Chapter 4 / Episode #103 — "Dame Gold's Second Calling"
Region: Safeton, Wild Coast
Weather: Cool and overcast. A grey sky off Woolly Bay. The kind of morning that asks nothing of you and gives nothing back.
Players Present
Slash the Bard (NPC — agent of Dame Gold)
Flocktime 1 — "Broke and Breathing"
They arrived with nothing.
That is not a complaint. That is a fact. The slavers took everything that could be taken, and what could not be taken was left behind in the Drachensgrab Hills along with pieces of themselves they will not easily recover. They arrived in Safeton broke, hungry, carrying only what their bodies remember — how to fight, how to endure, and how to hate the people who put chains on them.
Safeton is a walled city on the Wild Coast that has seen enough of the world not to be surprised by people who look like they have been through something. They found food. They found shelter. They found, eventually, each other — the particular gravity that draws survivors together in the aftermath of shared catastrophe.
Seven days passed. Long enough to heal. Not long enough to forget.
Flocktime 1 — "The Bleached Salmon"
The notice at the Bleached Salmon Tavern was written in a clean hand on decent parchment. Work available. Experienced individuals only. Report within.
The man waiting at the table was not what any of them expected from a job posting.
Slash the Bard — seventh level, Dragon Magazine trained, carrying more stories than most men carry scars — sits with a cup he has not touched and eyes that have measured every person who walked through the door. He works for Dame Gold now. He has worked for worse. He lays out the situation without embellishment because embellishment is for people who have time and these people do not look like they have time.
Dame Gold wants the ruins at the Drachensgrab Hills investigated. Specifically: surviving captives left behind in the chaos. Slaver manifests — the lists of names, buyers, prices, routes — that the organization used to track its inventory. Families in Safeton are still waiting for news of people who never came home. Dame Gold wants answers to give them.
Five hundred gold per person. Payment on the third of Flocktime, at the Bleached Salmon, upon return with findings.
The group listens. The group agrees. The group has, after all, been there before.
Flocktime 1 — "The Tall Man"
The evening settles over the Bleached Salmon in the usual way — noise bleeding toward quiet as the hour grows late.
Thorian notices him first.
The figure is hooded. Tall — six and a half feet at least, and built wrong in the way that things built for purpose and not origin sometimes are. The hood stays up. The face stays down. What is visible is a hand, and in the hand is a knife, and the knife is making a point that does not require words.
A message. An intention. A warning from something that knows they are here and wants them to know that it knows.
Then the figure is gone. Through the door, into the Safeton night, as if it was never there.
The group makes a decision without much deliberation: they will deal with whatever that was when they encounter it again. For now — the lighthouse.
Flocktime 1 — "The Northern Shore"
Barnabuss knows a place on the coast. He kept it to himself for years, the way people keep things that have served them well. The group camps there for the night — cold air off the bay, fog rolling in low over the water, the temperature in the low forties and the sky offering nothing in the way of comfort.
Harry scouts ninety feet ahead by habit and disposition. It is what a halfling thief does when he wants to stay alive, and staying alive has been Harry's primary occupation for some time.
In the morning they move north along the shoreline.
The lighthouse appears first — stone and old mortar, a wooden door at its base, the lamp long dark. Beside it, set back from the cliff's edge, the mansion. Stone construction. Decades abandoned if the rumors at the Bleached Salmon were accurate. A sea captain, they said. His family. Something that happened in those rooms that no one who knows will say plainly.
Grounded in the shallows nearby, half-submerged and barnacled over, the wreck of a ship rests at an angle that suggests it came to grief close to home.
The group takes it in from a distance. Then they move closer.
Flocktime 1 — "What the Door Would Not Do"
The lighthouse door is wood. Old wood, swollen in its frame, partially ajar in a way that suggests not welcome but collapse. Kagen tries the direct approach. The door does not move the way doors are supposed to move.
Hinges rusted. Something wedged on the inside, or wedged by time itself into a position it has no interest in leaving. Oil is applied. Squints proposes the mirror trick — an arrow shaft disassembled, the mirror angled to see past the gap and into the dark beyond the door.
The mirror goes in.
Something takes it.
Not a gust of wind. Not the frame shifting. Something on the other side reached through the gap and pulled the mirror from Squints' hand with intent, and now the mirror is gone and the door is still closed and the gap offers nothing but darkness.
The group recalibrates.
Harry goes up. Grappling hook to the second floor window — a clean throw, a solid catch. He goes hand over hand, gets the window, and finds what no one particularly wanted to find on the other side: an undead thing in the dark, and no easy way back down when things go wrong.
They go wrong.
Harry comes back down faster than he went up. The grappling hook does not follow him. The rope does not follow him. He lands in the way of someone who has survived worse falls but would prefer not to make a habit of it. The group regroups at the base of the lighthouse, lighter by one mirror and one grappling hook, and with a considerably clearer picture of what is waiting inside.
The session ends there. The Bleached Salmon has agreed to receive their report on the third of Flocktime. They have two days.
The lighthouse has not moved.
