Turn 16: out cold

You follow the path to the south, towards the port. The jungle becomes thicker and darker, and you hear strange cries and rustlings in the trees all around you. Some of them are enormous, the width of a garrison tower and fully three hundred feet high. This feels, somehow, like a bad place. You notice it's grown cold. Twix starts looking around wildly, but when Heflam asks him what it is, in an irritated voice, he refuses to say. The captive scout's eyes are wide in his head, and he starts to speak, but Twix flails away to motion him to be silent.

There is a sign here alongside the path, in Imperial Common. "Port this way. Run as fast as you can."

You do. Bombr is, once again, surprisingly fast for someone his size. Photius, once you release him, sprints ahead, clearly terrified. The rest of you rattle along behind in your legion armor of breastplate, greaves, sandals and helms. "You know," mutters Gepetto as you stumble along awkwardly, "this thing hasn't got much of a neck guard, has it?"

Twix suddenly shrieks, flailing at the air all around him. You can't see anything there. "Wolverines!" he screams at the top of a high falsetto, "WOLVERINES! AAIGH!"

Twix falls over backwards, stiff as a board, his eyes rolled up into his head. He's frothing at the mouth, unconscious. He's still breathing, but very cold. He's pretty heavy in that armor too, as you roll him over onto his back so he doesn't suffocate in the mulch and leaves into which he pitched facefirst.

Dane tries unsuccessfully to get Twix to drink some water, but he's not responding. The rest of you are gathered around in an anxious huddle. "Um," says Photius nervously, "it's better up ahead a ways, where the path climbs up and the trees are smaller. We usually try not to linger here."

"Why not?," asks Dane.

"Well, this place has a local name, like everything on the island. When the priest translated it, it turned out to mean Graveyard of Souls. A patrol got stuck out here one night in the rain when they were building the port a few years ago. Nobody ever saw them again. The priest told us they were eaten by the dead."

"Then why not build another path?"

"This is the only path between the port and the rest of the island. It would take years to hack through that jungle and build another."

Twix is out cold, and the rest of you are huddled around him. The light is beginning to fail. It's cold here, not frosty, but a damp cold that seeps into your bones. There is thick jungle with towering trees on either side of you, full of sounds that don't seem friendly or familiar.

And the path seems to have disappeared. You're now in a clearing.

"Told you," mutters Photius. "Maybe we should at least build a fire. Or try to keep going and find the path again."

"Or pray!" says Bombr, and begins removing his clothes again and singing.