This is a thread for my campaign journal for Return of the Runelords, written in-character by Siofra.
Description
Siofra is tall for a Varisian, standing 5’10”. Despite a lanky build, she is deceptively strong, a fact revealed when she works aboard fishing ships as an extra hand. Perhaps the most striking thing about her is her heterochromatic eyes—one is green as a poison swamp snake and the other a red as a smoldering coal under a witch’s brewpot. Despite an occasionally absent manner, her eyes always seem intensely focused (even if not always on what is right in front of her).
Background
Siofra is relatively new to Roderic's Cove. She arrived from the south three months ago, having worked her way north along the Varisian Gulf coast. She works day labor on-board the Cove’s many fishing ships, filling in wherever there is a need. It is hard work and not lucrative, but it provides her with enough to eat and rent a shed to sleep in from Audrahni, the town’s reclusive gravedigger.
The standoffishness of Roderic’s Cove locals doesn’t seem to bother her much. When there is not work to be had, she keeps mostly to herself. She wanders the town, staring closely at things people don’t usually stare at. In social situations, she is prone to asking odd, awkward questions—often sounding as if she is continuing a conversation that hasn’t actually started yet. She also seems fascinated by Roderic’s Wreck, standing for hours near the ruined house as if considering entering. She has yet to work up the courage, however.
With the exception of the other PCs and Audrahni, Siofra has mostly given up on efforts to socialize with the Roderic’s Cove community, beyond the bare minimum necessary to conduct business.
I read once that there is a line, like a mountain, in Time and the dead are marching up it in one direction and we are marching up it in the other and at that line in the middle is perfect balance; peace, where nothing happens and you can see everything in both directions forever.
Today, I saw a man from the other side of that mountain. He was near me but also a long, long way away. That’s why he was blurry.
It began with a fight that didn’t happen. I was wandering the Circle Market (widdershins) when I chanced to find some vermin repellent at a price that barely lightened my purse. I don’t like bugs. After the clink of coin into the seller’s palm, I spotted Simon. As I reached him, he was buying a brew called Possum Punch for a group of surly humans. Later, he explained that half of them (the half known as the Horned Fangs) wore patches bearing the Thassilonian Rune of Wrath. The other half styled themselves the Roadkeepers, which is a clumsy euphemism for petty bandits. The Horned Fangs are newer than the Roadkeepers.
I’m not sure what happened next, maybe someone got someone else’s punch first, but Simon’s guests all clenched their fists. That’s when I saw the man from the other side of Time’s line. His name is Roderic, I suspect. I couldn’t make him out just then, him likely being far away from the Circle Market but near enough to the Cove to appear.
“NO! MY COVE!” he cried.
Panic took me. Everything whirled and I ran in all directions at once it seemed. When my senses returned, I was a ways across town. I can’t have been running long, as it took me only a minute to tromp back to the Market with the rest of the folk.
Kels was squinting at the spot the ghost had occupied, checking for ectoplasmic trails. We chatted a bit about ghosts, with me filling him in on the theory that this was Roderic of Cove-founding fame and him confirming there were no tracks to follow. Which was good and bad, I suppose.
His brother Marko scanned the crowd while Simon considered what to do next. My landlady Audrahni invited us to dinner. Very odd.
Over dinner, she asked us to do what we’d already agreed to do—or maybe we agreed after she asked. Maybe it had never occurred to anyone until she asked or maybe she asked because she knew we’d already decided. Lord, sequence can be confusing.
She confirmed that was the ghost of Sir Auric Roderic. The last time he’d appeared was ten years ago, when the town rose up against a corrupt leader named Jess Gildersleeves and chased her out of town with her young daughter. This Gildersleeves had been stealing and associating with Riddleport pirates.
Riddleport pirates! Right! I almost forgot. The Riddleport pirates were the ones who didn’t kill six of the Horned Fangs (of Wrath Rune fame) a week ago. It happened a week ago but we wouldn’t figure out it wasn’t pirates until the day after our dinner with Audrahni.
Clue one was that the killers (according to smoked meat merchant Ladia Kelstrop) fled to the north. Given that pirates like water (I learned to swim by falling off a fishing boat!) it made little sense for them to flee to the Churlwood, where the Roadkeepers used to work until they were ousted by some dwarf-stealing goblins. Which happened a couple days prior to our dinner, a few days after the murder and we didn’t find out about until the day after our dinner. Sequences!
The second clue that it wasn’t pirates came from the young (and egregiously filthy) urchin Kynae. He’ll probably end up a priest of Sarenrae.
