I decided a month after I had gathered the remnants of my pitiful army, I had finally scraped together enough gold to hire more troops. I have enough of a skirmish screen that I can actually pay attention to my woefully inadequate archery support. I had the option of hiring another one of those scouts, but could not afford him. I bought a squad of 5 crossbowmen instead.
One of the most imperative things was now to find where the cultists had come from and explore the nearby regions before some other unpleasant surprise decided to manifest. There hasn't been much of any other kind lately...
So after bolstering the citadel defenses and leaving a few soulless to once more guard the gallows, I headed north through the forest while the seasons were still amenable to such ventures.
I discovered another dwarven mine, but far too heavily defended to even consider attacking it. Going northwest, I reached the open seacoast just in time to see the last leaf of autumn fall from the trees before the onset of winter.
Once the snows set in, it was an ordeal in itself to get out of that miserable nowhere on the north coast. Three months later I had made little progress and everyone but the undead are cold, tired, bored and hungry. We did manage to find one coastal village where we were able to spend a couple of warm nights. It was a curious thing, really. The place bore unmistakable signs of sea cultist occupation, strange runes scrawled on walls and similar things. Yet the people were not hostile even though most would be scared to death of the undead. They were positively relieved when I told them of the fate of T'yogh.
The strangest thing in the place was a well dug near the shore, larger than wells usually are and the placement made no sense whatsoever. The water would be contaminated by the sea and undrinkable, and lo and behold, so it was. The villagers would answer no questions about it, just make warding signs against evil. All except this one fellow who was a wild-eyed fanatic and merely spewed epithets at us. None of the others in that place liked him, but they feared him that much more despite the fact there was nothing special about him. I would have questioned him more forcefully, but once word of the sea cult's demise got out, the villagers knocked him on the head, trussed him up in a weighted net and tossed him down that odd seawater well. Then they set about filling the whole thing in.
Well, when I find the cultist bolthole, perhaps there will be more answers there.
In the middle of spring I finally found what I was looking for. After a stop to replenish our rations at a lone farm eking out a living here in the northern back of beyond, on a hunch I headed north to a forest that seemed to stretch northward. And certainly enough, after two weeks of trekking through the trees, we emerged out to a headland where a sadly delapidated town looked north to the sea.
The place was an actual town, but almost deserted and cultist signs where everywhere. There were several similar sea water wells in here and the people were close-mouthed and hostile, much like the fanatic the villagers killed. Once we put a few of them to the sword and informed them of what happened to their master, they decided to cooperate. Several threw themselves off the cliff and into the sea in despair and good riddance, they would have been troublemakers anyway.
Some of the writings I found were disturbing. Apparently these people worship something called the Old Ones that come either from the sea or someplace called the Void. There are references to Star Spawn and Deep Ones. They used those sea wells apparently to subject their women to congress with some kind of abominations from the sea in order to produce things called Star Children. All they ever got were things part human, part fish and part octopus.
*shudder*
If this place wasn't to suitable to use as a base of operations, I would put it to the torch. Apparently these cultists also had trade contacts because there are few ports here, so I now have options to trade for things I lack. Unfortunately I'm so lacking in everything I don't have anything to trade with...
(You can trade resources for gold or the other way around. Max trades automatically, up to your number of trade points.)