Sunday, Desnus 15 (morning)

Our tengu friend did not try to return, and his friends didn’t come looking for him. This was smart, in my opinion. Odds are they knew we were here (even if they didn’t know who we are) and that we’d have to come to them, eventually. Better to bolster their defenses than risk a battle on our terms.

Our biggest obstacle in the “take the fight to them” plan was the lock on their door, but the tengu gave us what we needed for getting around that, and Sera had it popped in just a few seconds. The door opened to a long hallway with numerous side passages branching off in the distance.

“It’s a maze,” I said, shaking my head.

There are all sorts of strategies for solving a maze according to everyone but me. I only knew of one, myself: crumple up the parchment on which they are drawn and throw them away. Sadly, this approach was impractical in our particular situation.

As we explored and bickered—I think someone suggested that we always turn right at every intersection for some reason—Sera found a secret door, and then we heard a loud squealing sound echoing from up ahead. That was followed shortly by the source: the first of three giant weasels, which seemed much more at home squeezing through the corridors of a maze than we were. And then things got worse.

There were secret passages everywhere. Tengu popped out of them left and right, dividing us up as we contended with them and the weasels. It was a chaotic, claustrophobic, and extremely musty fight. Stars, but those weasels stunk. Two of them spent considerable time in my face.

My tactics typically center around defending a very large area (and when Viktor uses that enlargement spell on me, a very, very large area) to slow our opponents and prevent them from ganging up on us. Needless to say, this doesn’t work so well in narrow hallways where the best we can do is line up in a single file. That being said, a horsechopper stabs as well as it slices, and does so quite well from several feet away, which put the weasels and myself on somewhat equal footing.

Once the last of the tengu and weasels had fallen, and it took a while to figure that out because we got scattered all over the place, we regrouped in a room that was in a fairly secluded corner to rest and heal.

And to get away from that blasted smell.

Starday, Desnus 14 (late morning)

Well, I asked for different and we got different.

Lamashtu is the goddess of, among other things, the monstrous and misshapen. If you’ve been thinking to yourself, as I have, that grimlocks aren’t really all that monstrous, and might be unfairly labeled as such, then you can set your mind at ease as we’ve gotten to the root of this mystery. We met the grimlock’s high priest today. And he had eyes. In true Lamashtu fashion, he had taken the eyes from some unidentified creature and sewn them to his face. And if that wasn’t enough, he had carved her holy symbol into his chest (their chieftain had done the same, so it was a whole thing). But that is the sort of dedication to abnormality that Lamashtu appreciates. Unlike Zon-Kuthon, it’s self-mutilation with, I dunno, a purpose.

The priest (Theldrick’s journals imply his name was Grallak) had some scrolls—I have no idea what someone who can’t see is doing with scrolls, so don’t ask—that were written in Common, but they were faded and nearly illegible. All we could make out was some reference to a power growing “in the pool of the dark cathedral” that would serve as a champion for the Triad, and more references to Kyuss bringing forth the Age of Worms.

The letter in Theldrick’s chambers also spoke of something called “The Ebon Aspect” stirring in the pool, and even suggested that heretics (that would be us) raiding the temple might awaken it.

Three guesses which pool they are referring to.

(early afternoon)

We’re resting back in the Zon-Kuthon wing because it’s nicer than a cave. And the beast, which Zhog has named “Bubbles”, needs to eat.

While we were waiting, there was a knock at the door in a deliberate pattern. It repeated after a short pause.

We were not expecting company. Not polite company, at any rate.

Snagsby did what any reasonable person would do, which is knock back with the same pattern. Then he said he heard footsteps retreating, and we decided to do something about that. He opened the door and there was a tengu backing away down the hall. Sera walked out after it and said, “Come in!’ with Snagsby following right behind her.

He froze and looked at Sera, then looked over at us through the door and said, “You’re not Theldrick’s…” leaving that thought hanging in the air.

Sera circled behind him somewhat threateningly, and it snapped at her with its beak. “Where is Theldrick?!” he demanded.

Viktor answered, “We’ve replaced Theldrick.”

“Prove it!”

I stepped into the hall with my horsechopper in hand, gave him my most charming smile, and said, “Honestly, we were not expecting visitors today! Come on in and we’ll show you around!”

“I see, I see…I didn’t mean to stay. It was just a simple errand…I’ll be back later.”

“What kind of errand do you have?” I asked. “Maybe you don’t have to leave!”

“I just want to talk to Theldrick. And I see he’s not here…”

“He is here! You can talk to Theldrick all you want! He just…won’t…answer.”

He was alarmed, and not sure what to do, so Sera decided for him. She gave the Tengu a shove, pushing him towards the doors. I swept my horsechopper low, catching his feet, and he tripped and fell forward into the room. He tried to stand up, so Zhog punched him and he went down again, this time unconscious.

We tied him up and decided to pump him for information. I checked his aura while he was out and it wasn’t tainted, which suggests…he just fell in with the wrong crowd. When he came to, I went with “nice”.

“Look, we get it. You wandered in here; you weren’t expecting all of this. You’ve got a message for Theldrick. Just tell us what it is, and maybe we can find a way for all this,” I said, gesturing around the room, “to end.”

“What’s your relationship to Theldrick?”

Honesty is important when you’re trying to build trust. “We’re alive and he isn’t.”

“The message was to simply ask him where his guards went.”

I smiled in response. “Oh! I can help you with that! They’re with Theldrick.”

The short of it was: he works for The Faceless One, which is the name mentioned in Theldrick’s journal, and the head of the Urgathoa contigant. Those journals have suggested that there is more than a little strife between the groups and something of a power struggle. He had written, “Grallak is the key. Thank the Midnight Lord that he trusts me and not the faceless One.” Well, good for you, Theldrick!

Of course, we couldn’t just kill him because I wasn’t going to allow another summary execution of a prisoner, but we couldn’t keep him with us, and we couldn’t let him go back to his cohorts. In the end, we made an appeal to logic and his sense of self-preservation: if he goes back to his master he’ll be seen as a snitch and most likely killed. But if he takes a chance on us, worst case is he has a lengthy head start running away. Best case? He’s the only surviving member of his little cult. He accepted the deal.

We aren’t naive. We sent him up the elevator, but there was nothing to stop him from coming back down so we set up a watch, just to make sure there were no surprises.

Fire Desnus 13 (night)

We’re spending the night down here. Everyone agrees that it’s too much of a risk to keep coming and going from the mine, and this wing of the…whatever this is seems safe now that we’ve cleared it out. The odds of being interrupted are low since there does not seem to be much inter-faith traffic.

We did more exploring and learned two important pieces of information.

The first is that “the beast” is just a wild boar. I don’t mean to imply that wild boars aren’t dangerous—they certainly are—but rather that it ended up being significantly more mundane than we were expecting. It was chained up in a room, like you do I suppose, and seemed hungry and not particularly discriminating about its meal. Zhog endeared himself to it by feeding it parts of its former captors and now he’s making noise about having another pet. And that’s all you need to know about that.

The second is just how deeply Smenk is in this mess. We found a storage room filled with crates that have his trademark rooster and coin painted on them, and they were filled with food and water. The story this told was pretty clear: Smenk entered into some deal with Dourstone to supply these fools with provisions, and Smenk being Smenk, he managed to irritate them to the point where it was less trouble for them to just knock him off the board. If that doesn’t sound like Smenk, I don’t know what does.

Also, how dumb do you have to be to do this? He essentially hired us to investigate himself, and even without that letter to Theldrick there’s mountains of evidence establishing that he is a co-conspirator in all of this.

Since he all but blackmailed us, I am not feeling particularly charitable about what to do with it, either.

Starday, Desnus 14 (morning)

The night passed without incident.

We found a stone key with Lamashtu’s symbol on it in Theldrick’s quarters, so we opted for that wing next. Unsurprisingly, the door opened up to a complex of naturally occurring caves. The tunnel leading away from the door was worked a bit into steps as it descended, and it emptied into a large chamber filled with stalagmites and stalactites.

We were admiring the beauty of this natural formation when something threw a javelin at me.

Viktor identified our attackers as grimlocks: humanoids that have adapted to living deep underground. The skin on their faces had grown over their eyes, presumably because eyes aren’t much good in the dark (for most people, anyway) so why bother having them at all.

This theme has repeated itself over and over: tunnel leading to cave, cave filled with stalactites and stalagmites, attacked by grimlocks. Sometimes there are chasms, sometimes there are ledges, sometimes there are pets, and this last one had a rope bridge, but that’s pretty much been it for variety. We’re taking a moment to rest up before moving on to—you guessed it—a cave with grimlocks in it.

