This will be necessarily somewhat terse and possibly inaccurate, since it's some considerable time since the sessions concerned. I'm such a slacker.
Outside, Vallana had come to (eventually) after being pounded into a dwarf-shaped crater in the mountainside, and had been rejoinede by Jim and Aloysius (the dog). They followed on after the giants, and met Karlof on the road. Karlof was a stranger to Vallana, but Jim remembered him from the brief time they spent together up north. He agreed to go with them and attempt to rescue Tallis, Barsh, Pandora and Count Basil.
Vallana and Karlof performed all sorts of feats of derring-do and agility to climb up the sheer precipice of the giants' lair, and snuck into a giant bedroom where they found themselves effectively trapped — they could not open the massive door to get out, and although Karlof could just squeeze through under the door, Vallana could not without removing her armour, which she was extremely reluctant to do.
Back in the kitchen, the giants sent in a sniffer-bear to find Barsh. He smacked it in the nose and led it and the giants something of a chase before being swatted into oblivion and thrown back into the can. He was treated so roughly this time that the cook thought he was dead, and so put him into an ice-bin in the cold-store to be cooked the following day (fortunately she didn't stop to gut and dress him first).
Some more giants arrived, very pleased with themselves for having caught another human for their Man Pie — it was Jim, of course. They tied him up from neck to ankle and bunged him in the caddy, which they put up on a high shelf in the pantry.
While the other giants searched for the missing Tallis, the cook caught sight of Pandora and went into shrieking hysterics, which resulted in the kitchen being thoroughly sprayed with fairy dust (powdered rust, basically) and giving Pandora something of a fright. Fortunately she'd dug herself a little burrow high up in the shadows by that time and wasn't harmed, but it made her leery of landing anywhere in case she got her little fairy feet burnt off.
A blur of GM-memory ensues.
At some stage Vallana and Karlof managed to sneak out of the bedroom as some giants came in, and were spotted by a giant search party. Vallana got smashed into coma (again), while Karlof managed to get back out a window and clamber down a rope, dropping and falling the last ten metres or so when the giants started hauling him back up. Vallana was taken into the kitchen and peeled, her gear tossed into the rubbish (except for her breastplate, which was snaffled by the giant shaman and added to his collection of hair-ornaments). There was some brief indecision about what to do with her when she was discovered to be a dwarf — whether to throw her straight on the fire, or feed her to the bears; in the end it was decided that the bears should get her, and one of the giants took her unconscious body across to the bear pens.
This is yet another instance of the GM completely forgetting how the PCs' powers are supposed to work — mental powers have to be built to work against specific types of minds, something I didn't take into account. Fortunately, as it turned out.
Vallana regained consciousness but played possum, waiting her chance to escape — which she did when the bear-keeper had to put her down to calm the bears down. Basil had been messing with their minds and goading them into a fury of territoriality. She slipped down off the shelf the bear-leader had put her on and scampered across the hall to hide in his bedroom.
I don't exactly recall the sequence of events next, but at some stage Vallana sneaked back into the bear pens in the hope of finding a way out through them, completely screwed her Stealth roll, was spotted by the bear-leader and chased through the pens. She spotted a chute in the back corner and threw herself down it; regrettably it turned out to be the rubbish-chute leading directly out into the open air, about a hundred metres above the nearest solid rock. She plummeted like a non-flying creature, unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) failed her Breakfall roll, and started bouncing away down the mountainside smashing bones and smearing body-parts all the way. Ouch.
In the meantime, those left in the kitchen had spent their time hiding in the refuse bin, becoming horribly covered in offal but eventually finding almost all of the stuff that had been stripped off them.
Everyone else escaped more sedately, and less fatally, by sneaking. They eventually made their way down the mountainside and found Vallana's remains, already being well-chewed by wolves. They scared off the wolves; Karlof put an arrow into one with a superb long-distance shot and they scared the remainder away, and then inspected the extremely unpleasant mess that was all that was left of Vallana. Bleeuch.
Some miracling ensued, which would (under normal circumstances) not have been sufficient to revive the extremely squishy and well-gnawed corpse, but a timely prayer and divine intervention turned the trick and Vallana notched up a bit more on her Heavenly Overdraft. Hoo boy, when that falls due she's in for a whole heap of fun. Oh yeah.
The party stayed in hiding through the day, so as not to be spotted by the giant lookouts, and towards dusk spotted what appeared to be a caravan coming up the pass down below. There was some discussion about warning them about the giants, which came to nothing in the end. In the dark Pandora saw a little bat-winged creature flying above them, which Tallis correctly identified not as a little thing but a BIG thing high up — a wyvern, in fact. It was circling its way down the valley. She also saw some giants making their way down to get replacements for their Man Pie.
Basil attempted to warn a member of the caravan psychically, but his target just freaked out big time and the contact was suddenly cut off. Then there were flashes and pyrotechnics galore from down the pass, the wyvern fled and so did the surviving giants. Pandora flew down to take a look and saw a very unsettling lich-like figure moving among the giant corpses, apparently tearing out their great big giant hearts for some unpleasant purpose. The news of this person's existence did little to cheer anybody up.
Our heroes roped together in two groups, each led by someone who could see in the dark, and scarpered up the pass to get as far away as possible before dawn. A hard night's hiking took them over the saddle and another day or so found them down in the foothills on the other side.
The night found them encamped, exhausted. So exhausted that nobody noticed until the early hours of the morning, not long before dawn, that their camp was being haunted by some sort of phantasm — a wavering, smoke-like warrior, terribly wounded and dressed in archaic arms. It didn't respond to any of their attempts at communication, and when Karlof poked the end of his staff into it he drew it out covered in hoar frost. Pandora flew up to get a broader view, and saw thousands of them standing, alone or in groups, as far out on to the plain as she could see.
They shifted camp, to find a spot that wasn't haunted.
The next day they made their way down the trail towards Rath Fonagel, with the forest on their right hand and the open plain on the left. Pandora noticed the signs that there was a fairy sidhe somewhere nearby, and shortly afterwards Karlof and Tallis noticed an ugly nubbly grey spheroid drift across the road up ahead. One of them recognised it as a death-kiss, a relation of the beholder and a very nasty piece of work indeed, and assumed that it was likely that it would be making its way through the trees to an ambush spot ahead. They advanced with caution, with arrows ready to shoot at a moment's notice.
Sure enough, they spotted it lurking behind the crest of a small rise, presumably thinking itself fully concealed. They snuck up on it (at least Karlof snuck up on it; Tallis used her usual clattering and clanging heavily-armoured approach) and shot arrows at its exposed part. It came tearing over the rise with a peculiar multi-throated bellow, extending its ten muscular tentacles as it came.
A fight ensued, in which Tallis had several pints of blood sucked out, and also some other stuff happened. Jim ran away (of course). Karlof made excellent use of his Martial escape, without which he would almost certainly be dead. Pandora blinded the thing, and Vallana smushed it mightily with her morning-star. Everybody was electrocuted to one extent or another by the thing's electric aura, and to a greater extent when it exploded in a lightning-storm when it finally died.
All that's left of the death-kiss is an empty, rubbery sac. There's no sign of Jim, but his tracks lead off into the forest.
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