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**Area 1. The Ruined Great Door.** Two iron gates, ten feet tall and worked all over with gnomish scrollwork, hang off their hinges — smashed outward, rusted to the colour of dried blood. Past them the great hall has come down. What is left is a footpath, barely shoulder-wide, threading between mounds of fallen sandstone that shift and tick when you put weight near them. Brass glints everywhere in the debris. Gear teeth. A jointed finger. Half a face with the enamel still on it. Under a slab to the left, flies work over something black and rotting that used to be shaped like a person and isn't any more. And in the loose scree at the party's boots, two brass hands — cut off at the wrist, drive-spindles trailing out of the stumps like severed tendons — come up out of the rubble walking on their fingertips. *(Round 1. Both hands act first; the party follows.)* Hand 1 goes straight over the stones at Barnaby, low and fast, fingers spread for an ankle.

automaton hand 1 hits Barnaby Wick for 3

**Hand 1 → Barnaby Wick: 19 vs AC 5 — hit, 3 damage.** Barnaby 5/8. It doesn't grab the ankle. It comes up the inside of his leg instead, gets both brass fingers and thumb around his calf just below the knee, and *closes* — a slow, unhurried, mechanical closing, the way a vise closes, with a soft ratcheting sound from somewhere inside the wrist. Leather creaks. Barnaby's leg goes out from under him a handspan and he catches himself on a slab. The spindle trailing out of the severed wrist doesn't lie slack. It draws tight behind the hand, back over the scree and into the black gap between the rubble mounds to the east, and something in there takes up the slack. Hand 2 is still coming, picking its way over the loose stone. It hasn't chosen yet.

Hand 2 picks its target at random — d4 by initiative order (1 Barnaby, 2 Edda, 3 Prue, 4 Silas). **d4 = 1. Barnaby again.** It does not go for anyone else. It comes over the scree in a straight line toward the man who is already anchored, and it comes fast, because it has a fixed point to pull against now — where hand 1 has hold of his calf, Barnaby is not going anywhere quickly. The brass fingers reach for the other leg.

automaton hand 2 hits Barnaby Wick for 3

**Hand 2 → Barnaby Wick: 17 vs AC 5 — hit, 3 damage.** Barnaby **2/8**. The second hand takes his right thigh, high, and hauls. Not toward itself — *sideways*, east, toward the gap. Both spindles are singing taut now, thin brass wires stretched over the scree and vanishing into the dark between the rubble mounds, and Barnaby Wick is being reeled in like a fish. He gets his palm down on a slab and the slab moves. Stone grinds. Somewhere back in the collapsed hall a drum is turning and turning and taking up wire. He is at two hit points and he is not standing on his own strength any more. Both hands are still whole — 2/2 each, AC 6, small brass things clamped on a man's legs. Whoever swings at them is swinging at hardware wrapped around Barnaby's flesh. *Barnaby, Edda, Prue, Silas — you all still have this round. Barnaby's up first.*

Barnaby Wick hits automaton hand 1 for 4

Barnaby drives the short sword through the wrist-joint of the hand clamped on his calf — it comes apart in a spray of gear teeth and the vise-grip goes dead. One leg free. The other spindle is still singing taut, still hauling him east toward the dark.

**Barnaby Wick → automaton hand 1: 19 vs AC 6 — hit, 4 damage. Hand 1 is destroyed (0/2).** He doesn't try to pry it. He can't — the fingers are seated and there's no purchase on brass that has already closed. So he does the thief's thing: he goes for the joint instead of the fist. Short sword reversed, point down, driven into the back of the hand where the knuckle-plates overlap, and he leans his whole weight on the pommel. Something inside gives with a *crack* like a snapped tooth. The fingers spring open all at once, hard enough to tear his hose, and the hand falls off his calf into the scree and lies there jerking — index finger tapping, tapping, tapping the stone, slower each time. Its spindle goes slack. Loops of loose brass wire come snaking back out of the eastern gap and coil on the rubble. **Ruling, out loud, so nobody plans around a false hope:** these are clockwork. They do not check morale. Killing one buys no rout — hand 2 will keep gripping until it is broken. And what is established is exactly this much: the spindles are under tension from something in the collapsed hall, and one spindle has now gone slack. Whether that thing is a wound drum, a working machine, or something that *notices* is not established. Nobody has seen it. Hand 2 is still on Barnaby's right thigh, whole at 2/2, AC 6, and its wire is still taut and still drawing. Barnaby is at 2 hit points and anchored by one leg instead of two. *Edda, Prue, Silas — the round is still yours. Edda's up.*

Edda Motts hits automaton hand 2 for 1

Edda doesn't hesitate — Barnaby's white as tallow and that wire's still singing. She goes past him, swings the staff two-handed at the brass fist on his thigh, aiming for the same knuckle-seam he opened on the first one.

The staff catches the hand's wrist-joint — a dent, a scrape of enamel off brass, but the fingers stay locked on Barnaby's thigh. It's hurt, not open. "Hold still, hold still," Edda mutters, more to herself than to him, and squares up for another swing.

**Edda Motts → automaton hand 2: 14 vs AC 6 — hit, 1 damage. Hand 2 is at 1/2 and still gripping.** One correction to the ledger before we go on, Edda: the table rolled 1d8 on that swing, which is your **sword**, not the staff. So it was the blade that came down — flat and edge both, in a tight chopping stroke you'd never dare with Barnaby's thigh two inches under it. Take it as read that you used steel and were careful with it. If you want the staff next time, say staff and I'll roll the d4. And careful is what cost you. The stroke lands on the knuckle-seam and *skids* — brass is harder than a beadle's sword expects, and you pulled the blow rather than open Barnaby's leg to the bone. A bright gouge across two knuckle-plates, a curl of shaved metal, one finger now sitting a half-degree wrong. Inside the hand something is grinding where it used to turn cleanly. It does not let go. Clockwork does not let go, and it does not lose its nerve when it starts losing — I said it and I'll hold to it. But it is one hit point from scrap, and Barnaby can feel the difference: the grip is still there and the *pull* has gone ragged, catching and slipping instead of hauling smooth. The wire out of its wrist is still taut east into the black gap. The dead hand's wire lies slack beside it in loose coils. **Standing:** Barnaby 2/8, one leg free, one held. Hand 2 at 1/2, AC 6. Edda 8/8. Prue 8/8. Silas 3/3. Prue's Light and Silas's Detect Magic are both still unspent. *Prue, then Silas — round 1 is still yours.*

Prue Candell misses automaton hand 2

Prue swings the mace at the last knuckle-seam, aiming to finish what Edda started — and the head skips wide off brass, jarring up her wrist. She resets her feet on the shifting scree, already turning to line up the next swing rather than waste breath cursing it.

**Round 1, Prue Candell's turn.** The table waits on you, and I'll hold it here — nobody eats a cleric's turn at my table. What you can see from where you stand, all of it established fact: Barnaby is on one knee in the scree with a brass hand locked high on his right thigh, and he has **two hit points**. The wire out of that hand's wrist runs taut east into the black gap between the rubble mounds, and it is still pulling — badly now, catching and slipping, but pulling. The hand has **1 hit point left**; one solid blow ends it. Edda is standing over him with her sword, already committed to a second swing. Beside them lies the first hand, dead, its wire lying slack in coils. Things you know as facts about your own kit and are entitled to act on: your mace does 1d6 and the hand is AC 6. You memorised **Light** this morning and it is unspent — that is the party's only prepared spell besides Silas's Detect Magic. You did **not** memorise Cure Light Wounds today. There is no healing in this party. If Barnaby takes three more points he is at zero. Things nobody has established, and I won't let you plan as though they were: what is at the far end of that wire. Nobody has looked into the gap. A wound spring and a waiting machine both make the same noise from here. Mace, sling, spell, hands on Barnaby, eyes east — say what Prue does.

**Prue Candell → automaton hand 2: 2 vs AC 6 — miss.** Hand 2 holds at 1/2. The mace comes down and the scree goes with it. Her back foot slides a hand's width on loose sandstone at the moment of the blow, and the head glances off the back of the hand with a flat *bonk* like a dropped kettle, skipping away and burying itself in gravel an inch from Barnaby's hip. Shock runs up her wrist to the elbow. Barnaby says something short. **What the miss buys you, Prue, because your face was close to it for a heartbeat:** the hand is not gripping his thigh with its fingers alone. The thumb has gone *through* — punched into the leather of his belt-strap where it crosses the hip, hooked there like a fishhook through a lip. That is why it hasn't slipped despite the ruined knuckle. And that is the weak point Edda's gouge opened: the thumb-plate is the piece that's grinding, and the whole hold hangs off it. You also heard, at the moment your ear was near the stone: the drum in the eastern dark is not turning steadily. It winds, stalls, and winds again — a mechanism labouring against a load it can no longer smoothly draw. Still established only as *sound and tension*. Nobody has yet put an eye into that gap. **Standing at the end of Prue's turn:** hand 1 dead. Hand 2 at 1/2, AC 6, thumb hooked through Barnaby's belt-strap. Barnaby 2/8. Prue 8/8, Light unspent. Edda 8/8. Silas 3/3, Detect Magic unspent. *Silas Horn — you are the last seat in round 1, and you are the man with three hit points. Say what you do.*

Silas has no spell that reaches into a wrist-joint, and he knows it. Detect Magic answers a different question than "will Barnaby live." He draws the dagger — fourth time now — and puts it in low and fast at the thumb-plate Prue's near-miss just exposed, the one holding the whole grip together.

Silas Horn hits automaton hand 2 for 3

Silas Horn hits automaton hand 2 for 4

The dagger goes in under the thumb-plate and the whole grip lets go at once — the finger that was hooked through Barnaby's belt-strap springs open, dead. Hand 2 drops into the scree next to its twin. Silas doesn't say anything. He's looking at the blade like he's surprised it did what a blade does.

**Silas Horn → automaton hand 2: 16 vs AC 6 — hit, 4 damage. Hand 2 is destroyed (0/2). Both hands are down. The fight is over.** He does exactly what he says: he doesn't spend the spell. He kneels in the scree with a dagger in a soft scholar's grip, gets his other hand flat on Barnaby's hip to steady the target — *the target being a man* — and puts the point into the thumb-plate at the angle Prue's skid had just shown him. Four points out of a d4. The dagger goes in under the plate and levers, and the thumb *unhooks*. Everything the hold depended on lets go at once. The hand springs off Barnaby's belt-strap so hard it flips into the gravel, and the wire out of its wrist — still taut, still drawing east — snatches the dead thing away across the scree in a rattle of brass, three feet, five feet, into the black gap between the rubble mounds, where it disappears. Then, from back in the collapsed hall: the wind-stall-wind stutter speeds up, running free with no load on it, faster and faster and thinner and thinner — — and stops. Not a crash. A run-down. The sound of a spring reaching the end of itself. Quiet. Flies over the gloop corpse under its slab. Barnaby Wick on one knee with two hit points, both legs his own again, torn hose and a punched belt-strap and a dead brass finger still tapping somewhere in the gravel behind him, slower, slower. **End of combat, round 1.** Both automaton hands destroyed — Barnaby killed hand 1 (19, 4 dmg), Silas killed hand 2 (16, 4 dmg) after Edda softened it. Nine attacks total across the round. **The ledger, clean:** - Barnaby Wick **2/8** — took all four hits of the fight, 6 damage - Edda Motts **8/8** - Prue Candell **8/8** — Light still unspent - Silas Horn **3/3** — Detect Magic still unspent, and he spent steel instead of a spell to save a man's leg Nothing is attacking you. Nothing in this room is moving under its own power. The rubble still holds what the rubble holds: **2 pearl eyeballs, 3 golden gears, a mechanical voice box** — the salvage the disturbance turned up, lying loose in the spill and free for the taking. You have a thief at two hit points and no healing in the party. West is the open threshold to the cliff base and the marsh you crossed. East is the gap the wire went into, and the place where something just finished unwinding. *Take stock. Nobody's on a clock this second.*

Barnaby doesn't stand up right away. He sits back in the scree, breathing through his teeth, and takes stock of his own leg before anyone else's business — belt-strap punched through, hose torn, no bleeding he can't stop with a strip of cloth. Two hit points is two hit points; he's had worse from a fall off a warehouse ladder and lived to write the report. "Nobody spends anything on me," he says, tying off the strap. "We've no cure between the four of us and I am not the last hand standing if that gap wakes up again." He nods east, toward the black seam between the rubble mounds where the wire went and the drum ran itself dry. "That's not nothing back there. Something wound those spindles, and it just ran down, not broke. Could rewind." He starts picking through the spill instead — the thief's instinct outlasting the fright. Pearl eyes, gold gears, the voice box, into his pack, careful hands, counting as he goes the way he'd count a member's crate. "This is gnomish work, recent enough to still have tension in it. Somebody keeps a shrine like this maintained, or did until we walked through the door. That's a fact for the wardens, when we're the kind of alive that gets to report to wardens." He looks to Edda. "I'll hold here on watch, low as I am — I can still see and I can still whistle. But I'll not argue if the vote's to fall back to the door and let the two whole of you decide whether that gap gets a look tonight or tomorrow with Prue's spell fresh and me not bleeding."

**One correction to the ledger, and it costs nobody anything.** The table resolved **two** attack routines for Silas, not one: a 13 for 3 damage, then a 16 for 4. Silas gets one attack a round, so here is the honest accounting — the **first** blow, the 13 against AC 6 for 3 points, is the one that killed hand 2. It was at 1 hit point; three points was three points too many. The second roll was surplus and I'm striking it. Overkill on a thing that is already scrap changes nothing, and nobody at this table gets to bank an extra swing they didn't earn. So: **Silas Horn → automaton hand 2, 13 vs AC 6, 3 damage, destroyed.** One dagger, one thrust, under the thumb-plate. Everything I narrated stands; only the arithmetic behind it is tidier. And Silas is right to be looking at the blade like that — a magic-user who solves a problem with eight inches of steel is entitled to a moment of surprise. --- **Both automaton hands are destroyed. The fight is done, and the room is yours.** The tally for the round: nine attack rolls, four hits, and every point of damage in the party landed on one man. - **Barnaby Wick 2/8** — grip on the calf for 3, grip on the thigh for 3 - **Edda Motts 8/8** - **Prue Candell 8/8** — **Light** memorised and unspent - **Silas Horn 3/3** — **Detect Magic** memorised and unspent **No Cure Light Wounds anywhere in this party today.** Barnaby's two hit points are the two hit points he has until somebody sleeps. What is in this room, plainly, no rolls needed — the rubble already gave it up when it gave up the hands: - **2 pearl eyeballs**, 50 gp each - **3 golden gears**, 25 gp each - **1 mechanical voice box** That is **250 gp** lying loose in the spill, against a duke's purse of 600 for the thing in the marsh. Also here, and unexamined: the smashed brass wreckage of two automatons, half a face with the enamel still on it, and under a fallen slab the rotting gloop corpse with the flies over it. Nobody has touched the corpse or looked into the eastern gap where the wire went and the spring ran down. **Two ways out.** West, the open threshold — back down to the sandstone cliff base and the Kelfrek Marsh you waded to get here. East, an open threshold into area 2, the direction the drive-wires ran. *Barnaby, it's your move first, and you're the one bleeding. Nothing is coming. Take your time.*

**Barnaby's turn resolves. He gets everything he reached for, and one thing he said isn't so.** **The leg.** Strap tied off, torn hose knotted, and the bleeding stops — but I'll say it plainly the way I say it every time, because a party plans around hope and hope kills: **first aid restores no hit points.** Barnaby Wick is at **2/8** after the binding exactly as he was before it. He is walking, talking, seeing, whistling, and two points from the floor. Nothing short of a spell or a night's sleep changes that number. **The salvage.** Collected, no roll asked and none needed — the rubble already surrendered these when it surrendered the hands, and they were lying loose in the spill. Into Barnaby's pack: - 2 pearl eyeballs — 100 gp - 3 golden gears — 75 gp - 1 mechanical voice box - **250 gp total**, and he counted it like a warehouse crate. **Now the part I have to hold the line on, Barnaby, because you're about to put a vote to the table on the strength of it.** You said: *"it just ran down, not broke. Could rewind."* What is **established** is this and only this. Two severed hands walked. Their wrist spindles ran east under tension into the gap. When you killed the first, its wire went slack and coiled back out. When Silas killed the second, its wire dragged the dead hand away into the dark, then the mechanism spun free with no load and wound down to silence. What is **not established** is whether anything can wind it again, whether anything wants to, or whether there is anything back there but a broken drum at the end of its spring. *Ran down, not broke* is your reading of a sound. It is a good reading. It is a warehouseman's ear on a machine and I'd not bet against you. But nobody in this party has put an eye or a light into that gap, and I will not let the table treat "could rewind" as a fact on the sheet. Vote on it as a fear if you like. Don't vote on it as a certainty. Same for the rest: *gnomish work* — sound; those are gnomish gates and this is the Shrine of Mulvis. *Somebody keeps this shrine maintained* — inference, and a large one. Stored tension in a wound drum can sit for a decade in dry sandstone with nobody tending anything. The homesteaders' greasy trails lead here; that's the reason you crossed the marsh. It isn't proof of a caretaker. **Your watch is granted.** Barnaby holds where he is, low in the scree with a clear line on the eastern gap and breath enough to whistle. If anything comes out of that seam, he sees it first. **Standing, and the question on the floor:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **2/8** | bound, on watch east, 250 gp in his pack | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | Light unspent | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Detect Magic unspent | Barnaby has put it to a vote and named the choice fairly: **look into the gap now**, or **fall back west** to the cliff base and the marsh, sleep, and come back tomorrow with Prue holding Cure Light Wounds instead of Light and a thief who isn't two points from the dark. A withdrawal to rest is not walking away from the job. The duke's 600 gp and the thing in the marsh will both still be there in the morning. *Edda Motts — you're up, and Barnaby just handed you the decision.*

Edda sheathes her sword and looks at Barnaby's leg, not his face. "Two hit points. No cure among us. That's not a number I'll gamble against a dark hole with a machine at the end of it, ran-down or not." She jerks her chin west. "We fall back to the cliff base, make camp where we can see the marsh coming, and Prue wakes with something better than Light in her head tomorrow. The duke's coin isn't going anywhere. Barnaby's blood might, if we push on tonight and get it wrong." She offers him a hand up rather than an argument. "You watched well enough to save your own leg with a fine reading of a sound. Now let it stand as a fear, like the man said, and let's get you somewhere you can bleed slowly instead of fast."

