado has struck. Her vision is still swimming in red and black, and for a fleeting moment, she wonders if she has lost her sight forever.

She feels for the haft of Jakez’s spear, and, thank the Rainmaker, it is not far from her grasp. She seizes it up and scrambles to her feet, searching vainly for the beast in the red-and-black-stained battlefield that reels before her eyes.

She feels the ground begin to shake beneath her feet again. She hears Mado: “Anwen! It is coming!”

She trusts to fortune and throws herself backward.

Normally, Anwen would be rolling at disadvantage, but thanks to Mado’s ambush result, she has advantage that cancels it out.

Anwen triggers Defy Danger w/ Dexterity: 4+4+0 Dexterity = 8, Weak Hit

We’ll deal a small amount of damage here and knock her down, passing the initiative again, to Vahid this time. Anwen suffers 3 damage, leaving her with 17 HP.

She expects to feel the bite of the horns as they pierce her, but they do not come. Instead, a breath after she thought she’d be dead, an impossible bulk brushes past her and it feels like a hammerblow. The weight of it drives her to her knees and then sends her tumbling across the shattered earth until she lies on her back, gasping for breath. She hears the bull roar in triumph, and Mado lets loose another shaken battle cry.

The stink of the bull’s ichor fills her nose, her mouth. She wills her limbs to move, but they are leaden. She feels, in a moment of madness, that it would be better to wait for death — for the trampling hooves, the tearing horn, the devouring maw. Before such a creature, is she not prey?

Vahid triggers Borrow Power: 4+5+1 Wisdom = 10, Strong Hit

Vahid uses his bound storm-spirit’s lashing wind, rain, and debris weapon, but he’s doing so in a desperate attempt to wash the ichor off Anwen and Mado. Anwen is under the effects of another monster move: Dull the herd, which two readers, John Constable and Alexander Williams, both suggested versions of.

A cold rain falls on her face. First only a few lashes, but it swiftly grows into a torrent, buffeting her with wind, water, and torn-up earth. The icy bite of it wakes her from the haze, and she paws at her eyes with rain-wet hands until her vision begins to clear. Before she can thank the Rainmaker for his timely intervention, she spots Vahid in the sky above her, the sheets of rain issuing from a nimbus of dark clouds that swirl around him.

She finds her feet, finds her spear. The reek of the bull still cloys; the world is reeling. The herd has fled before Vahid’s storm, stampeding towards the lake, and in the far distance, she sees the Dawn Shield riders, and Padrig among them, at their flank, stabbing at them with lances to turn them from their watery doom.⁶

Then the dust clears, sent back to the earth by the rain. Mado stands before the bull, his blade held up to fend it off—the short blade is hopeless before the thing’s massive strength. The creature opens its jaws, lined with row upon row of crooked, dagger-teeth. Its maw is nightmarish, yawning open wider than should be possible, splitting open its face and distending the muscles around its gullet.

Mado makes no move to escape — Anwen looks at his face and sees the same strange, placid calm she feels. She reaches for Vahid’s counsel. The storm answers your wrath — you must learn to make it come when you call.

A hungering maw, like its squamous father! He who hungers in deep waters! // Source: Midjourney

Anwen is going to blow all of her remaining resources — a Resolve to shake off the soporific haze, a Fury to move swiftly, and a second one to strike like a thunderbolt:

Anwen triggers Clash: 5+6+2 Strength = 13, Strong Hit.

With her strong hit result, she’ll choose to deal an additional +1d6 damage, and also suffer the enemy’s attack. She rolls 1d8+1d6+1d6, for 10 damage, bringing the creature’s total up to 22.

It deals 10 damage back to Anwen, leaving her with 7 HP. That’s a substantial enough hit that we’ll envision that she’s knocked briefly unconscious — not taken out of the fight, but enough so that she’ll need some time to recover.

There’s just one more monster move to use: If the skin you wear is damaged, slough off the broken body, proposed by reader District Dice (check out his substack!).

Through the buzzing, suffocating calm that surrounds this abomination, she reaches for her rage. She rages at Cirl-of-the-Storms for allowing this beast to be born into the world. She rages against Vahid for his hubris that may cost Mado his life. She rages against the gods who would allow such evil to thrive under their sight. And with that rage storming inside her, she hurls herself at the bull, spear held high.

Thunder peals out when Jakez’s spear strikes the beast’s gory flank. The broad leaf-blade vanishes in an instant, and then the crossbar behind it, exploding through the thing’s twisting, ropy muscle and rotted guts beneath. It shrieks in agony, the sound almost human, and whirls on Anwen, snapping the spear’s haft like a twig, its scything horns catching her in its death-spasm.

The tip of it pierces through her hide vest, and she feels a bloom of red agony in her side as she’s lifted off her feet and tossed bodily a half dozen yards. The ground rushes up to meet her, and then blackness.