Fireday, Desnus 13 (afternoon)

When I learned there was a temple deep under Dourstone’s mine, I was picturing a small space, roughly hewn out of rock and packed earth. Maybe three or four chambers, at most. Instead, what we found was a massive, sprawling complex. The antechamber was exquisitely carved from stone, with black marble tiles lining the floor and marble pillars and arches. And did I say this was just the antechamber?

There is no way this was done recently. How long has this been here?

The welcoming committee was a small squad of tiefling guards. They looked bored when the first three of us came down in the elevator, as if random people visit the place all the time. Which they must, because one of them casually asked, “Delivery?” Which would have been a great cover story for us, except that this was followed closely by, “Password?” And then we had a fight on our hands. A very short fight, fortunately. Varin put three of them to sleep with a spell, and that tilted the odds significantly in our favor.

I guess it makes sense that there are frequent deliveries. No one talks about this stuff in stories, but even cultists need to eat (well, some of Urgathoa’s followers may not, though some may eat more than their share) and there’s probably not much in the way of fresh food down here. Not the kind that doesn’t fight back, anyway. All that has to come from somewhere, and conveniently there’s a whole town overhead.

Three doorways—again, carved in marble—led out of the hall. Two bore symbols: one for Zon-Kuthon, and one for Urgathoa. The third doorway had no such adornment. I guess Lamashtu’s followers couldn’t find the time.

There was also a curious pool of black liquid filling the southern half of the chamber. It had a foul aura to match its foul appearance, and it seemed to suck the heat from the air. Zhog experimented with it a bit using…never mind, it’s not important what he used. The experiment was a let-down. The items he dipped in there just got really cold.

Sera wasn’t able to open Urgathoa’s door so we went for Zon-Kuthon. It was shaping up to be a pleasant Fireday afternoon of torture, murder, and self-mutilation. And skeletons. For some reason, the first resistance we encountered was skeletons in suits of armor. I didn’t think this sort of thing was in Zon-Kuthon’s dogma, but maybe his followers and Urgathoa’s have been comparing notes.

I guess we made a little too much noise in that skirmish—hitting suits of armor with metal weapons tends to do that—because we found ourselves rushed by more tiefling guards from three sides. One of them called out “I’ll unleash the beast!” which sounded like it might be bad for us, so Sera, who was next to him at the time, cut him down on the spot. This felt like what mom calls a “teachable moment”. If you’re going to announce your plan to run off and unleash the beast, maybe get some distance first.

We pushed our way through more guards and then found ourselves outside a huge chamber, surrounded by balconies 10′ above on three sides. We divided up into two groups, with half of us going to the upper level and the other half coming in on the main floor. And that’s how we ended up confronting Theldrick, the Triad’s priest of Zon-Kuthon. We knew that was his name because the tieflings we cut through had called to him for help. Help, which I feel compelled to add even though it surprises no one, never arrived.

Zhog’s entrance down below was blunt. “So. Are you that Thel-dick guy that someone was calling to while we were killing them?”

Theldrick responded by shutting the doors behind them. He probably thought this was a trap, but it didn’t really work out that way. Sera and I were on the balcony crew and had to work our way forward, one troglodyte zombie (what is it with those, anyway?) and cultist at a time. Our friends down below, however, were archers and spell casters and had their choice of targets, especially with us drawing away the bulk of his defensive line.

I am not saying it was easy. It was not. But once I got close enough to knock him to the ground, it was over.

We turned up some interesting documents. One was a letter to Theldrick and appeared to be written in an unfamiliar tongue. On closer examination, it was a code and not a language. “Based on how these patterns repeat,” I said, “it’s probably a letter substitution code. Give me some time with this, and I’ll work it out.”

It’s a common technique used by commanders to pass messages during wartime. The idea is, you have several tables and if you know which one was used you can do this quickly. If a message is intercepted by the enemy, by the time they solve it the information is probably stale. When used to send a letter in this manner, it’s just a way of saying “contents are private”, and preventing it from being read by the wandering eye.

Training with soldiers has its advantages.

It took Viktor and I about half an hour but we got it. And our dear friend Balaber Smenk is up to his eyeballs in this place. “The author believes that Smek is no longer useful, and must be killed,” I said, showing them the decoded message. “Smenk is using us to clean up after whatever mess he helped create.”

I don’t like being used.

There was more, though, and it was fairly ominous. It also spoke of someone named Kyuss. “Mighty Kyuss is the herald of the Overgod”, it read, and that undead bearing his worms were the key to the Triad’s research. “…send agents to the Mushfens, across the hills to the southwest. I believe that we will find what we are looking for there, among the lizardfolk”

This problem, it seems, is much larger than just Diamond Lake.

Oathday, Desnus 12, 4722 (night)

Ragnolin Dourstone has been operating his mine in Diamond Lake for longer than anyone can remember, and is arguably one of the more successful mine owners in town. It should be said, however, that this financial performance comes largely from abysmal working conditions and low pay, which keeps his overhead down and boosts his bottom line. And if that doesn’t paint a rosy enough picture of the man, rumor has it that he was run out of the Sky Citadel of Janderhoff after he intentionally caused a mine collapse as a way of quelling a labor dispute.

Surprisingly, Abadar’s church does not have a lot of advice for sneaking into a mine, even one run by the esteemed citizen that is Dourstone, and even if said mine happens to be a front for a world-ending triad of cultists. So, if you’re reading this and are faced with this same problem, this is how you go about it.

First, spend the morning casually casing out the mine entrance. This was mostly Sera’s department, but if you don’t have a Sera, anyone who is good at casing a mine without being seen will do. What you are looking for are answers to questions like:

• “How many entrances does it have?” (One. And before you make a smart remark here, some mines have more than one entrance. I live in a mining town. Please don’t argue with me.)
• “How is it guarded?” (The area around the entrance is enclosed by a wall, and guards are stationed at sentry positions by the main entrance, and more guards patrol the interior. Rotations occur at regular intervals. Note: To answer this question properly, it helps to have someone like myself, who has trained with soldiers and understands guard duty. If I am not available though, there’s always Sera, whose skill set is geared towards avoiding guards, which is almost as good.)
• “What is the general activity level?” (Miners work at all hours, and most of the activity coming in and out is shift changes for employees.)

Second, feel around for hints of any rumors of a cult down below said mine. Note that this tends to be situational, so adjust your feelers as needed. In our case, there were no such rumors, which suggests that Dourstone has so far managed to keep this secret of his pretty darned secret.

Third, identify a person or people that you can bribe to gain access to said mine. Note: If you are a representative of the Church of Abadar, you may want to reframe this as, “To whom can we offer our services as subcontractors, using an unusual financial arrangement where the subcontractor pays the primary?” The answer to this question, by the way, turned out to be “Just about anyone who works in the mine”, because this is Diamond Lake, and while most of the mine owners are horrible people who exploit their workers, Dourstone has raised it to an art form.

As such, it did not take long to find a group of copper miners who were happy enough to get a well-paid vacation day, provided that said payment was enough to offset their risk. As it turns out, my civics training did cover actuarial matters, and assessing the financial impact of personal risk is something I am comfortable doing. We named a figure, they negotiated, we accepted, and then we had a plan.

We meet up with them tomorrow, just before their shift starts at noon. Most of the crew gets a day off, and we get to wear their mining gear (they also get some new gear in case we are down there longer than their shift). The work crew lead will bring us in like he’s not sneaking strangers into a mine, and then he and his second will ensure we have a minute or so of privacy to get to the other shaft.

“The foreman says it’s for accessing another vein,” their crew leader explained. “It’s blocked off for now, and no one is allowed near it.”

That sounds exactly like what we’re looking for.

As to how they address the issue that some of the crew isn’t working because they aren’t really there? Not my problem.

Desnus 8, 4722 (Early Morning)

We set out for the cairn early in the morning. I am still not sure how we got on this “get up with the sun” routine, and I’d like to register a complaint. (Someone said that the sunrise was actually an hour earlier, and really, I don’t want to hear it.)

The Whispering Cairn was pretty much as we left it: dark, empty, whispering. We made our way back to the ball room and, this time? No ghost, no gricks, and most importantly, no closed door. For some reason, Snagsby tried to walk across the beam, despite the fact we all knew it was an obvious trap, and just as predicted, a steel ball shot out of the wall and knocked him off.

You would think we’d have already learned this lesson but I guess some of us are slow.

The room beyond was an enormous cylindrical chamber with walkways around the rim and a platform in the center connected by four catwalks like spokes on a wheel, two of which had long collapsed, swallowed by the chasm below. Four galleries of intricate bas reliefs lined the walls and they animated as we approached. I didn’t have much patience for the whole thing but Viktor sat through the show and said they told the story of the Wind Dukes and their epic, final battle against the forces of chaos (he actually said all of this with a straight face), ending with Zosiel falling when a giant wolf-spider sent some sort of beam of something or other into him as it was banished from this world. The whole thing was more than a little overdramatic, but then again, so is this whole place, so I guess it fits in with the theme.

