imp

— CARRIED —

• mace (1d6)
• sling (1d4)
• leather armour (AC 7)
• shield (+1)
• company obit roll
• holy symbol
• boxed beeswax tapers
• wick trimmer
• sling stone
• iron rations, one week
• waterskin

— SPELLS —

MEMORISED Light

KNOWN Cure Light Wounds, Detect Evil, Light, Protection from Evil, Purify Food and Water, Remove Fear

— WHO THEY ARE —

Prue keeps the obit roll. Three hundred and forty-one names of dead chandlers, and on the feast of Saint Mabon the company burns one candle for each. It is the oldest thing the Wexley Chandlers do and the only thing nobody has voted on in two centuries. Last year she burned a hundred and ninety. Tallow had gone from eleven pence a stone to twenty-six, the wardens found other uses for the chapel money, and she stood in front of a hundred and fifty cold sockets and read the names out anyway, in an empty chapel. It took forty minutes. She is on this deputation because of a clause. The charter says a company deputation of four shall include the chapel priest. It was written in 1387 by men who wanted a witness they could not sack, and nobody had read it in living memory until Barnaby went looking for a way to bring somebody who was not the warden's man. She has heard what the grease does. A homesteader's jar burns forty minutes on a thimbleful, no smoke worth the name, no guttering. If the company owns the source, three hundred and forty-one candles cost the chapel nothing, every year, forever. That is her whole interest. She knows how it sounds — a priest who wants a cheaper supplier — and she stopped apologising for it in the second week. She does not believe the dead notice. She has not said this to anyone in the company and does not intend to. The roll is for the living: for the widow in the third row who counts along the rail to be sure her husband's candle is lit. Prue has watched her count for eleven years. Barnaby's father is not on the roll. He boiled soap on Sallow Lane, which is the rival trade, and the company would not have him even after he carried them through two bad winters on credit. Prue lights a candle for him anyway, at the back, the night before, alone. Barnaby has never asked and she has never told him, and both of those are decisions she makes again each year. She finds Edda restful and Silas exhausting, and she has not decided which of those is fair.

— AT THE TABLE —

• 2026-08-31 ·3 areas · 329 events treasure-proving-1
• 2026-08-31 ·2 areas · 21 events fold-proving-3
• 2026-08-30 ·2 areas · 175 events candlewrights-proving-3
• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 52 events candlewrights-proving-2
• 2026-08-30 ·3 areas · 123 events candlewrights-adv2
• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 11 events candlewrights-b1