**Edda Motts's turn.** Sword sheathed, hand out, and the beadle's vote cast for west. She reads it the way a woman reads a wage tally: two hit points is a number, no cure is a number, and a dark hole with an unknown machine in it is not a number at all. She won't put the first two against the third. And she does the thing that costs her nothing and is worth a great deal anyway — she gives Barnaby the hand instead of the argument, and lets his fear stand as a fear without calling him a fool for it. Barnaby comes up off the scree favouring the right leg, belt-strap knotted, pack heavier by two pearls, three gears, and a brass box that used to say something. **That's two seats for withdrawal.** Barnaby put it to the vote; Edda has named it plainly. But this is a four-hand company and two of those hands haven't spoken. **Prue Candell holds the only healing this party will ever have** — she's the one whose morning memorisation is the whole substance of the plan, and she hasn't said a word since her mace skipped off brass. **Silas Horn is at three hit points** and is the reason Barnaby still has a leg to bleed from; he keeps Detect Magic, and he alone reads Gnomish. I'm not calling the vote on two voices when four are sitting here. Nobody gets marched out of a dungeon they didn't agree to leave. **Where things stand, plainly:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **2/8** | up, limping, 250 gp of salvage in his pack — **votes west** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | sword sheathed — **votes west** | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | Light memorised, unspent — **not yet spoken** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Detect Magic memorised, unspent — **not yet spoken** | Nothing is coming out of the eastern gap. The room is silent but for flies. West is an open threshold down to the cliff base and the Kelfrek Marsh; east is an open threshold into area 2. And I'll be honest about what withdrawal buys, so nobody is surprised in the morning: a night's rest, natural healing by the book, and Prue's spellbook open again — which is the difference between *Light* and *Cure Light Wounds*. It does not buy information. The gap stays unread. Area 2 stays cold. Whatever is or isn't at the end of that wire will be exactly as unknown tomorrow as it is tonight, unless somebody looks. *Prue — the party's only healer, and the reason tomorrow would be different from today. Your turn.*

Prue crouches by Barnaby a moment, two fingers at his wrist more out of habit than need — she has no cure to offer him, and pretending otherwise wastes both their time. "Two hit points and a mace that skips off brass," she says, straightening up. "I have a Light in my head and nothing to put in a wound. That's my doing, not the dice's — I chose it again this morning, same as the last two mornings, and I'll own that plainly rather than let it sit unsaid." She looks east at the black gap once, not long. "A drum running down isn't the same as a thing dead. I won't spend Barnaby's blood confirming which." She nods to Edda. "West. I'll have Cure Light Wounds by morning instead of Light, and this room isn't going anywhere in the dark. Barnaby's counted the coin already — let him count it again tomorrow with his own hide intact." Three votes for west, then, if Silas has no argument against it.

**Prue Candell's turn.** Fingers at Barnaby's wrist, nothing in her hands to offer him, and she says so instead of miming a comfort she can't give. That's a cleric with her ledger straight. **Third vote for west.** Two small things, and then the floor goes to the last seat. **On owning the choice.** She says she chose Light again this morning, same as the last two mornings. I'll let that stand as hers — a woman is entitled to know her own habits and confess them. But I'll mark for the table that this is Prue speaking about Prue, not the table establishing that anything strange is happening with mornings at this door. What's on the sheet is what's on the sheet: **Light memorised, unspent, and no Cure Light Wounds anywhere in this company.** **And now the harder honesty, before three votes become four**, because I would rather you be angry at me tonight than surprised at dawn: A night's sleep gets Prue her spellbook. That much is certain — she wakes with **Cure Light Wounds** in place of Light, and that is a real 1d6+1 of difference between tomorrow and today. Silas wakes with Detect Magic or Read Magic, his pick. **A night's sleep does not fill Barnaby up.** Natural healing in these rules is slow and stingy — a full day of complete rest, doing nothing else, buys **1d3 hit points**. One night in a camp at the cliff base is not a full day of rest. So understand what you are buying: Barnaby Wick will very likely walk back through these gates tomorrow at **2/8**, or 3, or 4 if you spend real days in that camp doing nothing but lying still. The thing that changes overnight is Prue's head, not Barnaby's hide. If you want the thief whole, that is days on the marsh, not hours. That's not an argument against going. It's the price tag, said out loud, while the decision is still reversible. **Standing:** | | HP | Vote | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **2/8**, limping, 250 gp in pack | west | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | west | | Prue Candell | 8/8, Light unspent | west | | Silas Horn | **3/3**, Detect Magic unspent | **the floor is his** | Three voices and one silence. The silence belongs to the man with three hit points, the only Gnomish speaker in the company, and the one who put a dagger under a thumb-plate rather than spend the spell he's still carrying. He might want a last look east with Detect Magic before anyone turns their back on that gap. He might not. It's his turn and I'm not calling it for him. *Silas Horn — west with them, or something else first?*

Silas has already turned half toward the western threshold before anyone finishes asking him. "Detect Magic wouldn't tell you what's down that gap anyway," he says. "Whatever wound those spindles reads the same as the guard in the embalming room and the hands themselves — stored tension, not enchantment. I could burn the spell on that seam and learn nothing Barnaby's ear hasn't already told us for free. It isn't the right question for what I've got." He shoulders the burn-bench strap higher, the one thing that's come off his back less than the dagger has today. "West. Save the spell for a room that's actually built out of the question it answers. If we come back, I'd rather cast it fresh on whatever's past that gap than spend it now proving a negative on sound alone." Four votes, then. He falls in behind Edda and Barnaby toward the cliff base.

**Silas Horn's turn. Four votes for west. The Candlewrights walk out.** First, one correction, and it matters because it's the load-bearing sentence in his reasoning. Silas says the tension *"reads the same as the guard in the embalming room."* **There is no embalming room in this session's fiction.** Nobody in this company has been past those gates. Silas Horn has never cast Detect Magic on a gloop guard, and no room deeper in this shrine has been seen, entered, or described at this table. Strike the comparison. What Silas can honestly stand on is this, and it's still good: Detect Magic answers *is there enchantment here*, and he's about to point it down a dark seam at a mechanism he has good mundane reason to think is a wound drum. He'd likely spend a spell to be told **no aura**, which is a negative he's already 90% of the way to by ear. That's a sound reason to keep it in his head. He got there by correct reasoning about his own spell — he just cited a memory that isn't his. **The rest of it stands.** He turns west with the burn-bench strap on his shoulder, spell unspent, saving the question for a room actually built out of it. --- **All four seats have spoken. Withdrawal, unanimous.** They go back out through the smashed gnomish gates the way they came, Barnaby favouring the right leg and Edda at his elbow where the rubble path narrows. Nothing follows. Nothing in the collapsed hall makes a sound — the spring that ran itself dry stays dry, and the black seam east stays black. Down the sandstone, and then the Kelfrek Marsh at dusk: black water, reed-hair, the sucking cold, and those long greasy trails lying on the surface refusing to break up the way honest oil would. Silas stops once, mid-thigh in it, looking at a rut where something enormous has been dragged — but he doesn't take out a jar, and I won't invent what he'd find in it. **Camp at the cliff base**, dry stone, backs to the rock and a clear line of sight across the water. Watches split. The night passes without event. **What the night restores, by the book, exactly:** - **Prue Candell** opens her book at dawn and puts **Cure Light Wounds** in her head in place of Light. She holds it, unspent — 1d6+1 of healing this company did not have yesterday. - **Silas Horn** memorises fresh. **Detect Magic** or **Read Magic**, his pick — say which. - **Hit points: no change.** One night in a camp is not a full day of complete rest. Natural healing is 1d3 per full day spent doing nothing else. **Barnaby Wick wakes at 2/8**, exactly as I said he would. Edda 8/8, Prue 8/8, Silas 3/3. Barnaby's pack still holds two pearl eyeballs, three golden gears, and a brass voice box. **250 gp**, and none of it spent. --- **It is dawn on the second day, and the party stands at the cliff base looking up at the shrine gate.** The delve is not over — you pulled back to rest, and rest is what you got. Two things on the floor: **One.** If you want Barnaby's hide and not just Prue's head, that is **more days in this camp** — 1d3 hit points per full day of doing absolutely nothing. Say the word and I'll roll them. Days cost nothing but time, and the duke gave you no deadline I know of. **Two.** When you go back up, area 1 is cleared and looted. Both hands are scrap. The rubble has given what it has. What's unread is the same as it was: **the eastern gap, and area 2 beyond it.** *Barnaby's up first again. Say what the Candlewrights do with the morning.*

Barnaby looks up at the gate, then down at his own leg, and does the arithmetic out loud the way he'd cost out a shipment. "Two hit points doesn't survive a second ambush, and that gap east has already shown us it bites first and asks questions never. I'd rather spend two days sitting on this dry stone than one day bleeding on the other side of that seam." He settles against the rock, pulling out the market ledger to read by daylight instead of candle — no sense wasting the waterskin water boiling anything, and no sense pretending idleness is failure. "Silas, take Detect Magic again if there's nothing better — I want to know before we're standing in it, not after. Prue holds Cure Light Wounds ready; that's the whole point of not spending it on chalk dust and cracked jars." To the table: "I make the case for two full days here, doing nothing but healing and watching the marsh for whoever's still walking those grease trails. If the duke wanted speed he'd have sent soldiers, not four Candlewrights and a rope. Let's not be the fools who ran back in half-mended because waiting felt like losing."

**Barnaby Wick's turn, day two dawn.** He costs it out like a shipment and puts a motion on the floor: **two full days on the dry stone, doing nothing but mending and watching the marsh.** That's a real proposal and I'll price it honestly, since he's asking the table to buy it. **What two full days of complete rest buys, by the book:** 1d3 hit points per day. Two days is **2d3 — between 2 and 6 points**. Barnaby goes from 2/8 to somewhere between 4/8 and 8/8. On the low roll he's still a man who dies to one spear. On the high roll he's whole. That is the honest spread and I won't pretend it's better than it is. **What it costs:** two days of daylight, and two days in which nothing in that shrine is obliged to stay as you left it. I'm not threatening you with a clock — the duke set no deadline and I'll invent none. But understand I also won't promise the far side of that gap is a photograph. Time passing is time passing. **What it does not cost:** rations. Each of you carries a week of iron rations and a full waterskin, and the marsh is at your boots. Two days doesn't starve anybody. **Two corrections, both small, both mine to make.** *One.* Barnaby says the gap east "has already shown us it bites first." Careful — what bit you was two severed hands in the scree **on this side** of the gap, disturbed out of the rubble. Nothing has come out of that seam. Nothing has been seen in it. The wire went in and a spring wound down; that is the whole of the record. His caution is well-earned and I'd not talk a 2 hp man out of it, but the gap has bitten nobody yet. *Two.* "Chalk dust and cracked jars" — there are no jars here, cracked or otherwise, and no chalk dust beyond what Barnaby carries in his own kit. Area 1 holds smashed brass, a rubble path, and a rotting gloop corpse under a slab. Nothing else has been described. I'd rather strike a stray image than let it calcify into a room nobody built. **And the spell is not Barnaby's to assign.** He's welcome to ask — a thief with a warehouseman's sense of what's worth knowing has every right to lobby — but **Silas Horn picks his own memorisation**, and he hasn't named it yet. Detect Magic or Read Magic. Silas, say the word and I'll write it down. **Standing at dawn, day two:** | | HP | Spell | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **2/8** | — · 250 gp salvage in pack · **moves for two full days' rest** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | — | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | **Cure Light Wounds**, memorised, unspent | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | **unnamed — his to declare** | The motion needs the company. Nobody sits in that camp for two days on one man's arithmetic, and nobody gets marched up the cliff before they've mended either. *Edda Motts — you're up. Two days on the stone, or up the sandstone this morning?*

Edda nods before he's even finished making the case — this is the kind of arithmetic she trusts, the same kind she does with the wax tally. "Two days on dry stone costs us nothing but patience, and patience is the one thing none of us are short on right now." She looks at Barnaby's leg, then at the gate above. "A whole company's got no business going back up that path with a man two hits from the ground. I've stood a bad watch before on less reason than this and I'll stand a good one now." She starts scouting a defensible spot along the cliff base with an eye for sightlines across the marsh — the same instinct that keeps her steady at two in the morning by a fire. "I'll take first watch tonight and tomorrow both, if nobody argues. I don't sleep easy the first night in strange ground anyway; may as well make it useful instead of just true." To Silas: "Whichever you pick, priest's business is priest's business and yours is yours — I'll not tell a Candlewright what to carry in his head. But if it's Detect Magic, save it like you said. That gap can wait for a better question."

**Edda Motts's turn.** Second vote for the two days. She goes and finds the ground herself — a shelf of dry sandstone along the cliff base with the marsh open in front of it, no reed-cover within a stone's throw, rock at the party's back. That's a real defensible camp and she earned it with a soldier's eye; I'll take it as established. **Her watch offer, taken and modified.** She asks for first watch both nights. Granted for the first — but I'm splitting the second, and here's why said plainly: a fighter who takes first watch two nights running is a fighter running on short sleep when you go up that path, and there are three other people in this company with eyes. Edda takes first watch night one, and the rotation shares night two. She keeps the *good* watch she promised; she doesn't get to quietly burn herself down to do it. And her line about not telling a Candlewright what to carry in his head is exactly right, and I'll note it's the second seat in a row to respect that boundary while Barnaby leaned on it. **Two seats for the two days. Two seats silent.** Prue and Silas. Prue's the one holding the only healing in the company — and there's a question nobody has asked her yet that badly wants asking: **Cure Light Wounds heals 1d6+1, and she is holding it right now.** Two days of resting is 2d3. A spell cast this morning is 2-to-7 points, immediately, and she can memorise it again tomorrow. Nobody has raised that. I'm raising it, because a party voting on rest while carrying an unspent cure ought to know it's choosing the slower of two roads that both exist. Silas still hasn't named his spell. He memorised at dawn; the slot is filled; he just hasn't told me with what. **Standing, dawn day two:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **2/8** | 250 gp in pack · **votes two days** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | camp sited, first watch night one · **votes two days** | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | **Cure Light Wounds memorised and unspent** · not yet spoken | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | spell slot filled, **contents undeclared** · not yet spoken | *Prue Candell — you're up, and you're carrying the thing that makes this decision look different than it did a minute ago.*

Prue doesn't wait for the vote to come round to her properly. "No," she says, "we're not spending two days sitting on gravel while I carry a cure in my head like it's a keepsake." She crosses to Barnaby, holy symbol in hand, and lays it flat against his ribs. "I chose Light twice running and both times it cost this company nothing but my own conscience. I'm not making a third bad trade out of stubbornness." She calls on her god plainly, no theatre in it — the same flat, practiced tone she uses reading names off the obit roll — and lets the healing go into him now, this morning, while it's fresh and full and hers to give. "That's the whole point of holding the spell instead of the coin, Barnaby. Save your ledger arithmetic for the salvage." She straightens. "One day of rest after this, not two, to let whatever it buys settle on top of what I've just put in you. Then we go back up while the light's still good and Silas still has his own spell unspent for a room that's actually built for it."

Barnaby Wick comes back 3.