We tried to approach the center but a pair of knights descended from above and tried to stop us. I say they were knights, but they weren’t actually knights; rather, they were more like animated suits of armor. Whatever they were, they weren’t interested in conversation so we had to fight our way through, which ended up being much more difficult than it sounds. Especially since they had this neat trick where they could clash their swords together to create a boom with enough sound pressure to rattle your bones. My trick, which I liked to call “a big hammer on a pole”, wasn’t as showy, but it was more than up to the task.

We reached the final chamber by literally stepping out into the air and letting the steady stream of wind blowing from below carry us up. And it’s up there that we found what looked like the resting place of Zosiel: a white marble sarcophagus with a lid carved into a figure, and more bas reliefs in the wall around it. The figure animated as we approached, saying, “Speak my name”. Sangsby replied with “Zosiel”, and a bright light shone on it, revealing a seam where we could pull to lift the lid off.

There wasn’t a body inside, just a pair of demonic-looking horns, a diadem, and a strange pewter box with unrecognizable writing on it that Zhog used a spell to decipher. The text spoke at length of the Queen of Chaos.

Inside that was what we deduced to be a legendary item known as a Talisman of the Sphere. Supposedly it could control another legendary item known as a Sphere of Annihilation which, also supposedly, destroys anything it touches. There’s a lot of “supposedly” in all that, but such is the way with legends. According to the others, our talisman appears to be dormant. No clue what this means—I mean, I know what “dormant” means, just not when it’s used in this context—and while it’s all very much above my pay grade, it does seem like the sort of thing we should hold on to.

Desnus 9, 4722

I spent the morning working on the legal claim for the property where the house/mine office sits, and getting it filed with the assessor’s office at the garrison. My thought is that we could renovate the place and turn it into a small lodge or inn of sorts. While this is not exactly “getting out of Diamond Lake” it is at least far enough away from it that I don’t feel depressed all of the time.

While I was doing that, the others pestered Allustan with what we’d learned in the Cairn. That ended with inviting him back to the house so he could see it all for himself.

Desnus 11, 4722 (late morning)

Remember what I said about this Filge thing coming back to bite us? Today was the day.

We swung by the observatory because…never mind why we went to the observatory. We were there, and we found a note nailed to the door.

You who did this,

I wish to have a discussion with you.

See Kullen the half-orc to make the arrangements.

S

So that’s just great. If I were to make a list of everything I didn’t want to do today, or possibly do ever, meeting with Kullen and meeting with Smenk would take the top two spots. Of course, Smenk doesn’t know who he’s looking for, or he’d have nailed that note into us instead, so at least we had that going for us.

I turned to Zhog and said, “All right. I guess we go see your uncle.”

Kullen was in his office, and Zhog walked up to him and set the note on his desk. Kullen looked up and said, “I was wondering when you’d find that.”

“It says you’re supposed to be the one we talk to,” Zhog replied.

“Yeah, Smenk wants to meet with you.”

“Does he want to meet with us, or does he want to hurt us?”

Just in case it wasn’t clear how dangerous this situation was.

“Probably both…but, I think he really does want to meet with you because he wants something. He didn’t say what.”

“So is it a meet, or is it an ambush?” Zhog asked.

“If it was an ambush, he would have had us set it up.”

Kullen suggested having the meeting just after the Feral Dog closed at midnight.

Starday, Desnus 7th, morning

Finding the Land Farm was a chore. If you have ever followed directions given to you by a 10-year-old boy, then you probably know what I mean, and it didn’t help that they were based on landmarks that were decades out of date. Fortunately, the copse of trees still stood, as did enough of the house, that we didn’t lose half the day literally wandering in a field before we came across it.

The grave markers sat at the edge of the crumbling ruins of the farm, each bearing the name of one of the Land family. Three of them were marked with an engraving of a four-petaled flower, denoting them as victims of the Red Death Plague. Unfortunately, they were also accompanied by mounds of fresh dirt and open pits, because someone had recently dug them up.

There were footprints everywhere. More than one person had been at work here exhuming the bodies. Prints ran between the open graves and what was left of the house, and as we approached the latter the trail devolved from orderly footsteps to the chaos of a battle. As if to emphasize that discovery, a low growl came from inside the remains of the structure.

We entered cautiously. The floor was splattered with dried blood, and in the corner of the front room sat the rotting remains of an owlbear and a severed human arm. The latter sported a tattoo, and when Zhog saw it, he said, “Oh, we are fucked.” It was the tattoo worn by Kullen’s crew.

I should probably say “gang” there, but I am trying to be polite.

“My uncle’s crew is down one member,” he added, underscoring the “we are fucked” part.

That’s when a second owlbear announced its presence. This one was obviously not a corpse like the first, but it had been seriously injured. Which is probably the only reason we got through this alive.

“I think this was a mated pair!” I said as I moved in to fight it off. Kullen and his crew are tough, but two owlbears defending their nest? No wonder it had gone wrong.

I sliced into the thing as Sera and Zhog moved in next to me. It lashed out at the three of us, landing savage blows over and over. Still, we managed to whittle it down, and I finally got in behind it and checked it with my shoulder. The spikes on my armor drove into it, and it dropped to the ground, dead.

We found an owlbear…chick? cub? (I am not an expert on owlbear vocabulary) in a nest in the far corner of the main room. So, not just a mated pair defending their nest, but one defending their offspring. Honestly? I’d be amazed if Kullen’s crew was only down one.

This did leave a problem of what to do, as the young owlbear obviously isn’t going to survive on its own. The thing is, wild animals literally cannot be tamed, so it’s not like someone could take it home as a pet. And while animals can technically be trained and, I don’t know, used as guards or something (as long as you are very careful never to forget that they are wild) that process still starts with raising one. And let’s not forget that owlbears aren’t just some normal animal, either: they are an ill-tempered abomination that, according to legend, were created by some ancient wizard that possessed more talent than sense.

As far as I’m concerned, owlbears fall into that category of “kill on sight”, but the others saw this as an opportunity—one with razor sharp claws, and a vicious bite, all of which we had recently become acquainted with—because they are either insane or greedy or both. So we took it with us, on the understanding that we’d find someone to take it off our hands as soon as possible so it could become their problem long before it became ours.

That, however, was a future concern. The more immediate one was Kullen. All indications were that his people had dug up the Land family, and if we wanted their remains back, we’d likely have to talk to him. Given that one of them died doing it? Well, talking to Kullen under ideal circumstances is mating fire and kerosene. Intruding on one of his jobs, much less a job where one of his own had died? I wasn’t looking forward to that. And from the looks of it, neither was Zhog.

Afternoon

With all this on our minds, we headed into town. The first stop was to see Allustan about our owlbear problem opportunity. I guess he had been voted “mark of the week”.

Allustan: Diamond Lake’s resident wizard, and brother of our corrupt mayor. The mayor who oversees our corrupt constabulary, and keeps the corrupt mine managers in check, and who is so widely known for corruption that it doesn’t even qualify as an open secret: it’s just open.

You are probably sensing a theme here.

I am not sure what to make of Allustan. The rumor is that he and his brother were a lot alike when they were younger, but that Allustan has mellowed with age and might even qualify as being “civic-minded”. Supposedly, he helps reign in his brother’s worst impulses and serves as an effective barrier against a change in the balance of power between the corrupt city government and the corrupt mine owners. Personally? I find the whole political situation distasteful, but no one gave me a vote.

Allustan is also apparently Viktor’s mentor. Viktor is a pretty decent guy, and he speaks fairly highly of Allustan, so I guess that’s a point in his favor. Of course, Viktor’s hardly an unbiased source, but he’s been sharing some of our discoveries with Allustan and so far that hasn’t turned into an arrest warrant. So, carry on, I guess.

Allustan was willing to play ball on the owlbear plan, at least for now. He said he knew someone who knew someone, which I guess should not have been a surprise. “I’ll get in contact with him again. If he doesn’t want one, he will likely know someone who does. Even after a reasonable handling fee, your proceeds from the sale—if, of course, one can be arranged at all—would still be considerable.” For my own part, I just stayed silent and let them talk. There was nothing positive that I was going to contribute to the conversation.

Viktor showed him more of the rubbings he’d taken, which is probably why Allustan was willing to go along with this audacious owlbear plan.

“You must tell me where you found these!” he said. “They are tied to the most ancient histories of our world!”

Viktor looked at me and I just shrugged. May as well go all the way.