For now, he told me what he saw, hiding from his drunk father (whom Kel and Simon are exceedingly likely to murder at some point in the next month, if Marko doesn’t sell him to slavers first—which seems like it would take a journey, given the lack of slavers in Roderic’s Cove—unless he knows the goblins, I suppose).
“Buncha people standing around yelling threats. Then the leader of one group, she drew a weapon, except it wasn’t a weapon just the handle part [I interrupted him to give him the word ‘hilt’]. She shoved that at the one person who suddenly had a wound. Then there was shadowy figures what came up out of the ground and five others died of being afraid. Everyone else ran including me, on account of one of the shadows looked just like my Pa after a barrel of Angry Water.”
His account matched with Simon’s assertion that the five bodies killed without a mark (the sixth being traditionally exanguinated via a bladed implement through the neck parts) was the result of a powerful illusion spell called Weird. That gave me a bit of a shiver, as if I’d wielded such magic before—or would someday…
With a bit more prodding, young Kynae told me that the leader with the invisible sword was from the Resplendent Order.
I patted the general direction of his head (the likelihood of lice was too high to risk touching the boy) and bade him farewell.
Marko and Kel, being local detectives, were familiar with this Resplendent Order. Seems after Jess Gildersleeve left town (but before I arrived; sequence), a rich eccentric scholar named Corstela Rostrata moved to town. She built Peacock Manor (in the north of town! Clue three!) There were rumors (no idea what kind of rumors, but in these coastal Varisian towns you can’t sneeze on a dead bass without starting a dozen rumors)—rumors her money and jobs were sufficient to keep to just murmurs.
She then started the Resplendent Order, which was a group of scholars interested in Thassilon. Not unlike Simon, Marko, and myself. Kel is interested in the undead. Mostly keeping them on their side of the Time Line, as far as I’ve been able to gather.
THEORY: If the Resplendent Order is looking for Thassilonian artifacts, they might have killed the Horned Fangs for wearing the Rune of Wrath; that being a sign that said Fangs knew something about Thassilon they didn’t share (whether they knew or not I don’t know, let alone what they knew or if the RO knew that they knew something or thought they knew something. I don’t know.
Our local guides, the Half Point detectives thought it a good idea to talk to the town’s Port Governor. Lorenza Thort didn’t have a lot of time—or so she claimed; I suspect she had the same amount of time that anyone else does, but who can really say?
Temporal scarcities aside, Governor Thort told us that she had lost a pair of town guards chasing after some dwarves (did I mention this before? It happened earlier.) Said two dwarves were captured by goblins in the Churlwood, though their companions Galdsbredtha Morgmon, a weaponsmith, and Fordren Kulsoth, her valet, managed to flee. The Roadkeepers used to charge them, but goblins I guess they weren’t prepared for. At any rate, Governor Thort appreciated our investigations into Roderic’s Ghost and assured us the dwarf search was under control. Given her dubious temporal state, I found that hard to believe, but it wasn’t a problem I found interesting.
I suggested we go to Roderic’s Wreck—the founder’s house. I’d stared at it a lot without knowing why, and now I am sure I will have been there before at some point before the top of Time’s mountain.
On the way, I fell into the cold water and drowned, except only in my mind.
“In the quietest part of night, a listener at right angles to everything will hear a shifting whisper and that is Time’s spiders spinning cobwebs in the corners of existence.”
I read that in a worm-gnawed book in the Sandpoint cathedral’s meagre library. I don’t like spiders.
Which is to say, we were walking resolutely across Roderic’s Cove towards Roderic’s Wreck when the dinner bell rang. We ate a simple meal at the same place Audrahni had tasked us with pacifying Roderic’s ghost. So many Roderics, so little time.
Resuming our interrupted journey, we were accosted by a filthy creature hurling curses from the eaves. At first, I was concerned when he said I wore the face of a dead woman, but then I realized he was talking to Simon—who, one suspects, may well be doing so. His reasons are unknown, but thus far no indication they are nefarious.
While the surly rat-faced beast spewed anger at us, the town well belched up wrath of its own. A fleshdreg of wrath lurched towards us—a misshapen lump of tissue, appendages, and biting mouths that, I read somewhere, results from malfunctioning Thassilonian magic. Luckily, not the most powerful Thassilonian magic, for it was easily dispatched by the four of us.
