When a side track appeared to their right, leading towards the edge of the island, Marisol led them down it.  After about a hundred yards through gnarled trees and twisted bracken they came to an overlook.  A small valley was cleared in front of them and the path led down to a farmstead with several sheds, outbuildings, a large barn, and a main house.  All were intact but they could see the beginnings of black mold and mildew climbing up all the walls.  Beyond the building were a couple of fenced pastures with no farm animals.  Beyond the pastures was the edge of the island and yellowish-grey misty oblivion. 

Marisol led them down the cart path.  No movement from within the house, no smell of a midday meal cooking, no sound of normal farm activities.  Just a windless day, pervasive stink of decay that had become the norm, and the hushed quiet that pressed down on everything.  Towards the bottom of the hill they fanned out into a wedge formation with Marisol and Cley at the front.

The nearest building was a long shed with large doors open to the farmyard.  They came up to it and saw that it was a workshop with timber and metal stored at the far end.  On the wall above the workbench was a newly carved bow with some bowstrings looped over it.  “Finally,” said Isiah.  “Tell them I’ll pay triple for it.”  He started walking into the shed.

The barn and the main house were another fifty to seventy feet beyond the shed.  A side door to the barn opened and a middle-aged woman stepped out with tools in one hand and a freshly cut haunch of a pig in the other.  Marisol waved and called out, “Bethaniere!”

The woman dropped the tools, dropped the haunch, leaned forward, her knees popped backward, her arms reached down, and a row of grey tentacles could be seen growing out of her back.  She leapt forward and sprinted at them like a spider.

Marisol let out a forlorn cry of “Noooo!”

Isiah snatched the bow from the wall and started to string it.

Miah and Caelian set their stance.  Miah cast a ray of frost cantrip, the beam shot out and hit Beth in the side.  Caelian brought down her holy fire cantrip and searing flames appeared overhead and burned into the tentacles.  

Marisol choked back tears.  “Too late,” she whispered.  She raised her fist and shot a radiant blast into Beth’s face when she was just ten feet away.  The body dropped and tumbled across the grass, stopping at their feet.

“We’ve got to go,” said Cley, longsword drawn.

Isiah nocked an arrow.  “Agreed.  Let’s go!”

Miah shouted, “Wait!”

They turned back to see two children in worn clothes standing behind a low stone wall beside the barn, probably a pig stye.  They had blank looks on their faces and had their arms at their sides.  Miah started forward.  “Everything’s all right,” she called.  “We can help!  Come with us!”

Isiah reached out and grabbed her arm.  “Miah, no.”

She wrenched her elbow away from him.  “Let go of me.”  She started running.

Cley and Isiah ran after her.  The others called out for her to stop but all she saw were the two children.  Helpless, ragged clothes, smudged faces.  They started moving forward.

Miah stopped dead in her tracks when she saw black tentacles slide up over the wall.  The children opened their mouths together and let out a shrill scream that could have broken crystal.  They tipped backward slightly as a black creature like a starfish crawled up into view.  The children were sticking up out of the thing’s back from the waist up, like the eyestalks of a crab.  Miah had to fight back the bile in her throat.

Kaspar staggered to his knees, disoriented by the pitch of the abyssal screams from the children.

Isiah launched two arrows in rapid succession.  One struck each child in the chest and black ooze bubbled up around the shafts.  They didn’t stop screaming.

Caelian brought down holy fire on it.  Marisol fired a radiant bolt from her fist.

Cley shook off the scream’s effects and ran straight at it, sword raised.

Miah raised her quarterstaff, about to call up a spell when huge tentacles burst out of the top of the barn and whipped out towards her.  She couldn’t dodge in time and one of the tentacles wrapped around her.  Black scorch marks appeared on her armor.

Isiah couldn’t see the beast within the barn, but he shot two arrows into the thickest parts of the tentacles.

Marisol fired another radiant blast, hoping to hit something inside the barn roof but couldn't see any success.

Caelian ran forward with her mace and slammed it down on a tentacle reaching for Isiah.  It snapped back and flailed about when her mace contacted it with a flash of Holy Light.

By the pig stye, Cley jumped between two of the creature’s arms and swung his sword.  Both of the children’s heads were lopped off with one blow.  The screaming stopped.

Kaspar jumped up and ran for the barn.

More tentacles uncurled from the opening in the barn.  They knocked Isiah and Caelian aside.  Marisol dodged by rolling out of the way.  Miah was being lifted up.  Her quarterstaff was pinned to her side so she couldn’t focus on a major spell.  She pointed into the barn and cast another ray of frost cantrip.