“There is an entrance to what seems to be an ancient, uh, building—”

“Cairn,” I corrected. All the way.

“Cairn. And inside, that’s where we found this.” He went on to describe the traps, chambers, and various passageways.

Allustan’s suspicion was that these were tied to the Wind Dukes, which our parlay with the earth elemental (before we smashed it to rubble) more or less confirmed. “What we are talking about are the movers of events that date back to the Age of Creation, when many of the deities of Golarion had not even yet come into existence. This information will help me research these glyphs. This could be the discovery of a lifetime! These look like they are of the language of the Vaati.”

I didn’t know what a Vaati was, but he did, and it sounded important, I guess? If he was willing to do some legwork here to figure out what, exactly, we found, then great. More free time for us. And as a bonus, we could spend it back at the house instead of choking on the air in town.

The second stop was the meeting with Kullen. We debated the best way to do this without involving his “associates”, and settled on catching him just after the lunch rush at the Feral Dog. And, yes, they serve food there. Don’t ask. After several days of trail rations pretty much anything is an improvement.

I worked as a server there a few years ago when I was a teenager, in a moment of what I would call desperation and character-building. Mom and dad were not happy about my choice, especially given the reputation of the place and what goes on there, and I wasn’t either. But let’s be honest: the family needed the money. Even the pittance I was bringing home with me was enough to make a difference in our lives. It was also one of the few places one could get a serving job without any experience.

Believe it or not, it’s a lot safer than it looks, and that is mostly because of Kullen’s management. Say what you will about the man—and there is plenty to say—but he keeps people in line. Kullen is loud, volatile, and borderline abusive, but when you work there you know he’s the only person you have to worry about. Only the craziest of crazy people cross him, and few go on to repeat their mistakes. I had to put up with a lot from the patrons there, but Kullen made sure they never crossed certain lines.

This may sound like I have fond memories of working at the Feral Dog. I don’t. The only good things that came out of it were the money and my friendship with Zhog. What I’m saying is, I really didn’t want to be back there—this made for twice in one week—but we weren’t exactly drowning in options.

Alas, Kullen wasn’t around. We sat at a table and ordered lunch, hoping he might come in while we ate. There weren’t many customers left after the rush, but we did hear a frustrated voice from a three-top nearby: “You said that cairn was full of treasure!” I turned to look that way and recognized the group from Korvosa we saw a few days back. I could practically script out that conversation. We’ve all heard it, so many times.

After the better part of an hour, we figured Kullen wasn’t coming back any time soon so Zhog suggested catching him at home. Pestering Kullen where he lived felt like a bad plan to me, but Zhog knows his uncle best and the list of alternatives was down to zero, so I didn’t object. This was basically the Zhog show, anyway. There was no one here better equipped to start this conversation, and my opinions on the matter probably weren’t worth anything.

We caught Kullen as he was coming out the door. Because we just have that kind of timing.

“And what’s all this?” he said, looking our group over and eventually setting his eyes on Zhog disapprovingly.

“We need to talk to you,” Zhog replied. “And I brought somethin’ to eat.”

Kullen relented with a grunt and showed us in. He sat at a table and glared at us. Finally, to Zhog, he said, “I didn’t know you had this many friends. Ever.”

“I got business associates. We are doin’ business together. And our business crossed your business and we need to talk about it.”

This was the part of the conversation that none of us were looking forward to. Kullen did not disappoint.

“Zhog, when you first came here, I gave you the best advice you were going to get in this town. ‘Keep your nose—and any other part of you that you want to keep attached—out of other people’s business.'”

So that was clearly not a great start. But, good news! It got worse. Zhog pulled out the arm and showed it to his uncle. “We found this. And, by the way, the owlbears are dead.”

“Zhog,” he replied, his tone getting increasingly threatening, “this looks an awful lot like stickin’ your nose in someone else’s business.”

“Look,” he says, pointing at the tattoo, “everybody knows what that means. If somebody else had found that, it would have been trouble for you. I’m doin’ you a favor by returning what’s yours.”

“What. Were you doing. In that house?”

And now we had to talk fast. We didn’t want word of the Cairn getting out, so Viore and Zhog were a little loose with the truth, and vague about where we had been, but stuck to the core of it. We needed the return the bodies to their graves, and bury the bones of the boy with his family. We had found the boy’s remains, and we needed to put his spirit to rest. Kullen knew about the marker with the empty grave, which confirmed to us that he had been there.

“This was a bad deal all along,” he said, borderline furious. “And it cost Skutch his life! So. What do you want from me?”

“We want to know where the bones are.”

“You’ve been in this town long enough to know that nothing is ever that easy. This puts me at risk.”

I knew where this was going, and figured it was my turn to talk. I asked, “What degree of financial risk are you facing?”

“What are you offering?”

Unsurprisingly, the art of the bribe is not one of the skills you pick up in Abadar’s church. While offering money to a private party to get some information from them is a far cry from, say, paying off a government official, it’s still not something that is encouraged so I was out of my depth. In the end, it cost us 100 gold to get Kullen to talk. I have no idea if we overpaid, but that was not our chief concern.

The job, he explained, was a request from Balabar Smenk to obtain some bones for someone named Filge. Smenk is Diamond Lake’s resident creep—other than our mayor, that is—and arguably its most ruthlessly successful mine owner. He actually owns the Feral Dog, and in a way, that means he owns Kullen and his crew. So when Smenk said “dig up some bones for Filge”, that is exactly what they did. The problem, of course, was that this cost Kullen one of his men, and when Kullen angrily expressed his displeasure to Filge—he knew better than to complain to Smenk—Filge dismissed him out of hand.

And that is how you get on Kullen’s really bad side.

“You go get your bones if you want. I don’t care about that. But, in return, you bring me that thin bastard’s eyes.”

Well, crap.

Afternoon

According to Kullen, Filge is the latest in a long line of vagrants to move into the old observatory. I use the term “move into” loosely there because it doesn’t really have an owner, so they aren’t really tenants so much as they are squatters occupying the space. Since there’s no owner, there is no one to file a complaint against trespassers, and that makes it remarkably easy to just sort of live there for a while until what passes for the authorities in town figures it out. Keep your head down, and you can go several weeks before you’re arrested.

I’ve never been to a nicer town, myself, but we get visitors from them quite often, and I’ve read a few stories that take place in one. In a nicer town, the observatory would probably be what the locals call an “eyesore”. Pretty much everything in Diamond Lake fits that description, though, so we just call it “the observatory”.

Dad says there used to be an order of monks living there. He didn’t say who their deity was, but it was probably Desna or an empyreal lord since it’s way too old for Nocticula and way too public for the less savory faiths. He didn’t say how long ago, either, but based on the crumbling exterior of what is surprisingly quality construction, I’m going to guess it’s been a few generations since they left. It sits on this bluff—an important feature in an observatory—that overlooks one of the town’s abandoned mines. The mine is unimportant; it’s so old that no one remembers its name or who it belonged to, so we just call it “the mine under the observatory”.

Our first stop before going over to visit Filge was to The Captain’s Blade to pick up some weaponry. The way we figured it, Filge specifically needed bones for some project, which suggested necromancy, which further suggested we might be facing them as skeletons. I love my blade—I made it myself, after all—but smashing bones is not what it’s designed to do. A pronged hammerhead on the end of a seven-foot pole, on the other hand? The right tool for the job.

One Lucerne hammer and a 10-minute walk later, we were standing next to the narrow stairs that led up to the small landing in front of the entrance. Below the landing was a wooden door that looked like it would open to a little storage space. It’s the sort of thing that you’d call a shed if it was a free-standing structure, but since it was built into the side of the observatory we just called it “the storage space under the stairs”.

It was at this point that I stopped to think about what we were about to do. Specifically, we didn’t have any real authority to just barge in and evict Filge. Abadar is pretty clear on the point that he doesn’t care for vigilantism or any other action that can be summed up as “taking the law into your own hands”. That being said, there’s a rather long list of other things that Abadar has little tolerance for, too, and those include: corrupt government officials, squatters, and animating the dead. While we could go tell Sheriff Cubbins that a suspected necromancer was occupying the observatory and robbing graves, the problems with that approach ranged from “believing anything we said” to “getting him to care” to “doing something about it”.

You might think that this would put me in a bit of a bind, but here’s the thing: I took up this faith because I honestly believe it’s possible to govern people responsibly, and the way you do that is more or less the opposite of how things are done in Diamond Lake. Sometimes you just have to lead by example. If there’s a necromancer squatting in an abandoned building, animating the dead from corpses that he’s exhuming from peoples’ graves, then they’re kind of a danger to everyone, and maybe that’s something you should investigate sooner rather than later. If, in the course of this investigation, said necromancer were to start a fight and end up dead, then that’s unfortunate but also something of a time-saver.

