Arriving to ensure the village were paying their taxes to the khanate, the party discovered a village of mutilated and blinded townsfolk. The people of Bleakbarrow have been systematically blinding themselves for years, ensuring their infants undergo the now sacred ritual before the end of their first season, so that they can live under the protection of a medusa, Keyla. The party learn the medusa eats the statues she creates, needing the petrified flesh for sustenance -so as long as people attack the village, she defends them, a bait for her food source. A convenient symbiosis, if a little grizzly.
But there was conflict in the village hall – The village elders wanted her protected and kept alive. She asked nothing of them, only to bring her the statues of their assailants, the villagers themselves they had willingly blinded each other. Many refused to help the party, remembering the days before the arrival of Keyla, days of battle, of rape and pillage. But there was a dissenting voice in the village. Squint, speaking for the first generation of those blinded infants who now grow old , accused the elders of being too fearful to see the truth, instead choosing eternal darkness for the illusion of safety. They want something more for their own children
As the party delved into the forest, they found multiple statues, adventurers like them perhaps, who had perished under the gaze of the medusa. But the learned more of her.. they learned that she once knew the Khan… Keyla claimed she had once perhaps loved him but he had turned on her, and forced himself upon her, and rather than enslave or kill her, he had somehow cursed her, transforming her into a creature that no man could look upon again.
Throkk stands silently in the clearing now, under the shadow of the ancient elven watch tower. The head of the medusa hangs by his side, within the tattered backpack Alastair had managed to wrestle over her writhing hair. Alawyn the Shalesmith stands frozen in place, mid lunge, a look of terror on his heavy chizzled features.
The Khan doesn’t know what his champions have done here today, but neither does he know what they have learned of his past. There is a village of blind farmers to the North, now without their protector, the elven woods to the South containing unknown mysteries and dangers, and the shadow of the Great Khan looms over the steppes as the party pursue their goals ever further South.