Having had successfully liberated three frightened horses from their sure demise at a nearby ranch, the party continued the remaining 60mi leg of their trek to Quanlo.
As the sun set upon the foothills, the heroes stumbled upon a campsite recently wiped out by some sort of green acidic slime. Talos attempted to identify the source of the slime, as did Doc, but came up empty handed. The only survivor was a man whose lower half had been disintegrated by the slime. Talos managed to eek some semblance of a conversation out of him before putting him out of his misery. According to the dying man, he'd heard some sort of terrifying roar from the sky just before the attack, leading the party to assume it was the dragon they'd seen the night before during the funeral pyre. Rummaging through the merchant's pack, Talos found an invoice of a handful of gems to be sold to one Orpheus Loraine of Cannesh. He also found a hand-drawn sketch of... something; what appears to be a desert landscape with strange "tears" superimposed.
That night, during Vyreth's (second) watch, the camp was assaulted by a small gnoll raiding party. The gnolls attacked from the darkness of night, as the party decided against lighting a campfire, and Vyreth was impaled by a spear from mob. Combat ensued.
The following day's ride was, for the most part, uneventful. Temperatures climbed hotter than the previous two days and the sun was out at full-blast. The terrain slowly started shifting away from grassland to more of a rocky, arid desert. Somewhere around noon, the party spotted a medium sized caravan far ahead on the trail kicking up dust. Scrambling to come up with the best course of action, Fhasys rode on ahead to meet the caravan with Talos "invisibubbled" and sitting behind her. Two of the caravan guards broke formation to speak with her and offered little in the way of useful information. They urged her to continue riding around the caravan and to pay no notice. Relaying this information back to the party, Vyreth and Doc decided that they should all approach the caravan and attempt to speak with the leader, a red-headed woman riding in front, dawning a fine set of splint mail armor and riding a well armored horse. As they were discussing how to proceed, two of the caravan guards broke formation and raced past the heroes, riding at full-clip toward Quanlo.
The woman in charge, who soon introduced herself as Talon, was equally as useless as the guards behind her. Giving up, the party rode on ahead and then slowed a bit to keep the caravan in their rear-sights while coming up with a new plan of action. During Vyreth and Talon's brief conversation, Vyreth noticed one or two slaves as being from his village, and he felt his blood start to boil. On what seemed like a whim, the entire party about-faced and charged the caravan, determined to lay waste to the guards and free the slaves.
The battle between the heroes and the slavers was likely the toughest the party had encountered to-date, and Talon was not a woman to be trifled with! She easily tore through Doc, then Vyreth, and then Fhasys before finally succumbing to her wounds. Vyreth, hanging on to a shred of his consciousness, managed to drag himself over to Doc in order to lay on hands. Doc, returning the favor, got back to his feet and helped finish off the last remaining guard who was chasing Talos down. Aside from a handful of well-maintained gear, the heroes discovered a scroll of revivify (3rd level), a handful of coin, and a slave invoice on which was both written the name of Vyreth's lost love, Varishna, as well as one Bruenor, headmaster of the Thanon mines. While Varishna wasn't amongst the slaves rescued today, Vyreth finally had a lead into his agonizing past.
Once combat had subsided, the reality of the situation hung heavy over the party's shoulders... They were standing right in the middle of a main thoroughfare surrounded by the bodies of 6 slain guards, Talon herself, and her badly injured horse, and now responsible for the lives of 8 slaves who had no idea where they've been, who they've been bought and sold by, or where they were going. Since it was still mid-day, the crew decided they'd better gather the bodies, horses, and wagons, and drive them South toward the foothills in order to hide the evidence and decide what to do with the slaves. Tomorrow, they would complete the journey to Quanlo.