Sera opened the door to the storage space under the stairs, revealing the storage space under the stairs and a tiny creature that appeared to be made up of bone fragments. It was not at all happy about our intrusion, and it scurried up to us and started biting at me. Someone called it a “mote”, which is apparently short for, “undead creature made of bone fragments”. Sera and I smashed it to even smaller bone fragments, and we more or less had our confirmation that this Filge character was a troublemaker.

The entry room in the observatory, proper, confirmed our earlier hypothesis. Three animated skeletons—two adults and a child—sat behind a crude barricade and they were armed with crossbows. They shot at us as we came in, and so we smashed them into fragments, too. A quick examination of their remains showed skeletal deformities consistent with the plague that claimed the Land family, so that was progress and more proof of our suspicions. Further examination revealed that their crossbow bolts were coated with some sort of poison, which is another entry on the list of things Abadar doesn’t approve of. It was also what some might call “antisocial behavior”.

Most of the rooms on the ground floor of the observatory were still empty, which made a certain kind of sense: Filge was only one person and probably did not need all of this space. He did, however, find a use for a rather large room at the base of the tower that was probably a former dining hall, and it was the creepiest thing I have ever seen. Nine decomposing bodies were seated, motionlessly, around a table, with dinner plates, silverware, and unfinished glasses of wine set before them. What was he doing with nine zombies at a dinner table? No idea. What was the point of all this? Didn’t care. They didn’t even flinch as we destroyed them, one by one.

Stairs ascended the tower to the room Filge was using as his bed chamber (the large bed in one corner gave it away). Continuing with the “I’m a psychopath” theme, a mummified figure about the size of a gnome or halfling, dressed in a black suit and tophat, stood against one of the walls. It was holding a platter with a woman’s severed head on it. A platinum piece sat on the head’s outstretched tongue. Another corner of the room held a statue of an angelic figure, and the base of it was inscribed with “Filge” in ornate lettering.

Someone clearly has a high opinion of themselves. And, also, very few ethical limits.

We left the head alone, because why would we want that? And also because it felt like an obvious trap. A small work desk contained a mess of notes and papers. Among them was a letter to Filge from Smenk, requesting his services. Smenk claims someone has been finding “green worms and unkillable zombies” in the southern hills, and they’ve been brought below the Dourstone Mine for study. Who is “they”?  And why would “they” be below the Dourstone Mine? And how does Smenk know about any of it? These were all good questions, and they suggested we had stumbled upon more than just a vainglorious necromancer with limited social skills and a penchant for grave-robbing.

We ascended the stairs to the top floor of the observatory. A long time ago it probably held a telescope for viewing the stars. Now, it hosted Filge’s necromantic laboratory. There were four glass cylinders spaced evenly around the room, each filled with a yellow fluid and containing a monstrous humanoid body within. Filge, himself, was in the center, doing something with the body of a blue-skinned humanoid creature as though he were a surgeon in an operating theater, with an animated skeleton following him about. It seems he didn’t waste any time moving in and getting to work.

Filge was displeased with the interruption. At his command, the glass tanks shattered and zombies emerged from each, three of them troglodytes, and the fourth a bugbear. These are creatures that are disgusting even when they are alive, so you can imagine how much more fun they are when they are dead.

Unfortunately, they also did their job of keeping us pinned down. We had to fight our way through them to get to Filge, giving him the time and opportunity to toss spells at us. Just as Sera was about to reach him, he did something that froze her in place and suddenly we had an emergency on our hands. I left the zombie I was dealing with to Zhog, and ran to her side.

Filge was holding a large syringe filled with liquid and was preparing to inject her with it. Snagsby and I arrived at the same time and managed to keep him away from her, so he stabbed Snagsby with it instead. Fortunately, Snagsby was able to shake off most of the effect, but he still did not look good as whatever was in there took hold.

As the others closed in around us, I used my polearm to trip Filge, and he fell to the ground. He tried to cast a spell while lying on all fours, but he lost his concentration and it fizzled out. At that point he yelled, “I yield! I yield!” and the fight was over.

Then Viore approached him and asked, “Do you repent? Are you willing to undo the evil you’ve done? Are you ready to worship Sarenrae?”

Filge answered the way any reasonable person would. “What?”

Which was not the answer Viore was looking for. He executed the man on the spot, saying, “He can go sort it out with the gods.”

I don’t feel good about that at all, and if I had known that this was where Viore was going, I would have intervened. This whole situation was a moral tightrope as it was, and one where I had to rationalize my involvement. But on the other hand, we were surrounded by mountains and mountains of evidence that Filge was animating the dead, stealing remains of those who had been properly and respectfully interred, using peoples’ corpses as playthings, and just being a generally awful person. But on the other, other hand, he had surrendered. But on the other, other, other hand, none of us put much faith in what passes for law enforcement and justice in Diamond Lake, either, so I can more or less see Viore’s point. Sarenrae didn’t have a problem with it, either, but it still felt wrong to me. This is the sort of thing that comes back to bite you.

A search of the floor turned up a foot-long tube filled with some chemical solution, and inside was a slim, green worm. Likely this was the worm that Smenk referenced in his letter to Filge. We agreed to take it to Allustan in case he could make some sense of it.

On our way out, Zhog stopped to pick up the mummified figure in the tophat and glasses.

“What do we want that for?” I asked.

“For my uncle.”

I decided to leave it at that.

Sunday, Desnus 8th (small hours)

The big question, of course, was “What next?” And if my faith hadn’t been challenged before, it was sure getting a workout now.

As the observatory has no owner, that makes it the property of the city, which in turn makes its steward the Governor-Mayor. An upstanding citizen of a law-abiding settlement would, of course, immediately report all of this to the authorities and let them investigate Filge’s crimes. But Diamond Lake is far from a law-abiding town, and our raucously alcoholic sheriff?  When it was first announced that Mayor Neff had appointed Cubbin to the job, people literally thought it was a joke. And when I say “literally” there, I literally mean literally. No one took Cubbin seriously until he actually arrested someone. Like, for real.

And as bad as Cubbin is? His deputies are even worse, if you could believe such a thing is possible. The most upscale entertainment venue the town has—remember, this is Diamond Lake so the term is relative—is the Spinning Giant, and neither Sheriff Cubbin nor any of his deputies are allowed on the premises. At all. Not even in an official capacity (many of the Giant’s patrons hail from the Garrison, which is how they’re able to get away with that). That in itself says plenty about local law enforcement.

The general consensus was to consider our actions here a public service, one for which we did not require any official recognition. We also didn’t want to risk panicking the citizens by exposing proof of necromancy in their collective backyards.

And people wonder why I am having trouble sleeping tonight.

While Zhog took care of the “delivery” for his uncle, I sought out the city records for the mine office. It took a couple of hours of digging to determine that there was simply no record of it, presumably because both it and the mine pre-dated the current cadaster. We could put our own legal claim on the property by defining the plot and paying a small fee for the acreage. I added this task to my to-do list.

When I got back to the observatory, the rest of the group had finished erasing signs of Filge’s presence, and arranged his corpse and those of his zombified victims into a pile for burning later that night.

We (re-)buried the Land family first. There was no service this time as we were tired and just wanted to get all of this over with. Also, I wasn’t feeling so charitable towards Alastor after what he’d done to me. Any words I’d have been asked to say would likely have been south of polite.

We returned to the observatory to start the bonfire and then headed out for the house before it got large enough to attract attention.

Stars, what a day.

Fireday, Desnus 6th, morning

Viore, Viktor, and Zhog made a supply run to Diamond Lake last night. We needed to descend the pit to reach the newly-exposed passages below, and it stood to reason that more swarms of insects might lie within. While we could easily outrun them on foot, that plan would only work so long as there was somewhere to run to. Climbing a rope didn’t qualify, and that meant we needed to be better prepared, both with the right spells and more fire. Specifically, more fire than we could get from oil that is typically used to light a lantern. For that, we turned to alchemist’s fire. It’s expensive, and it apparently turned some heads in town since normal people don’t buy so much of it at once, but it meant we all had something we could contribute.

We stood over the pit, and estimated it’s depth at about sixty feet. The shaft had suffered enough damage both from the collapse and the swarm of acid-spitting beetles that one could reasonably climb down it, but we used a rope, anyway. It made the descent faster, easier, and safer. There’s no shame in not wanting to fall to your death.

We guessed that the chambers we explored yesterday had belonged to either the chief craftsman or the architect of this place. In the anteroom of that complex, the statues were carved as if in deference. In this anteroom, the androgynous figures were all glaring at us pejoratively. And from this, we guessed that this was the workers’ quarters, because people are pretty much the same everywhere, and if you have an ego big enough to carve stone worshippers to yourself then of course it’s big enough to carve a court of judgement for those that you think are beneath you.