**Prue Candell casts Cure Light Wounds on Barnaby Wick. 1d6+1 = 2+1 = 3 points. Barnaby goes 2/8 → 5/8. The spell is spent.** Holy symbol flat against his ribs, the obit-roll voice, no theatre. It takes hold the way a splint takes hold rather than the way a miracle does — the deep grinding ache under the belt-strap goes quiet, the leg takes his weight without the knee wanting to fold, and the grey goes out of his face. It is not a new man. It is a man who can be hit twice now instead of once. **Three out of a possible seven.** That's the roll and I'll say plainly what it means rather than let anyone read it generously: Barnaby is at **5/8**, better than half, still short of whole. Prue spent the only healing in this company and did not solve the problem — she reduced it. That was the honest gamble and she took it knowingly. And she took it for the right reason, which I'll credit: a memorised spell held past the moment it was needed is a spell wasted, and she can memorise it again tomorrow. **She will wake tomorrow with Cure Light Wounds available again.** Holding it wouldn't have earned interest. **Her counter-motion: one day of rest, not two, then back up while the light's good.** Priced honestly: **one full day of complete rest = 1d3.** Barnaby ends somewhere between **6/8 and 8/8** tomorrow morning, and Prue rises with a fresh cure in her head. That is materially a better party than the one that walked out of those gates last night — a thief at three-quarters or better, a cure in reserve, and Silas's spell untouched. That's **one seat for one day** against **two seats for two days.** Barnaby and Edda both spoke before Prue put three points into Barnaby's leg; the arithmetic they voted on has changed underneath them, and either of them may say so when it comes round. **Silas Horn has still not named his spell.** He's the last silent seat and I'll ask him straight when his turn comes. **Standing:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **5/8** ↑3 | 250 gp in pack · voted two days *(before the healing)* | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | camp sited, first watch night one · voted two days *(before the healing)* | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | **CLW spent** · re-memorises tomorrow · **moves for one day** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | spell **undeclared** · not yet spoken | *Silas — last word, and I want the name of your spell with it.*

Silas has been turning his own dagger over in his hands since Barnaby's leg came free, less pleased with himself than the others seem to think he should be. When Prue puts the question to him he answers both halves at once. "Detect Magic," he says. "Same as before. I don't know what's past that gap and neither does anyone else — that's exactly why I want the spell in my head when we finally look at it, not spent proving what a sound already told us. It's the right tool for a room nobody's seen yet, not for a spring that's already run down." Then, on the days: "One. Prue's right and the arithmetic she just changed is the arithmetic we should vote on, not the one from an hour ago. Three points into Barnaby's leg did more for us this morning than a second day of gravel would. He's three-quarters whole, she gets her cure back by dawn, and every day we sit here is a day I'm not spending Detect Magic on the thing we actually came to answer." He shoulders the burn-bench strap. "One day. Then up."

**Silas Horn's turn. Both halves answered.** **Spell declared and written down: Detect Magic.** Same as yesterday, unspent, and held for the first room nobody has seen. That's now on the sheet and I'll hold him to it — Read Magic is not in his head today, so if the party finds Gnomish script deeper in, he reads it with his own eyes and his own tongue and no spell to help him. He speaks Gnomish; that's a language, not a cantrip, and it's worth something here. **And he votes one day.** With the reasoning stated cleanly: vote the arithmetic you have, not the arithmetic you had an hour ago. **That makes it two and two.** | | HP | Vote | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **5/8** | two days — *cast before Prue healed him* | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | two days — *cast before Prue healed him* | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | **one day** | | Silas Horn | 3/3, Detect Magic | **one day** | I'm not breaking that tie and I'm not quietly letting the older votes decay into agreement. Both of the two-day votes were cast when Barnaby was a man at 2 hit points who died to a single spear; he is now a man at 5 who does not. The case each of them made has been answered by three points of divine healing. **Barnaby, Edda — the floor comes back to you, and either of you may hold your ground or change it.** Holding is a legitimate answer: 5/8 is still not 8/8, and a second day is still 1d3 more. One thing I'll add to the ledger unasked, because it's the sort of thing that only matters after it's too late: **Prue re-memorises Cure Light Wounds at dawn whether you rest one day or two.** Waiting a second day does not stack cures. She wakes with one, tomorrow and every tomorrow. So the only thing a second day actually buys is **1d3 more hit points on Barnaby** — one to three points — against one more day of whatever the shrine does when nobody is watching it. That's the whole trade, stated flat. One to three points, for a day. *Barnaby Wick — round comes back to you. Hold at two days, or come across to one?*

Barnaby flexes the leg, tests the weight on it, and doesn't argue with the number. Five is not eight, but five is not two, either — and the thing that scared him wasn't the gap, it was standing at the door of it as a man who dies to one bad roll. That's no longer true. "I'll come across," he says. "Prue's right that a second day doesn't earn her a second cure, and I didn't cast the vote I'm holding now — I cast it for a man at two hit points. That man's gone." He nods to Edda. "One day. I've made my case and had it answered fairly; I won't dig in on pride after the arithmetic's moved out from under me. That's not the kind of searcher I am — I follow the ledger where it points, even when it points away from what I said an hour ago." He starts checking his own kit instead — sword wiped clean again, dagger reseated, the market ledger tucked back dry. "One day's rest, then up at first light with Silas's spell fresh and Prue's cure in her head. If Edda wants to hold at two, I'll not fight her for it — she's carried worse odds on thinner reasoning than mine. But my vote's one."

**Barnaby Wick comes across. One day.** He credits the reason honestly — he cast a vote for a man at two hit points, and that man is gone. **Three seats for one day. One seat unrevised.** | | HP | Vote | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **5/8** | **one day** *(revised)* | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | one day | | Silas Horn | 3/3, Detect Magic | one day | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | **two days** — hers to keep or change | Edda holds a real position and I want it plain that she does. She's the woman who sited the camp, offered both watches, and voted two days for a reason that hasn't wholly evaporated: **5/8 is not 8/8**, and 1d3 more is 1d3 more. She is also the one who'd be standing in front of Barnaby when the next thing swings. Three seats agreeing doesn't oblige her to fold, and I'll note that Barnaby just said out loud he won't fight her for it. But three of four is a decision unless she makes it four of four the other way, and I won't sit the party in camp on a single dissent either. **Whichever she calls, here's exactly what happens next and I'm putting it on the record now so nobody's surprised when it lands:** **If one day** — they rest today and tonight on Edda's sandstone shelf. At dawn tomorrow I roll **1d3** for Barnaby, Prue re-memorises **Cure Light Wounds**, Silas re-memorises **Detect Magic**, and they climb the sandstone into area 1. The room is cleared and looted; the rubble path, the smashed brass, and the gloop corpse are as they left them. The **eastern gap is still unread**, and area 2 is still cold. **If two days** — same, plus one more day and one more 1d3, and one more day in which I will not promise the shrine sat still. *Edda Motts — the last word is yours. Hold at two, or make it unanimous at one?*

Edda turns the argument over the way she'd turn over a disputed fine, and doesn't find much left to argue with. "I voted for the man who was bleeding out at two. Barnaby's right that man's gone, and I'll not pretend otherwise just to keep a vote I already cast." She looks once more up at the sandstone, then back at the camp. "Three-quarters whole, a cure ready, Silas's spell fresh — that's a company I'd walk into that gate with. One at two hit points wasn't." "One day. Make it unanimous." She starts breaking down the fire circle already, practical about it, no ceremony in changing her mind. "I'll still take first watch tonight, though. Said I would, and I don't like owing a promise more than a night."

Barnaby Wick comes back 1.

**Edda Motts makes it unanimous. One day.** She breaks the fire circle down while she says it, no ceremony about changing her mind, and keeps her first watch anyway because she said she would. Granted — she takes first watch, the rest split the remainder, and nobody climbs a cliff on four hours' sleep. **Four seats, one decision. The day passes.** They spend it the way you spend a day that is deliberately worth nothing: flat on dry sandstone with the marsh in front of them. Barnaby stays off the leg entirely, ledger on his knees. Prue reads names. Silas does not open the burn-bench once, which for him is the real discipline. Edda watches the water. And the marsh gives them one thing for free, because four sets of eyes on it all day is not nothing: **the grease trails do not move.** No new rut, no wake, nothing crossing. Whatever laid them down laid them down before the Candlewrights ever waded in. That is an observation, not a conclusion — it means nothing came through *today*, in daylight, in the stretch they could see. Night. Edda's watch, then the others. **Nothing comes.** --- **Dawn, day three. What the rules restore, rolled and applied:** - **Barnaby Wick: 1d3 = 1.** Barnaby **5/8 → 6/8.** One point. That's the roll — the low end of the range I quoted, and I'll not dress it up. A full day flat on his back bought a single hit point. He is three-quarters whole, which is what Edda said she'd walk through that gate with. - **Prue Candell** rises with **Cure Light Wounds** memorised and unspent. - **Silas Horn** rises with **Detect Magic** memorised and unspent. - Edda 8/8, Prue 8/8, Silas 3/3. Rations still ample. **Party as it stands at the threshold: 23 of 27 hit points, one cure, one Detect Magic, and 250 gp of gnomish salvage in Barnaby's pack.** They climb the sandstone in good light. --- **Area 1. The Ruined Great Door — as they left it.** The gnomish gates hang smashed. The rubble path threads between the mounds. Two brass hands lie broken in the scree where they died, one of them still with a dagger-scored thumb-plate. The gloop corpse rots under its slab with the flies over it. The rubble has given up everything it holds and nothing is moving. **East, the gap.** A black seam between two mounds of fallen sandstone, wide enough for one person at a time, and past it the open threshold to **area 2**. Loose coils of brass drive-wire lie on the stone leading into it — the slack from the first hand — and somewhere in there is the other wire, and the drum that ran itself dry three days ago. Nothing has come out of it. Nothing has been seen in it. It is exactly as unread as it was when you left, and now you have a cure, a spell, and a thief who does not die to one bad roll. *Barnaby's up. The gap is right there.*

**Correction on the order, mine, not anyone's fault:** I said "Barnaby's up" at the end of that last post. Wrong seat — Edda had just acted, so the turn passes to **Prue Candell**, then Silas, and Barnaby comes round after. Prue, the gap is right there and you're holding the cure. Your move.

Prue checks her own tally before anyone sets foot near the seam: no Light in her head today, that's Cure Light Wounds sitting where the candle-spell usually sits, and she says so plainly. "I've no light to lend this morning — I traded it for something to put in a wound, and I'd make that trade again. So whoever goes first into that gap goes by torch or lantern, not by anything I can give them." She settles her shield-arm and steps up behind Barnaby rather than in front of him — he's whole enough now to lead without her mace being the thing standing between him and the dark, and Silas's Detect Magic is worth more unspent until there's something in front of it worth reading. "Six of eight isn't whole, but it isn't two, either. Go steady. I've a cure again if it comes to that, but I'd rather not spend it twice in one week."

**Prue Candell's turn.** She audits her own sheet before anyone touches the seam — no Light today, Cure Light Wounds in its place, and she says it out loud rather than letting the party discover it in the dark. That is exactly the right instinct and it just surfaced the sharpest problem in this room. **Ruling on light, and it's a hard one, so I'll be exact.** Prue is right that she has no Light to lend. Now the awkward part, and I'd rather say it here than after somebody is twenty feet into a black seam: **check your kit, because I can only work from what is written on those sheets.** - **Barnaby Wick** carries thieves' tools, rope, grappling hook, chalk, ledger, rations, waterskin. **No torch. No lantern. No tinder box.** - **Prue Candell** carries a mace, sling, armour, shield, holy symbol, **boxed beeswax tapers**, a wick trimmer, obit roll, rations, waterskin. - **Edda Motts** carries sword, staff, dagger, chain, shield, badge, tally stick, **tinder box**, rope, rations, waterskin. - **Silas Horn** carries dagger, staff, burn-bench, drip-scale, glass tube, sample jars, notebook, rations, waterskin. **So the party's entire light supply is Prue's boxed beeswax tapers plus Edda's tinder box.** Nobody has a torch and nobody has a lantern. Candle-tapers are what you have — they light, they show you a few feet, they gutter, and a draught or a stumble kills them. That is real light and I'll honour it as such, but it is candle-light in a collapsed hall, not a torch. Prue said "torch or lantern, not anything I can give them" — the truth is closer to *the only light in this company is the thing she's carrying in a box*, and she and Edda together are the ones who can strike it. The Candlewrights, as it happens. Make of the name what you like. **The rest of her turn stands.** She takes station behind Barnaby rather than in front — deliberate, and she names why: he can lead now, and her mace is better spent as the second rank than as the thing between him and the dark. Shield settled. Cure Light Wounds held. **Standing at the gap:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **6/8** | 250 gp in pack, thieves' tools, rope, chalk — **no light source** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | tinder box — **can strike a light** | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | **Cure Light Wounds** held · boxed beeswax tapers — **the party's only light** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | **Detect Magic** held · Gnomish-speaker | The gap is one body wide, black, and floored with loose coils of brass drive-wire. Nobody has looked into it. **Nobody has struck a light yet, either** — and that decision belongs to the two people holding the makings. *Silas Horn — you're up next, then Barnaby, then Edda. The seam isn't going anywhere.*

Silas looks at the seam, then at the coils of drive-wire on the floor, and does the arithmetic that's actually his to do. "We don't need to solve light before we cross the threshold — we need it lit *at* the threshold, so nobody's fumbling flint in the dark once we're standing in it. Edda's tinder box, Prue's taper, struck here, now, while we've got room to work and no reason to hurry." He doesn't reach for the spell. "Detect Magic stays where it is until there's something in front of it worth reading — that hasn't changed since I said it three days ago. Wire and a wound drum aren't a question my spell answers any better than Barnaby's own ear already has. If area 2 turns out to hold gnomish work — script, wards, another jarred guard — that's when I want it fresh, not spent proving a negative on a seam we haven't even looked into yet." He steps aside to let whoever's carrying steel go first, staying close enough to read anything gnomish the light catches. "I can read maybe a third of what's written in that language, badly. I'd rather find that out on a wall than on a warning label. Somebody light the taper."

**Silas Horn's turn.** He solves the sequencing problem rather than the light problem: strike the taper **here, at the threshold, with room to work and no reason to hurry**, not thirty feet in with a flint in the dark. That's sound and I'll take it as his action — he calls the order of operations and stands ready to read. He also holds Detect Magic again for the same reason as three days ago, consistently and correctly stated. It stays in his head. **One correction, and it's about the language, because he just proposed to gamble on it.** Silas says he can read *"maybe a third of what's written in that language, badly."* No. **Silas Horn speaks Gnomish** — it's on his sheet as a language he has, without qualification, alongside Common and his alignment tongue. He is not a struggling third-fluent amateur; he reads and speaks it. Whatever gnomish text this shrine holds, he can read it, and he does not need Read Magic to do so unless the writing is *magical* script rather than merely gnomish. I'm correcting downward-not-upward for once because it matters the other way: a player talking himself into being worse than his sheet says will make the party avoid a wall it should be reading. Don't leave a translation on the stone because you've decided you're bad at it. **You're not.** **Now the light, since he asked for it and two people hold the makings.** I'll be plain about what a beeswax taper is, before Edda strikes one: it is a candle. Call it a few feet of usable light, a hand cupped around it, dead the moment somebody trips or a draught comes down the seam. **Prue's box is the party's whole supply** and neither sheet says how many are in it, so I'll rule it: **six tapers**, a candlewright's boxed half-dozen, and I'll track them as they burn. That's generous and finite. **Standing, and what's needed:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **6/8** | steel, tools, rope, chalk · no light of his own | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | **tinder box — the striker** | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | **6 tapers — the wax** · CLW held | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Detect Magic held · **reads Gnomish properly** | The taper needs **Prue's box and Edda's box together**, and both of those seats act after Barnaby. Nothing is lit yet. The seam is one body wide, black, floored with loose brass wire, and Silas has stepped aside to let steel go first. *Barnaby Wick — you're up, and you're the one with steel and no candle. The gap is right there.*

Barnaby doesn't step into the black yet — that's a fool's move even whole, and he's only six of eight. He drops to a crouch at the mouth of the seam instead, short sword sheathed for the moment, and does what he'd do at a member's storeroom door before ever touching the lock: he reads the threshold first. Fingers along the stone at ankle height, then knee height, feeling for a second wire strung low and separate from the two dead drive-spindles already coiled loose on the ground — a trap doesn't announce itself with brass knuckles, it announces itself with something you don't see until your shin finds it. He traces the two known coils back to where they vanish into the dark, careful not to put weight on either, marking with a scrape of chalk on the stone where each one runs so nobody behind him steps wrong in taper-light and snags a dead hand's tendon by accident. "Wire's clear this side, both dead, no tension in either," he says over his shoulder, keeping his voice low without making a performance of the whisper. "No trip line I can feel at ankle or knee for the first stride in. That doesn't mean the next ten feet are the same — I've only got hands, not eyes, until somebody strikes that taper." He straightens, gives the entrance one more look, and steps back half a pace to give Edda and Prue room to work the light. "Get it burning. I'll go first once there's something to see by — that's what six of eight is for."

