<div class="floatright">(https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e2/46/ba/e246ba7f857600ac7531b607d926e102.jpg)</div><br/>Traveling north from Waterdeep was easy enough for Tandi. Playing at inns were time honored traditions and allowed those with talent to get a free room and board for filling up the establishment with patrons. And the crowds she drew! A sizable majority of men stared at her beauty and were amazed at her singing. While she didn't have *all* the otherworldly looks of true elves, she filled out her curves as a human would, she was the idealized girl next door. She was sophisticated, but she was attainable, and her short cut hair and pointed ears would have many women talking to their husbands, if they were not also fantasizing about the half-elf bard. All too soon though, the inns and way houses started spreading farther and farther apart. Amphail and Red Larch were busy places of industry and trade, but nothing anywhere approaching the cosmopolitan Waterdeep.<br/><br/>She made good time with her horse, a spirited mare that pranced on light hooves, and ready to sprint and run if Tandi would let it. She would need the animal to cover ground quickly in the Kryptgarden Forest. Durnan's 'informant' wasn't too big on directions other than saying this old burial site was on a hill in the Forest but near the Sword Mountains... that's a lot of fricken hills to cover. And so Tandi spend a week, then it stretched into a tenday. Supplementing her rations with wild game and berries helped stretch her rations out much longer than otherwise. She would have needed to go back to town to resupply and possibly end up starting somewhere else and completely missing the location.<br/><br/>Towards the end of her second tenday in the wilderness, she had found it. A large hill that was solitary and leveled off half way up, and large obsidian plinths and cairns adorning the top of the hill. As she approached, the land seemed to wash out. The vibrant colors of the forest seemed to muddy and fade as she walked up to the hill. The trees in the Kryptgarden were in various states of bloom this season, but here, they seemed to struggle to produce leaf. The ground around the hill was scraggy brush, and though she could pick her way through animal trails, the twisted gnarled briars tugged at her leggings and scratched her when they could. The hill rose sharply some sixty paces, marking as something that was carved or mounded into a heap, not simply wind swept into being. If this was a tomb, it was massive. Tandi had approached from the southwest and looking at the hill, it tapered to a point so she could see it stretched three hundred paces north and probably another three hundred paces east. Again, the weeds and thorns scratched and tugged at her as she climbed up the hill to make sure there were black rocks upon it.<br/><br/>As Tandi approaches the black plinths and cairns, she sees a hulking figure about 30 paces to her front and left. It was large and man shaped, but the proportions were exaggerated. She'd guess that if she stood next to it, she would only come up to its waist and it was so barrel chested she wouldn't even begin to get her arms around it. Its legs were short and stocky, while its arms were long, but no less powerful. Hells, his limbs looked like they were bigger around than she was! If he got his arms around her, there would be no escaping that vice grip. His skin looked rougher than cowhide and twice as thick, sporting scars from battle and ritualistic carvings and gouges. There was zero fat on him, pure muscle lay beneath his skin. He had no footwear, but he was covered in strips upon strips of dirty cloth and scrap metal sown together as haphazard sheets of armor. Tandi couldn't discern his features due to the ragged hood he wore, but the dual snub horns marked him for the ogre he was.<br/><br/>They menaced outlying farms, but judging from this one's relative lack of gut, it was safe to say it didn't have a piece of civilization to poach from. One of the bawdier farmer truisms about Ogres: They wanted all the food, all the gold and all the fucking they could get.  At the moment, the ogre was ripping and chewing some unrecognizable pile of meat and bones, shear happenstance kept her from being spotted just now, yet the ogre stopped and began sniffing the air.<br/><br/>Whatever she decided, Tandi would need to act fast.<br/><br/><div class="floatright"><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide</div><div class="spoiler_body">(http://www.kekaiart.com/uploads/5/4/7/6/5476798/6287487_orig.jpg)</div></div></div>