Travel East to the caves

Ending a day of traveling with a climb up into the low mountains is exhausting. Your muscles are hot with pain and your legs and back are aching terribly. Sweat covers your mucular limbs and drenches your shirt. The wind howls around you and when you look down you realize that a fall from this height would certainly kill you.

At last you find a narrow, winding path up the mountain. Cave openings appear every few dozen feet, but most are too small or too shallow to provide you any shelter. Finally, you come upon the dark mouth of a large cave. There are some unusual smells coming from within, but otherwise it is quiet and much warmer than the increasingly cold rains slashing across the mountainside.

You collapse just inside the cave's mouth and fall asleep the moment you cover yourself with your blanket.

You are awakened by a sound from within the cave and, suddenly afraid, you attempt to hide in the shadows.

Heavy footfalls approach and you hear, to your surprise, a deep female voice humming a tune. You try to quiet your breathing and sink even deeper into the shadows. Your heart leaps into your throat as the source of the humming emerges into the moonlight.

The creature is perhaps eight feet tall, stout-bodied, and clearly female. Her arms and legs are thick as tree-trunks and a bulging, fat belly hangs over a fur loincloth. Her huge breasts are bound in patchwork cloth that hides their shape, but not their overflowing size. Her skin is tanned from the hard life atop the mountain, and her broad face is weathered and middle-aged. Her thick lips are as big as your thumbs and twice as long and her brown eyes bulge slightly from her face. Her ungroomed hair is tied with strings and matted in place, as though she has never bathed.

Your father once spoke of these creatures. Ogresses or ogre witches. He warned that woodsmen who strayed from the work camps or slept on the job might be seized by an ogress. The huge beast would drag the poor men to her cave and use them for her pleasure until their backs broke and their lungs burst. When they died the ogresses would cook them in stews.

As these lurid tales fill your head with images of doom you realize that the ogress has seen you. You gasp and reach for your short sword, dragging it from the sheath as the ogress bellows and draws a huge, wicked-looking club from her back.

"You not supposed to be here, human!" she roars. "Why you in my cave?"

She growls before you can answer and takes a menacing step closer.

"Thief try to take Mugda's thing, try to steal! Thief is going to die!"

She steps closer and you realize she is within reach to swing her huge club at you. There is little time now to act.