When I say it came out of the well, I mean that is where Kel tracked it back to. While Marko knotted a rope to descend into the shaft and get to the source of them, more diffident heads suggested notifying the town guard. Simon thoughtfully posted a warning as well, should anyone feel thirsty. The Cove’s problems with wrath run deep, it seems.
Finally reaching the edge of town, my landlady Audrahni stopped us. She asked about the progress of our investigation and future plans. She said she ‘failed in her faith’ at Roderic’s Wreck, without going into more details. I didn’t press her. It seemed personal. She did give us a curative wand and six vials of holy water—useful tools should the ghost prove recalcitrant.
Roderic’s old house deserved the name Wreck. Where once the river had flowed by at a dock’s length away, the shifts of a hundred years had moved its banks. Now it gnawed at half the sloping house. In another hundred years there would be nothing left.
Before the spiders, a pair of enormous vermin buzzed up under the front porch. One latched onto me. Calling on the Key and the Gate, I moved them faster down Time’s line. That was enough to rot one out of existence and weaken the other so that Marko could finish it off. I would have preferred to keep the blood it sipped, but the cosmos never asks my preference. Hence the twisted ankle when the stairs gave way under me.
On the front porch, a silver locket glinted. It contained the picture of a young woman, who Marko recognized as young no longer—Caralee Freson, whose son is Captain Julit Freson, currently of the Cove’s guard. Marko gave the locket to his half brother to return to the captain, when we went back to town.
Inside, two cockroaches the size of dogs attacked us. I smeared the verminbane paste all over myself before that. Good thing I’d found it at the Circle Market. Maybe some future me had left it there for past me to keep future me from being bit by a roach. Thanking all three of them, I helped dispatch the pests. And the swarm of spiders who poured out of the hole-riddled floorboards a few minutes later.
I truly despise vermin.
Too many legs. And why do they need compound eyes? What extra dimensions do they need to see that I can’t?
After the roaches but before the spiders, we found a piece of paper stuck in a drawer since the days when Roderic and his family bobbed bloated ashore. It showed an X in the midst of a forest and the letters St. Hs.—our intrepid locals identified the woods as the Churlwood and the St. Hs. as a place known as the Stone House.
Had they not, we might have guessed that when the home’s owner appeared. Confused, the dripping spirit mumbled, in a frustrated tone: “The Cove… the stone house in the wood… the gauntlet… save them… my map… the key…”
He repeated that a number of times, befuddled and angry. He did not seem to notice us.
I have theories about the Key but dare not commit them to a page.
An old Sczarni fortuneteller once told me that in Varisia, the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. I have no idea what she meant by that. Then again, she also told me I’d marry a rich man and rule Korvosa, so she may not have had The Gift.
Regardless, in Roderic’s Cove, the past was very much not past. As we continued to explore the wreck of his house, we saw many visions through time. Roderic, reading to his doting children while his wife worked needlepoint. A churning surge of drowning water, lurching out of a hall closet. And the man himself, in the present now… but that happens last.
Leaving the dried husks of spiders in the dining room, our little group proceeded down the hall. Marko found a door under the stairs that had been jammed shut—naturally this was far more compelling than the other sag-hinged half-open doors in the house. Quick work with a crowbar forced it open and the seething haunt within rushed forth to drown us. Luckily, we were quick on our feet and no one’s lungs filled up.
I poured some of Audrahni’s holy water onto the haunted ground, perhaps cleansing it. (Did she know we would need it? Can she see the future better than that Sczarni carnival crone?)
The echo from the past left behind a pair of soggy slippers that Simon assured us were magical. Not being one to turn down a pair of comfy slippers, I stuffed them in my belt and we pressed on.
In the kitchen, the moldy wall attacked us. A piece of it, anyway. Not the whole thing. That would’ve been an architectural disaster, given the precarious nature of the structure.
In the living room, we saw the scene of Roderic reading I mentioned earlier. Except I forgot to say that the idyllic scene suddenly turned macabre as the family’s skin sloughed away in wisps of shadow to reveal skeletal faces. Roderic turned to me, pointed accusingly, and demanded:
“GET OUT!”
Marko and Kels (perhaps following a local custom Simon & myself were unaware of) sprinted through the house and out the front door. We two out-of-towners observed the scene until they returned. A few more vials of holy water were sprinkled to cleanse the afflicted space and close the gate through time that kept that poor family locked in a loop of domestic bliss and terror.
The first floor being thoroughly explored, we carefully made our way up creaking stairs. No one put a foot through the boards, so I call that a win.