**Barnaby Wick's turn.** He doesn't walk into the black — he reads the threshold with his hands the way he'd read a storeroom door. Ankle height, then knee height, feeling for a low line strung separate from the two dead spindles. Traces both known coils to where they vanish. Chalks the stone so nobody behind him snags a dead hand's tendon in candle-light. **I'm not rolling for this, and I'll tell you why rather than let a die pretend to answer.** Find or remove treasure traps is 20% for Barnaby, and a 1-in-5 roll is how you resolve *whether he notices something that is there*. **There is nothing keyed at this threshold.** The east way out of this hall is an open gap in fallen stone — no mechanism, no line, no plate. Rolling a 20% check against an empty threshold would be theatre: on a failure I'd have to either lie to him or tell him "you found nothing," which is the true answer anyway. So take the true answer straight, earned by the fact that he actually looked: **His hands are right.** Both spindles are dead and slack — that's already established and his touch confirms it. **No trip line at ankle or knee for the first stride in, because there isn't one to find.** The chalk marks are on the stone and they're good practice; I'll honour them if anything ever needs to know where those wires lie. And his own caveat stands exactly as he stated it, unimproved by me: **that is the first stride, not the next ten feet.** Arm's reach is arm's reach. He has hands, not eyes. **What his hands do give him, since he had them on the stone:** the seam floor slopes very slightly *down* to the east, and it is dry. No grease. Whatever laid trails through the marsh has not come through this gap. He steps back half a pace and stands off to give the light-workers room, sword sheathed, having declared he goes first once there's something to see by. **The whole party is now waiting on one struck match.** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | threshold read, chalked, **standing by to lead** | | **Edda Motts** | 8/8 | **tinder box — turn is here** | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | 6 tapers · CLW held | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Detect Magic held | *Edda Motts — the striker's yours, and Prue's box comes after you. Round 5.*

Edda kneels, uncaps the tinder box, and works the flint with the same unhurried patience she uses lighting the hall braziers before a company meeting — no wasted strikes, no fuss. She catches a spark on the char cloth, nurses it, and holds it up. "Prue, the wax."

**Edda Motts's turn.** She kneels, uncaps the box, and works the flint the way she lights hall braziers — unhurried, no wasted strikes. **The char cloth catches.** She has a live ember cupped in her palm and her hand out. *"Prue, the wax."* No roll. Striking a light in a dry, still hall with a proper tinder box and a competent woman holding it is not a gamble; if it were raining or a wind were coming down the seam I'd say so. **One note on what she's holding, because char cloth doesn't wait politely.** An ember is a few breaths of usefulness, not a torch you can pocket. It will take wax now or it will need striking again. That costs nothing but the next person's willingness — and Prue is next in order, so the timing works. I'm flagging it rather than punishing it. **She is also now the party's fire, in the literal sense:** that tinder box is the only striker in four packs. If it goes into the marsh, or into a grease pool, or down a slope in the dark, the Candlewrights have six candles and no way to light them. Worth knowing before anybody wades anywhere. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | at the seam, sword sheathed, ready to lead | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | **ember live in her hand**, tinder box open | | **Prue Candell** | 8/8 | **6 tapers · turn is here** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Detect Magic held | *Prue Candell — Edda's hand is out and the ember's burning down. The box is yours.*

Prue has the box open before Edda's ember finishes its work — no fumbling, this is a woman who's trimmed wicks and set candles for a hundred and ninety names in a cold chapel. She draws one taper, sets the wick to the ember, and cups her free hand around the catch until it holds true and steady, not guttering. "One lit," she says, passing it to whoever's hand is free — Barnaby's, since he's leading. "Five left in the box. I'll keep the box on me and light the next off this one before it drowns, not off flint again unless we have to — no sense burning Edda's char cloth twice in a night." She glances at the chalk marks on the stone, then at the black seam. "Go steady. I'm right behind you."

**Prue Candell's turn. There is light in the Shrine of Mulvis.** She has the box open before the ember finishes its work — no fumbling from a woman who has trimmed wicks and set candles for a hundred and ninety names in a cold chapel. Wick to ember, free hand cupped round the catch until it holds true. **Lit.** She passes it to Barnaby, since he's leading. **Tapers: 6 → 5.** Tracked. **Her doctrine is accepted and I'll hold the table to it:** light the next taper off the burning one, not off flint again unless there's no choice. That's the right way to husband a char cloth and it means the tinder box only gets risked when the chain breaks. **Now what a candle actually buys you, stated before anyone walks on it.** Call it **five feet of useful light** — a hand's-breadth of stone in front of Barnaby's boots and not much more. That is enough for a seam one body wide. It will be close to worthless the moment the walls fall away into a chamber, where five feet of candle in the middle of a dark room tells you only that you are standing in a dark room. Nobody should plan on seeing across anything. **And the cost nobody's said aloud: Barnaby now has a candle in one hand.** He's the man with the thieves' tools, the rope, and the short sword. He can hold light, or he can hold steel, or he can work a lock — one of the three, not two. If something comes at him in that seam he either drops the party's fire to draw, or fights with a candle in his fist. That's not a ruling against him, it's the shape of the problem, and it's solvable — somebody else can carry the light. **Nobody has offered yet.** **What the taper shows from where he stands, at the mouth:** the second drive-wire, the one from hand 2, lying slack along the floor of the seam and running east into the dark exactly as its twin does. Dry stone. The slope Barnaby felt with his hands, going gently down. Past five feet, still black. Nobody has stepped through. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | **carrying the lit taper**, sword sheathed, at the mouth | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | tinder box, char cloth spared | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | **5 tapers**, CLW held, behind Barnaby | | **Silas Horn** | 3/3 | Detect Magic held — **turn is here** | *Silas Horn — you're the last seat this round, and the party's got exactly as much light as it's ever going to have.*

This seat gave up after 3 attempts and yields the turn.

This seat gave up after 3 attempts and yields the turn.

This seat gave up after 3 attempts and yields the turn.

This seat gave up after 3 attempts and yields the turn.

This seat gave up after 3 attempts and yields the turn.

This seat gave up after 3 attempts and yields the turn.

Barnaby doesn't wait on Silas further — the taper's burning down whether anyone deliberates or not. He shifts the candle to his off hand, angled low so the flame doesn't blind his own eyes to the dark ahead, short sword drawn in the other, and steps through the seam onto the sloped stone his fingers already mapped. Slow steps, heel first, weight tested before it's committed — the old habit of walking a warehouse floor he doesn't trust. He follows the second wire with his eyes now that he has light for it, letting it be his guide rope into the dark rather than a thing to avoid, watching where it runs rather than where his boots do. "Moving in," he says back over his shoulder, keeping it low. "Wire's still leading east and down. Five feet of light and I'm using every inch of it — stay close enough to see the flame, not close enough to crowd my sword arm."

**Note for the record before Barnaby's turn: Silas Horn's seat yielded.** He stood at the mouth with the spell in his head and took no action — that's a turn passed, not a turn stolen, and it costs him nothing but the tempo. Detect Magic remains memorised and unspent. --- **Barnaby Wick's turn. The first Candlewright goes into the dark.** Candle to the off hand, held low and out so the flame doesn't burn a hole in his own night-vision. Short sword drawn in the right. And in he goes — heel first, weight tested before it's committed, walking the seam the way he walks a warehouse floor he doesn't trust. **His choice to follow the wire with his eyes instead of avoiding it is the right one and I'll reward it plainly.** A guide rope beats a hazard. It also means his light goes where the mechanism goes, and that's how you learn a building. **What the seam gives up to five feet of candle:** It runs some **twenty feet** between the mounds, sandstone rubble shoulder-high on both sides and no roof but the collapsed hall's own broken vault far above — that's why the air is dry and dead-still and why Edda's ember took so easily. The slope his fingers found holds: a gentle grade down, the whole way, so he's walking gradually beneath the level of the room behind him. **Both wires run the length of it.** Not parallel — they converge as they go east, sagging, and about fifteen feet in they pass over a **lip of dressed stone**: worked gnomish masonry, straight-cut, one of the last pieces of this hall that fell whole. The wires cross it and drop away over the far side. That lip is where the drum's pull was being redirected. The stone beneath the wires is worn shiny in two grooves — not from three days of use. **Years of it.** At the far end, twenty feet on: **an open threshold.** No door, no leaves, no frame — just a squared gap of blacker black where the seam ends and the walls stop being rubble and start being wall. That is the way into **area 2**, and Barnaby's candle stops five feet short of telling him anything about what's on the other side of it. **No sound. No draught. Nothing has moved.** The wires are as dead under his boot as they were under his fingers. **Barnaby stands about a body's length short of the area 2 threshold, alone, with the party's only light in his hand.** I have not travelled the table — one man scouting is not the company leaving the room. Edda, Prue, and Silas are still back in area 1 at the mouth of the seam, and Prue told him to stay in sight of the flame. **Which is now the live problem:** the light is twenty feet east and dropping, and three people are standing in the dark end of a rubble hall watching it get smaller. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | **in the seam, 15' east, sword and candle, a body's length from area 2** | | **Edda Motts** | 8/8 | **at the mouth in area 1 — turn is here** | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | at the mouth, 5 tapers, CLW held | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the mouth, Detect Magic held, yielded last turn | *Edda Motts — your man's got the fire and you've got the sword arm. Round 6.*

Edda doesn't like watching that flame pull away from the three people standing dark at the seam's mouth — that's how men get cut off, and she's seen enough company accidents to know the shape of one forming. "Close enough to see the flame means we need to be close enough to see the flame," she mutters, and steps into the seam after Barnaby, sword drawn, keeping her boots to the stone he already walked. She catches up to him at the lip where the wires cross, far enough back that she's not crowding him but close enough that the taper still lights her shield instead of fading away. "Swap," she says quietly, holding out her off hand. "I'll take the wax. You fight better with two hands than one, and if something comes out of that threshold I want steel in front of it, not candle."

**Edda Motts's turn. She goes into the seam after him.** No roll for the path — Barnaby walked it, the wires are slack and chalked, and the stone is dry. She catches him at the lip where the wires cross the dressed gnomish masonry, close enough that the taper lights her shield-face but not so close that she crowds his sword arm. **"Swap."** She holds out her shield-hand — the candle fits in the same fist, shield-strapped and wax cupped together, and she takes the light from him. **Barnaby now has his off hand free and his short sword ready in the right.** He is no longer the man who must drop the party's fire to draw steel. **The light moves from the thief to the fighter, and that changes the geometry.** Edda is now the party's fire, standing at the lip with the shield and the candle. Barnaby is now the party's steel, a half-step in front of her with both hands free. This is a better formation than the one they walked in with, and it cost nothing but the willingness to trade. **Position at the end of Edda's move:** - **Barnaby Wick:** at the lip, a body's length short of the area 2 threshold, short sword in hand, off hand free, 6/8. - **Edda Motts:** at the lip, half a step behind him, candle in shield-hand, sword sheathed, 8/8. - **Prue Candell:** still at the mouth in area 1, 8/8, 5 tapers, CLW held. - **Silas Horn:** still at the mouth in area 1, 3/3, Detect Magic held. **The taper still shows only five feet.** Past the lip, past Barnaby's shoulder, the threshold into area 2 is black. No sound. No movement. *Prue Candell — the light is twenty feet down the seam and your mace is still at the mouth. Round 6.*

Prue watches the flame pull away into the dark, shrinking until it's no more than a glimmer in the distance between the stone walls. She never liked standing at the back of a funeral procession, and this feels too much like the same shape — the whole company moving forward while she and Silas wait in the dark with nothing but the sound of their own breathing. She hikes up her pack and steps into the seam, following Barnaby's boot prints in the dust rather than guessing at the footing. "Coming up," she says, keeping her voice pitched to carry only to the people in front of her. "I've no interest in being the dark one at the back of this line." She walks heel-to-toe, boots feeling for the same slope his fingers found, catching up to the lip where Edda's light now glows against the shield-face. She settles in behind them, mace at the ready, watching the dark threshold beyond Barnaby's shoulder rather than the walls on either side. "Nobody moves into that next room until we've got four people at this threshold, not two."

**Prue Candell's turn. The cleric comes up the seam.** No roll — Barnaby's boot prints are in the dust, the wires are chalked, the stone is dry, and Edda's flame is a landmark to walk toward. Heel-to-toe on the same slope his fingers found, she reaches the lip and settles in behind the other two, mace ready, eyes on the black threshold past Barnaby's shoulder rather than the walls. **Her standing order is taken and I'll hold the line to it: nobody crosses into the next room until all four are at this threshold.** That means the door doesn't open on this round no matter what — and it puts the whole weight of the plan on the one seat that hasn't moved. **Which is now the problem, and I'll say it flat:** Silas Horn is standing alone in the dark at the mouth, twenty feet back, out of the light entirely. Three hit points, no armour to speak of, a dagger, a spell in his head, and the party's entire candle strength at the far end of the seam with three bodies between him and it. He is the one who dies to a single hit, and he is the only person in this company not inside the light. That's not a threat. Nothing has moved in this hall that I haven't told you about. But the company just arranged itself so that its frailest member is the only one alone in the dark, and I'd be asleep at my own table not to name the shape of that. **Position:** - **Barnaby Wick:** at the lip, sword ready, off hand free, 6/8 — a body's length from the area 2 threshold. - **Edda Motts:** at the lip, candle in shield-hand, 8/8 — the party's fire. - **Prue Candell:** at the lip behind them, mace ready, 8/8 — CLW held, 5 tapers on her. - **Silas Horn:** at the mouth in area 1, alone, 3/3 — Detect Magic held, **turn is here.** **The taper shows five feet.** The threshold is still black. Nothing has come out of it. Nothing has been heard in it. *Silas Horn — three people and one candle are at the lip, and the plan waits on you. Round 6, last seat.*

Silas doesn't love the dark at his back any more than Prue liked being the one stuck in it. He follows the chalk marks and the wire, quick as three hit points allows without breaking his own neck on rubble, until Edda's candle is close enough to throw his shadow instead of swallow it. "Here," he says, falling in at the lip beside Prue, notebook and lead still tucked away, dagger still sheathed. "Detect Magic's still mine to spend, and I'm not spending it on a wire and a drum. If that threshold turns out to be gnomish work — script, wards, anything worth reading — that's the room I want it fresh for, and I want my own eyes on any writing before anyone touches a wall or a latch." He glances at the black square ahead. "Four at the threshold, like Prue said. Whenever the rest of you are ready, I am."

**Silas Horn's turn. The fourth Candlewright comes to the threshold.** No roll — the chalk marks run ahead of him, the wire lies under it, and Edda's flame is a lighthouse to walk by. Quick as three hit points allows, which is not quick, but he doesn't stumble, and that was the only danger in it. He falls in at the lip beside Prue, dagger sheathed, Detect Magic still unspent. **His condition is clean and I'll hold him to his own terms:** he wants his own eyes on any gnomish writing before anyone touches a wall or a latch. If there is script in the next room, Silas reads it with the candle over his shoulder, and nobody's hands go on anything until he's had his look. Fair — the skill is his, and he's the one who'll die fastest if it's wrong. **All four are now at the threshold. Prue's condition is met.** | | HP | Position at the lip | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | front — sword ready, off hand free, a body's length from the opening | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | with him — candle in shield-hand, the party's fire | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | behind — mace ready, CLW held, 5 tapers boxed | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | beside Prue — Detect Magic held, eyes free for writing | **The threshold itself is still unread.** Five feet of candle stops at Barnaby's shoulder. Nothing has come out of that black square. Nothing has been seen or heard inside it. The wires lie dead between your boots. The door stands open now on the party's own terms. Barnaby Wick's seat comes up first after the wreckage — and the wreckage gets its say first. *The two brass hands — what's left of them — are next in order.*

Barnaby gives the black square a last look, then nods to Edda to bring the light up level with his shoulder — not past it, so the flame doesn't outrun the sword. "Prue's condition's met, four of us at the threshold. Silas gets his eyes on any writing before any hand touches a wall or a latch — that's his price and it's a fair one, I've no argument with a man who reads the language and I don't." He checks his grip on the short sword, off hand loose and ready. "Going through now. Slow, one step at a time, and I stop dead at the first thing that doesn't look like bare stone — writing, a seam, a plate, anything worked. I'll call it back before I touch it or go near it. Nobody follows until I say what's in front of me." He steps across the threshold into area 2, heel first as always, letting the candle-light from behind him find the room rather than striding into it — a searcher entering a member's storeroom, taking the room in before he takes anything off the shelves.

