Date: Flocktime 1, 576 CY
Region: The Lighthouse and Northern Shore, Safeton, Wild Coast
Weather: Overcast. Wind off the bay. By evening, clearing.
Players Present
Bellator Nocturnus, Fantra Paladin
Kagen Sunhammer, Dwarf Cleric/Fighter
Thorian, Warrior-Monk
Barnabuss, Healer
Harry, Halfling Thief
Squints, Archer of Safeton
Flocktime 1 — “The Top of the Tower”
The door at the top of the lighthouse spiral was stuck in the particular way of things that have been
wedged shut deliberately and left long enough to forget. Harry checked it for traps first, found none,
and then the group spent the better part of an hour failing to open it. Kagen snapped a crowbar against
it. The door did not move.
Harry looked at the exterior of the tower, at the rope in his hands, and made the calculation that
halflings make when they have decided the straightforward approach is no longer available. He tied off
and went up the outside of the fluted stonework, hand over hand in the coastal wind, until he reached
the window at the top level. On the other side of the stuck door he found the spikes that had been
holding it — driven into the frame from the inside, someone’s idea of making sure no one followed
them up. He pulled them and the door opened.
The top room held the lighthouse mechanism — mirrors, once used to throw firelight out over the
Woolly Bay. Burn marks on the housing showed how it had worked. Two ornamental blue quartz gems
sat at the base of the mechanism, low value but worth carrying. Bellator tested one in the housing to see
if it produced any effect. It did not. The group dismantled the mirrors carefully, stacking them for
removal. They would fetch something at market.
The torch went out during the work. They finished in the dark.
Flocktime 1 — “The Hidden Room”
Squints ran a feather along the wall of the corridor below the top level, checking for air movement,
looking for gaps. The stone gave him nothing on the first pass. On the second, a seam.
The hidden room behind it was not a treasure vault. It was an armory.
Longswords. Shortswords. Daggers. Maces. Battle axes, hand axes, javelins, spears. Crossbows and
bolts counted out in stacks. A bardiche. Glaive-guisarmes. Bill-guisarmes. Bucklers and wooden
shields ranked against the walls. All of it freshly forged, well-oiled, without a mark of rust or a scratch
of use. No heraldry on any of it. No maker’s mark that meant anything. Fresh boot prints on the floor.
Someone had been stocking this room recently, and whatever they were stocking it for had not
happened yet.
The group stood in the armory and looked at the inventory and did not say aloud what several of them
were thinking. There was no proof of anything. There was only a room full of unmarked weapons in a
supposedly haunted lighthouse on the edge of a city, and a dagger in Thorian’s pack with a triangular
symbol on the hilt, and the memory of a hooded figure in the Bleached Salmon pointing a blade at
someone who had survived the slave trade.
They moved the chest out of the hidden room first. It could be opened outside, in the light, with room to
work.
Flocktime 1 — “Harry”
They brought the chest outside onto the grass above the cliff. The lighthouse at their backs. The bay
below. A good day for it, or as good as any.
Harry knelt in front of the chest the way he always did — unhurried, methodical, the tools coming out
in the right order. He was the best at this. He had always been the best at this. The group stood back and
gave him room and watched the coast and waited for the sound that meant the lock had given.
The dart came out of the chest mechanism and Harry did not have time to know it had happened.
He was gone before he fell.
The group stood over him and the chest sat open in the grass and the wind came off the Woolly Bay the
way wind does when it has no particular interest in what just happened. Inside the chest: three thousand
electrum pieces and four thousand copper. Not nothing. Not enough.
“He was careful,” Squints said, after a while. “He was always careful.”
No one had anything to add to that.
Flocktime 1 — “The Pyre”
They gathered wood from the treeline and brought oil from their packs. The pyre went up on the grass
above the cliff, in sight of the water, which seemed right for a halfling who had spent the last weeks on
the Wild Coast doing things that were considerably larger than most halflings attempt.
They lit it and stood back and let it burn.
There was no ceremony to speak of. These were not people who had known Harry long enough to
know what he would have wanted said, and Harry had not been the kind of halfling who talked much
about what he wanted. He had been the kind who went up the outside of a lighthouse in coastal wind
because someone had to, and who knelt in front of locked things with patience and good tools and did
not make a fuss about it.
The fire did its work. They turned away when it was done and began loading the mirrors and the
weapons onto improvised carries made from the polearms, and did not look back at the lighthouse
again.
Flocktime 1 — “Back to Safeton”
The road back into Safeton was heavy going with the mirrors and the weapons and the chest, but they
managed it. At the money changer they converted the electrum. At the market the weapons moved for
what weapons move for when they have no history attached to them. The mirrors found buyers.
When it was tallied: one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one gold pieces divided among five. Three
hundred and seventy-two gold each — more than most of them had seen in one place before the slave
cart, and a different kind of weight to carry than the chest had been.
The evening was Barnabuss’s idea. His place, a pig purchased for three electrum, a fire that had nothing
funerary about it. The group ate and drank and did not talk about the armory or the dagger or the
hooded figure or what the weapons in that hidden room had been waiting to be used for.
There would be time for that.
Tonight they had earned the fire.
XP Award — Episode 105
372 XP each after returning to Safeton
Harry, Halfling Thief — killed by a poison dart trap, Flocktime 1, 576 CY. He was careful. He was always
careful.
Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends — blog.hommlet-dark.com
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