Session 2: Welcome to adulthood, there's death and cookies!

Tanny whistles and hums and pipes and lilts songs of our grand journey on the way back, unaware of the terse verse and cold coda to come.

As the path towards the village rises from the woods, we stumble upon a corpse. Only Tanny has met death in his short time, and for the rest of us, the moment is of stomach-churning, brain-boiling dread, short excitement, and a swift return to head-spinning flight-or-fight. We recognize this as the father of the official village bully, Sings-his-Praises, but have no clues as to what danger did this to him. An orange-on-purple gloom paints the sky above the village.

Two massive silhouettes step on the stage set by the light of the burning village. A winged savior, scythe-wielding protector of the village, our fabled guardian godling, facing off against a blob of inky darkness surrounded by people on fire. The fellas aflame are so by their own volition, serving the blob, and gladly set anything and everything on fire. The village is gone, finished forever by the two giant entities wrestling on top of any remaining houses like its hell in a cell 2008.

As our village guardian is brought down by an earth-shaking piledriver by the villainous blob on top of the schoolhouse, with his last whisper, the formerly entirely unspeaking, far-in-the-mountains-looming avian custodian of all we knew, tells us to fuck off and live. We do.

Forcibly dragging Gigi, who is still trying to intimidate the giant blob and its flaming army of saboteurs to fuck off, we flee back the way we came towards the temple. This time, we run through the dark woods in the early hours of the night, only the embers of our childhood lighting the way. Somehow we make it, just as monsters of darkness and flame beset us from the sky, to the temple. Tersis, the fucky lookin' fella from before, is at the temple, doodling some mandala bullshit on the ground as we flee for our lives. Tersis waves his hands, activating the symbols of the mandala, and banishes the first wave of monsters. Just as we have time to ask the quintessential three-word-question in unison, darkness comes. The blob has followed us here, and as its cowl covers us, Tersis punches the ground, forming an opposing force in the form of a fist of earth about the size of a Fiat punto 2014 1.2 liter hatchback, which punches our doom in the "face". The temple floor cracks with the might of the hit, and Tersis instructs us to leg it into the crevasse. We say nary a bye and jump into the hole, where an impossibly long underground river, much like a magical rebirth canal, ferries us to an adulthood and strips us of our embryonic innocence and dreams of a peaceful life.

The kids wake, having been birthed out of a spring in the woods in a land called Acondia, where local adults decide these kids look working age and unguarded. We become basically slaves to some fucker called Coldmarch for seven years.

Welcome to adulthood, kids!