“The aptly-named Forest of Despair was widely considered to be the most dangerous place to venture towards in the Alcidean continent. Out of every hundred explorers that went into the forest, only around three returned alive. Granted, those numbers were from the past, before the Unliving went and claimed the area in the center of the forest as their own and built a city right on the spot.

Nowadays, travel to and from the Forest of Despair remained risky, but the path cleared by the unliving notably had less wild beast presence around it, which made it an acceptable risk to traverse. A well-guarded caravan will generally make it through the journey relatively intact, and the Unliving were never shy to offer themselves as escorts on your way back out, either.” - Nols-Farren Arnqvist, Trader from Knallzog, circa 17 FP.

In the end, Reinhardt led a group of around fifty people southwards from Zephirous, with Bærengant as their first destination. The Unliving had cleared a path towards their city from Knallzog territory, so they had to circle to the south to reach that path. It was folly to challenge the Forest of Despair the hard way, and Reinhardt had not lived so long as a successful mercenary Captain by being a fool.

The journey from Zephirous to Bærengant was as safe as it could be. The dwarves of Knallzog maintained a tight grip over the security of their territory, and while the former Theodinaz regions had some issues with banditry – mostly people who were unwilling to accept the new rulers – at first, by this time any such bandits had long been uprooted.

They made a stop at Bærengant mostly to confirm the route they would need to take. None of the mercenaries had ever ventured towards the Forest of Despair, so they needed more precise directions in order to avoid making undesirable mistakes along the way. While Reinhardt looked around for the pertinent information, he also asked his family to take Astra and Ze’phane around Bærengant to entertain them while they waited.

It was not that hard to find someone who could brief him on the route to take to head to the city of the Unliving, which he learned was called Paradise. A rather ironic name for a city built in the middle of the most inhospitable land in the continent, though he guessed the name likely made more sense from the perspective of the Unliving.

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On the first day it didn’t find any leads, though he found one of the subordinates of Uncle Angus who in turn directed him towards a trading house in town who had done trade with Paradise in the past few years. When he went to visit, the trading house was already closed due to the late hour, so Reinhardt could only postpone his visit to the next day.

Reinhardt managed to secure a meeting with the head of the trading house the next day and asked them of the route that he needed to take to head to Paradise. He got more than he bargained for, in many ways, as the head called for one of his senior merchants who last took the route then had said merchant explain the route in great detail to Reinhardt.

In the end, he left the trading house not only with a detailed map of the path to take to Paradise, but also with a pretty exhaustive listing of the dangers that he would likely encounter along the way and what remedies and medicine could be used to counteract some of them. As a result, he had to delay their departure another few days in order to collect all the suggested countermeasures on the list first.

Only after they spent nearly a week in Bærengant did the small convoy continue on their trip. From Bærengant they headed to the south-west, skirting along Knallzog’s northern border towards the wastelands that the dwarven nation had been reclaiming slowly but surely. Roughly when they were in the middle of said wastelands, they took a turn to the north, towards the Forest of Despair.

The hardest part was to find the path that led to Paradise, as there were not that many landmarks to be used as reference around the Forest of Despair, so it took them three days of going around its southern perimeter before they discovered the cleared forest path. It turned out that Reinhardt had gone a bit too far west in the wastelands and had gone past the path itself.

While the path was indeed more than large enough for even three wagons to travel side by side, it still looked rather foreboding and was quite dark, in some ways reminiscent to the maw of a beast that waited for its prey to walk inside on their own volition.

Reinhardt ordered his people to go into formation as they proceeded into the forest. The shieldbearers practically formed a protective circle around the wagons, with most of the rest lined up behind them. The platoon leaders were either leading the animals that pulled the wagons, were on guard in the wagons, or rode next to the wagons.

The forest was dark and gloomy, as even in the cleared path, the forest’s canopy still cast a shadow on those traveling below. Streaks of sunlight did penetrate the canopy here and there, but they did little to dispel the gloom that the convoy had to go through. The rustling of leaves sounded from time to time, as some sort of wildlife passed by unseen in the forest by their sides.

Both Lili and Rózsa – the half-elven druid sisters from Nicole’s platoon – took on their wildcat guise and traversed the trees to the left and the right of the convoy. Reinhardt ordered them not to go deep into the forest, as it would be too risky. He asked for them to act as an early warning in case some dangerous beast was approaching the convoy, as they could likely notice those earlier thanks to their sharp senses.

According to the map he received, it would take at least four to five days to reach Paradise from the entrance, up to a week if they were unlucky.