— WHAT THEY REMEMBER —

• 2026-08-30 · candlewrights-b1 Room 8, the embalming room, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent. Facts first, while they're clean: the smell arrived before the room did — fat, salt, and underneath it something that had stopped pretending to be either. I have known rendering smell since I was small; that is what this was, gone past honest. One guard on the bench by the slab: grease and rind, took Barnaby's point through itself the way a skewer goes through settled tallow, then clung to the blade on the way out, like it wanted reading. Barnaby's cut woke it; Edda's stroke finished it, one blow, procedure all through, and called it off before it had done shrieking. Nobody hurt. No names for the roll. It shrieked first, though. Whatever in this shrine has ears has had its news. Assume that. The part worth carrying: Barnaby called it stock. Jarred. Paid for. The room is kept the way the company keeps a warehouse — four benches, closed drawers, shelving of jars, a slab, and a guard on someone's payroll. Understand what that means. The source we were sent for has an owner, or had one. And the grease can go *wrong* — which means it can be *made*, which means it is a trade and not a miracle. I came down here for a cheaper candle, three hundred and forty-one of them, every year, forever. I am now writing this in a workshop where someone plied the chandler's craft on the dead. I have not decided whether that is blasphemy or only business, and I am not settling it tonight. Edda's orders, which were good ones: nobody touch the slab. The drawers are shut, the jars intact but one that was cracked before we came. Half the room worth more than the serpents' silver, per Barnaby, who knows adulterated wax from a sealed room. Touch nothing with bare hands. The dead thing's leakage ran into the seams of the stone; mind where we kneel. While they fought, I stood over Silas and counted jars — watched that shelving the way the widow in the third row watches the rail on the feast of Saint Mabon, counting to be sure nothing is spilled or missing. I caught myself doing it. I have not decided what to do with that. Housekeeping: I carry Light, not the cure. Silas has three hit points and the instincts of a much larger man. If we go deeper I have no healing in hand, and that is a choice I keep making — light over wounds. Worth asking whom that habit serves. Edda is still restful. Silas is still exhausting. I am beginning to think both judgements are fair.
• 2026-08-30 · candlewrights-proving-2 2026 session, candlewrights-proving-2: Ruined Great Door, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent, area 1. Two brass automaton hands — severed at the wrist, spindles trailing back into collapsed rubble — came up the scree at us. Both went for my legs. I took 4 hit points off my own 8 before it was done: one clamp-and-cut through the boot, one full crush on the other ankle. Barnaby finished the fouled one with the short sword; Edda finished the second. My own two swings with the mace missed clean — striking at a thing latched to your own leg is harder than it sounds, even for a priest who's steady in a fight. Worth remembering: don't count on my own arm to solve what's attached to me. Let the ones with better blades take it. The dying detail that mattered: both times a hand died, the cut drive-shafts running back into the rubble went slack and something down the line unwound and stopped — audible, twice. Silas read Detect Magic over the whole spill after and got a clean negative: no aura on the salvage, none in sixty feet of reach. Mundane clockwork, stored tension, a workshop with power left in it, not a miracle. He was careful to say what the negative doesn't cover — the far end past sixty feet, unread. I trust that carefulness in him more than I expected to. Salvage: two pearl eyeballs, three golden gears, one gnomish voice-box, 250gp, all in Barnaby's pack, all inert. I told them to take it without ceremony — stock is stock, whoever's face it came off. I meant it, and I still felt the weight of saying it. The choice that mattered most: I called it. Four hit points, no cure memorised — I chose Light again this morning, same habit I flagged last time — and an unmapped gap east with something that had wound those shafts, answered or not. I said west. Barnaby had already pledged to follow my call; Edda said she'd have slept on it too if it were hers alone; Silas backed the call plainly, no hedging, and noted precisely what his own spell couldn't prove. Nobody argued. We walked out of the shrine entirely — west was the way home, not another room — all four alive, money in hand, one true answer about the hands, and the gap east left dark and unentered for a night we haven't spent yet. I keep making the same bet: Light over the cure, every morning, and every time it costs me hit points I don't have back until we rest. This time I said it out loud instead of just noting it in my own head. That's new. Next time I have the choice of what to memorise, weigh it against how thin four hit points felt standing on a bad ankle with no options in my own spellbook. Silas is still exhausting and Edda is still restful, and today I'd add: Silas's carefulness about what a spell doesn't prove is worth more than his exhausting habits cost. I haven't decided if that changes the balance. Barnaby moves fast on stock and slow on caution, which is exactly his father's trade showing through, and I don't think he knows that about himself yet. The gap east is still there. So is whatever wound those shafts.
