The next morning, we awoke, gathered our belongings, and prepared to set out. Then a discussion ensued.

It appears that Molistaead had a problem.

Several months previous, we were met by some gentleman who apparently was hired to kill Molistead. Why he wanted to kill him, I had no idea. Anyway, he said that to make the killing more 'sporting', he would give us three months. At the end of three months, we were to meet him in Myth Drannor. Otherwise, he would kill Molistead in his sleep.

Molistead informed us that we were down to the final twenty one days before he had to show up in Myth Drannor. A place that, quite frankly, I had no desire to visit. And was almost a thousand miles away.

So after some discussion, we figured out a way to make it back to Rybath, the town where Raymond was, in about three days or so. We wanted to go back there partly because it was on the way but mainly to spend some of our gold.

We were just about to leave the dragon's cave when we met... Him.

"Him" was a rather large fellow, about dressed in bear skins. He said something about Boudica I didn't quite catch, then charged into battle. I managed to get a few good hits in before he cast some kind of spell and darkness enveloped the area.

I really hate it when people do that.

The darkness spell was broken relatively quickly, but he did it again. Immediately afterwards, he teleported away.

It took several minutes for the darkness spell to expire. In that time we found out that Boudica had been blinded by Him. Our attempts to cure it failed. So we spent an hour trying to chase the guy down, to no avail.

We finally decided that it was unlikely we were going to catch him without a rather long and difficult chase, and he was going in the wrong direction. So Molistead conjured up some horses and we made all haste for the town, three days away.

I was quite impressed by Molistead's skills in magic by this point. The steeds he created had the ability to travel three or four times faster than a man, and snow and rocks didn't bother them in the slightest. We made excellent speed.

We left Dante behind, as he insisted he'd catch up with us.

That, unfortunately, took a lot longer than we anticipated.