The Battle of Giant’s Grove ought to have been remembered as a great victory for generations. The Rutar had not won such a battle against outsiders in a century. Instead, it merely served as the violent prelude to something far worse. The disaster that followed was entirely the result of the scheming of the Pustulant Jade, the Obsidian Order, and the honorless dregs of Ynayal’s forces, especially Navassay. I record these events with great regret, for I bear some responsibility myself. If I had not taken shelter among the Rutar then the Pustulant Jade would not have accompanied this force south and this disaster would not have occurred. However, it is without a doubt that, given the opportunity of such a time of chaos and hardship, the wizards would simply have inflicted great suffering elsewhere.

Though the Rutar celebrated long into the night, it was not as if they acted without vigilance. Their captives were disarmed, bound, and left to shiver together in the cold muck, a circumstance that would drain the fight from anyone. A small group of halberdiers kept guard. The idea of any sort of post-battle uprising would have seemed impossible. Regrettably, the Rutar were unaware that those they had captured included three wizards and nearly two dozen soldiers heavily modified by their distorted arts. Perhaps, given time and a careful examination of the prisoners, the shamans would have discovered this, but they spent the evening preparing the dead and treating the wounded.

Exactly how the outbreak was achieved will never be known. It unfolded in darkness and silence, and all possible witnesses were eliminated. I suspect that the wizards, possessing inhuman strength, simply snapped their bonds and overpowered the guards after waiting until shortly before dawn. By this time most of the Rutar were asleep, many deep in a drunken stupor. The wizards and their thralls freed the prisoners and launched a charge against one of the stacks of weapons assembled following the battle for distribution come the morning. This was successfully seized, and chaos claimed the camp as the prisoners sought to slaughter the Rutar before they could rouse and take formation. Blood flowed freely as knives drove through the night in search of all possible targets.

Though there was much blood spilled in the opening moments of this mad scramble, an alarm went up swiftly and the Rutar rallied. Though only the sentries retained their armor, and the bows of the archers were largely useless in the dark, they remained better armed and in significantly better fighting shape than the stiff, chill, and exhausted prisoners. Even as their enemies attacked as a murderous mob they formed up into small groups under the leadership of their veterans and supported each other in a counterattack. This almost sufficed to turn the tide. Once again, if not for the Pustulant Jade I believe they would have triumphed. Unfortunately, the wizard possessed a cunning mind. Joined by his elite thralls, he made directly for Ludun-Mulun and his fellow leaders in the opening moments of the attack. Their hardened bodies, with no explorer powder to weaken the bonds, smashed through the desperate blows of the Rutar warriors. The sudden rush claimed the lives in one devastating strike. It was not bloodless, green-stained bodies were found smashed by heavy clubs in the aftermath, but they achieved their goal.

Without overall leadership or anyone to command the drums, the Rutar failed to form an overall battle line. Their enemies, being driven by maddened instinct, simply avoided those groups that assembled under strong arms and preyed upon the weak instead. The result, in the madness of darkness and scattered firelight, was an absolute bloodbath. It was also indecisive. Unwilling to engage the Rutar infantry, the surviving invaders fled into the marsh with the coming of dawn. They took with them any supplies they’d managed to steal. Those who survived the night bore witness come the morning to absolute devastation. Over one thousand Rutar warriors perished, and a similar number of their enemies joined the tally of the fallen. Several hundred more on either side suffered serious wounds. The Rutar would receive treatment in time, but the remaining sentries walked the battlefield and executed all surviving invaders. Such is the price to be paid for siding with wizards and going back on surrender.

For my part, I was awakened early in the madness of the battle, having barely fallen to sleep moments before. My simple tent, which was pitched near those of the shamans, was far from any prisoner lines, so I emerged armed and prepared by the time the enemy reached that region. An attack did come, and I stood beside a group of halberdiers and briefly exchanged blows with the mob before they fell back seeking less vigilant prey. I remained by the shamans as the halberdiers attempted to clear the camp. I remained in place until the mad melee came to an end. For this I was thanked, though I felt I had done little service at all.

Following sunrise, I joined a group of stretcher bearers in order to aid the wounded, but this lasted only until the green-tinged distorted bodies of the thralls were discovered by the command tent. I was called back before the shamans and confirmed that these were wizard thralls to them. Following this, one among their number, a wizened and elderly woman named Molu-Vum who had admired my map-making during the march, pulled me aside and told me I must leave at once. The Obsidian Order was not, she admitted in a trembling whisper, without adherents among their ranks, and with Ludun-Mulun dead the army possessed no one who would protect me from their greed. I must make for Tarvu with all possible haste.

Before I came to Shdustu I would have doubted that advice. The idea that members of an honorable organization such as the shamans of the Rutar would side with wizards in anything was anathema to my understanding of the world. On that day, surrounded by the devastation wrought by disregard for all tenets of military conduct, I no longer retained any doubts. Without further discussion, I offered my apologies, gathered my papers and notes, took as much food as I could fit in my pack, and departed south without further word. There was, in any case, no one to tender my goodbyes too. I could only hope that the confusion of that day, and the camp was in utter bedlam, would allow my absence to go unnoticed for a time. A dubious prospect, the warriors might ignore such things, but shamans have perceptive minds.

From Giant’s Grove to the port of Tarvu would normally be a journey of seven days along narrow but well-established trails. However, with enemies and traitors scattered across the landscape by battle, I dared not use that route and chose instead to bushwack directly through the marsh. This was a very dangerous course and not one I undertook lightly, though I was aided somewhat by the simplicity of proceeding directly south.