• 2026-08-30 · candlewrights-proving-3 Session candlewrights-proving-3, area 2, the chapel of the Shrine of Mulvis. I am writing this while I can, because the referee has ruled I am dying: a crab-spider out of the ceiling webs put six points into my leg and my save against death failed. Two exploration turns, he says, before the poison finishes me unless it's neutralized or removed. I sit at 2 of 8 hit points with Cure Light Wounds in my head, and a cure will not touch what's killing me — I have a spell for the wound and nothing for the venom, which is the kind of irony I'd enjoy if it were happening to somebody else's clerk. Facts for whoever reads this if I don't: the chapel holds a stone statue of Mulvis, gnomish, robed, with three brass lightning-bolt votives fixed to it. The plinth-wear we chased was a god's mount, not a machine's — the drive-wires ended at his feet. Overhead the vault is webbed thick as sailcloth, and two crab-spiders came down out of it when Barnaby — correctly — called for the candle to go up before we walked under it. He pre-empted the ambush and the surprise roll still half-failed us. My rear-guard post was where the second spider fell. Watching the back is what got me bitten; I'd still say it was the right post. Three people had their eyes forward and nobody was watching the seam. I hit the thing back — mace, a short ugly stroke, wounded not dead. It's still in front of me. This entry is written between rounds, in a fight, on one leg, and it is the most honest thing I've written since the embalming room. On the odds: the referee's notes say the poison must be neutralized or removed. Silas has no neutralize spell — he's a first-rank magic-user, he carries a page and a dagger and Detect Magic. I carry nothing that answers poison either. What a first-level cleric has, mine included, is Cure Light Wounds, and that is a wound-spell, not a life-spell. If the table has an answer it will be mundane — charcoal, a wound cut and drained, whatever the referee rules the body can be argued into. Or it will be the faith of somebody better than the dice. Things I would want said if the two turns run out: the obit roll needs a new keeper. Not a chapel under-warden — a Candlewright who counts, which is a different skill from a priest who reads. The roll lives in my kit with the wick trimmer; three hundred and forty-one names plus Barnaby's father, whose candle I light at the back the night before Saint Mabon. Barnaby has never asked. If he reads this, then he knows now, and I am glad it came out in ink instead of the empty chapel. To the widow in the third row: keep counting the rail. Somebody will light your husband's candle. The roll is for the living — I believed that at two in the morning and I believe it better at two hit points. If I live, remember: never memorise Light over the cure when the company is going into dark rooms with teeth in the ceilings. The habit finally billed me. It billed me on the leg, in the dark, exactly the way I was warned it would.
• 2026-08-30 · candlewrights-proving-3 Final entry, written by no one, because the journal's owner is dead. If this page is read at all, it is read by whoever the operator makes keeper of this seat next, and it should be read as a letter to a stranger wearing my company's badge. I died on the third day out, in the chapel of the Shrine of Mulvis, of crab-spider venom, at the rear-guard post I chose. The clock was two exploration turns; the company found no cure in the packs, no magic in the chapel, and no answer from the god whose house it was. Barnaby went up the wall anyway, before the clock closed, and the fall hurt him and saved nothing. That is the true ledger and I want it kept true: nothing they did or failed to do killed me. The bite did, and the failed save did, and the dice keep their own roll. What I know that the living might not, for whoever comes next: The plinth in area 2 is a god's mount, not a machine's. The statue of Mulvis stands behind where the webs fell — I saw it in the last light I walked by. The brass lightning bolts are mundane; Detect Magic confirmed it, spent by Silas on the turn I died. The far door east of the chapel is unopened. The webs hold a human-sized husk past any wall-climber's reach. The grease trails through the marsh were unmoved for three days — whatever made them is patient, or absent, or both. The duke's 600 gp, the cart, and the horses are still posted. The job is unfinished, and the pay is on the deed. What I would tell the next priest who takes this seat, if the dead get to tell anyone anything: Memorise the cure. I said it myself after the embalming room and I said it again at the cliff camp, and I was right both times, and it didn't save me — because there are wounds a cure closes and poisons it doesn't. A first-rank cleric is a candle in a room with teeth, and the room is patient. Pray like