In a child’s bedroom, we found a sobbing attic whisperer. Most disheartening. The poor thing wept all around us.
I wonder if she was one of Roderic’s kinder or just some opportunistic reverse orphan who’d made a nest in the sad place.
To comfort her, I hugged her close but she wriggled loose and bit me. I can’t blame her—being dead is a lot for a child to cope with. While Marko, Kels, and Simon provided some much needed paternal discipline, I used Audrahni’s wand (again, so presciently useful!) to soothe her soul with maternal healing until she stopped crying and slept. She did steal my voice to use as her own, the mischievous tyke, but kids will be kids.
Another chaotic haunt greeted us in the craft room—needles and yarn and fabric whirled around as if thrown every which way by invisible hands, until it wore itself out and calmed down. In a hidden compartment in Mrs. Roderic’s sewing basket, I found some gold bars that might well prove useful to trade for more vermin repellent.
The true treasure came in Roderic’s map room. As before, a seeping puddle of water through the floor heralded the arrival of the home’s owner. This time, however, he seemed much more aware of our presence, looking right at us and speaking to us:
“My map. They took my map. It holds the key to the Vault. Baraket will control them. It will control you. I should’ve taken the gauntlets but I fled. I was a coward. You must be brave. You must endure where I did not. The Vault. It lies still in the Vault. You must save my Cove. Save. My. Cove.”
BARAKET!
With a shock I realized I had read the name before. I could even see it on the page—in a dusty volume about the Runelord of Pride. Baraket was an artifact associated with that Runelord. It seemed Roderic’s interest in Thassilonian items had paid off, if not the way he had anticipated. I wonder if that was why he had been killed?
Before I could ask, he was gone again into the distant past.
Gauntlets. Baraket. The Vault.
These words swim around my vision like stirges in a swamp.
Even the vermin are dead in Roderic’s Cove.
After Roderic’s ghost faded, we finished in his map room. It was now the lack of map room—an inverse atlas with a bunch of blank rectangles on the walls. Marko & Kels recalled that most of his maps had been relocated to the town library after his death.
We went to the childrens bedroom. Three exoskeletal centipedes the size of dwarves scuttled from the walls and under the bed. Like moulted shells animated by negative energy. I shuddered.
Roderic appeared to us again in his bedroom. While he seemed even more aware of our presence than before, he merely repeated the same words as he’d said in the Map Room. After he disappeared, we found a long wooden sword case labeled ‘Baraket’. Unfortunately, there was about as much Baraket in it as there were maps on the Map Room wall. Roderic’s Wreck is more noteworthy for its emptiness than anything there. Which also includes exoskeletal cockroaches, incidentally. And a poltergeist. She may well still be there. I drew a Pharasmin spiral to confuse her.
The case that had held Baraket had been broken out of a hidey-hole in Roderic’s bedroom and then the lock broken open. Evidence of foolish haste.
If Baraket was a sword of the Runelord of Pride… Pride masters illusions… powerful illusion magic and an invisible blade killed six of the Horned Fangs… all signs point to Peacock Manor. But first we had to pay a visit to somewhere called the Stone House. Neither Marko nor Kels could precisely remember it, save that it was somewhere in the Churlwood. We all know so much less than we’d like to and every new thing just reveals how much less we know… my brain feels like a roomful of missing maps.
We ran out of insects, dead or alive, to kill in the house so it was time to return to town. Simon and I updated Audrahni on the situation, including the links to Thassilon. Then we slept.
On our way to the library the next morning to look at Roderic’s maps a voluntary vagrant named Kolton Harrismore Lovekin approached us. He told us he’d heard we were trying to make the town a safer place. I did not mention that the Cove was a significantly less safe place for undead insects if I had my druthers. This Kolton used to be an adventurer of sorts himself. He asked our help in finding those dwarves who’d been taken by goblins and the guards who’d likely been taken trying to find them. Why he thought we would do better than they is beyond me, but Marko confidently volunteered our aid. It cannot hurt, I suppose. Except the goblins. Or us. Someone is getting hurt.
I asked Kolton to look after Kynae—the lad already as good as lives on the streets, he could use a charming vagabond to teach him how.
We found the map and made our way to Hallen’s Ferry, where old Helen Rosker ran a crossing service. Chattered and nattered with her about this and that. I’m curious about how long rumors take to propogate in a small community, so I made several up and we’ll see how long they take to return to me and in what state they are in when they do. Before then, however, I will have to address a situation that has arisen as I write—Lullaby Vancaskerkin and a few Roadkeepers block our way to the Stone House and must be dealt with. Someone is getting hurt.
