The huge thing drops his robe, and it is covered in mouths. A rather horrible sight among the various horrible sights we’ve seen this past year. There is an unsettling intelligence in its eyes, as well. The fight begins with a charge at Dalish. The thing seems to be using magic just as we are. Eventually we realize he’s using our own spells against us. Its a very long fight, but we wear it down, and Klyce rips its head off. The strange little man has been knocked unconscious in his cower, so we leave him be after unchaining him. I have to buy Nat a big chain when we get home, because I convinced her not to carry his all through Sardonia. We then vacate the area, and find a place to take a rest. The Dawnmother helps heal our wounds, and in an hour, we set off again, traveling all through the night.

We travel on by night, and sleep by day until we get all the way down to Catenzaro. Nat sends Hey Hey to go look and sees the strange man entering the city. The Sardonian army is camped all around this city and the gates are being closely watched. The group decides Chirina and I have the best chance of sneaking in and Remy lets me borrow Ceres. We head off and go through a tunnel that leads us into a wine cellar. There we wait, and Chirina tells me we might have to pretend to be girlfriends to get through the city unmolested. Sure, why not.

Eventually the merchant comes down with a crossbow and he and Chirina chat animatedly for a while in Italian. The man insists on 100g to let us go up into the city! That’s nearly half of what I have left! But we have to, so I hand it over. We head down to the dock where Hey Hey saw the man go. The army is loading ships full of food and supplies to send out. We find someone who saw the man. The sailor says the old man was trying to get to America, but they turned him away. So, we set out to check around nearby.

When we find him, he’s still freaking out. Demanding to know why we killed the beast. Saying it’s going to be so much worse now. He’ll come back stronger. The man is afraid it’ll kill him and then come kill us, too. It can’t be stopped, he claims. He says his job is to let people know when they are going to die. If they manage to defeat the beast, it still comes back and gets them in the end.

We calm him enough to get some details. He’s being the crier for this thing for eight years. The last crier is now a part of the beast. It was hired by the Sardinian Army to find and kill Americans, or bring them to the Army. They found Philomena a week ago far to the north near Solerno. We get the man some clean clothes and food, then try to convince him that he is safer in the city, surely the beast will have trouble finding him here. He doesn’t believe us, but does stay in the city.

Chirina then takes me to a different contact in the city to get us passage out. We head to a bar, and she talks to a bouncer. We get drinks and she is ushered back to a room while I drink with the bouncer. Fortunately, he doesn’t try to talk to me. When Chirina returns, she says he can get us out later in the day. I let Ceres know our timeline to pass on to the group and we wait. At the appointed time, we head down to the docks and have a nice sewer gondola ride out of the city.

Once we get back to the rest of the group, we fill them in on everything and try to come up with a plan. Chirina is going to go back into the City with Ceres to chat up drunken soldiers. Nat is going to use her Arcane Eye to search the military camp, while Gerhardt sends his snake it to look, too. Nat reports three tents her eye cannot enter – one big, two small – and a runed man walking between them all. A man who stomps on Gerhardt’s snake.

We decide that we really have to have a look at those tents, and let Chirina know our plan through Ceres. She hasn’t gotten much info yet. Nat and Remy are going to sneak in under an invisibility spell from Dalish, to see what they can find out. Nothing could possibly go wrong…