Date: Flocktime 1, 576 CY
Region: The Lighthouse, Northern Shore of Safeton, Wild Coast
Weather: Fog through the morning. The coast offers nothing but grey and cold.
“Three Knocks”
Someone tried the knocker.
One knock. Two knocks. Three.
The door swung inward on its own, smooth and unhurried, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask
politely. Kagen spiked it open before it could reconsider. The group filed through into the debris and
the dark, torchlight pushing back just enough of the lighthouse interior to show them what they were
dealing with.
What they were dealing with announced itself from somewhere in the shadows.
“Arr, what’ve we got here then? Lost, are ye? Wrong door, I’d say — though it’s a fine last sight
ye’ll have of the world above.”
The skeleton stepped into the torchlight with the swagger of something that had once stood on a
quarterdeck and had not entirely forgotten it. It had a pirate’s bearing and a pirate’s mouth, and it
seemed genuinely pleased to have company after however long it had spent alone in the dark.
“Turned”
Kagen raised the holy symbol.
The turning hit the skeleton like a wind off open water — sudden, irresistible, pushing it backward
against its will. The bravado went out of it in an instant. Whatever it had been saying died in its teeth. It
turned and fled, rattling down the stairs to the lower level, the sound of its retreat echoing up through
the stone.
The group went after it.
The lower level opened into a long corridor heading north — toward the mansion, if the lay of the land
above matched what was below. The skeleton was somewhere ahead in the dark, still moving under the
compulsion of the turning. Squints raised his bow and put an arrow into it.
The turning broke.
The skeleton stopped fleeing and became something else entirely. Bellator did not wait for it to close
the distance. The paladin charged down the corridor, which is exactly the wrong thing to do in a
corridor that has not been searched, and the floor opened beneath him. He dropped into the pit trap and
the darkness swallowed him whole.
The skeleton, freed from the turning and faced with a corridor now partially occupied by a
paladin-shaped hole in the floor, seemed to find this arrangement agreeable. The fight that followed
was close and grinding — the group working around the pit, Bellator hauled up by rope while the battle
continued over his head. The skeleton took enough punishment to decide the corridor was no longer
worth holding and disappeared back into the dark.
They let it go. Squints was hurt. Bellator was bruised and irritated. They pulled back to the ground floor
to regroup.
“While the Party Was Upstairs”
The second floor called for attention. Harry went up first, then others followed — four giant rats in the
close dark of the upper room, dealt with in the efficient way the group had developed for things that
bite and have no particular strategy beyond biting. Squints worked angles. Kagen worked the stairs.
The rats were finished.
Below them, the ground floor door slammed.
Bones had come back.
Barnabuss and one other had remained on the ground floor, and now they had the skeleton’s full
attention without the rest of the party to distribute it. The fight downstairs was smaller and more
desperate than the one in the corridor
By the time the others came back down, the skeleton was broken on the floor.
Flocktime 1 — While Upstairs
The wolf spider came out of the upper dark with the confidence of something that had not been
seriously challenged in a long time. The group spread across the room and attacked from angles, and
Squints put the killing arrow into it from across the chamber. It folded.
Harry found the footlocker. He found the trap on it first, which is the correct order of operations, and
then he opened it. Inside: copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum in quantities worth the weight.
Three gems. And beneath the coins, folded with the careful attention of someone who considered these
things important — a cloak, clothes, and a dagger.
The dagger stopped the room.
The blade was wavy, curved in the particular way that has a name in certain circles. On the hilt: a
triangular symbol, small and precise, stamped into the metal with the care of something meant to be
recognized by the right people. Thorian turned it in his hands.
It was the same mark the hooded figure had carried into the Bleached Salmon the night before — the
tall thing with the knife and the nine-inch tongue that had put its blade in Thorian’s direction and then
dissolved into the Safeton dark.
Someone connected to that creature had been in this lighthouse. The cloak was ordinary cloth — no
magic to it, just fabric. But the dagger went into Thorian’s pack and the clothes into Bellator’s, and the
group stood in the room with the dead spider and the open footlocker and a thread that now ran from
the Bleached Salmon to the hooded figure to whatever had been living here.
The third level of the lighthouse remained above them, unopened.
XP: 40 each
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