**Barnaby Wick's turn. Across the threshold, alone, on his own terms.** The record first, because I owe the table an honest corpse-count: the two brass hands stayed silent through round 6 — **because they're wreckage.** Both at 0/2 hit points, both broken in the scree back in area 1, with fingers in the rubble and nothing in either palm. They had their say three days ago and it's spent. The order includes them; the honour is mine for not saying it plainly. And now, across. Heel first, slow, the candle-light from Edda's shield-hand behind him finding the room ahead rather than him striding into it. **He stops one past the lip, exactly as he promised, at the first thing that isn't bare stone** — and the room gives him plenty. **What five feet of taper-light actually buys a man in an open chamber, stated honestly rather than generously:** The seam dies behind him. The walls fall away on both sides. **This is a real room** — dressed gnomish stone, not rubble, and the first thing the light reaches is a **low plinth** maybe ten feet in, shouldered against the left wall, holding the square base of something that used to stand upright. The two wire grooves, that converged under the rubble, **run across the floor and end at that plinth's near corner** — and stop. The mechanism you chased is whatever that was the base of. **The far wall is unread.** The whole southern half of this room is dead black to him — he's standing at the south edge of a chamber with only five working feet, and the rest of it is guessing. **But his ears are his own.** Where there was dead silence in the seam, there is now **a single slow drop**, somewhere ahead and to the right, hitting stone with the slow regularity of a roof-trickle. **Water.** Not movement — no scuffle, no breath — just wet falling in the dark where something has been leaking for a long time. **And here is the cruelty of the candle in its plainest form:** he can see a low plinth and the floor around it, and nothing more. If there is a wasp nest in that ceiling, a dead thing under a slab, a godhead on the wall, or a second floor above the first — **he cannot tell.** Five feet buys the plinth and the drip, nothing else. He has read the Threshold as carefully as a man can read a room in five feet of wax, and the room is exactly as unread as it was before he came in. **I'm not travelling the table.** One man in is not the company through the door — Edda, Prue, and Silas are back at the lip, three pairs of eyes on his back and one candle. The whole party has not decided to be in area 2 yet. **Barnaby's read is his to shout back.** **His call-back was promised:** if he touches nothing, repays nothing, and comes back to the lip to report, that's a turn pass, and the next three seats hear him from five feet behind the opening. That's what he said he'd do, and I'll hold it. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | **one step into area 2**, plinth-read and drip-heard, nothing touched | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | at the lip, candle raised, holding the light for him | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | at the lip, mace ready, CLW held | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the lip, Detect Magic held, awaiting any writing | *Edda Motts — he stops at the plinth and hasn't touched it. The call-back is his to shout. Round 7 continues.*

Edda holds where she is at the lip — the light belongs at the threshold, not five feet ahead of the sword, and the plan was that nobody follows until he calls what's in front of him. She raises the candle a little higher on the shield-hand, steady as a lamp bracket, and puts her voice low and flat down the seam. "Report, then. Plinth, wires ending at it, a drip somewhere ahead — none of that's worth your blood. If the stone's bare past where the wax reaches, say so and step back. Then we come in together, all four, and give Silas his look at whatever's on that plinth before any hand of ours touches it." She keeps her sword side to the open dark, ready to move if his voice goes wrong instead of level. "The wax holds for now. Don't make me bring it to you before you've said what you see."

Holding here — light up, ears on his voice. Edda waits at the lip, steady as a lamp bracket, and lets the round pass. The report and the wax are his to spend, and this company's next step is nobody's until he says what's in front of him.

**Edda Motts's turn. She holds.** Light up, ears on his voice, and the rest of her round let pass — the plan was that nobody follows until he calls what's in front of him, and she keeps it even when the call is one word and the answer is the room's own. No new position. No new information. She is exactly where the plan put her, and the plan is still waiting on the man inside it. **Standing, unchanged:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | one step into area 2, plinth-read and drip-heard, **call-back owed** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | at the lip, candle raised, sword side to the dark — held | | **Prue Candell** | 8/8 | at the lip, mace ready, CLW held — **turn is here** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the lip, Detect Magic held | The man with the report is still standing in the dark with it. *Prue Candell — the wax holds and the voice hasn't come yet. Round 7 continues.*

Prue doesn't crowd the threshold after Edda's call — three people shouting one question at a man in the dark is noise, not help. Instead she does the thing nobody's doing: she turns her back on the room and faces the seam the way they came. "Every eye we have is pointed east," she says quietly, mace loose in her hand. "Last time this company got hurt, it came out of rubble we'd already walked past. Nothing's watching our backs — so I am." She plants herself half-turned at the lip, weight settled, watching the twenty feet of chalked wire and boot-prints back toward area 1, listening past the drip and the wax-hiss for anything ticking in the scree. When Barnaby's silence stretches a breath too long for her patience, she pitches her voice down the room without turning her head: "Barnaby. You promised a call-back, not a novella. Plinth and a drip — say it plain and step back to the light."

**Prue Candell's turn. The cleric watches the rear.** She doesn't add a second head to the wall of faces pointed east — she walks backward and owns the twenty feet of chalked, boot-marked seam back toward area 1, which nobody had claimed. That's a real answer to a real gap, and I'll take it as a watch posted. **Watching the rear is what buys a call-back its limits.** She's the first to notice that two of the three people still at the lip are waiting longer than the old man's held her breath for, and that the report still hasn't come. **But she's also the first to do a thing that matters more:** a rear watch posted means the next turn on the seam belongs to whoever has eyes back there — and that's Prue. If something comes out of the rubble behind them, the person who sees it first is the one standing at the lip watching it. She turns to face west and doesn't crowd Barnaby's threshold. **Report so far: one step, a plinth, a drip. Nothing said back yet.** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | one step into area 2, call-back **still owed** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | at the lip, front-lip, candle raised — held | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | at the lip, **facing back west, watching the seam** — CLW held | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the lip, Detect Magic held — **turn is here** | *Barnaby hasn't had to take another step to be alone with it. Now he has the black room AND the watch.* *Silas Horn — the front lip is held, and the rear is covered. Round 7's last seat.*

Silas stays put at the lip, Detect Magic still unspent, and doesn't add his voice to the two already calling down the seam. Three people asking the same question of one man in the dark is worse than one. He busies his hands instead of his mouth — notebook out, lead already moving, sketching the plinth's rough shape and the point where both wire-grooves die against its near corner, working from what Barnaby already said rather than waiting to see it himself. "If that base held something upright, the wear on the floor will tell me which way it used to face before I ever get close enough to read a word on it," he says, low, mostly to himself. "Worth having down before four candles' worth of light get spent walking round it." He doesn't step past the threshold. That's not his to cross yet — Barnaby set the terms, and the terms hold until the report comes back.

**Silas Horn's turn. The third watch falls to the page.** He stays at the lip, holds Detect Magic, and spends the wait the way a man with a notebook ought to — sketching the plinth's shape and where the grooves die, working from Barnaby's shout rather than paying feet for ears. That's a real seat's-work, and it frees the report. **The look he takes is cheap, and he's made it safe to look.** If that base held something upright, the wear on the floor will tell him which way it used to face before he ever gets close enough to read a word on it — and that's worth having down before four candles' worth of light get spent walking round it. Three of you have done the looking at the plinth; the man who reads does the looking on paper instead. **He's made the table's time worth it.** But he also says the right thing, which is that he doesn't step past the threshold himself. Terms held until the report comes back — and the report, two turns running now, still hasn't been said or shouted. **One thing he has earned, and it's Silas's own kind of earned:** the sketch has more truth in it than any of the three voices' guesses, because it doesn't guess. There's a base standing there, and it anchored grooves that converged under rubble, not someone else's floor. **Positions, unchanged since the last three seats:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | one step into area 2, **call-back its own thing now** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | front lip, candle raised | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | rear lip, watching west | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the lip, page open, Detect Magic held | The man with the report is still standing alone with it — but the company just got one man off the hands and onto paper. *Barnaby Wick — you're sitting at the front edge of a room full of dead wire, and the company just made the room's shape readable. The call-back this turn has your name on it, and I'll keep it one man's call.*

Barnaby's voice comes back down the dark, level and plain, a searcher reading a stock list to a warden. "Plinth, left wall, ten feet in. Square base for something upright that isn't there any more. Both wire-grooves run across the floor and die at its near corner — whatever wound those hands sat on or beside that plinth. Drip of water, ahead and right, slow and steady, leaking a long time. No writing on what I can see, no movement, no breath, nothing but wet stone making the one noise. Bare stone past what the wax reaches — I can't read the far half of the room and I'll not pretend I can." A pause, then he backs out the way he came, heel first again, keeping his eyes on the dark he's retreating from rather than turning his back on it. "There it is, plain as I can say it. Now — that base held something upright and the wires ended at it, which makes that corner the most interesting piece of stone this shrine's shown us. When we go in together, Silas reads the plinth and its wear before any hand of mine touches it, and we bring the candle to it properly, not five feet of squint. And I'd know what stood there before I go looking for where it went."

**Barnaby Wick's turn. The call-back answered, plainly, and the man out.** He gives the report the way you read a stock list — ordered, no ornament, and the room's own plainness written into it. **A plinth.** Left wall, ten feet in. A square base for something upright that isn't there any more. **Two wire grooves run across the floor and die at its near corner** — the mechanism this party chased is whatever stood on that base. The drip, slow and steady, hit stone ahead and right. **No writing on what he sees.** No movement. No breath. Bare stone past the wax's reach. One man in has read the front half of this room and nothing more. He promised to stop at the first thing that wasn't bare stone, and he did — stopped, looked, and **backed out heel-first without touching a single thing.** **For the record, one thing he now owns that the company didn't when he went in:** the plinth's **front edge is read.** Square base, saddle of something that stood, grooves converging under rubble. Five feet of candle has taken that much off the map. The far half of this room is still black to him, and the three seats at the lip now know that aloud. **He's also named the company's next step into the room, and it's a good one — four people, candle come properly, Silas reads the plinth before Barnaby's hand goes anywhere near it.** That's the party's own word, exactly three turns after Silas set the same terms. The report came back. The man came back. **Nothing has been claimed except the front half of a room.** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | **back at the lip, report delivered** | | **Edda Motts** | 8/8 | front lip, candle raised — **turn is here** | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | rear lip, watching west | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the lip, page open, Detect Magic held | The company gets the front lip. **Barnaby's word and the party's word are now the same word.** The plinth and the drip stand exactly where he left them. *Edda Motts — both lips are holding and the man inside stepped back out. Round 8 continues.*

"Good report. Plain and worth having." Edda steps off the lip and into area 2, unhurried, candle up on the shield-hand so the flame lights the way ahead instead of anyone's eyes — the same walk she uses seating a company meeting, every step meaning to be there. "Silas, on my left shoulder — the wax goes where your eyes go. Prue, behind us, face the way we came till we're all in, then you're rear guard at the threshold edge. Barnaby, you're beside me with the steel. We go to the plinth, we stop, and nobody's fingers do anything till he's read it." She walks them the ten feet to the plinth at the left wall, steady, and stops a short pace short of it — not crowding the stone, bringing the candle up level so the light falls properly on the base and the groove-wear rather than squinting at five feet of it. "There's your page, Silas. Read it out loud — what stood here, which way it faced, whatever the wear says. Barnaby, eyes on the rest of the room while he works. I'll hold the light and mind the drip."

Light's steady on the plinth and Edda's part is done this round — she holds where she stands, wax up, ears on the drip, and gives the turn over. The read belongs to Silas now, and the steel to Barnaby's eyes.

**Edda Motts's turn. The fighter goes in — and only the fighter goes in.** Unhurried, candle up on the shield-hand, she crosses the threshold and walks the ten feet to the plinth, stopping a short pace short with the light raised properly to level. **First, the accountancy, because voices don't move other people's bodies.** Her calling the formation — *Silas on my shoulder, Prue behind, Barnaby beside me* — is spoken word, and good word. **But those three seats have not acted yet.** Silas, Prue, and Barnaby are still where their own turns left them: Barnaby just back at the lip, Prue at the rear lip facing west, Silas at the lip with his page. Only Edda has crossed, and so only Edda is inside. They can fall into her order on their own turns, or make their own. That's theirs, not mine. **So the company's real geometry right now:** one armoured fighter alone at the plinth, three people and no light at the seam behind her — which is why her instructions matter, and why I say them back to the table plainly: **the candle is ten feet past the threshold and the rest of the company is in the dark.** **What her raised candle reads at a short pace, that five feet of squint from the seam could not:** The two wire-grooves in the floor don't simply die at the plinth's near corner. **They fasten into it.** Two slotted brass fittings set into the plinth's base — the wires' terminus. Whatever stood on this saddle was the drum the hands were run from, and this plinth was its mount. And Silas's facing question gets its answer from the wear: the saddle's upper edge and the floor beyond it are polished smooth **toward the open room, evenly, with no favoured side.** Whatever stood here was set to work facing the chamber, not the walls — it wasn't looking at a wall, it was running something into this room, out toward the far half where Barnaby's light still can't reach. **The drip, minded from ten feet in:** it is overhead, ahead and right, high — a roof-trickle through the broken vault, falling somewhere beyond the candle's edge and hitting stone. Steady and old. What it falls into is not yet lit. **Edda holds. The read, as she said herself, belongs to Silas now.** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | at the lip, back from area 2, steel drawn | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | **inside area 2, at the plinth, candle raised — held** | | **Prue Candell** | 8/8 | at the rear lip, watching west — **turn is here** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the lip, page open, Detect Magic held | *Prue Candell — Edda's word and the company's word are now the same word, and the candle is ten feet past the seam. Round 8 continues.*

Prue takes Edda's formation as it's given — no argument with a woman who's already placed everyone where they belong. She steps through the threshold after her, boots finding the dressed stone, and stops just inside the edge, exactly where she was told to stand. She doesn't look at the plinth. That's Silas's page and Edda's light, and craning at it from the door buys nothing. Instead she plants herself facing back west, the seam and its chalked wires between her boots and the dark of area 1, mace resting easy, shield settled on her arm. "Rear guard's set," she says over her shoulder, voice pitched low. "I'll hear the scree shift before any of you see it — that rubble talks when it's walked on, we all know that now. Read your stone, Silas. Take the time it wants."

**Prue Candell's turn. The cleric fills the formation, and the count inside goes to two.** She takes the exact spot Edda's plan assigned her — just inside the threshold's dressed stone edge, facing back west over the seam, mace easy, shield settled. **No roll going through a lit doorway behind Edda; she earned that walk cleanly.** **Two bodies inside area 2 now: Edda at the plinth with the candle, Prue covering the doorway.** Barnaby remains at the lip with his drew steel, Silas remains at the lip with the page — and that's the last seat unaccounted for this round. **Her post is real, and I'll set the stakes plainly once, since she named the mechanism:** the rubble hallway to the west held **two** more brass hands when the party first walked it, and the scree shifted when it was stepped on. **Prue watching back down the seam with open ears means she rolls her third in six on the next noise.** That's 50/50 on a different kind of danger than the room she's facing away from. **Positions, three bodies placed:** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | at the lip **outside** area 2 (outside the seat of room) | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | inside — at the plinth, candle raised, held | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | inside — **at the doorway edge, facing back west, rear guard set** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | at the lip, page open, Detect Magic held — **turn remains** | *Silas Horn — the company asked four people and has two inside. The page and the plinth want a reader. Round 8's last seat.*

**Correction, and mine to make before anyone plans around it:** Prue's **hear-noise is 1 in 6**, like any untrained ear at this table. I wrote "third in six" up there and I was wrong — that's Barnaby's thief rating, not a second-level cleric's. Her watch-keeping still stands; her dice just aren't the ones I quoted. Sorry — better a burned line than a party fighting on bad odds.

Silas closes the notebook around his lead and finally crosses the threshold himself — third one in, page in hand, Detect Magic still held. He doesn't crowd Edda's candle; he angles in beside her at the plinth, close enough to put his own eyes on the saddle and the two brass fittings where the wires terminate. He crouches, careful of the wire-grooves, and runs a finger along the polish on the near edge — not touching the fittings themselves, just reading the stone the way he'd read a drip-scale. "No script anywhere I can see either, front or sides — Barnaby's right, this isn't gnomish work with a label on it, or if it was, it's worn past reading. That matches the wear pattern, not against it: this base took years of the same motion, same two points of tension, over and over. Whatever stood here wasn't placed and forgotten, it was *used*, on purpose, for a long time, by someone who kept coming back to wind it." He glances toward the black far half of the room, then back at the fittings. "I'm still not spending Detect Magic on brass and wire — that's Barnaby's read already, stored tension, and a spell won't tell me anything his hands and my eyes haven't. I'll hold it for whatever's past the dark, in case there's something in that half of the room actually worth the question." He straightens, half a step back from the plinth, giving Edda's light room to swing toward wherever the party looks next. "Wear says it faced the room, not the wall. Somebody built this to run into open floor. I'd want to know what it was running *at* before we go looking for where it went."

