For the first session, the party travelled for a time away from the city before stopping. Once they did so, as dawn was breaking, Audrius was awakened by his eye sentry by significant movement from the south. He awoke and borrowed Jorn's spyglass and saw what seemed to be four people in bone white full-plate & tower shields with scraps of grey funeral shrouds trailing behind them, riding skeletal horses in similar barding in full gallop towards the party.
Not certain if these were hostile, the party went into hiding except for Antric, who awaited their arrival. Because they were in full gallop without slowing, this was not a long wait. Just as they were seconds away, they each reached behind them and pulled out lances, the head seeming to be obsidian that emitted smoke constantly. They rode by in columns past Antric, two of them surpassing the defenses of his shields and gravely wounding him.
As the party realized they were hostile, they lept from hiding and began to unleash their attacks, with Audrius hurling magic to gum up their steeds and Jorn using the nearby dune to duck behind between shots and disappear without anyone even being able to tell where the arrows came from. Honestly, Jorn did the lion's share of the damage here, one-shotting each horse to deprive them of their steeds and ultimately one-shotting the knights because the party softened them up by the time he got to them.
Once defeated, the party saw the armor & weapons degrade in quality and discovered that it was skeletons beneath the helmets. Audrius recognized what these were to be Pale Riders, dark warriors sent out to slay the enemy, ever tireless in their pursuit and able to move their spirits into any nearby corpse if ever defeated.
Knowing they would return eventually, Audrius planned out a binding circle to capture their spirits as soon as they left the next set of bodies to ensure that they don't repossess a corpse.
Unsure of how far the corpses would be to be animated (that stage takes an hour) with the travel time to reach them, they returned to sleep with Audrius's eye on watch. An hour later, he was awoken to the sight of the Pale Riders coming from the same direction towards them. This time, they knew them to be hostile, so Jorn used his sniper like skills to kill each horse as they galloped before even reaching the party. Meanwhile, Audrius and Flynn worked together to draw the binding circle.
Jorn wasn't confident with striking the Pale Riders themselves at these distances, so he waited, and observed them slowly regrouping and eventually skewering one of their slain steeds in unison, raising it up, and marching towards the party with the horse corpse as a shield.
Just before the Pale Riders got within charging distance, they began to howl and scream and shake, and then collapsed into a pile of lifeless bones and armor pieces. The party waited for five minutes before getting any closer to examine what happened, and as soon as Jorn touched one of the bones, they all flew back together into the four Pale Riders and stabbed with their lances. There was a bit of damage, but the party had an easier time this time since they didn't have to worry about them being mounted or having the opportunity to charge.
Slaying the Pale Riders, their spirits were captured in the prepared vessels, at which point the party deduced the animated corpses they were using must just be over the sand dune in the distance to arrive so quickly. With haste, they mounted up and rode over to see what was over the dune, discovering a full dozen Pale Riders surrounding a decorative and demonic box which Audrius theorized to be the phylactery for the Pale Riders. Cautiously, they attacked the soldiers from a great distance, and discovered they were only mindless skeletons (prepared vessels for the Pale Riders) and made quick work with them.
They rechecked the box to verify it as the repository for the spirits of the four Pale Riders, sundered it, and went back to sleep.
Afterwards, they travelled further until they found a cave to hide in, asking the dreamthief (been hiding Between the Veils while combat occured) to take them into Audrius's dreams in order to seek out this flower that the Black Lotus Eaters.
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