We didn’t have to travel far before we heard the buzzing and chittering of thousands of insects. Though I was pleased to have been proven right, it would have been nice to have been wrong in just this one instance.

I have nothing against bugs. I recognize that they are part of the ecosystem, and fulfill important roles in nature. I do, however, draw the line at ones that are larger than me, swarming by the thousands, or trying to share my living space. The last one I solved more or less by paying a rent that most would consider exorbitant, and others might call criminal. Until yesterday, I had considered the first two concerns to be academic.

What causes insects to mass like this? I am no entomologist, but I bet that one answer is “lack of competition from an abundance of food”. In the other complex, we found a magic font of sorts that was continually producing an edible mush that both looked and smelled like gravy. The same thing was happening here, just on a larger scale, and the bugs had figured it out. I guess the folks who created this place forgot to turn all that off when they were done.

While the bugs were keeping themselves occupied, we explored the room across the hall. This one contained several stone slabs watched over by a large statue of a muscular being wielding an enormous club, a long-desiccated corpse, and a giant beetle.

What was the beetle doing over here? Who knows. Maybe it was tired of the noise next door. Regardless of its reasoning, we killed it because it was a giant beetle, though not before it could spray me with acid because that is what I needed today.

The corpse was spread out on one of the slabs, and the slabs had the right size and shape to suggest a bed of some sort. Stone beds aren’t particularly comfortable, so they were probably topped with a softer mattress back when this place was in use. What that didn’t explain is why someone would lie down on one now, when it’s quite obviously just a stone slab. Whatever their thinking, they got bludgeoned to death for their trouble, assuming their shattered bones were an indicator of their fate. It’s the sort of stage picture that said, “trap”.

We’ve gotten good at spotting these traps in advance, though admittedly we’ve been getting quite a few clues in the form of crushed and mangled bodies. It occurred to me that, perhaps, being the first person in line to explore an ancient burial cairn is maybe not the best idea. From what we’ve seen so far, it’s probably better to be fifth or sixth. Of course, two days ago we did deliberately walk into a trap that we even knew was a trap, but I like to think that we’ve learned a lot since then.

We found a ring on the corpse, and an insignia on their armor that matched the engraving on the ring. According to Viktor, this was the symbol of a group that called themselves the Seekers, which he described as an unscrupulous group of archaeologists and pseudo-historians who raided burial sites for their own gain. Which sounded an awful lot like what we were doing. I guess the difference there was that we weren’t pretending to be something more than just grave robbers. Not that this sounds any better, mind you, but honesty is important.

We still had to deal with the bugs, so we dealt with the bugs. The less said about that, the better. It was gross, and it smelled terrible, but through the cleansing power of fire we emerged victorious. Unlike the three additional Seekers whose remains we found in the sludge.

We followed the hall to stairs that descended into a flooded chamber. I think it’s reasonable to assume that people who worshipped the Wind Dukes would not voluntarily submerge themselves in water, so this must have happened sometime after the tomb was built. That didn’t change the fact that none of us could breathe underwater, which meant holding our breath and swimming.

Snagsby and I volunteered to scout it out. I left my armor on because I wasn’t worried about sinking to the floor—I wanted to walk along the bottom, not swim—and I didn’t want to be defenseless while I was under. It’s a lot easier to fight underwater when you have sure footing, and being weighed down to the bottom helps with that. Swinging a weapon while swimming is a good way to spin out of control.

Step one was entering the water. That’s when the water attacked.

I swear, I am not making this up. Something that looked like nothing surged at me, and then water erupted from the water. You wouldn’t think that you could fight water, but it turns out that you can. At least, you can when it’s an elemental. And as a bonus, there’s no mess to clean up afterwards, because it’s water.

With that out of the way, we tried this again. Snagsby and I each took a side of the chamber, which looked like some sort of communal shower, and walked the perimeter, swapping at the far end. There was a small room connecting on either side, and as I passed one I got chills as I sensed a malicious presence. A presence that seemed to be aware of us, because it was on the move.

We emerged from the water and discussed our strategy: make it come to us.

Back in the water we went, this time with more support. I crept around one side as the other half of the group took the other. I could feel the presence moving, and then I caught a glimpse of it around one of the pillars: a walking corpse with pale flesh and sharp teeth.

Ghoul.

I motioned for the others to retreat. I wasn’t worried about myself, but a ghoul’s touch paralyzes and that would be a death sentence here. They needed to know what we were up against. And then it came at me, and raked my flesh before ducking out of sight.

We backed up to the stairs, and I told everyone what I saw. Then it was back in the water with a new strategy: corner it and take it down. We advanced cautiously in a pincer formation, and when Viore caught sight of it he signaled its location. Slowly, we converged on it, and trapped it between us. There was nowhere for it to go, and in a matter of moments we cut it down.

It was wearing a ring with the insignia of the Seekers. So that would be Seeker corpse number five. This venture did not go well for them.

With the ghoul dead (again), we searched the rooms and found, among other things, Seeker corpse number six, and our missing red lantern.

We climbed back up to the main hall and hung the lantern on its chain. Confident that this would disarm the wind trap, we ascended the blue alcove, and approached the giant face carved in the wall. This time, the mouth opened like an iris, and we stepped through.

It led to a long, dark room with narrow plank suspended above a sea of metal balls, each about the size of an orange. We couldn’t see the floor, so we had no idea how deep it was, but it didn’t really matter. Like so many things we have run into here, this had “trap” written on it and no one thought performing on the balance beam was a good idea. I could just picture us trying to maintain our footing on that thing while dodging metal balls being flung around from who-knows-where.

We heard a young child’s giddy laughter from somewhere in the room. While we searched for its source, the voice said, “You didn’t die!”

I couldn’t see where it was coming from, so I just answered to the air. “We didn’t. Others that came before us cleared the way, and so we lived where they fell.”

“They sure did,” it answered.

“You didn’t die, either,” I replied, without thinking. I still couldn’t determine where the voice was coming from, and maybe that should have been a clue. “Or, did you?” I added, my voice trailing off as I realized how stupid that was.

No reply. I must have really touched a nerve.

None of us felt like falling to our deaths, so we ignored the beam and climbed down into the pit. The balls were not easy to walk across, but it was a stable enough surface. Or at least, it was, until the balls started shifting. Something was moving around beneath our feet. I had just called out a warning when a large, pallid worm erupted from the pit. It was covered in slime, and had a mouth with hooked jaws that was surrounded by a mass of tentacles. A grick.

Two gricks, in fact, one smaller than the other. Both were angry and attacked immediately, and they were surprisingly difficult to kill. My blade practically bounced off the big one, and Sera was not faring any better. Zhog was carrying the enchanted sword we found down below, but he got hurt bad and had to retreat before he could put it to use. Only Viktor, with his wand that fires magical bolts of force, was reliably having an effect.

Zhog had dropped the sword where I could pick it up, so I did, and that turned the tide. Unlike our other weapons, this one was cutting into the gricks with ease, and while I didn’t care for fighting so close to my opponent, I preferred it to dying. Which is where this was headed otherwise.

When we were done and the gricks were dead, the ghostly figure of a young boy, barely a teenager if that, appeared before us. His neck had clearly been broken, which was probably a clue about how he had died. Before I could say anything, he rushed towards me and then the world went dark.

When I came to, the ghost of the boy hung in the air before me. I glared at him malevolently.

“Don’t. Ever. Do. That. Again.”

I had been violated and I was livid. It didn’t matter that there was nothing I could do, that I likely couldn’t back up any threat with action so there was no point in issuing one, but it had to be said. Dead or not. Too young to understand or not. It had to be said. Not just for his benefit, but for mine. My friends needed to know where this line sat. Not because I thought they might cross it, but because someone else might. This thing we were signing on for? It wouldn’t work if we didn’t understand one another. If we didn’t know and respect each others’ boundaries. If we based our relationships on assumption. Sure, this was one that they could guess, but better to take the guesswork out of it.

Speaking of my friends, they filled me in on what I missed. The ghost was formerly one Alastor Land, who wandered in here over thirty years ago after running away from his family. Amazingly, he made it quite far on his own before the cairn claimed his life, and his spirit was unable to move on. He believes that’s because his remains must be laid to rest with the family he left behind, and so he made a deal with us: we bury him, and he will open the final chamber, whose only latch is on the other side of the door.

While I would prefer not to bargain with someone who used my body without permission, I didn’t see much choice in the matter. Not one that would see this matter to the end, anyway. So I agreed.

Reluctantly.

I fumed all the way back to the house.

Fireday, Desnus 6th, evening

We held a small burial service for Masi.