Cley ran up and swung his sword overhand, chopping through the tentacle lifting Miah.  She dropped to the ground at his feet.  The severed tentacle poured a rush of black blood all over the both of them.

The entire roof of the barn shattered and exploded upward.  Black and yellow tentacles shot out in all directions like a furious sea urchin.  Sitting in the hay loft, taking up the whole length of the barn was a fleshy mass of writhing eldritch horror.  They could see squirming parts that looked like swine and cattle all merged together and there were at least twenty tentacles sprouting up out of it, each thirty to forty feet long.  It had no discernable face or front, just a diseased looking lump sitting at the nexus of all the flailing limbs.  It used a few tentacles to raise itself up slightly, then it began to quiver all over.  A sound like a discordant orchestra began low and started to build.

“We really should go!” yelled Isiah.  They started backing away.  Kaspar slashed through a tentacle with his longsword and received a splash of blood on his chainmail for his trouble.  Cley reached down and helped Miah stand.

The sound grew quickly enough to be painful.  Miah stepped forward and pointed with three fingers up then leveled.  She shouted her spell words and a zigzag line on her staff glowed white.  A lightning bolt shot out with a thunderclap and hit the horror in the center of its vibrating mass.

The monstrosity exploded in a shower of gristle and goo.

They kept backing away, moving faster.  Barn debris and splattered remains of putrid black flesh littered the entire farmyard.  Cley pointed to the farmhouse.  Two more tentacled creatures were crawling out of upper windows.  Another man-sized creature, hunched over with horns growing unnaturally out of the side of its head, shambled out of the front door.

Booming sounds like a giant’s drum came from beyond the pastures and beyond the edge of the island.  Up from the abyss came a spider like creature, nearly thirty feet tall with several spindly legs and a huge knot of waving tentacles coming up from its back.

“Run!” yelled Isiah.  “Kay!  Smoke screen!”

They all started running back up the hill.  Caelian lagged behind, using her holy fire cantrip to light as many fires as she could.  Barn debris, the long shed, brush and bracken; it all went up in dark gouts of smoke and flame.  They angled away from the cart path, trying to keep the smoke between them and the thing coming across the pastures.  Soon they got up above the valley and kept moving, darting around trees.  

Isiah looked back over his shoulder and didn’t see anything following them.  In another minute they came to the main road, out of breath and watching for anything else that might attack.

Cley reached out towards a tree and started scraping eldritch goo off his sword.  “Who’s hurt?”

Miah was leaning up against another tree across the road.  “I’m not good.”  The necrotic effects of the barn creature’s touch had withered through her armor in several places and the rest was blackened from chest to waist.  Beneath her armor there were welts and sores visible.

Cley stepped over to her. He drew in a breath and placed his free hand on her side.  With some concentration and a whispered prayer, the paladin healed her.  

“Thank you,” she said softly.  “Does my armor look more like a grizzled adventurer’s should?”

Cley smiled.  “It does.”  He patted her side as the healing finished.  “Are you going to be all right?”

She returned his smile.  “All healed.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Her face darkened a bit and she looked across the road at the farm she could no longer see.  “I just... I just never thought all this was really happening.  Right under our feet.”

“Yes, it is.”

Miah looked up into the paladin’s blue eyes.  “Are the SkyKnights hiding this from everyone?”

Cley shook his head.  “No, we’re not hiding anything.  We’ll tell anyone who asks.  The problem is, everyone has stopped asking.”  He turned and noticed that the others had finished wiping the black bits from their weapons and armor and were listening in.

Cley stepped into the middle of the road and addressed everyone.  “Look, you all know how the Sea was created.  It was about power, all right?  It was about power.  Aldarion mages who wanted to take power from the Abyss.  Well, the Abyss wants it back.  And they’re going to get it.  Eventually.”

“So we’re all doomed?” asked Caelian, waving a hand back towards the farm.  “These things are just going to keep coming up and we’re going to keep going down?”

A slight shrug.  “The Shattered Sea works.  It’s manageable.  But its days are numbered.  One hundred years.  A thousand.  It doesn’t matter.  The Abyssal Domaine will eventually win.  There are a handful of people around the Sea that fully understand what’s happening and they’re doing what they can.  But the rest of you are just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.”

They heard a fast paced series of booming sounds from back at the farm.  Cley pointed up the road with his sword.  “Lecture time is over.  We need to move.  They’ll know we’re coming so speed is our only advantage.  We’ll just have to make up a plan as we go along.”

Isiah motioned for the others to get into position.  “That’s basically our style.”