Your meditation is interrupted by a cawing of a raven, you open your eyes and find yourself on the battlefield where your squad fought the orogs before you were captured. You can't move your body, but can feel the wet of mud and blood, can smell the tang of blood, and the stink of the fallen relaxing into death. The caw sounds again, somewhere close, and a few hops bring a raven into your sight. It cocks its head back and forth, cawing again, and you can see that both of its eyes are missing, just open sockets. It turns its head and seems to be regarding you with its sightless face, before hopping forward and gently stroking its beak against your cheek. It gives a softer caw, before opening its mouth and lowering it to your face. Up close your vision doubles, one eye looking down the throat of the raven, the other seeing the side of its head as it approaches your paralyzed form.

The tips of the beak press against your unblinking eye, you can feel them sliding under your eyelids, but unlike your dreams... hallucinations... when the drow ablated your vision, there's no pain... only a slight tugging as the raven plucks your eyeball from its socket, then a give as the optic nerve and blood vessels snap. You can feel the blood pooling in the socket and running down your cheek, past your nose, over your lips... but still no pain. The raven gives a garbled caw, your eyeball still held in its beak, before tossing its head back and swallowing your eyeball.

It gives a caw, blinks, and you realize that one of its empty sockets is now filled... not with the black orb of a raven eye, but the white sclera and brilliant gold of your own eyes... well... eye.

The raven turns its head as if it heard something you did not, before beating its wings in a flurry and taking off.

You come back to the Underdark to a haggard looking Sarith gently shaking your arm.

"You ready to do some foraging?"

You knew it was only a matter of time until the goblins returned, and in larger numbers. You first caught sound of them an hour or two ago, but they sounded like they outnumbered you four to one, or worse. After a brief debate, the party chose to flee at all possible speed. You caught sight of them in a large chamber where the path wound along a ledge, one of them attempting a nearly impossible shot that somehow still found its way into the back of your thigh.

Galingal quickly pushed the arrow through, and healed you, but a piece of the crude goblin arrow must have chipped off inside, as you can feel it with each step, digging and grinding against your femur. There's no time to dig it out properly, the goblins, buoyed by the shot, come howling in at greater speed. The party eventually reaches a long rope bridge, similar to the one you encountered shortly after escaping from the drow, and everyone hurries across, you lame leg leaving you at the back of the pack.

Goblins mob the entrance to the cave, and you pull back an arrow to shoot... and have a flashback to the last time you were trying to shoot from a rope bridge. The arrow fumbles from your grip, and improbably impales your bare foot. Hobbling and limping, you hurry across the rope bridge, as Buppido and Jimjar are working frantically at cutting the silk.

"THOM! Get over here, I need you! That's an order from your Prince!", Derendil howls in concern as the first few strands of silk part and you feel the bridge lurch under you. Looking over your shoulder, you see goblins storming across the hundred foot expanse of the bridge. Their added weight making the silk snap faster and faster, Buppido and Jimjar standing up and looking at you in horror as you make it within a few feet of the bridge only to have it drop out from under you.

Your plunge is only short lived, as a furred paw clamps tight around your forearm and you're jerked to a halt. Looking up, you see Derendil, hanging, his arms stretched between  you and the remnants of the silken rope. You hear the screams and clattering splats far below as the goblins on the bridge hit bottom.

"I've got you... I've got you!"

Derendil begins swinging you back and forth before straining with all his might to heave you back up onto the ledge, Shuushar and Lia helping you to your feet.

You hear the whistling of flights through the air and whip your head around as dozens of arrows find their way unerringly into the Prince's body. He gasps, blood flecking his snout as he whispers.

"Save... our... people."

His grip loosens as he plunges down into the dark, his death celebrated by the goblins on the far side.

The party turns to run, but again your lame leg slows you as you see them pulling away, as you feel arrows thudding into your back...

You wake... in the faerzress... no goblins, the party surrounding you... when something jabs you in the back!

Rolling away from it and getting up, you see Prince Derendil, who had curled up next to you as you slept. He's whimpering in his sleep, his hind legs kicking like a dreaming hound. They must have hit you.

