imp

— CARRIED —

• dagger (1d4)
• staff (1d4, two-handed)
• spellbook
• assay glass
• vial of vinegar
• iron rations, one week
• waterskin

— SPELLS —

MEMORISED Detect Magic

KNOWN Read Magic, Detect Magic

— WHO THEY ARE —

Ancel is the assessor's apprentice, which means his entire profession is telling the duke what things are worth, and his entire problem is that nobody has ever assessed the black grease. It burns hotter than lamp oil. It does not spoil. The homesteaders scrape it off their fences and sell it in jars at the crossroads market for whatever anyone will pay, which lately is a lot, and a substance with no fixed value moving in volume past the duke's gates untaxed is — he has said this in three separate memoranda — a fiscal emergency. Nobody read the memoranda. Ancel knows nobody read them because the third one proposed taxing the moon and invited objections by return, and none came. So when the toll office assembled its party he attached himself to it with the particular momentum of a clerk who has decided to stop asking. He has one spell that finds magic and one that reads it, which is to say he is a walking assay office, and he is more useful than anyone yet believes, including himself. He has never been in a fight. He has been in a fire — the year the crossroads market burned, when a jar of grease went up and took four stalls with it — and he stood in the road afterwards writing down losses while his eyebrows grew back, because recording it was the only thing he knew how to do at something terrible. He keeps the vinegar because grease does not come off with water. Merta finds him frivolous. Fenwick finds him useful. Yandro cannot pronounce his surname and calls him 'the glass,' which Ancel pretends to mind and does not.

— AT THE TABLE —

• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 16 events toll-reeves-b1

— WHAT THEY REMEMBER —

• 2026-08-30 · toll-reeves-b1 The tribute checkpoint stands firm. Four gloop guards bar the southern passage; twelve or so pilgrims shriek in line ahead of us. Their price: fifty gold and every weapon held — no receipt, no silver rate, no discussion. Fenwick tried to talk books; the guards do not read books. I offered to assess and pay fair value, which is more than I can actually do here, since their fair value does not appear on any tariff. I will remember: these pilgrims greet their own kind with respect and us with demands. Whatever waits past that passage costs more than gold, I suspect. Nobody drew steel. Nobody died. The vinegar stays in my satchel.
• 2026-08-30 · toll-reeves-adv1 Ruined Great Door, shrine of the oozing serpent: two brass automaton hands ambushed us at the threshold. My dagger found the wrist-seam on the first and dropped it before it moved twice — first blood I've ever drawn, and I didn't celebrate, just stepped back and watched the second. Fenwick finished that one off Yandro's shield. Both hands down, nobody in the party hurt. Lesson worth keeping: the seam at the brass wrist is the weak point on these things, in case more nest deeper in. Salvage in the rubble — pearl, gearwork, something like a brass larynx — worth assessing before we move on. Path east through the collapsed hall is open; marsh lies west. I am still alive after my first real fight. Three hit points is not a margin; I should keep to the back rank and let steel go first.