I attended her funeral years ago. I sat in uncomfortable silence while I listened to the service— there wasn’t a burial because there was nothing to bury—and the eulogies from some of her friends. None of those were Night Walkers, the only ones who knew what she had really done the night she disappeared. Not that anyone would have let one of us stand up there and speak.

Most everyone knew that we were all tied up in it together. We were those kids to them. Those kids who spent years recklessly flaunting the dangers of the wilderness and of the night, and it had finally caught up to them and gotten one killed. To many of them, and to her parents especially, we were to blame for her death. They weren’t entirely wrong about that, but they weren’t necessarily right about it, either. It also begged the question of where they were before, and why they hadn’t intervened back when it could have made a difference. They were questions no one asked because the answers were uncomfortably pejorative. It was easier to just pass on the blame.

Even my own parents had been shockingly negligent in those years. Maybe it was a form of denial. Or willful ignorance. There’s this malaise that drapes over the town, one that you don’t realize is there until you’re gone, and it presses you down and makes it hard to fight inertia. So if your kids found a way to cope with it on their own, then why not leave them be? Let them be kids. So long as no one was getting hurt.

We all know how that turned out.

So here I was, again, at a service for her. A burial this time. For remains, all we had was her old bed roll, but it was hers and it would fill that role.

I hoped it was enough.

Wealday, Desnues 4th, evening

The walk back to the house—it looks like a house, it’s functionally a house, and “house” sounds better than “mine office”, so ergo, it’s a house—seemed longer than the one to the cairn. In part that was because we were tired from the long day, but mostly it was the feeling of defeat. When we left in the morning, I was fairly optimistic about returning to a place that was, on some level, familiar. I was eager to explore, excited by the possibilities it offered, and confident in our skills. And why wouldn’t I be? Between us we could fight, overcome obstacles with logic and skill, perform wonders through magic, and call upon the gods for grace and mercies. And yet, despite those varied talents, here we were, walking solemnly and silently back, as dogs with tails between our legs, battered and bruised. And all we had to show for our efforts were a few trinkets, mostly taken from those who had tried before us, and failed more thoroughly.

And then there was the crumbling remains of Masi’s old bedroll in my pack. I had last seen it, what, five years ago? The last time I had seen her. I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do with it. There was no family to give it to, no grave for it to be buried in. Burning it or just tossing it out like trash felt wrong. Burying it in the wilderness would probably be the best way to honor her memory, but it would bury the answer to the question of what had happened to her, too. So what to do with it? Take it back to town, I guess. Give it to (as much as it pains me to say it) the Sheriff, so that the story her life wouldn’t end in a question mark. Of course, that would also open myself, and my companions, up to questions of our own and unwanted prying eyes. Knowing the Sheriff, it would probably also end in some form of extortion or blackmail.

The truth is still the truth, though, even when it’s inconvenient and poorly timed and it needed to be told. On the other hand, it’s also been five years, give or take, and there isn’t anyone still searching for her. Sitting on the answer to a question that no one is asking for a few more days or weeks would not do anyone any harm.

What it really comes down to, I guess, is that I don’t know what Masi really would have wanted for herself. Or what her parents would have wanted.

And what about my companions? As we learned today, what we are doing is dangerous. If something happened to one of us, what would we do? And that got me to thinking. While Snagsby and Zhog were busy using magic to make small repairs around the house, I pulled out some parchment—I never go anywhere without something to write on and something to write with—and worked up some simple legal documents, so we could all express our wishes in the event we don’t survive this. It’s an ugly subject, one most didn’t want to talk about, but given the realities of the day it was a discussion we needed to have.

Sharing a living space with a number of people you don’t really know all that well is an enlightening experience, whether you are seeking enlightenment or not. One of the first things Zhog did, for example, was string a hammock between two structural pillars on the second floor. Yes, that second floor, the one with the gaping holes in the roof.

“OK, I admit I am curious,” I said as stepped off the stairs. “Why up here?”

“I spend my nights in a brewer’s cellar,” he answered as he tied off the second strap. “Don’t want to sleep on the floor here, too. And I haven’t slept under the open sky since I came to Diamond Lake.” Right. Follower of Desna. And, nephew of Kullen, a man not known for the comforts of home.

After dinner (which sounds more formal than it was, which was us just eating whatever non-perishable rations we had brought with us), Zhog said some prayer to Desna and his bucket filled with two gallons of some sort of ale. I watched as he drank the whole thing down, spilling a bit here and there in his enthusiasm to finish it off. It was another reminder of why I don’t drink a lot. Abadar doesn’t forbid alcohol, of course, or even frown on it if it’s done in moderation, but the key words there are “in moderation”, and drinking is one of those vices that is prone to excess. This is especially a problem in Diamond Lake, where if there’s one thing we have an excess of, it’s excess. I find it easier just to abstain. More than one person has tried to be clever by pointing out that I used to work in a tavern. Yeah, well, what of it? A person’s got to eat, and there aren’t that many options for work in town, especially for a woman. While I never enjoyed dealing with obviously drunk patrons, I’ll take the tavern over the brothel any day.

The evening fell into a pattern of idle chatter, and this is where I am most at ease. The conversation broke up into small groups, as it invariably does. Viktor and Varin were talking magic and spells. Zhog and Snagsby spoke of making it to a real city (for reasons that should be obvious, Snagsby was of the opinion that Kaer Maga didn’t count), and all the things such a thing offers. If I believe half the things that were said, places like Korvosa are paved in gold, all manner of humanity is welcomed with open arms, and untold riches are to be had for those willing to work for them.

Color me skeptical. While there are likely kernels of truth in these fantasies, cities are still made of people, and people and are probably not that much different from one place to another. I imagine large cities simply provide more places for the worst of them to hide.

That being said, that is so far above where we live now that it’s hard not to indulge. Korvosa may still have its slums, but I am reasonably sure they don’t comprise the whole town.

Oathday, Desnus 5th (early morning)

Sera woke me early for our shift on watch. This was more or less like old times, except we couldn’t spend the two hours talking lest we wake everyone in the house.

Watch duty is pretty dull, which is of course how you want it to go. It’s a lot of standing around, walking around, sitting around, looking at nothing and hoping it stays that way. When I would camp out by myself a few years back, it wasn’t really possible to spend the whole night awake, much less awake and on alert, so I had to get creative. That mostly came down to finding a good, defensible location, masking my scent, and discouraging wildlife. In a group of seven you can watch for surprises. In a group of one, you don’t want them at all.

(late morning)

The day back at the Cairn started with a long, methodical search of every inch of the walls from the entrance to the sarcophagus. If you think watch duty is dull, try spending an hour around people who are caressing stone walls like they are rediscovering a forgotten lover. I get that all this is important and that we may have missed something yesterday, but some of what they were doing might actually count as foreplay. It was almost enough to make me uncomfortable.

When they reached the central chamber, Zhog had finally had enough and came over to me. “Let’s try pushing on that thing and see if it moves.”

I mean, why not? His theory was that either the head or the feet were meant to point in a certain direction and if that was so, then the sarcophagus might rotate. It was better than getting intimate with the walls.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s give it a go.”

We both crouched down to put our weight into it, and gave it a push. It took a couple of tries, but sure enough it started to give. We pushed harder and the sarcophagus swung 45 degrees counter clockwise before locking into place. The head was now pointing towards where the red lamp would have been if we had the red lamp.

“Look down the halls and see if anything has changed,” I called out to the others. They spent a few minutes searching each one, and as near as anyone could tell, there was nothing different about them.

“Let’s try again,” I said to Zhog.

We gave it another shove, and it rotated again so that the head was pointing towards the entrance. There was still no change that anyone could see, so we kept at it: there were still five more positions to try before it came back to its original orientation.

Two more rotations put the head pointing towards the indigo lamp, and then we heard a grinding sound from beneath us as the hall rumbled. A five foot diameter cylinder rose up out of the floor directly underneath the indigo lamp where the hall dead-ended. It was tall enough for a person to stand in, and based on the crushed bones and rotting fabric that was inside, someone had already tried to do so.

This is the sort of thing that says “obvious trap”. Our brief time with the cairn, though, has made us suspicious enough that we wanted to test the theory, because not all obvious things are obvious. Well, so far, the one obvious thing has been obvious, but “one” isn’t a big number, so it was best not to just assume. Since no one wanted to bet their life on it, we put a waterskin in there instead, and sent the cylinder down, then brought it back up.

Short answer: definitely a trap.

Two more rotations pointed the head down the hall towards the green lantern. Another cylinder started to rise under that one, too, but it didn’t make it far before it stopped. We heard a loud banging followed by repeated popping and what might have been straining and shearing metal as the ground in the hallway started to shake. Zhog and I quickly pushed the sarcophagus to the next position, and it all stopped as the cylinder sunk back into the floor.

