After climbing out of the grotto, our first order of business was locating Shamil. He was still tied to a tree, so there's at least that. I convinced the lizardman to camp for the night, then I sent Cahir to talk to the dead and Athosian to locate our guide. With all undesirable witnesses out of the way, I crushed the assassin's mental defenses and dominated his mind. At least he won't try to kill us now. Right?
...Unfortunately Cahir's god took offense to so much mind control, and denied the paladin the recovery of his faith resource.
Anyway, we made camp and rested for the rest of the day and the night. We tried all manner of things to break the evil witch's spells... such as giving Biznard a potion received from the old warlock, which only gave him the traditional diarrhea.
I went into a divination trance for the night, which confirmed most of our theories regarding the witch, the lizardmen and the island in general. I posted all the guards, but Shamil circumvented the direct orders by poisoning our food. Fortunately, he made a ruckus by approaching the lizardmen, who still carried the head of the witch, and started caressing the head while crying. This made me suspicious in the morning, and I made him spill the beans. (Also literally.)
We decided on going with the lizardman, as we had no other options at this point, really. I managed to read the journal on the way, learning the name of the evil priestess and all her nefarious deeds.
While trekking through the swamp, Shamil made it clear that he still hates us, and tried every trick possible, also trashtalking all the way. I commanded him to be silent, after thoroughly enjoying the roleplaying aspect of it.
To gain additional clues, I broke the mental defenses of the old warlock (who was carried all this way by the barbarian) and found out that he too, was hopelessly in love with the evil priestess. I redirected that emotion towards myself, making him my best friend. I questioned him along the way, finding out nothing new...
An additional divination trance only revealed that the journal itself was important, so we grasped at straws. The paladin looked into its spiritual past, I tried to sanctify it, tried to detect magic, looked for invisible ink with alchemy... nothing worked.
While discussing on whether we should destroy it, we made Shamil read it - perhaps someone affected by the foul magics of the priestess would do something with it? This proved to be the solution, although not the way we thought it out. The assassin read about the priestess poisoning him while on guard, then casting a lovecharm on the two of them. Also plans on how to use them to gather sacrificial victims and sacrificing them if needed... confronted with irrefutable evidence of hostility on the part of his "love", the spell broke. I then broke my own charm spells, and the party was whole once again.
In the meantime, we continued towards the lizardman camp. A patrol intercepted us, but upon seeing the head of the witch, let us through.
We arrived at a sizable stronghold, and spent an excellent evening in the company of these beings.
Well, excellent in the sense that we were well received by a barbarian tribe, we got food and drinks. The huge, rectangular chunks of meat looked thoroughly unnatural[1] but tasted OK. Some of the lizardmen sat down to talk, while others looked on with a hostile demeanor. We managed to get some info out of the friendly ones; namely, that they lived on another island, but one day their god flew out of the mountainside and came here, then opened a portal for them.[2] Their god granted them dominion over this island, and allowed them to enslave the entire population of the sizable human port city. That explained the large number of human slaves, but made our current situation untenable to say the least...
Nevertheless, we slept through the night and decided to collect our bounty and leave. Our bounty being weapons made of bronze and obsidian[3] and five slaves. I used magic to locate the baron, who turned out to be chained up and working in the mines. We took him and four other dudes, and left the encampment with a sizable knot in our stomach.
[1] Soulcast! we cried as one, as we're now all reading The Stormlight Archive.
[3] So inferior to our own stuff made of steel. I asked Athosian to take the five most expensive looking things.
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