BLACKSTONE FORD

Hook: Your horses descend the dry, rocky path to the rushing stream. The ford is there, below you, a dark smear in the otherwise crystalline watercourse, the sandstone cleft lies just beyond it... Your horses begin to fight you and resist the careful path you're taking. Why? You look around you, and finally eye the shadowed cleft... Nothing stirs. The warm evening air is silent, still, save for the swiftly running stream that laughs through the dusty terrain, as if mocking the near-arid world around you. The horses become more and more agitated, but, you see nothing... Continuing forward, the first horse to touch the water and the loose, dark stones beneath the surface of the water passes without incident... splashing lightly to the other side of the course. Then another, and then another. Your own horse makes it, as well... Your eyes are glued to the rocks around you, and you sweep the cleft, regularly, to root out hidden agendas in the darkness, there. Two more to go... Your priest, a follower of The Lady of Light, and the hireling he brought from the temple in the last town. As soon as the priest's mule touches the water, however, the air around you begins to change; the hair begins to stand up on the back of your neck and arms... A dark pall of melancholic energy begins to build as the priest continues. You look around, nothing... then a thought a occurs to you... down. Your eyes move to the streambed where the stones are unusually dusky for the sandstone terrain you're in, and... growing darker? You don't have long to contemplate the matter before the water around the priest and retainer explodes. Immediately, the mule dumps its rider and bolts for the opposite bank. The priest lands on his back with a surprised grunt as the wind is pushed violently from his lungs.The retainer is pushed sideways off his feet by the careening animal, and falls heavily, painfully, to his hands and knees with a great splash. Round gray stones (no longer black) and sprays of water fly in all directions as figures begin rising from the streambed. The rest of you manage to keep your animals from panicking, though that is no easy feat. You can feel that, at any moment, they may ignore you completely and run where they will... a thought you don't relish. The rocks around you offer plenty of places for the frantic animals to rub their riders off their backs. What? How? You do your best to reason through the chaos. What seemed, at first glance, to be men, suddenly reveals a more sinister reality. They are not men, at all. At least, not entirely. Or, more accurately, they were men. Now nothing more than black-boned skeletons dressed in ancient blackened armour bearing the markings of Strixa. Their kit droops from their dripping bones, somehow still intact, as are their flashing iron weapons and round, painted shields bearing the fearsome, stylised faces of monsters, and Strixa's owl skull and bat wings. Your friend and his man are soon cut off from the rest of the group by a ring of 7 hunched skeletal warriors, their empty eye sockets and dark, silent presence and nightmarish grins unnerve everyone. After regarding the priest for a moment, they rush in and begin swinging their wavy blackened steel blades at the two hapless travelers!

Details: The Blackstone Ford is an old ambush site where the forces of law and good caught a small advance force of Strixian warriors unawares, and left their bodies to rot in the stream. The priest with the Strixians cursed the ford, before he succumbed to his wounds. All the stones in this part of the stream are black (only as long as they are here), and, whenever a strictly lawful person enters the water where the stones are located, old Strixian warriors lying under the stones of the ford return to life to attack the lawful individuals crossing there.