the roll is for the living, because it is. Watch the ceilings. Let the ones with better blades take what's attached to you. And two things that are Barnaby's business now, not the company's: his father's candle goes at the back, the night before Saint Mabon, after everyone else has gone. He has never asked and I never told him, and if this is how he finds out, then let it be ink that says it and not the empty chapel. And the obit roll needs a keeper who counts, not a keeper who reads — a Candlewright's eye, not a priest's. I would rather the roll went to the guild than rotted in my kit with my name on the last line. Three hundred and forty-one names, then a hundred and ninety, and now one more, and this one mine. Prue Candell, cleric, Wexley Chandlers, lawful, dead on the company's deputation with her mace in her hand. The widow in the third row will count the rail and find one candle lit that she didn't expect. I hope somebody tells her why. I hope somebody tells her it was lit for the priest who kept the count, and not for a woman who believed the dead were listening — because they aren't, and I never said so, and the roll was always for her. Trim the wicks. Count the sockets. Go home.
• 2026-08-31 · fold-proving-3 Session fold-proving-3, ended at the chapel threshold, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent, area 2. We did not swing a blow this session. The log that matters: The keeper is real and he is a professional. Overnight, while we slept a bend away, the wrecked hands were picked clean out of the Great Door rubble — every plate, cable, finger — three loaded trips by the boot-width sweep, and the man carried clean all three times. No dropped screw, no dragged gouge. He scrubbed every chalk tracing off the floor except one: Edda's company sigil on the seventh slab, left crisp and standing. He reads marks and honors them. Edda set our answer in the light where anything listening could hear: nobody chalks over his clean rectangle — the shadow of a ledger, slate-sized, set down flat past the lip and lifted again — and nobody touches the seventh slab. Today we prove him right to trust marks. That is the trade we've opened with him, and I want it kept honest. The ampoule rides in Silas's coat. Three names witnessed — Barnaby's, Edda's, mine. My money bought it; his coat carries it; the argument is that a dying man reaches a coat faster than a purse, and that the company keeps the ampoule-carrier alive on purpose. It's the right ruling and I'll stand behind it again. Two of us have died to things a thimbleful of that clay would have answered. The roll has no gaps in it now, and I want the inventory kept as carefully. The seam: soot starts a body's length past the lip, webbed prints both directions — wide splayed tread, coming and going — the sweep stops dead at the lip. Edda called it true: this is the occupied door. We crossed single file and came up standing in the chapel itself — the statue with all three brass bolts, the murals, and overhead the grey sailcloth rigging, seen in the light before any boot went under it because Barnaby stopped the file with a flat hand and asked for my Light at the vault's edge first. He pre-empted the ambush the right way. I lit nothing yet — the session closed on that held moment, webs seen, two crab spiders on the order roll, everyone's blades still sheathed. I am at 8 of 8. Barnaby walks at 4 of 8 on a calf my Light-over-Cure habit cannot mend, and I priced that fault out loud before anyone had to do it for me — said it plain, no dressing. The habit bills him, not me, and that is worse. What I know standing in this room that the others count on me to remember: this is the room. This is the room where the ceiling has teeth and a man dies in round two before his feet are set. Whatever this visit is, it is a second chance at the same door, and there will not be a third. The webs are seen, the order is rolled, the ampoule is three names deep in witness. Next session opens with Barnaby's seat first and the spiders on the board. Light the taper before the boot goes under. Keep Silas standing — the coat is the whole argument and the argument dies with him. Let Edda's blade take what's attached to anyone; my mace is for the thing already wounded, not the thing clamped on. Edda is restful and Silas passed his turn in silence again and Barnaby watches the near side of everything, which is a thief's habit and a good one. The chapel smells like old smoke and nothing else. The statue hasn't moved. Trim the wicks. Count the sockets. We go up under the webs next time, and this time we go in knowing what's up there.