---

Mado stands before the fallen beast. Its massive jaws, which a moment ago threatened to swallow him whole, are still agape. Anwen had fallen upon the thing like a thunderbolt, her charge driving it off its feet, even though the thing outweighed her tenfold. Now the marshal lies still in the grass, seeming for all the world but a mere mortal.

Mado makes to go to her side, to try to rouse her, or to see if she has fallen, but before he reaches her, he sees dark movement at the edge of his vision, where the bull’s corpse rests. He whirls, expecting to see it rising to its feet like a wight, but it only lies there. There is a wet, gurgling sound, and its gut seems to deflate, but its limbs do not move.

He takes a tentative step towards the thing. It must be purged with Bright Heol’s light, Erwann had told them. The crystal the spirit-talker gave him is heavy in his cloak pocket⁷. He closes his hand around it, but before he can draw it out, the thing’s maw shivers and shudders, and a tendril lashes out, then another, and another, each one wrapping itself around one of the jagged teeth. Others, longer, thicker, and bristling with spines, slither forth and grasp at the earth.

You wanted a share of the glory, didn’t you, Mado? Quite a tale this will make in the meadhall. As he watches, grimly fascinated, a squamous, writhing mass of purple flesh slides out of the bull’s gullet and onto the muddy, churned earth. Amidst the masses of tendrils, Mado catches glimpses of rolling, filmy eyes staring back at him. He takes the fist-sized crystal from his cloak—it seems utterly mad now to think such a weapon will save him from this.

“Seeker!” he calls up into the sky. “Give me light! Helior’s light!”

Vahid triggers Eye of the Storm: 6+1+1 Constitution = 8, Weak Hit

Vahid stills the storm he called up to allow the light of the setting sun to break through. As a result of the Weak Hit, he must take a consequence (2d4 damage + a debility, Weakened) and use his whole concentration.

The Seeker descends from the sky, grounding the Azure Hand and calling down the storm’s vis. The roiling clouds seem to boil away in the sky, and the red light of the setting sun breaks under the clouds as it begins to dip below the horizon. When the sunlight falls upon the mass, it shudders and flails, its tentacles lashing out at Mado, some dragging it towards him, some reaching for his face—for his mouth, he feels with unsettling certainty.

Mado puts the sun at his back and holds the crystal aloft, as Erwann showed him, catching the last light in its facets and letting it fall upon the crawling horror.

The effect is instant and gratifying. The light from the crystal sets the corrupted flesh alight like kindling, cooking off into an oily black smoke. The thing’s death howls roll over the Flats, and in the distance, down towards the water, Mado can see the Dawn Shield raising their lances and cheering, the herd broken and scattered, moving slowly back uphill away from the dark lake’s banks.

Anwen rises and comes to his side, leaning heavily on the shattered haft of Jakez’s spear. Mado holds the crystal steady as the last light of the setting sun burns away the corruption to nothingness.

That will close out this episode! Next week we’ll conclude Session 17, and lay the groundwork for a confrontation with Cirl in Session 18. As always, thank you for reading—and extra thanks to the readers who contributed monster moves to the corrupted bull; I hope you enjoyed seeing them in the fiction!

Look for Session 17.7 in your inbox next week, 8/3!

1. Mado’s mother is Cerys, Stonetop’s priestess. She is not Vahid’s biggest admirer, always suspicious of his motives and the power he wields.

2. This is the moment Vahid’s gestalt with Stormcatcher was revealed. If you need catching up, you can read quite a lot about that in last week’s essay, Who is Stormcatcher?

3. Kirs (the younger), the young Hillfolk war leader whom Anwen had a brief but intense connection with, died when the Stormcrows struck at the Sun-Spear’s camp in the dead of night. His father, Elder Kirs, died at the battle of Gordin’s Delve, defending Vahid from an assassin.

4. Quick errata here — I noticed (after triggering the move in Session 17.4) that Mado’s character creation gave him Skill at Arms, not Ambush, so I’ve been using that move without having it on the character sheet. To fix that issue, I swapped the move Parry & Riposte for Ambush — we’ve never triggered Parry & Riposte before, so swapping it is fair game (at least at my tables).

5. Mado’s barrow-blade is exceptional at dispatching the living dead, but the Things Below are quite horribly alive.

6. A quick Deploy roll takes care of Pad’s role in the plan — his Marshal playbook’s Logistics move gives him advantage on the roll, and the Dawn Shield are quality +2 for this, it being part of an ancient and sacred duty. Pad scored a Strong Hit, and the herd is guided away from the lake.

7. This is the move Have What You Need. It’s reasonable, given their plan, that Erwann would give Mado the Heol-crystal required to banish the corruption. This sort of retroactive declaration allows us to avoid bogging the session down with a lot of pre-planning.