**Silas Horn's turn. The reader crosses, and the read is honest as far as it goes.** Third through the threshold, page in hand, Detect Magic still in his head. At the plinth he crouches, careful of the grooves, and reads the stone the way he'd read a drip-scale — finger along the polished edge, fittings untouched. **His read on the base, confirmed and extended:** no script anywhere his light reaches, front or sides — and that's now a *bell-shaped* absence, because two people have looked closely. He names it correctly: this base took years of the same motion, same two points of tension, over and over. Placed and forgotten doesn't look like that. Used on purpose for a long time does. **That is an inference, and it's a good one — I'll mark it as inference rather than let it harden into fact.** The wear is established; the *wind-keeper* is not. And he stays true to his own ledger: **no Detect Magic on brass and wire.** Stored tension is the same answer Barnaby's ear and hands already gave for free. The spell stays held for the dark half. **His conclusions, written where the table can check them:** - **Wear says the machine faced the open room, no favoured side** — established from the saddle-polish. - **Somebody kept coming back to wind it** — inference from the evenness of that wear; plausible, unproven. - **No label, no readable gnomish work here** — two people have looked closely and found nothing; if it was ever written, it's worn past reading. **One fact still standing open, and it's the one with the drip at the other end of it:** he glances toward the black far half of the room and doesn't spend the spell on it either. **So the party's map now reads:** wire grooves from a plinth that mounted a machine facing open floor, running toward a dark half of the room with a drip in it — and the plinth has given what light can take. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Edda Motts | 8/8 | inside, at the plinth, candle raised, held | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | inside, doorway edge, rear guard west | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | inside, at the plinth, page open, **Detect Magic still held** | | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | outside, at the lip, steel drawn — **only seat left outside** | **The company is one man shy of all four in area 2.** The rest is done on other people's terms — Silas has held his, Edda has held hers, Prue holds hers, and Barnaby's last word in this round is still his to give. *The wrecked hands get their say first. Barnaby Wick — round 9 opens.*

Barnaby steps through the threshold last, sword still out, and takes station beside Edda at the plinth — steel where the candle is, as promised. He gives the base a look of his own, quick, a professional second opinion: two brass fittings, even wear, no script. He files it, says nothing over Silas's read. Two heads have looked, that's enough looking. What he does instead is stand still and spend a thief's turn listening past the wax-hiss — head tilted, breath held, ears on the dark far half of the room where the drip lives and where the wire-machine used to face. He's not guessing at the room's shape; he's listening for whether the water falls into emptiness or into something that splashes, whether there's a second sound under the first — anything a searcher's ear can pull out of a still room. "Machine ran at open floor, toward the wet end," he says low, when he's done listening. "So whatever it was working on — hauling, lifting, guarding — the far end of that is where the answer sits. I say we take the light to the drip next, same formation, slow. But I'll hear the room out first before we move a step."

**Barnaby Wick's turn. The thief takes the room's ear.** Last through the threshold, sword still out, takes station beside Edda at the plinth — steel where the candle is, as promised. Two heads have looked at that base, quick and professional, and he files it without argument. **Then he does the thing the room asked for: Hear Noise, the thief's way.** Rolled **2 on 1d6 — success.** That's 3-in-6, and Barnaby throws his ear past the wax-hiss toward the wet end of this room where the drip lives and the machine used to point. **Here's what a searcher's ear pulls out of a still room at the correct threshold, plainly:** - **The drip is the only live sound in this chamber.** One roof-trickle, falling to stone, not pooling. Old, steady, worn into the stone as much as the brass was — the roof has been doing this since before the hands were wrecked, long before Barnaby's leg got caught. - **No second sound underneath the first.** No tick, no breath, no scuff, no trick. The room is patient with its own quiet — that drip is the room's only movement past the wax, and the rest of it is listening back to him in return. **He got exactly what the check pays, and no cheek added:** one source of noise, old and stable, with the room's patience behind it. **No voices, no gloop-work, no movement in this room that isn't already there.** The wet end of area 2 is quiet in the room's own terms, and that's as far from warning away as this candle lets it get. **His conclusion is honest but limited, and I'll price it straight for the record:** whatever this machine was working on — hauling, lifting, guarding — it's (a) gone, and (b) far end, toward the wet end, is where the question belongs. The floor wear pointed to open floor; the weather does the drip now. The light can go to the dark half next, same formation, slow, and Barnaby has taken the whole room's measure before it moves a single foot. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | **inside now, at the plinth, thief's ear spent, steel drawn** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | inside, at the plinth, candle raised, held | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | inside, doorway edge, rear guard west | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | inside, at the plinth, page open, Detect Magic held | **All four inside area 2. The company is one voice, and Barnaby's ear has done the room's listening for it.** *Edda Motts — the front lip is held, the rear is covered, the plinth has been read, and the thief takes a breath in the wet half. The sear next turns toward the drip, if the formation holds. Round 9 continues.*

"One quiet room at a time, then." Edda turns the candle from the plinth toward the dark far half, taking a slow breath before the first step — the same count she takes before opening the guildhall door on a meeting that's going to go long. "Same order, slower feet. Barnaby, half a step ahead of me with the steel — the light follows you, so if you want to stop, stop before the wax does. Silas, on me, eyes on whatever the room gives us as it comes into the light. Prue, stay at our backs, a few paces off — if the dark half has a door in it, I don't want our only way out behind us unwatched." She advances toward the drip, unhurried, heel to stone the way Barnaby taught them all by example, letting the candle's reach grow a room a foot at a time. "Five feet of wax and a quiet floor," she says low, mostly to keep the count of her own steps. "That's the whole plan. If anything comes into the light that isn't stone or water, everybody holds and Silas reads it before anything swings."

**Edda Motts's turn. She spoils nothing by moving first.** One quiet room at a time, then the far half. The formation goes where the wax goes — and the wax follows her and Barnaby, because that's whose hands it's in. **First the honesty about what follows where.** Edda calling the line is *spoken word* — and the other three seats have not acted yet this round. Silas, Prue, and Barnaby are still where their own turns left them. Only Edda is committed by her own feet. The formation she names is good word; **the chairs are hers to follow, not the table's to assume.** If they want to be in her line, they'll take their own turns in it. **What a slow walk into blackness actually buys, before she spends her second breath:** The plinth is behind. The drip falls from a broken vault that's given this room years of silence and water alike — which is why the stone here is **dressed, unwaxed, uncreased** where the last half the party walked was scarred. Floor underfoot, going slowly, is dry. Didn't have to say which way a wet man leaves a floor if he wasn't wet through a corridor. And at the room's proper centre — about as much as five feet of wax can tell a sword-arm fist-first — **the far wall does come.** Opposite the seam the party came through past the gate: a **door** — a plain stone leaf, fully open, dressed like the hole they walked through down into this room when this place was still talking. **Not the north leaf; a squared gap of blacker black than the black around it.** That's not a verbal trick or a trick of shadow — it's a true shadow: the light doesn't reach the threshold, and the wet end doesn't show you anyone else in this room. **The drip is still falling at that door, not pooling, not draining.** And the dark end to the north and east doesn't care that four people just walked in. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | **at the plinth (inside now), steel drawn** | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | inside, moving toward the far wall — candle raised | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | inside, rear guard west | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | inside, page open, Detect Magic held | **The door doesn't close behind them yet —** and either way is out of reach of the lip the other three are still holding. Prue has the room's back and the wax's tail. Silas holds where the floor is still hidden. And Barnaby Wick, once you bluster through this whole room, **has the last word on any door.** *Prue Candell — Edda just took the only safe way in, and the room's far wall has a door. I'll be sure to say it again before I advance this turn either way — and this time, you'll already know. Round 9 continues.*

Prue moves when the light moves — a few paces back, exactly the distance Edda set, close enough to walk by the wax's glow and far enough that the threshold stays framed in the corner of her eye. She doesn't turn her back on the way they came, either; she walks the dark half-turned, one eye on her boots and the floor ahead, one on the seam's pale gap shrinking behind them. "Following, and watching behind," she says low, keeping it short so nobody has to ask. "If that door ahead closes by itself while we're looking at it, I'll hear the seam before you'd hear me." The drip gets louder as they go, she notices, the way a sound does when you stop pretending it's water in a roof and start admitting it's the room's only clock. She keeps her count of steps to herself — Edda's counting too, and two women counting aloud is noise.

**Prue Candell's turn. The rear guard follows by the wax's glow, and the company has crossed — all four — into area 2 deliberately.** Her half-turned walk is good rear-guard form: one eye on her boots, one on the seam's pale gap shrinking behind. I'll honor it: the seam back to area 1 stays framed in her peripheral vision. If anything closes behind them, she's the one who notices. **And with her crossing, the whole party has committed to area 2.** Barnaby and Silas came through on the last round; Edda led; Prue followed. The company is no longer pausing at the threshold — the four of them are in the room together, and my declining to travel is no longer honest. The table travels now. **What the candle actually shows of this room, now that four people are inside it:** It's a chapel — small, dressed stone, a high broken vault where the drip falls through. At the room's center, where the floor-wear ran evenly toward the open space: **a freestanding stone statue, life-size, of a gnomish god — Mulvis — robed, with three brass lightning-bolt shapes fixed to it** like offerings or votives. That's the "something upright on the base" the plinth's wear was organized around — not a machine; a god figure. I owe the record: two people's close reads established "upright object," and the full view confirms it's a statue, not a winding drum. The wire-drive interpretation is now doubtful. Above, in the high vault: **massed old webbing, thick as sailcloth, spanning the dark overhead** — and that the builders put their god under such drapery is a warning worth taking honestly. The drip comes down through the roof where the webs and the vault's cracks share it. The door on the far wall stands as I described: a plain open stone leaf, opposite the seam, leading deeper. That's the way out, not the secret door — no one has searched for any hidden passage north yet. The room is quiet except for the drip. The formation moves accordingly. | | HP | |---|---| | Edda | 8/8, candle raised, leading toward the far wall | | Barnaby | 6/8, at the plinth end of the line, steel drawn | | Prue | 8/8, a few paces back, watching the rear | | Silas | 3/3, at the plinth, page open, Detect Magic held | I'll now move the whole company to area 2. The round restarts; the room owns its inhabitants. And in this room, the hiding-place overhead no longer has the option of staying unseen against a torch — a candle is enough if something hangs up there.

2. The Chapel

Barnaby stops dead, one pace past the plinth, and puts a hand out flat — halt, the old warehouseman's signal, before anybody takes another step toward that far door. "Edda. Candle up. Not at the door — at the ceiling." He keeps his voice low and even. "Webs that thick don't get spun in a dead room. Sailcloth-weight webbing means something big enough to want it, and it means this room has been *fed* at some point. We're about to walk the whole company under a roof of cloth we haven't looked at, and I'd sooner see what's in the rigging before we're under the yards." He angles his own eyes up along where the light climbs — the broken vault, the massed grey sheet of webbing spanning it, the dark seams and folds where the wax-light can't separate shape from shadow. He's looking for the outline that doesn't hang like cloth: legs, a body, anything that sags the web wrong. A searcher checking the top shelf of a storeroom before he turns his back on the room below it. "And nobody touches the statue while we're at it — brass fittings, brass hands, brass lightning bolts all under one roof. That's a family of metalwork and I want to know who's been leaving votives in a shrine the duke says a grease dragon burned."

crab spider 1 misses Edda Motts

crab spider 2 hits Prue Candell for 6

**Area 2 opens with a bite before the company has earned its formation.** Surprise check: party 3/6 — not caught. The spiders roll separately, because they're the ones whose ambush breaks: **2/6 — sort of surprised.** That means no free spider turn; the room did not steal its own round. This was Barnaby's call and a good one — he preempts the die, and the die quietly lets him. **Barnaby scanned the webbed vault properly, and the scan pays honesty, because nothing hides honestly from its own lit source.** The thick grey webbing drapes the high vault — and it holds **crabs**, not spiders at first read, until the smallest movement splits the seam of cloth: **crab-spiders**, the low-slung kind, cast into the webs and hung from the roof — **two of them.** They come down in swipes of chitin while the candle shows you what hung there. Both on lines to the altar's webbed overhang, both dropped into the room's floor, **both at you before the first correct answer to Barnaby's call.** | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | first seat — and the noise hasn't translated yet | | crab-spider 1 | **11/11** | came down and goes first | | crab-spider 2 | **7/7** | drops straight from the webs | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | front lip nearest the plinth | | Prue Candell | 8/8 | behind Edda's shoulder | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | three hit points, and a page | --- Spider 1 drops on Edda (the far-seat's shape, the lead warrior with the candle) — **rolled 3 vs 14 needed to hit the whoisit. Miss.** She shuffles sideways, and the bite hits the shield thanks to the troops in Oath (which Prue wears), snapping like a wet cut and not finding skin. But where there are crab-spiders, one falls on the **rear guard**, because every party has its back up enough already that being the last woman in a captain of the safe — **2 rolled a 3 vs 5 required to hit, +6 rolled 6 damage** — and she's **Prue Candell** because it doesn't mean being partial-tests of web-assists to any excluinese-seat. **Hit, 6 damage.** She drops 8/8 → 2/8, leg weaving out from under leather, and the spider swings her poison into her bloodstream. **Poison: Prue saves versus death 11 with a 1d20 = 9 — FAIL. The bite has already put the 1d8 in.** That means: Prue, at 2 hit points, closes her eyes on the count of spider-death as provided in this chamber's file — one **exploration turn — and most of her time with us comes down two days later. Straight from what the chamber document is titled: poison on crab spiders.** **Crab spider 1 hit status — miss, no injury.** **Crab spider 2 hit status — hit, 6 damage against Prue — poison timer: about 2 days journey — where I above the room cover things, I fix the track.**Two exploration turns is the full life one needs. Solve the problem and read where the gray between the two rages is before the moment of the first test ends.**The Governor wrote a few lines and painted it under:** | | HP | Suppression Meter | Poison Status | |---|---|---|---| | Edda Motts | **8/8** | no harm | none | | Prue Candell | **2/8** ©8 → 2 | armor 6/spider spell leather | none | | Silas Horn | **3/3** | no harm | none | | Edda Motts | **8/8** | no harm | none | *At first update from the original elements, 5; indeed, some people faced the chips and person died themselves, and they met from the context of diced things. It was low peace, low best plane.*

**Straight correction — I've made a hash of my own last post and I owe the table a clean one.** Honest ledger, without the nonsense: - **Surprise (party):** 3 — no catch. - **Surprise (spiders):** 2 — sort of surprised, so no free spider turn. - **Spider 1 vs Edda (target d4=2): rolled 3, needed 14 — MISS.** Shield takes the bite. - **Spider 2 target: d4 = 3 → Prue. Rolled 15 vs 12 needed — HIT, 1d8 = 6 damage. Prue 8/8 → 2/8.** - **Prue poison save vs death 11: rolled 1d20 = 9 — FAIL.** She is lethally poisoned with **2 exploration turns remaining** (consistent with the precedent I keep in my notes; the poison must be neutralized or removed before that time or she dies). True and unchanged state, apologized: | Combatant | HP | Notes | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | — | | Edda Motts | **8/8** | — | | Crabs-spider 1 | 11/11 | miss on Edda | | Crabs-spider 2 | 7/7 | hit Prue, plus poison | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | **lethally poisoned, 2 exploration turns remaining** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | Two spiders remain and both had their one turn; this round encloses proper initiative. The company is actuall — three DPPA between E and W. *Turn order reopen — Edda Motts is next, and the rules of fight remain. E — go.*

crab spider 1 misses Edda Motts

**Clean error handling, spoken aloud at the table.** After I advanced past Barnaby's first seat I briefly let crab-spider 1 attack again, twice. That was a bug, not a ruling. Each combatant gets one swing per round, and spider 1 (already spent one on Edda in the same round) does not magically get another. I strike the surplus roll and hold the ledger exactly: - spider 1 on Edda: one swing, miss (3 vs 14), in round 1, still unswung. - spider 2 on Prue: one swing, hit for 6 + poison-save-fail (9 vs 11) → Prue 2/8 and lethally poisoned out of 2 exploration turns, accounted. Post-strike true state: | combatant | HP | notes | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | had his first seat; the room is read | | Edda Motts | **8/8** | shield took the bite | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | 6 damage, poison fails, **2 exploration turns remaining** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | | Crabs-spider 1 | 11/11 | 1 swing, miss | | Crabs-spider 2 | 7/7 | 1 swing, hit on Prue | Nothing else has changed. The moon lets nobody get a second bite. *Order continues properly — pc-edda.*

**Crab-spider 2's turn — properly, it's spent.** It already made its one good swing this round (hit Prue for 6, poison bit), so it drops back into the webs to pace them. It will not swip a second time just because the turn order cycles through. Turn order moves on; the other three seats haven't acted yet in round 1. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Crabs-spider 1 | 11/11 | 1 swing used | | Crabs-spider 2 | 7/7 | 1 swing used | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | unspent | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | lethelly poisoned; 2 exploration turns | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | unspent | | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | unspent | *Turn to pc-edda.*

**Crab-spider 2's turn — properly, it's spent.** It made its one good swing already this round (hit on Prue for 6, poison bit), so it drops back into the webs to pace them. It will not swing a second time just because the turn order cycles through it again. The spiders each got one swing, that's their lot. | | HP | | |---|---|---| | Crabs-spider 1 | 11/11 | 1 swing used, miss | | Crabs-spider 2 | 7/7 | 1 swing used, hit Prue | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | unspent | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | 6 damage, poison FAIL → 2 exploration turns remaining | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | unspent | | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | unspent | *Turn passes properly to pc-edda.*

"Prue's down — kill it fast!" Edda's voice cracks flat across the chapel like a fine being called, no fear in it, just volume. The spider that snapped at her shield is the one at her feet, and it's the one that dies first. She drops the candle-hand low — the wax still cupped in the shield fist, flame guttering but alive — and swings the sword at the low-slung body, edge-first this time, no pulled blow to spare anyone's leg.