If the Roadkeepers keep the road, who keeps the Roadkeepers? Do they keep to the road or do they go into the forest on paths we don’t know about? And does the Road keep them? Like the Key & the Gate…
These thoughts were buzzing around my head like swamp gnats as old woman Rosker’s ferry reached the far shore. Lullaby Vancaskerkin and two Roadkeepers waited for us. As we got off, Vancaskerkin asked for 10 gold coins from each of us as part of the road toll. I gather from Marko’s stern, toothy reaction, that this was an overcharge. The somewhat rattled Roadkeepers agreed and reduced it to a single gold coin apiece, which we parted with. Lullaby also gave us directions to the Stone House.
For someone who lives in the forest and keeps the roads, she wasn’t very good at directions. Instead of the Stone House, we found yet another restless dead person, encircled by the path. A trailgaunt sprang from a dead tree in ambush. He had already slain three guards—the three guards we were looking for, who had gone in search of the dwarves. All roads lead to one place, I guess.
Having returned the trailgaunt to his appropriate corpse state, we considered the clearing. It seemed the guards had not become trailgaunts themselves, because someone (perhaps the Roadkeepers) had extended and maintained the road within sight of their bodies. If we didn’t want them marching back from the other side of time, we would have to hurry them to sacred ground before nightfall. We deferred that task till our exploration of the Churlwood was done.
The others were of the opinion that Lullaby had misled us. I suppose that’s more likely than her being wrong about directions. What a scamp.
We tracked through the forest, led by Kels’ memory of Roderic’s map. In due time, we stumbled upon some more Roadkeepers and the Stone House. Simon stepped forward and pretended (somewhat awkwardly, I must say, as even I noticed) that Lullaby had sent us. The Roadkeepers stood up and drew their weapons. The predictable happened.
That’s when things took a turn for the odd. While I dispatched the remaining unconscious murderers, the lads opened the Stone House door. A burst of rainbow color arced forth from a pair of withered, spotted old hands. Simon and Kels fell over. Marko, less impressed by the display, swung his falchion at an old woman.
That, I presumed from the fearful cries of the dying Roadkeepers, was their leader Mother Nightthrush. It being customary to hug one’s mother, I proceeded to seize the old woman. As I wrapped her in my embrace, she reached out into the infinite void between the stars. A deep chill rattled my bones, like the endless chill I feel whenever I contemplate the eldritch creatures drifting malevolently through those spaces, waiting and waiting for living warmth.
While Marko slashed at her, I choked the air from her lungs. I left her alive, calling on the Key and the Gate to stabilize her on the threshold between. I want to know how she did that trick with the void. There’s something there…
After a couple minutes, Kels and Simon reconstituted themselves. We manacled the unconcious Mother Nightthrush and searched the Stone House. The second story was destroyed, but a secret door led to stairs, descended beneath the Churlwood, far as we could see.
Thassilon…
A frisson rippled across my skin as we stepped cautiously down the stairs.
We must have gone hundreds of feet below the earth, based on how long it took (if we’d had one of those kidnapped dwarves with us, I bet they could’ve given us an exact number. Dwarves do have their uses.)
Out of the daylight sun, we strayed into ancient Thassilon. We found ourselves in a series of chambers. The first had a lantern and a small saucer with crumbs and milk in front of a boarded up doorway. Simon made a compelling case that one does not usually board up a cat using spikes driven through wood into stone and therefore perhaps we ought investigate the rest of the location before prying those boards off. Which we proceeded to do.
Sadly, four more Roadkeepers decided to wave weapons at us instead of sharing knowledge. Once again, the predictable happened.
After using Mother Nightthrush’s wand to heal up our crew (she had a curative wand! Interesting clue…) we realized we had found a remarkable room. Ruling over the small chamber snarled a statue of a rage-filled woman with a glaive.
“Alaznist, Runelord of Wrath,” Marko said.
“The statue radiates very faint divination magic,” Simon informed us. “Once it was used as a remote observation device, though its magic is long dormant or spent.”
I cannot decide if I am disappointed or relieved. Is there a word that means both?
Why would the sword of the Runelord of Pride be hidden a vault belonging to the Runelord of Wrath?
The answer lies in the distant past but I will only learn it in the future. What a confused mess time is. For example, we found the door to Alaznist’s Vault (marked with the Sinhedron symbol of ancient Thassilon). And we found the code to open it. Yet we somehow managed to do that in the wrong order, meaning a long trudge back to Roderic’s Cove. And Roderic had even told us the key was in his map (which I now realize is not THE KEY).