“Let’s save that one for last.”

We were now pointing towards the hall with the yellow lantern, where a third cylinder had risen up from the floor. This one looked clear: no bones, no sign of any traps, just a human-sized chamber that was apparently some soft of elevator.

I’ve not seen many elevators, and none that looked like this. Some of the larger mines use them to take people and ore in and out. Around town, a few places have one for moving heavy loads up and down. All of them use ropes attached to a counterweight via a pulley system, and someone has to pull on the rope to make it go. This one had no visible mechanism of any sort.

With the experience of the last two elevators fresh in our minds, we repeated some experiments before stepping in ourselves. Once it was clear it wasn’t just crushing anything inside, or dropping it fast enough to cause injury, Snagsby volunteered to ride it down. He surprised us by coming back up on his own.

“There’s a button down there, and when you press it, the cylinder comes back up,” he said. Which was convenient, as we were trying to figure out how to go down without leaving someone behind. Or being trapped underground for the rest of our lives.

Details.

One at a time, we entered the cylinder and descended to the chamber below, exiting into a small anteroom whose walls were lined with bas-reliefs of human figures done in the same style of the carving on the sarcophagus. Each hairless, sexless figure was seven feet tall, and posed as though paying deference to us. Some of the carvings came far enough out of the wall to practically be separate statues, and several of these were missing their arms, heads, and any other body part that was easily broken off. More evidence that others have been here before us.

Why would someone steal a stone arm or head from a wall? I can’t imagine there is a huge market for statue limbs, so I figured it was done out of frustration. The only other exit from the room was blocked by a large, stone slab that was standing on its end. It looked as though it could be pushed over, but again, this seemed like an obvious trap. I bet most of the would-be thieves that made it this far thought the same, and decided that a stone hand was as good as they were going to get.

Fortunately, we have Sera with us, and she was able to disable a pressure plate that the stone was sitting on. She said it was set to trigger something when the weight of the stone was removed. With the plate disabled, we could safely, albeit very loudly, push it over.

Where Sera learned this sort of thing is a bit of mystery, and not something that she really talks about. After the Night Walkers disbanded, she put her skills to use by starting a business for herself, doing I’m-not-exactly-sure-what. She always spoke of it rather vaguely. “Sometimes, people need to have things done without attracting a lot of attention,” she said to me once. “I know the town, and I can navigate it in the dark. That lets me be discreet.” She never bothered explaining what “things” meant, or who “people” were, and why attention was an issue. I didn’t ask. The less I know, the better. But I am pretty sure it goes beyond her childhood pastime of picking the locks to the rooms of the inn that her parents manage.

The hallway beyond was lined with alcoves, each containing a statue of another sexless figure, their arms stretched outward and their hands cupped as if holding or offering something. We were giving them a closer look when I saw a pair of eyeballs joined by connective tissue float out into the hall.

There are a lot strange things in and around Diamond Lake. The lake itself has been polluted for so long that the only fish that seem to live in there are the gar, a predatory species with razor-sharp teeth that can be as long as a man is tall, and some longer than that. The hinterlands have their share of wildlife, including unnaturally large and aggressive forms of wolves, boars, and bears. And enough people have claimed to see ghouls that these stories are generally accepted to be true (though clearly they haven’t seen ghouls up close, since they lived to speak of it). What we don’t have a lot of is floating eyeballs. Or any. We don’t have any floating eyeballs. I am pretty sure I would have heard about something like that.

One eye looked at Sera, and she turned and bolted as if in fear for her life. I’ve never seen Sera afraid of, well, anything, and this oddity was more gross and curious than scary, so I assumed that magic was involved. Then the other eye tried to get a bead on me. I felt something try to take hold, but I was able to shake it off.

You would think a pair of floating eyeballs would be an easy target, but it was small and  surprisingly agile, and that made it difficult to smack the thing. Viore managed to hit it with a magical bolt of some sort, while slings and arrows sailed harmlessly by. I swung my blade twice and missed both times. Then it made the same mistake just about everything has made since our adventure began: it moved inside the arc of my horsechopper where it thought it was safe.

Surprise, Mr. Eyeballs! Have a good look at my armor spikes as they are slamming into you.

After that, Varin caught it with a crossbow bolt, the eyes dropped to the ground, and that was that. The spell that struck Sera apparently wore off in the meantime, and she got back just in time to watch us make sure it was dead. By squashing it under our feet.

The hallway led to a large room built around a huge, square central pillar of stone. The north end was bitter cold and the floor there was covered in a brown mold that I believe someone said was actually called brown mold. Other than the name, we knew nothing about it, but it seemed like something that we did not want to touch. The closer we got to it, the colder it became until it was so impossibly cold that it felt as though our flesh would freeze. Once again, we put it on the list to deal with later.

“Later” was shaping up to be great deal of fun.

The south end had more evidence that would-be grave robbers were here many years before us. A Large stone block had fallen and crushed someone next to the central pillar. There was a latch that reset the trap and raised the block back to the ceiling, and it revealed the crushed remains of a display case, and the crushed remains of the body that attempted to steal from it. The chainmail it had been wearing was completely unscathed, however, which suggested that it was enchanted. Sera disabled the trigger—again, don’t want to know how she knows so much about pressure plates—and we retrieved the armor.

It occurred to me that part of our success has been people dying before us. Were we looking at multiple individuals, or a group like ourselves that simply lost people as they went along, until the only one left alive was the one who had only stone limbs broken off of statues to show for their trouble?

While our group has been exceedingly cautious since yesterday’s events, there is no denying that it helps to have deadly traps pointed out to you in advance. I suppose one could say, correctly, that much of the challenge has been removed because of this, but I like living and prefer to spend a great deal of time doing that, so I don’t care. We are not here to feed our egos. The fewer deadly traps we have to find on our own, the better.

With a bedroom to the south, a dry fountain in the west side of the central pillar, and what looked like an old privy beyond that, this was starting to feel like it was someone’s private quarters. The only room left to explore was to the north, and required that we travel through the brown mold.

Snagsby threw some oil on it and used a spell to spark it to flame, and the mold almost instantly doubled in size. This was obviously progress in the wrong direction.

“I think it feeds on heat,” I said. It was a guess, but if you consider cold to be the absence of heat, then a creature that chills the air around it by drawing in heat, instead of living where it is cold, made a certain kind of sense. Varin took that as an invitation to hit it with a blast of freezing cold, and the mold died almost as quickly as it had grown.

The final room was something of a workshop, containing worktables, vises, a spinning wheel for cutting, and blocks of unfinished marble, among other things. Our theory is that the craftsman who made this place, or at least designed it, created this area as their personal space. Thinking back to the bas-reliefs in the anteroom, those figures were paying deference to someone, and that also suggested the builder had a rather high opinion of themselves.

We ascended back to the main level and considered the sole, remaining passageway, the one where the green lantern was hung. We now knew that there were chambers below, and we had seen the small elevator rise up, or at least make an attempt of it. The cacophony of metal, stone, and gears, lacked the subtlety of the rest of this place which suggested that it wasn’t a trap, but rather a legitimate mechanism that had succumbed to age.

Everyone backed away to a safe distance as Zhog and I swung the sarcophagus to the green light. The cylinder tried to rise again and stuck as before, only this time we let events run their course. The ground shook, and with a great sound of shearing of metal the stone cylinder dropped away, and the floor collapsed around it leaving a gaping pit tens of feet deep.

The dust settled in silence, but the calm did not last. A chittering sound of a mass of insects rose from the depths, and we backed away just before a massive swarm of beetles erupted into the hall followed closely by a giant eyeball walking on spidery legs.

Flasks of oil flew from behind me as I crossed over to Sera where she confronted the spider. Snagsby used a spell to ignite the slick into flames, and half of the swarm was caught in it as the other climbed the wall. With Sera’s help, I cleaved the spider in two but the beetles just flowed towards our friends. I saw Viore and Zhog get overrun, and each ran out of the mass, frantically swiping and swatting beetles off their bodies. Viore looked ill, and Zhog nearly so.

“This isn’t working!” I yelled as the implacable insects continued their advance. They were too numerous to die in the fire and too small to strike at with weapons. We were tired, and our spell casters were spent, so we ran for the exit.

The beetles surged out from the cairn far behind us, and quickly broke up into smaller groups that started feeding on the vegetation on the hillside. If we had been closer to farmlands this might have been a disaster in the making, but no one would ever confuse Diamond Lake and the surrounding landscape for anything resembling fertile soil. None of these beetles would live long enough to destroy anything of value.

For the second time, we walked back to the house in silence.