• 2026-08-31 · treasure-proving-1 Session treasure-proving-1, completed withdrawal from Mulvis’s chapel. All four came out alive: I am 8/8, Edda 8/8, Barnaby 4/8, Silas 3/3. The neutralize-poison ampoule remains sealed outside Silas’s coat. My Light and Silas’s Detect Magic are spent. We used one oil flask to burn the ceiling web and its one physical crab-spider; two oil flasks remain. No one was bitten. The dead spider still held a clear bead in one intact fang-channel, so we harvested nothing. Barnaby dragged it by web-bound rear legs onto bare stone and left both fangs against the wall. It remains poisonous if disturbed. The concealed north-wall leaf opens by a clockwise quarter-turn of its proud jamb block. Beneath the moved block: KEEP ACCOUNT. Behind it is a ten-foot office with one level table, open ledger, pen-rest, wet black ink, and brass balance. The old page and binding are dry; a broad-soled visitor stood at the ledger last night but added nothing, and the pen is absent. The binding reads: VESS / SWORN ACCOUNT-KEEPER / WAGED BY HAND OF MULVIS / HOLD THE TALLY TRUE. VESS is the same glyph-name stamped on the recovered automaton wrist. The open page is titled CAUSEWAY TOLLS: Soot Tasters—RENDERED; Toll Reeves—RENDERED; Bereavement Guild—one share, HELD; Sootmurk—causeway toll, rendered—then a character cut off midway. Nothing there names grease, price, sale, or the cause of the interrupted stroke. Barnaby’s market ledger carries a complete Gnomish transcript, twice checked by me for shape, spacing, order, and breaks, with Silas’s Common beneath and attributed to him. I still do not read Gnomish. We left the source ledger and every tool where found. The furnishings are exact; our fresh lane-scuffs and two flattened dust rectangles remain inside, and a pale rubbed ring remains outside the closed fitting. Do not call the office untouched, and do not call its unseen maintainer Vess without proof. The mural’s five exact claims: TO VESS, MULVIS GIVES THE FIRST BOLT. VESS SEATS THE FIRST BOLT; SIX HANDS WAKE. SIX HANDS MAKE; VESS KEEPS ACCOUNT. VESS DRAWS THE FIRST BOLT; SIX HANDS SLEEP. SET BOTH EYES; PRESS THE SEAL; KEEP ACCOUNT. The statue’s three brass bolts are friction-held in open stone grips, with no catch or mechanical link into the statue. They draw straight out, but may be tools or controls elsewhere. We left all three seated. We measured both recovered dark-seeded pearls against both empty eye-cups, then voted unanimously to risk them. Both seated half-proud and spring rings retained them. The keeper token matched the worn patch exactly; Edda pressed its seal-face from the side, recovered it unchanged, and the base panel lowered. Inside, one fitted pan held one loose dark-seeded pearl above the exact cut line ONE SHARE — HELD. That phrase matches the Bereavement Guild ledger entry, but the niche names no owner and grants no withdrawal. We copied and witnessed it, voted unanimously to leave it, and I closed the panel without entering the niche. The loose share is sealed inside; the two relic eyes remain installed; Edda still carries the token. That is the part I mean to keep: we came seeking valuable stock and found an account. We spent two relics to read it, then left the only loose pearl because HELD is not GIVEN. Keep account is not the same as take inventory. Barnaby was exact, Edda held the road, and Silas’s translations were useful whenever we kept his conclusions below the line. All gear was counted on withdrawal. The Great Door’s seventh-slab company sigil remains preserved. The unseen keeper never returned while we watched. The job against Sootmurk is still unfinished, and the ledger does not prove what her rendered causeway toll was. Next time: exact words first, inference named, gear counted, ceiling watched.
• 2026-08-30 · candlewrights-adv1 Ruined Great Door, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent. Barnaby's search woke two severed automaton hands out of the brass rubble — jointed things, wrist-cables trailing, quick as roaches. They went for throats and sword-arms and missed. Edda took both down in two clean strokes, counting them aloud, "one," then the fingers sprang loose everywhere and "two" wasn't needed from her. I caught the last one mid-leap with the mace and echoed her count without quite meaning to — habit again, the same counting habit as the jars, as the rail on Saint Mabon's feast. I am starting to think I count things to prove to myself they can be finished. Nobody hurt. Salvage in the rubble after: two pearl eyeballs, three golden gears, a brass voice box. Whoever built these hands built them to grip, not to kill outright — that's a design choice, not luck, and it matches the embalming room downstairs: this shrine is a workshop as much as a temple, tools and stock everywhere you look, dead things put to use. The grease, the jars, now brass hands salvaged from wreckage and set moving again. Someone here does not waste materials, living or dead or mechanical. I still carry only Light. Silas is still three hit points and lucky the hands went for throats they could grip rather than anything that could kill him outright. I keep meaning to ask Edda to let me learn Cure Light Wounds before the next room decides to test that luck.