Regardless, before that we had to deal with the third Roadkeeper leader, a volatile dwarf named Dolland. He disappeared—not in the Sczarni ‘dropped of the end of a dock chained to a rock’ kind of disappeared, he literally vanished after we had hit him several times. Which would not have been necessary if he had just paused a moment to talk. We had the same goal, getting behind the Vault door, as his notes revealed. They also revealed yet another restless ghost—his former apprentice, now turned gearghost, Sharlise.
The whole area is awash with spirits who don’t want to move on.
After chasing off Dolland (who would go on to rescue Mother Nightthrush later, we assumed; or ‘disappear’ her in the aforementioned dock-dropping fashion), we continued to explore Alaznist’s compound. We found a goblin in a strange room, accessible only by a space-hopping portal. The room translated, though Marko (as one might expect) is fluent in Goblin. Oh! I need to remember to ask him if it is true that there are 27 words for ‘fire’ in Goblin. Not for any reason, I’ve just read that a few places and it sounds suspicious.
The goblin was named Murkle. Other goblins (the same band who captured the dwarves the town constable had asked us to find—the roads are converging!) had shoved her into a portal and she’d been trapped on the other side of a cage of force. We decided to go back to town and get her some food. I’m not sure why, but it seemed important to Marko. Marko… Murkle… Marko… Murkle… idle speculation.
We also returned the guards’ bodies to the graveyard for sanctified burial, to prevent them from returning as trailgaunts. I feel as though Audrahni and the town’s priest of Pharasma ought to be more diligent, given the seemingly excessive number of regional restless dead. I did not offer the criticism though—a bit like closing the sarcophagus after the mummy has escaped.
I updated Audrahni on our progress. After a restless night’s sleep, filled with dreams of Thassilon, I joined the men at the library. We quickly copied the instructions to open the Vault and then blotted the map with ink. Dolland was probably not the only interested party—after all, the Resplendent Order’s leader had somehow gotten her hands on Baraket.
Beyond the Vault door lay an opaque screen of dark fog. I watched myself step through it, and then I stepped through.
Smooth white marble lined the walls of the chamber beyond, carved with softly glowing runes and spiraling lines. Everything was covered in a fine layer of ash. The only two objects in the tiny chamber were an empty sword display and an iron chest. Within the chest I found a pair of gauntlets—noqual and leather, bearing more softly glowing Thassilonian runes. I watched myself put them on and then I put them on.
At once I knew these were Runewarded Gauntlets—an artifact of Thassilon almost as old as the swords of the Runelords themselves. I could feel the deading of magic in my fingers. I also knew now that there are magical items with sentience of their own; sentience and powerful will. And these gauntlets would enable me to handle such things without falling under their control.
Roderic’s words echoed in my mind.
Baraket will control them. It will control you. I should’ve taken the gauntlets but I fled. I was a coward. You must be brave. You must endure where I did not. The Vault. It lies still in the Vault.
Did Corstela use Baraket to slay her enemies or did Baraket use Corstela?
What I would give to see that moment clearly…
I stepped out of the Vault. Marko gave it a once over, but it was clear that there was nothing else.
How did Corstela get Baraket out but not get the gauntlets? Perhaps she did that in the wrong order and Baraket, not wanting to lose control of her, hied her out of the Vault before she could grab the gauntlets.
I idly speculated on that while we pressed on through Alaznist’s building. We defeated Sharlise and found her body, to take back to town for yet more santification. Pharasma should give us all manner of credit, though I doubt she will. So uncaring…
Munkle told us about Chief Cheektooth who runs her tribe and confirmed they had the dwarves. Also, there is some goblin named Ssesseleck who Munkle says is scary and who casts magic. I’m intrigued. What kind of magic could a goblin cast? There is perhaps something to learn.
Prior to pressing on, however, we opened the boarded-up room. Marko seemed intent on getting in there, which I did not understand, until we were attacked by an invisible beast of some sort (Simon, who could see it, cried out ‘phantom fungus!’ but the name means little to me). Despite its natural invisibility, we were able to dispatch it. In addition to an unseen abomination, there was also an invisible coffer, which had all manner of magic in it, rendering Simon nearly giddy with delight.
Perhaps I should be more open to entering what seem like uninteresting spaces. Clearly I do not know what waits beyond a boarded up door…