"Hey Thom. It's your shift anyway.", Eldeth mutters.

She lays down, rolls over and tries to get comfortable.

The next day is wearying. You feel like you've been having to hurry to keep up with the party. When you stop for a water break at a pool Sarith found, you realize that Eldeth is a few inches taller than you... which wasn't the case this morning. She notices as well, giving you a confused look.

"You... feeling okay?"

You assure here  you're fine, and the party carries on, managing to slay a deer that must have wandered down, and you find a place that others deem to be safe enough for a fire, and have roast venison for dinner. For once everyone is able to eat as much as they want, as there was plenty go go around, and better to eat it now than have it go bad. The piece you grabbed must have been bigger than you realized, as you feel like you've been eating if forever and it's still a lot of meat. So much that you get full, and wander over to see if Eldethwould like the rest of yours.

The venison sits heavy in your stomach as you realize you barely reach up to her waist.

"Shadow elf. You're a healer. What's wrong with Stena?!"

Galingal approaches, worry on his face. He seems at a lose.

"I bet she'll be fine, just needs to sleep it off! I was little once, but I kept sleeping day after day until I got big. Of course, it took forty years...", Jimjar quips.

The next morning, however, you're too small to keep up on your own, and Lex adds you to her pack where you ride with Stool (and he's been repeatedly admonished that you are *NOT FOOD*). 

You keep getting smaller though, and when Lex takes a short leap down, are jostled down into the pack where you fall through a tear in the bottom. You scream after them, but your tiny voice doesn't carry enough, and within moments, you're all alone... or are you...?

Shuushar gently shakes you awake to take your shift, just as your dream self heard skittering of eight monstrous feet.

You hope that it was just a one off, or a fluke as a result of the faerzress, but you get your chance to find out the following day, when the party is attacked by some of those insect/reptile things that were killed in the drow outpost cavern right before you escaped. You cast faerie fire... and while it works, it also backfires again, you song a lullaby that puts half of your party to sleep. Then the enemy is upon you, Sarith getting cut down, and as you go to sing health back into him, a wave of lethargy again flows forth, dropping more of your party, but at least some of the enemy this time. You still seem unaffected.

The chaos of battle swirls around you, and you realize that if you can knock out everyone, you can end the fight. You keep casting, pulses of sleep inducing magics rolling off of you, until you're the only one standing, even the elves having succumbed. Success! Now just to wake your party members...

...which you find impossible. You try shaking them... slapping them, screaming at them. They don't respond to being lightly stabbed, and you even try seeing if they can be woken with a kiss... nothing. You can't leave them... where would you go to get help? What happens if the sleeping creatures wake? Your friends would be in the midst of enemies. Luckily the fight took place near a pool of fresh, drinkable water, and you're able to keep your party hydrated... and the slumbering enemy also seems unable to wake, even when you slit their throats to be able to feed your fellows. Days go by, each much the same as the last. Foraging for fungal kindling, killing and cooking the creatures that attacked you... then lacking any cooking vessel to make a broth in... chewing up the cooked meat as fine as possible, swishing a mouthful of water, then dribble feeding it to your companions like a momma bird feeding her chicks. 

It's been... weeks? Thankfully the drow haven't found you, but it all blurs together, your jaws ache from doing the daily chewing to keep ten others alive. Thankfully Stool seems to be able to passively absorb what he needs from meat tucked into his fungal body.

But you're running out of firewood within close foraging... and running low on the reptilian insect creatures. You discovered after the first few days, when the meat you'd cooked had gone bad before you could use it all, that you could cut off a limb and cinch things tight to staunch blood loss, and thus keep them alive for a few days as you harvested what the party needs to survive. But soon you'll have used up the last of the available meat. Then what? Do you leave them to go try to find help, or keep doing what you're doing... would you sacrifice one to keep the others alive a few more days? Who would be the first to go?

As you're heading back, a meager armful of kindling, you make out footprints. Booted footprints. You sneak closer, and hear voices speaking in elven tongues. Drow? After all this time? The first emotion to flood through is relief that you don't have to make the hard decisions of how to keep who alive... followed closely by shame at thinking that way about your friends being returned to slavery.

