Days and days and day (7 to 16)

The journey since we left the undead city of Talon's Junction has been brutal and scary. We said good bye and walked off the edge of civilization. The goblin has been showing me the maps he's been making, from what information can be found. Despite all his crude drawings on my things, his map making skills are amazingly refined. The labels on the maps however, "Mustafa's forest of richs" and "Magnificant's Land", lead me to believe he's only making the maps so he knows what to conquer and sell later.

Lord Nellen's main city sits in the south of his lands. Though, the reality of it is that, there's nothing south of Talon's Junction. We walked out of the biggest city I've ever seen into near howling wilderness; almost immediately. The grass here in the plains is dense, tough, and thorny. Awful stuff to walk through, I can see why Zoe and Mustafa have frequent attacks of their grass allergies and have to ride on my shoulders. Zoe doesn't wear shoes, so I can understand her plight. The goblin has armored boots however, so maybe grass bits get down in them?

The walking was tiring but not bad. What was bad was, several days out, we came under attack by these huge earth elementals for no good reason. Those things were terrifying! They roar out of the ground all of a sudden and attack us with fists made of iron and granite! 5 or 6 of them gave our group bad trouble, I was very afraid I was going to die when one of them came after the mule I was protecting. There's still a wide difference between me and my companions. I was only able to hurt those creatures with my best creation magic attacks; which are exhausting. If the drow hadn't saved me, I wouldn't be writing this now. Those bruises won't go away quickly though. I guess I'm not allowed to make fun of him when he talks to his weapons anymore.

Anyway, after repeated attacks, we figured out that earth-magic runes could be used to make the elementals not care about us. Zoe was positively gleeful when our group decided that we needed her to cover us in runes made of mud. I think the drow has about three times more mud than is strictly needed to write the runes with. At least the mud was clean and has improved the goblin's smell. I just feel dirty, always dirty. We have to renew the runes every few hours, and there's no way to bathe out here. Grit and dirt are in every part of my armor, food, packs, and clothing now. We all look like avalanche survivors. I never knew hero work would be like this!

We've spotted some kind of huge cemetery out in the plains here. We'll be getting close to it soon. My companions seem utterly fearless about it. The thing gives me the creeps. Why would there be a miles-wide cemetery out in the middle of nothing?