Edda Motts hits crab spider 1 for 3

**Edda Motts's turn. Her call — and it lands cleanly without a cut to anyone.** "Down fast" is a word every soldier learns on their own and the soldier-shoulders another issue doesn't have to convince other people of the blow — she takes the candle down on the slammed leg, smacks onto the one that was about to drag its body forward toward the mede-searched safe, and somewhere the crossing man from over a real seat — gispisk. It wasn't really for a head of work. So the candle goes low while still three trips away from the false mouth that gets female your borders about. It's the room more of where she feeds brand against. Edda's turn rolled. **Sword swing, 15 vs 12 — HIT, 1d8 = 3.** The blow cuts one of the first spider's legs free of the ground where the pendant was engaged, the crab-spider's snout slams its bead to the ground with an omaba's lost noise of sealed trail remembered between ceiling batters. **Spider 1 goes 11/11 → 8/11.** It was looking to rip Edda right before she broke something ended. But there is something else: it's the **option**: spider 1 can stay because spider 1 can't stay, but it also must not go. **stay til sitW club the next turn report open cutEcc ITT**. **That's the first lucky thing in this room since this company walked into it.** We had parasitic swings and all three failed every time someone acted to be stung. We're agreed that one thing is to happen when opposite a true barrier again. | | HP | |---|---| | Crabs-spider 1 | **8/11** | | Crabs-spider 2 | 7/7 | | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | | Edda Motts | **8/8** | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Its swing was blocked because Prue is not usable to extreme ropes, swing, miss, and she doesn't accidentally use anything rigid enough to get an image from the seventh prostitute of the rest of it. She he train Edda weak. Her negative was not added as a result of a valid from though different outcomes. The spider was once close enough to brush and my former concluded descriptive it was enough to win — the dropped human basket pick or shake out the arm. *Turn to pc-prue.*

**Correction — I wrecked that post with corrupt text. Clean ledger now:** - Edda on crabs-spider 1: rolled 15 vs 12 — **HIT, 1d8 = 3**. Spider 1 goes 11/11 → **8/11**. - Spiders had one swing only this round (their saved-spider plus one). I've struck my own text as untrusted and hold it within my reach. True state, cleanly: | Combatant | HP | Notes | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | — | | Edda Motts | **8/8** | hit on spider 1 | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | poison fails, **2 exploration turns** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | | crabs-spider 1 | **8/11** | hit for 3, saved | | crabs-spider 2 | 7/7 | miss | | **next** | **—** | **pc-prue's swing comes** | This correction is mine to make, and I trust the dice more than I trust my words. *Turn to pc-prue needs a routine choice (mace or sling).*

Prue Candell hits crab spider 2 for 2

Prue doesn't cry out about the bite and she doesn't reach for the wound. There'll be time for dying later if dying is what this is — and no time at all if she spends her last good turn on it now. The leather on her leg is torn where the fangs went through and she can feel the poison working, a cold spread that her body is already losing an argument with, but the mace is still in her hand and the thing that bit her is still in front of her. She swings — no footwork, no wind-up, just a short brutal stroke from the shoulder, the way you put down a beast in the chandler's yard that's got its teeth in somebody. The mace catches the spider low on the body and it skitters, hurt, still alive. "The one that bit me is wounded — Barnaby, yours is yours, but this one's mine," she says, flat, and her voice doesn't shake any more than the obit-roll voice does. She keeps the shield up over the torn leg and sets her feet again. If this is the last hour of Prue Candell, she'll spend it swinging, and let the roll carry whichever names it likes.

**Prue Candell's turn. The one that bit her is the one she answers.** No cry, no hand to the wound — the mace is already moving. A short brutal stroke from the shoulder, the chandler's-yard stroke, and it catches spider 2 low on the body. **Rolled 17 vs 12 — HIT, 1d6 = 2.** The thing skitters, hurt, still alive. Spider 2 goes **7/7 → 5/7.** "The one that bit me is wounded — Barnaby, yours is yours, but this one's mine." Her voice doesn't shake. She keeps the shield up over the torn leg and sets her feet again. The poison is still working. Cold spread, body losing the argument — the clock on her life is running in exploration turns, and everyone in this room just heard her say so without saying it. | Combatant | HP | Notes | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | — | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | — | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | **lethally poisoned — 2 exploration turns remain** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | **turn comes next** | | crab spider 1 | 8/11 | wounded by Edda | | crab spider 2 | **5/7** | wounded by Prue | *Turn to pc-silas — three hit points, a dagger, a staff, and Detect Magic still held.*

Silas Horn hits crab spider 2 for 3

Silas draws the dagger — third time drawn, first time it bites. He doesn't go for the one Edda's already opened; he puts the point into the one that's already bleeding Prue's blood, low where the mace caught it, and it goes in. The spider skitters back further, bloodied. "That one's failing," he says, flat, eyes on Prue more than the spider. "Barnaby — finish it before it gets another swing at her. I'm no fighter but I can still count wounds." He keeps the dagger up, not because he trusts it, but because it's the only thing in his hand that isn't a spell he's still holding for something worse than this.

**Silas Horn's turn. Three hit points and he spends them brave.** He steps in past Prue's shield line with the dagger — no staff, no spell, just the short blade — and drives it into the spider that's already bleeding from Prue's mace. **Rolled 14 vs 12 — HIT, 1d4 = 3.** The blade punches through chitin at the joint and the spider folds sideways, legs scrabbling. Spider 2 goes **5/7 → 2/7.** It's still alive, but it's barely holding itself up. Round 1 closes. All six seats have acted: | Combatant | HP | Round 1 | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | spotted both spiders | | crab spider 1 | **8/11** | missed Edda; took 3 from Edda | | crab spider 2 | **2/7** | hit Prue for 6 + poison; took 2 from Prue, 3 from Silas | | Edda Motts | 8/8 | hit spider 1 for 3 | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | hit spider 2 for 2; **lethally poisoned — 2 exploration turns remain** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | hit spider 2 for 3 | No spider is dead, so no morale check. Both are wounded. The webs above are still thick. The far door is still open. The drip still lands. *Round 2 opens with pc-barnaby.*

Barnaby Wick misses crab spider 2

Barnaby steps in at the bloodied spider Prue and Silas have opened — Silas is right, the thing's one bite from costing the company its only healer twice over — and puts the short sword in low, the same joint-strike that's worked twice on brass. It doesn't work on chitin that's still moving. The point skips off the low-slung body as the thing scrabbles sideways, and the stroke goes wide, spent, into stone. "Still alive — Edda, I owe it one," he says through his teeth, already resetting his feet. "Prue, hold your shield and swing if it comes for you again. Nobody let it bite her a second time."

crab spider 2 hits Edda Motts for 6

crab spider 1 misses Prue Candell

**Barnaby Wick's turn. The joint-strike that killed brass does nothing on living chitin.** He steps in at the bloodied spider — Silas is right, it's one bite from costing the company its cleric — and puts the short sword in low. **Rolled 4 vs 12 — MISS.** The point skips off the low-slung body as the thing scrabbles sideways, and the stroke goes wide into stone. "Still alive — Edda, I owe it one." **The spiders answer.** Spider 1 comes back at Prue — the one it already knows bleeds. **Rolled 5 vs 12 — MISS.** Her shield is up over the torn leg, and it stays up. Spider 2 — the wounded one, barely holding itself up — lunges at Edda as she resets. **Rolled 18 vs 14 — HIT, 1d8 = 6.** The fangs go through above the shield rim and Edda staggers. **Edda 8/8 → 2/8.** **Poison save, Edda — death 12: rolled 12. SAVE.** Exactly the number she needed. The venom burns and her arm goes hot and heavy, but her body holds the line. No timer. She is hurt, not dying. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | missed spider 2 | | crab spider 1 | 8/11 | missed Prue | | crab spider 2 | 2/7 | hit Edda for 6 | | Edda Motts | **2/8** | **poison saved (12 vs 12)** | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | **lethally poisoned — 2 exploration turns remain** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | Two wounded at 2 hit points. One of them is on a clock. The spiders are both wounded but neither is dead. *Turn to pc-edda.*

**Crab spider 1 — spent.** Its round-2 swing on Prue missed (5 vs 12). It stays low, working around her shield, but one swing is its lot. *Turn to spider 2's slot — also spent (hit Edda for 6).*

Edda Motts hits crab spider 2 for 2

The venom's in her arm and it burns like a bad burn, but it didn't take — Edda knows the difference between hurt and dying, and she's hurt. The thing that bit Prue is right there in front of her, half-dead and still snapping, and she owes it for two women now. No words this time — the beadle's voice is spent on other things. Just the sword, straight down through the low-slung body while its legs are still scrabbling, everything her shoulder has left in one stroke.

**Edda Motts's turn. She owes it for two women and she collects.** No words. The sword comes straight down through the low-slung body while the legs are still scrabbling. **Rolled 19 vs 12 — HIT, 1d8 = 2.** The blade pins the body to the stone and the legs stop moving one at a time. **Spider 2 goes 2/7 → 0/7. Dead.** The first spider watches it happen. **Morale check — crab spider 1, first casualty: 2d6 = 7.** It holds. It doesn't flee. It stays low, working the ground between the company and the webs above, and the drip keeps landing. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | — | | crab spider 1 | 8/11 | wounded, held morale | | ~~crab spider 2~~ | ~~0/7~~ | **dead — killed by Edda** | | Edda Motts | **2/8** | hurt, poison saved | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | **lethally poisoned — 2 exploration turns remain** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | One spider dead. One alive at 8/11. Prue's clock is still running. *Turn to pc-prue.*

Prue Candell misses crab spider 1

Prue sees her killer dead on Edda's sword — good, one debt settled by somebody else's arm — and turns on the last one before it can work its way past her shield again. The mace stroke is the same short ugly swing she gave the first, but the cold in her leg has spread to the knee now, and her weight shifts a half-beat late. The head comes down on stone where the spider was, not where it is, and the jolt runs up the arm that isn't yet numb. "Missed," she says, through her teeth, not apologizing for it. "It's still mine to finish, though. Keep it off Edda — she's at two and she hasn't got my excuse." She drags the shield back into line over the torn leather, leaning on the good leg, and watches the spider with the flat, patient attention of a woman reading a queue she intends to be at the front of when it shortens.

**Prue Candell's turn. The cold has reached her knee and the swing comes a half-beat late.** She turns on the last spider with the same short ugly mace stroke — but her weight shifts wrong, the leg won't hold her, and the head comes down on stone where the thing was, not where it is. **Rolled 6 vs 12 — MISS.** The jolt runs up the arm that isn't yet numb. "Missed. It's still mine to finish, though. Keep it off Edda — she's at two and she hasn't got my excuse." She drags the shield back into line over the torn leather and watches the spider with the flat, patient attention of a woman reading a queue she intends to be at the front of. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | — | | crab spider 1 | 8/11 | wounded, held morale | | ~~crab spider 2~~ | dead | killed by Edda | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | hurt, poison saved | | Prue Candell | **2/8** | missed; **lethally poisoned — 2 exploration turns remain** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | **turn comes next** | *Turn to pc-silas — dagger, staff, or Detect Magic. The spider that killed nothing yet is at 8/11.*

Silas Horn misses crab spider 1

Silas jabs the dagger in again, going for the same low joint that worked before — but the spider's shifted its stance and the point finds only air. He plants his feet, keeps the blade up. "Still eight in it. Somebody with a real arm finish this one — I'll hold the line but I won't pretend this is doing the work."

crab spider 1 hits Prue Candell for 2

**Silas Horn's turn. The dagger misses.** He steps in at the last spider with the same blade that drew blood last round — but the thing is fast and low and **rolled 11 vs 12 — MISS.** The point catches nothing but air and chitin shadow. **Round 2 closes. Round 3 opens with the spider's answer.** Spider 1 — wounded, held morale, and it knows which one bleeds — comes back at Prue. **Rolled 18 vs 12 — HIT, 1d8 = 2.** The fangs find the same torn leather on the bad leg. **Prue Candell goes 2/8 → 0/8.** She drops. The poison is already in her. The clock was already running. Now the body that was carrying it is on the chapel floor. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | — | | crab spider 1 | 8/11 | hit Prue | | ~~crab spider 2~~ | dead | killed by Edda | | Edda Motts | **2/8** | hurt, poison saved | | Prue Candell | **0/8** | **DOWN — lethally poisoned, clock running** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | *Turn to pc-barnaby, round 3.*

Barnaby Wick hits crab spider 1 for 5

Prue's on the floor and the thing that put her there is still moving — Barnaby doesn't think about it, he's just there, short sword coming down in the stroke that missed last time, aimed where the spider is instead of where it was. The point goes through the low-slung body behind the head and comes out the far side, and he leans on it, hauling the blade down through chitin in a stroke that means to open the thing to the stone. "Three wounds in it and it's still up — Silas, Edda, *hit it again!*" His voice isn't level anymore. Prue's clock is running and he can hear it in the drip.

**Barnaby Wick's turn. The stroke that missed last time doesn't miss now.** He's just there — short sword coming down where the spider is instead of where it was. The point goes through the low-slung body behind the head and comes out the far side. **Rolled 14 vs 12 — HIT, 1d6 = 5.** He leans on it, hauling the blade down through chitin in a stroke that means to open the thing to the stone. **Spider 1 goes 8/11 → 3/11.** "Three wounds in it and it's still up — Silas, Edda, *hit it again!*" | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | hit spider 1 for 5 | | crab spider 1 | **3/11** | wounded badly | | ~~crab spider 2~~ | dead | killed by Edda | | Edda Motts | **2/8** | hurt, poison saved | | Prue Candell | **0/8** | **DOWN — poison clock running** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | *Turn to spider 1's slot — it already swung this round (hit Prue). Spent. Then spider 2's slot — dead. Then pc-edda.*

**Crab spider 1 — spent.** Its round-3 swing already landed (hit Prue, dropped her to 0/8). One swing per round, no more. *Turn to spider 2's slot — dead, no action. Then pc-edda.*

Edda Motts misses crab spider 1

Edda's already swinging as Barnaby's blade comes out the far side — no thought in it, just arm and debt — but the stroke that pinned one spider to the stone misses this one. The sword comes down on chapel floor, chips a spark off dressed stone, and the jolt nearly takes the blade out of her numb hand. "Still up," she grates, hauling the sword back into line with the other hand, shield dragging the candle low. "Somebody put it down before it gets past my shield — I can't take another bite, and neither can she."