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The first day was very hard, tiring and wet. I was spooked again and again by any unnatural noise, something all too common due to the spring-induced breakup of ice throughout sheltered areas. Despite this, I knew that distance from the battlefield was essential and therefore kept walking until I reached a hunter’s lean-to shortly after sunset. There was a small amount of dry wood stacked there allowing me to start a fire and dry my soaking clothes. With no allies to serve as a guard I could only bank the fire behind a screen of reeds and fall exhausted into slumber. However, the dispersal of hundreds of members of Ynayal’s force aided me at this time, for the swamp was full of desperate men fleeing the aftermath of battle. Hundreds of fires sprouted through the swamps in that night, far more than any force could track and probe. Masked by these numbers, I remained unmolested.

I traveled south for three more days, alone in the wild as the swamp slowly but surely surged to life as spring unfolded all around me. Waters had begun to rise at this time, fueled by melting far to the north, and the number of paths available diminished. Progress was very slow, as I was often forced to wade through water up to my knees or even waist for hours at a time. Even taking such steps, which carried considerable risk, I was nevertheless forced to turn east by the course of the river and moved further from my destination. This did provide a measure of protection from pursuit, as the majority of those at the battle had journeyed the opposite direction, westward toward Varu-Tavur. Rutar archers hunted men in the swamps there, sniping down any outsiders they found with neither warning nor mercy. I came across the bodies of two former mercenaries, though they bore no arrow wounds and seemed to have perished from cold. They carried no food and their bodies had been severely ravaged by boars. A miserable sight, but it will speed their return to the cycle in that way. I offered such prayers as I had time to spare and reclaimed two knives and spearhead. It is not a pleasant thing to take from the dead in such a manner, even though they have no need for possessions. They ought to be distributed properly, not simply taken in this way. Despite this, given that the alternative was that the metal would simply be lost in the swamp, this appropriation did not weigh on me overmuch.

I built a fire to dry off each night, but then quenched it and camped away from the embers on such dry ground as could be found nearby. This made for miserable and uncomfortable nights, but thankfully I had good clothes toughened against the damp. Unfortunately, I was unable to protect my papers as well as myself. Despite sealing them in an otter fur bag, water leaked inside and several sketches, including those I made of Giant’s Grove and the battle, were lost to mold. As the days passed, I felt less like a scholar and more like a refugee. Truly disheartening, this last vestige of the Dragon Expedition, scrabbling to simply survive and find a way home.

On the fifth day I encountered a Rutar trapper. He was an elderly man with wispy white hair and gnarled fingers who lived alone in the marsh taking and trading furs. Every day he paddled about the streams in a small boat, checking long lines of traps. At night he returned to a lean-to at a riverside camp, surrounding by drying racks and stretching frames. This man, who asked me to call him Old Skinner as he was suspicious of written letters and desired his name be recorded nowhere save his funeral monument, possessed incredible comfort in the marsh. He could read the water at a glance. He found paths nearly effortlessly and left the land barely disturbed by his passage. This was a simple existence and, though it seemed fulfilling to this man, was certainly a poor one.

Old Skinner spent his days alone, survived mostly on fish and the meat of the various animals he trapped, and only occasionally traded with nearby villages. His awareness of external events was very limited. He did not speak much of the past, but I suspected some deep tragedy had led him to adopt this isolated life that left the world behind. He never mentioned relatives, suggesting he’d lost his family, probably to illness. He spoke only accented Rutar and that sparingly. Though this made communication very difficult, I was able to express my desire to go south to the shore of the Salt Sea through a combination of words, gestures, and scratching in the mud with a stick. He agreed to take me there in exchange for the weapons I had acquired from the dead soldiers, which he valued very highly, but insisted upon checking his trapline first. This required an additional full day.

Frustrating as that delay was, it proved to be a blessing from the Divines. It happened that, by this time, the agents of the Pustulant Jade were already ahead of me and had I proceeded overland it is very likely these marauders would have found and slain me. Several times as we paddled south in the little canoe used by the trapper, we saw fires lit by these armed bands. We also observed their depredations in the form of burned lean-tos and shoreline camps and in one case a pile of ragged bodies being consumed by boars after Rutar archers took revenge. Whatever promises the wizards made, they were not fulfilled. Of the five thousand strong army that went south under Ynayal, not one ever returned from the swamps. That doom was perhaps inevitable, but the wizards added many horrors to the tally before the end finally came.

I saw such things, to my sorrow, firsthand. Ten days after the battle, Old Skinner and I poled past a village raised on a bluff beside the river. It had been sacked and burned, with bodies left to rot in the houses or worse, burned away on fires. Such barbarism was surely the act of the wizard’s servants, so wasteful it was. We stopped and did our best to gather the bodies and lay them out, knowing the boars would surely consume them. This is a poor fate, for the Rutar wish to end in water, but better than the flames. It would have been best to try and clean the village in the aftermath of such devastation, but two pairs of hands were insufficient to the task.

Old Skinner was frightened by this incident and wished to turn back north to his traplines. Observing his nervousness, I did not press him to take me further, but asked only that he pole me across the river one final time so that I could begin the trek west over to Tarvu. I gave him the blades as asked, and all other spares I possessed, for I hoped to travel as light as possible. I expected that it might well be necessary to swim the river if I could not find local fishermen, and that would be exceedingly dangerous. The old trapper departed north without further word. It is my hope that the Divines guarded him on the way home. They are said to favor hermits who choose the path of submersion in nature. I could never walk that road myself, but I hope those words are true.