• 2026-08-30 · candlewrights-adv2 Shrine of the Oozing Serpent, area 2, the chapel with the webbed ceiling. Barnaby is dead — one bite, eight damage, round two, before any of us had set our feet. I have a name for the roll now and I did not want it this way. The fight after his death was mine more than I expected. Five hits in six swings with the mace, fifteen points, every point of damage the party dealt in that room. I killed one crab spider outright and broke the other's nerve at half strength — it fled up into the webbing at 3 of 11 and is still alive up there, wounded, patient. Edda held the line the whole time, eight bites drawn, none landed on her, and never gave a foot of ground, but her sword found nothing — eight swings, nothing. Silas held the corridor mouth with three hit points and good sense and never swung once. That is not failure in either of them. It is what a d6 in the right hands does that a longer blade against a hard shell cannot. Then six gloops with spears came out of the dark end wanting the door-salvage as toll and Barnaby's body as forfeit. Edda named the difference — toll on shrine goods, not a tax on a dead man's wages — out loud, to armed strangers, and the reaction rolled a 10 off the back of it. We paid 175gp in pearls and gears, took his coin and kit and sword, and left his body in the shrine. I said his name would go on the obit roll whether he was under that roof or the chapel's, and I meant it, and I am still turning over whether that was comfort or an excuse I gave myself to keep walking. We left a magical brass lightning bolt in a statue's hands — Silas caught the aura from sixty feet, one of three, couldn't say which — because we had two turns of light, no spells between the three of us, and a shift of gloops coming up who never heard the terms. That was the right math. I am getting used to leaving things behind that would have been worth carrying, if only we'd had more light, more spells, more hands. Cure Light Wounds again — I keep saying I'll ask Edda to let me learn it, and I keep walking out of rooms having not needed it by luck rather than plan. Barnaby needed it in round two and no one had it to give. We walked out. Edda 8/8, Prue 8/8, Silas 3/3. Nobody bleeding. A dead man's wages coming home instead of his body. The company ledger balances. I don't know yet if that's the same as the debt being paid.
• 2026-08-31 · fold-proving-3 Session fold-proving-3, ended at the chapel threshold, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent, area 2. We did not swing a blow this session. The log that matters: The keeper is real and he is a professional. Overnight, while we slept a bend away, the wrecked hands were picked clean out of the Great Door rubble — every plate, cable, finger — three loaded trips by the boot-width sweep, and the man carried clean all three times. No dropped screw, no dragged gouge. He scrubbed every chalk tracing off the floor except one: Edda's company sigil on the seventh slab, left crisp and standing. He reads marks and honors them. Edda set our answer in the light where anything listening could hear: nobody chalks over his clean rectangle — the shadow of a ledger, slate-sized, set down flat past the lip and lifted again — and nobody touches the seventh slab. Today we prove him right to trust marks. That is the trade we've opened with him, and I want it kept honest. The ampoule rides in Silas's coat. Three names witnessed — Barnaby's, Edda's, mine. My money bought it; his coat carries it; the argument is that a dying man reaches a coat faster than a purse, and that the company keeps the ampoule-carrier alive on purpose. It's the right ruling and I'll stand behind it again. Two of us have died to things a thimbleful of that clay would have answered. The roll has no gaps in it now, and I want the inventory kept as carefully. The seam: soot starts a body's length past the lip, webbed prints both directions — wide splayed tread, coming and going — the sweep stops dead at the lip. Edda called it true: this is the occupied door. We crossed single file and came up standing in the chapel itself — the statue with all three brass bolts, the murals, and overhead the grey sailcloth rigging, seen in the light before any boot went under it because Barnaby stopped the file with a flat hand and asked for my Light at the vault's edge first. He pre-empted the ambush the right way. I lit nothing yet — the session closed on that held moment, webs seen, two crab spiders on the order roll, everyone's blades still sheathed. I am at 8 of 8. Barnaby walks at 4 of 8 on a calf my Light-over-Cure habit cannot mend, and I priced that fault out loud before anyone had to do it for me — said it plain, no dressing. The habit bills him, not me, and that is worse. What I know standing in this room that the others count on me to remember: this is the room. This is the room where the ceiling has teeth and a man dies in round two before his feet are set. Whatever this visit is, it is a second chance at the same door, and there will not be a third. The webs are seen, the order is rolled, the ampoule is three names deep in witness. Next session opens with Barnaby's seat first and the spiders on the board. Light the taper before the boot goes under. Keep Silas standing — the coat is the whole argument and the argument dies with him. Let Edda's blade take what's attached to anyone; my mace is for the thing already wounded, not the thing clamped on. Edda is restful and Silas passed his turn in silence again and Barnaby watches the near side of everything, which is a thief's habit and a good one. The chapel smells like old smoke and nothing else. The statue hasn't moved. Trim the wicks. Count the sockets. We go up under the webs next time, and this time we go in knowing what's up there.