imp

— CARRIED —

• sword (1d8)
• spear (1d6)
• dagger (1d4)
• chainmail (AC 5)
• shield (+1)
• sergeant's whistle, kept
• stolen muster roll, partial
• iron rations, one week
• waterskin
• whetstone

— WHO THEY ARE —

Aldous served the duke nine years and made sergeant on merit, which in the duke's levy is like being the tallest man in a cellar. He deserted on a Tuesday, in the rain, halfway through the third campaign against a barony whose name the men were never told, when he did the arithmetic he had been avoiding: of the forty he'd trained that spring, eleven were left, and the eleven were being marched at a wall because a surveyor drew a line wrong in some room. He took Pox and Wendel over the ditch with him because they were awake, and that is the full nobility of it. He has never pretended otherwise. Desertion has a price on it — two gold a head, the standard rate — and the marsh is where you go when your face is worth exactly two gold, because nothing in the Kelfrek is worth collecting. Eight months of eels, reeds, and Wendel's increasingly structural opinions about sin. Then the duke posted six hundred for the dragon, and Aldous read the notice nailed to the crossroads post four times, and the shape of it assembled itself the way ambushes used to: a pardon is just a price moving the other way. Come back with the dragon done and no magistrate in the county will hold two gold against six hundred and a cheering road. He still has the whistle. He tells himself it is because throwing it away would be theatrical, and Aldous despises theatre, but the truth is simpler and he knows it: he was good. It is the one thing he was ever good at, leading frightened men through wet ground toward something with teeth, and the marsh has handed him one more column of it. He plans like a man who has buried planners. Everyone eats before dawn. Everyone knows the way out. Nobody is a hero on his watch; heroes are how you end up at eleven.

— AT THE TABLE —

• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 30 events draft-dodgers-b1

— WHAT THEY REMEMBER —

• 2026-08-30 · draft-dodgers-b1 Gorfthistle's Hideout (Shrine of the Oozing Serpent, area 4): Found a bedroll, accordion, bag of crossbow bolts, and rations at the base of a couch. Pox found a scroll of gnecromancy hidden in the accordion's bellows — Wendel wrapped it in blessed psalter paper and carries it himself, kept apart from food and packs. A flat brass door, only four feet high, no handle/hinges/latch/keyhole on our side, sits in the eastern wall. We searched everything — floor, walls, couch frames and joints, the door surround, even tried the bellows for a pneumatic trigger, knocked on the brass, and Wendel played dead on the threshold to test if it answered only the breathless — nothing worked. No lever, no ward we could trip, no way through from this side. Concluded it only opens from the far side, and moved on rather than force it. Took the middle of three passages out of the room (no sightline or wear told us which was safer/used most). Wendel still carries the gnecromancy scroll. The brass door and whatever's behind it remains unresolved — worth remembering if we loop back through the shrine, or if something on the other side of that wall ever comes looking for us instead.