The voices turn argumentative, and you see Shoor and Jorlan debating, before Jorlan bows his head in agreement. Shoor barks an order to the other drow warriors, who pull shortswords and begin dispatching your friends. Perhaps you made a noise in reaction, but Jorlan glances up and locks eyes with you. He raises a finger to his lips.

"Ssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhh...." He shushes you.
"Ssssssshhhhhh.... gggggrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooookkkkkkkkkkk...." he starts snoring??

You open your eyes, back on the cave floor of the faerzress, as Buppido blows out his mustaches as he snores. He gets an elbow from Jimjar, and rolls over to a quieter position.

Stena swings widely at Shuushar and scrambles back and away, blinking and gasping. She holds up her hands and then looks wildly around at the others.

She swallows hard before waving Shuushar away and unsteadily rising to her feet. She takes her watch, constantly comparing her size to her bow and nearby stones. She keeps an arrow in her hand that she measures her legs with every few minutes.

Shuushar falls back, blinking at you with his large eyes.

During your shift, you seem to be the same height you've been.

You experience a bout of short term (9 minutes) madness, in which you are convinced, despite repeated checks with your bow and arrow, that you are in fact shrinking. The walls warp and shift around you, as if you were getting smaller and smaller.

You now have Madness Level 1.

You shake off the residue of your... dream. Surely it was just brought about by the third eye you briefly possessed, there's something odd about this area, and suffusion of magic that must have affected your meditation.

After a bit of foraging with Sarith, you come across a pair of wide, waist high mushrooms that he identifies as barrelstalk.

"This will be on the way out, we can come back to these and harvest them. They're a larger relative to the waterorb, and taste a fair bit better too. If you're careful, you can cut the cap off and free them from the underground fungus and you've got a portable, storable barrel of food and water. Not as easy to carry though. If we can rig something up so we can take one of the empties with us, would give us a place for you to make water, and we won't have to trench it each camp."

((Each one can contain 1d4+4 gallons of water and 1d6+4 lbs of edible food, so can weigh between 45-74lbs, plus the weight of the 'barrel'.))

Omg wow wow wow! The dream posts were incredible!!! Thanks for all your time and effort here! Amazing! :-)

Some time after you wake, either on watch or when you wake for the day, you experience a bout of short term ( 7 minutes) madness, in which you are convinced that your arrows twist in your hands, their points seeking your flesh. You try to throw them away from you, but you're not able to open your hands as they twist and wrap, trying to stab you! You end up smashing 6 arrows before the terror and hallucinations pass and you come back to your right mind.

You now have Madness Level 1.

Some time after you wake, either on watch or when you wake for the day, you experience a bout of short term ( 4 minutes) madness, which worms its way into your brain deeper with each glance Sarith gives you. Is he watching you specifically? Is he going to capture you and drag you back to the other drow? He's been leading the party, did he get you purposely lost here? Where the other drow can find you? Has he been leaving marks or messages for them? He goes out every night with the other elf, they say they're foraging, but they didn't bring back anything tonight, are they out there meeting up with the dark elves? You've noticed subconsciously, being one who uses words to her advantage, but only realized now, that he no longer refers to the drow as 'us' or 'we', but says things from his past as 'the drow'... trying to divorce himself from them in our minds? It's perhaps easier to forget, now that his black stain has been worn and washed mostly off, his paper white skin and paper white hair no longer matching the description of the dark elf raiders of the Underdark that you're accustomed to.

As you thoughts muse all of this over, Sarith looks up at you quizzically, and asks in simple Undercommon that you can understand after a few days of practice, "Are you alright?"

Him speaking sends your heart racing, and you flee, stopping right after you leave line of sight of him, cowering against the tunnel wall. He stands as if to follow, before sitting down, farther away, occasionally glancing at you.

Eventually the feeling of dread passes, and you can look at Sarith without wanting to flee. He's done right by you... helped you escape, made sure folks made if off the bridge, and has been guiding you all to Darklake. Surely if he was still working for Ilvara, you would have been recaptured by now... 

You now have Madness Level 1.