After surviving an attack from bandits in the night, the Wild Rovers awoke feeling stronger than ever. They packed up their things and continued following Mack, their bear friend, as he led them toward the city of animals he called home.
After a day of travel, dusk arrived and they realized they needed to make camp. Just ahead they noticed a campfire. They approached and were greeted by a welcoming man who knew of their quest to deliver Tobias, whom he called Tiktose. He offered them jerky, salmon, and a warm fire to spend the night. As indecipherable runes drawn in the dirt shifted form by his side, “Mr. Salmon” (as Desmond mistakenly took his name to be) described himself as an unbiased historian who doesn’t take sides and remarked that the gods were amused by the Rovers’ triumphs and failures. He spoke of each of their personal encounters with the divine in the Feywild: The Deep’s call to Desmond, Vara’s dreams about protection versus intimidation, Aengus’s wrestling with the nature of love and abandonment, and Urs’s struggle between greed and reverence for his god’s sacred space. From the start, Mack was wary of the man and refused to approach too close, and so Urs shared this mistrust and slept away from the fire. Before they finally drifted to sleep, Mr. Salmon mentioned to Desmond that his mother was in prison, somewhere…
In the morning they found the man had vanished, so they continued their journey to the city. When they arrived, they were greeted by a menagerie of beasts of all forms, and by Rena, the humanoid protector of the city for at least the past 700 years. She prepared a Hero’s Feast for them, performed a ritual in a tongue only Urs could understand (though the words were too big for him), and they stepped through the fabled arch with the expectation that the Seldarine would greet them and welcome Tobias into their ranks.
That did not happen.
Rena charmed Urs into giving her the necklace containing Tobias. Compelled to obey, Urs handed it over with a smile and gave his farewell: “Bye Tobias!”. Just as suddenly as the magic word “bye” was spoken, Tobias erupted from the necklace, along with the pent-up magic it had contained.
[more cool stuff happened but I’m out of time…]
The battle was won, though one enemy escaped. The Rovers soon realized that stepping through the arch to arrive in a separate plane was a ruse. They hadn’t gone anywhere. The animals, which were nowhere to be seen, were apparently part of Rena’s elaborate scheme to trick them…