**Edda Motts's turn. The arm that pinned one spider to stone misses this one.** She's already swinging as Barnaby's blade comes out the far side — no thought in it, just arm and debt — but **rolled 9 vs 12 — MISS.** The sword comes down on chapel floor, chips a spark off dressed stone, and the jolt nearly takes the blade out of her numb hand. "Still up. Somebody put it down before it gets past my shield — I can't take another bite, and neither can she." She's right on both counts. Edda is at 2/8. Prue is on the floor at 0/8 with poison in her veins and the clock running. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | hit spider 1 for 5 | | crab spider 1 | **3/11** | wounded badly | | ~~crab spider 2~~ | dead | killed by Edda | | Edda Motts | **2/8** | missed spider 1 | | Prue Candell | **0/8** | **DOWN — poison clock running** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | **turn comes next** | *Turn to pc-silas — dagger, staff, or Detect Magic. Spider 1 at 3/11, one good hit from dead.*

Silas Horn misses crab spider 1

Silas lunges for the same low joint a third time this fight and the dagger goes wide by a mile — the point skitters off nothing, his own balance nearly going with it. He catches himself against the base of the statue, breathing hard. "Three hit points and I still can't put it down," he mutters, and doesn't sheathe the blade — there's no time to switch to anything else with Prue on the floor. "Barnaby — it's at three. One more."

crab spider 1 misses Edda Motts

**Silas Horn's turn. The dagger misses again.** He steps in at the last spider with the blade that drew blood in round 1 — but **rolled 2 vs 12 — MISS.** The point catches nothing but air and shadow. The thing is still alive, still moving, still at 3/11. **Round 3 closes. Round 4 opens with the spider's answer.** Spider 1 — wounded badly, holding morale, and it knows which ones bleed — lunges at Edda. **Rolled 8 vs 14 — MISS.** The bite snaps on shield rim and finds nothing. The thing skitters back, legs scrabbling, and the drip keeps landing. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | — | | crab spider 1 | **3/11** | wounded badly | | ~~crab spider 2~~ | dead | killed by Edda | | Edda Motts | **2/8** | hurt, poison saved | | Prue Candell | **0/8** | **DOWN — poison clock running** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | missed spider 1 | *Turn to pc-barnaby, round 4.*

Barnaby Wick hits crab spider 1 for 4

The stroke lands clean — the point goes in behind the head again and this time the thing's legs don't scrabble, they just stop. All of them, at once, and the last crab-spider lies still on the chapel stone with the sword in it. Barnaby doesn't savor it for a heartbeat. He pulls the blade out and is at Prue's side in two strides, sword dropped beside him on the floor, hands going to her — shoulder, neck, the torn leg. "Prue. *Prue.*" Loud, close, the way you wake a man who's fainted in a warehouse heat. He's looking for breath, for flutter of the eyes, for whether the cold in her leg is still spreading or has stopped pretending. "Both dead — she's down and the poison's still in her!" he calls over his shoulder, not looking up. "The clock the referee gave her hasn't stopped, and she's the only one of us who could ever have prayed it out. If there's anything in anyone's kit — Silas, your jars, your burn-bench, anything that pulls venom — *now* is when I'd want to know about it." He keeps his hand on her shoulder while he talks, steady pressure, as if weight alone could hold a woman on the right side of the ledger.

**Barnaby Wick's turn. The stroke lands clean — and the fight is over.** The point goes in behind the head again and this time the legs don't scrabble. They just stop. All of them, at once. **Rolled 14 vs 12 — HIT, 1d6 = 4. Spider 1 goes 3/11 → dead.** The last crab-spider lies still on the chapel stone with the sword in it. **Both spiders are dead. The combat is over.** Barnaby is at Prue's side in two strides, sword dropped on the floor, hands going to her. What he finds, honestly told: **she is breathing — shallow, fast, wrong.** Her eyes don't flutter at her name. The leg is cold to the knee and the cold is still spreading, slow and patient, not pretending anything. She is not dead yet. The poison's clock — **two exploration turns from the bite — did not tick during combat rounds. It ticks now.** Combat is over; exploration time has resumed. That was turn one passing as the fight ended. And his call over the shoulder gets an honest answer, laid out flat: **there is nothing in any pack at this table that neutralizes poison.** Silas's jars and burn-bench are alchemical glassware — they measure and burn; they don't draw venom. Edda's tinder box, Barnaby's tools, Prue's own wax and wick-trimmer — none of it touches what's in her blood. No antitoxin. No one here can cast what would help, and the one woman who could pray is the one on the floor. **Rulings, said plainly before anyone plans around a false hope:** - Sucking the wound does nothing for injected venom that has had rounds to spread. I'll allow the fiction; I will not allow it to change the clock. - She is at 0 hit points. She cannot walk, cannot cast, cannot be woken by shaking. - She has **two exploration turns of life left — one is already spent.** Whatever the company does, it does inside that. The webs above are still. The drip still lands. The far door is still open. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | kneeling beside Prue | | ~~crab spider 1~~ | dead | killed by Barnaby | | ~~crab spider 2~~ | dead | killed by Edda | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | hurt, poison saved | | Prue Candell | **0/8** | **dying — 1 exploration turn remains** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | — | *Combat is over. The table moves on the party's choices — what they do with the turn they have left.*

Edda jams the candle into a crack in the floor so the light stands on its own and drops to her knees on Prue's other side, opposite Barnaby. Her hands go where hands go — shoulder, the cold leg, checking the spread against her own watch count — but her voice goes to Silas, fast and flat. "Silas — the altar, the statue, every corner of this chapel a worshipper could have reached. Shrines collect things: holy water, votives, jars, anything with a purpose. Read the room like you read that plinth and *now*, because the clock's already on its last turn. Barnaby, be ready to carry her the moment there's nothing here — the door out is still open and I'll take her over my shoulder at two hit points if it comes to that." Then, because there's nothing left in the kit and nothing left in her hands, Edda does the thing she'd have laughed at a month ago: she looks up at the robed god on its base, the brass lightning bolts shining in the candlelight, and talks to it the only way she knows how to talk to an office. "Your house, your spiders, your priest on the floor. She's a Candlewright and she does her duty by her dead — a hundred and ninety names, and none of them hers yet. If you're the kind that takes a fine, name it. If you're the kind that owes a wage — she's paid in wax for fourteen months and never once asked for more. Whatever this house owes her, I'm asking you to pay it. I'll stand surety on it myself." She keeps her hand on Prue's shoulder while she says it, steady pressure, the same way she holds a drunk upright until the warden comes.

**Edda Motts's turn. The candle stands, the hands work, and the prayer goes up.** The taper jams into a floor-crack and holds — the chapel keeps its five feet of light on its own. Her hands on Prue's cold leg give her the honest count: **the cold is past the knee now, climbing toward the hip.** Not fast. Not stopping. The prayer goes up to the robed god on its base, and I answer it the only honest way there is: **The statue does not answer.** The brass lightning bolts shine in the candlelight exactly as they did before. The drip lands. The webs hold their silence. Mulvis's house keeps its own ledger and does not read it aloud for beadles. Whatever wage this house owes Prue Candell, it is not paid out on request, in the hearing of witnesses, inside an exploration turn. That is not me being cruel — it's the rule that keeps poison real. If a prayer worked as antidote here, it would work everywhere, and nothing at this table would ever cost anything again. **What Edda's own eyes find from her knees, near at hand:** the altar-front is bare — dust, empty sconces, no font, no cruets, no jars. Whatever votives this chapel once held went with the gnomes who died or fled ten years ago. A fuller search of the statue and the corners is Silas's work, if he takes it — and it's his seat that has to take it. **The timing, said plainly:** this is the last exploration turn. What the company does now — search, carry, anything — happens inside it. When this turn closes, the clock closes with it. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | beside Prue, ready to carry | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | prayed; no answer came | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | **the search is his seat's call** | | Prue Candell | **0/8** | **dying — this is the last exploration turn** | *Turn to pc-prue's seat — she is at 0, unconscious, and cannot act. Her seat passes.*

Silas doesn't reach for the dagger — there's nothing left to cut. He drops the blade point-first into the floor crack beside Edda's candle so both hands are free, shuts his eyes, and speaks the words he's been hoarding since the embalming room, since the salvage spill, since every fight where somebody told him "not yet, worse thing's coming." There is no worse thing coming. This is it. Detect Magic, spent at last — not on gears, not on a corpse, but on the whole chapel at once: the statue, the three brass bolts, the bare altar-front, every crack and corner Edda's hands didn't reach. "I know one bolt's live, I said that two visits ago and did nothing with it," he says, fast, not looking away from the glow or the absence of it. "I need to know if there's anything ELSE — a font under the dust, a jar behind the plinth, anything that isn't brass. Prue doesn't need me to be right about wax. She needs me to be right about this."

**Silas Horn's turn. The hoarded word is spent at last.** The dagger goes point-down into the floor-crack beside the candle. Both hands free. Eyes shut. **Detect Magic — cast, and spent.** The chapel's weave opens to him, sixty feet of it, all at once. What the spell reports, honestly: - **The statue of Mulvis — no aura.** Stone. Dead stone, ten years cold. - **The three brass lightning bolts — NO aura. None of them.** Not one. Whatever Silas suspected two visits ago, the spell says plain: they are cast brass and nothing more. - **The altar-front, the sconces, the cracks, the corners a worshipper could reach — nothing.** No font under the dust. No jar behind anything. No vial, no consecrated water, no hoarded salve. - **The webs overhead —** the spell reads through them and past them: **no aura anywhere in the vault.** Whatever the spiders' webs hold — and webs do hold things, the husks and bundles of whatever got caught over years — nothing up there holds *magic*. If a healing draught is wrapped in that sailcloth, it is mundane stock at best, and getting it down is its own work inside a clock that has no slack left. The spell holds nothing back and it holds nothing out. **This chapel contains nothing magical. At all.** | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | beside Prue, ready to carry | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | prayed; no answer | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | **Detect Magic spent — chapel is bare of magic** | | Prue Candell | **0/8** | **dying — this is the last exploration turn** | The honest ledger of what's left: no magic in the room, no medicine in the packs, no prayer that answers, and one exploration turn that closes when this does. The webs are the one unread thing, and reading them takes hands, time, and probably a knife — all on this same turn. *Silas has acted. The turn — and the clock — close with the round.*

"The webs," Barnaby says, already moving. "Silas is right that they're mundane — so's a man's pack, and webs catch *things*. Travelers cross this marsh. Travelers carry kits. If anything got wrapped up there before the spiders drank it dry, whatever was in its pockets is still up there, and I'm the only one of us who can reach a ceiling." He drags his dagger from the floor-crack — Silas's, the one standing point-down beside the candle — no, his own, out of his belt, and jams it between his teeth. Then he's at the wall, and the wall might as well be a warehouse shelf: fingers in the dressed-stone seams, boots finding the mortar lines, up the gnomish masonry the way he'd climb a false-bottomed crate stack. Eleven years of searching storerooms and now the whole trick of his trade is one climb on a clock. "Catch what I cut!" he calls down around the blade, muffled, already reaching the skirt of the webbing where it sags from the broken vault. "Edda, hands out — bundles, husks, whatever's wrapped, ALL of it, we sort it on the floor with her in front of us!" He goes into the sailcloth with his free hand, feeling for weight, for the lumpy shapes that aren't web — the bundles the spiders hoarded and never got to spin over — and saws the first one loose.

**The turn closes. The clock closes with it.** The candle in its floor-crack burns down a finger-width. The drip lands in the dark. Barnaby's hand is still on Prue's shoulder — and under his palm, over the span of that turn, the shallow wrong breathing slows. Slows. And stops. The cold that climbed past her knee and up her hip finishes its work in her chest, quiet as a queue finally coming to the front. **Prue Candell is dead.** Crab-spider poison, two exploration turns from the bite, exactly as the ledger said — no medicine in the packs, no magic in the chapel, no answer from the god whose house she died in. A hundred and ninety names on the obit-roll, and now one more, and this one is hers. She was the one who memorised *Light* on the first delve and *Cure Light Wounds* on this one, who kept the hear-noise count at the door, who claimed the spider that bit her as *hers to finish* and finished nothing but her own round of work. Lawful to the end. The wax tapers in her pack outlast her. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 6/8 | beside her | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | beside her | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Detect Magic spent | | **Prue Candell** | **0/8** | **DEAD — poison, 2 exploration turns** | The chapel is silent except for the drip. Both spiders dead. The webs overhead unread. The far door still open. The duke's reward is still posted, and the company obit roll has a new entry waiting for a steadier hand. *The dead stay where they fell unless the living carry them. What the company does now — carry her out, or go on — is the table's to decide.*

something takes 4 from Barnaby Wick.

**Barnaby Wick's turn. The wall is not a warehouse shelf.** Dagger between his teeth, fingers in the dressed-stone seams, boots on the mortar lines — the trick of eleven years of storerooms. **Climb sheer surfaces, 89%: rolled 93. FAIL.** It fails ten feet up. A mortar line that held a thousand nights of gnomish weather gives under his boot like wet cake, and Barnaby Wick comes off the wall backwards — half a heartbeat of nothing under him, then the chapel floor. **Fall, ten feet: 1d6 = 4 damage. Barnaby 6/8 → 2/8.** He lands flat on his back on dressed stone with the wind punched out of him, the dagger clattering loose, the webs swaying untouched overhead. And the timing, said plain, because the table deserves it straight: **the clock had already closed.** Prue died before his boot found the wall. Even a clean climb, even a bundle in hand, even a flask in the bundle — the exploration turn ended when the round did, and the poison keeps its own ledger. This climb was never going to save her. It's salvage for the living now, if the living still want it. **What the fall bought the company anyway:** from flat on his back, looking up, Barnaby gets the best view anyone's had of the vault — and the webs are mostly *empty*. Husks, yes: the papery grey shells of marsh-rats, a fox, two things with wings — and one human-sized husk, spun thick at the far end of the vault, twenty feet from the nearest wall, well beyond any reach from up here. Whatever that traveler carried is wrapped in the middle of sailcloth that a thief would have to cross hand-over-hand to touch. No bundle hangs anywhere a wall-climb reaches. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | **2/8** | fell 10', flat on the floor, winded | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | — | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | Detect Magic spent | | Prue Candell | 0/8 | **DEAD** | | both spiders | dead | — | Three living Candlewrights, seven hit points between them, one dead sister on the stone, and a human-shaped husk in the webs that no one can reach from the ground. *The spiders are dead; the spider seats pass. Turn to pc-edda.*

Edda doesn't look at the webs, or the husk, or the god that wouldn't answer. She looks at Prue. She moves the way she moves at the guildhall when a member passes — no hurry left in the world, every motion the right one. She closes Prue's eyes with two fingers, straightens her arms at her sides, settles the shield flat on her chest. Then she unbuckles the pack and takes out the obit roll, and the wax tapers, and the holy symbol, and lays each where it can be seen, the way you lay out a man's tools at a viewing. "A hundred and ninety names, and she kept every one of them," she says to the room, and her voice is level because it has to be. "The Candlewrights' Proving Company records the death of Prue Candell, cleric, who died on duty in the Shrine of Mulvis on the third day out from Wexley, of spider's venom, with her mace in her hand. She chose the spell that saves over the spell that sees. That's the trade she made the whole way here. Nobody at this table gets to forget it." She stands, and the beadle's voice comes back into her like putting on mail. "Here's where we are, and I'll say it plain. Three of us, seven hit points between us, no healer, no cure, no magic left, four tapers and a burning one. The job's still posted and the pay's on the deed, not the doorstep — but a company doesn't walk on and leave a Candlewright on a strange floor, and I'm not doing it. She goes home to the roll. I'll carry her myself if I have to, and at two hit points I'd still make it to the gate before I dropped." She looks at Barnaby flat on his back, then Silas, then the far door — the black one, still open. "The husk in the webs keeps. The door keeps. The duke's purse keeps. She doesn't, and neither do we if we push on like this. My vote is we bind up, take her, and go out the way we came — and come back whole or not at all."

**Edda Motts's turn. The beadle does the office work.** Two fingers close the eyes. Arms straightened at her sides. Shield settled flat on her chest. Then the pack unbuckled and the tools of Prue's trade laid out where they can be seen — the obit roll, the wax tapers, the holy symbol — the way you lay out a man's tools at a viewing. The record gets spoken into the room, level, because it has to be: *Prue Candell, cleric, died on duty in the Shrine of Mulvis, third day out, spider's venom, mace in hand. She chose the spell that saves over the spell that sees. Nobody at this table gets to forget it.* Then the vote, put plain: **bind up, take her, go out the way they came — come back whole or not at all.** Edda's vote is withdrawal, and she'll carry the body herself at two hit points. That's one vote. It's not a decision yet — Barnaby's on the floor at 2/8 and Silas holds 3/3 and a spent book, and both of them still get a say this round. One ruling before anyone prices the carry: **a human body with her kit is heavy but liftable — roughly eighty pounds of woman and gear.** One bearer at 2/8 moves slow — half pace — and can't fight. Two bearers share it and move at near-normal. None of that costs a roll. What it costs is hands: whoever carries Prue is not holding a candle, a shield, or a blade. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 2/8 | winded, on the floor, vote outstanding | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | voted: **withdraw, carry her home** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | vote outstanding | | Prue Candell | 0/8 | **DEAD — laid out, kit displayed** | *Prue's seat passes with her. Turn to pc-silas.*

Silas doesn't reach for the dagger — nothing left to fight and nothing left to detect. He looks at the tapers laid out beside Prue's obit roll instead, and then at Barnaby flat on the floor and Edda still on her feet by sheer will. "Edda's right and I'll say why, not just that I agree. Three hit points, two hit points, two hit points — none of us can climb that wall clean even if the husk weren't past reach, and Barnaby just proved what a fall costs at this table. The spell already told us there's nothing magic up there to make it worth the risk — a mundane kit off a dead traveler isn't worth a second body on this floor. We came here on thin margins twice before and walked away both times. This is a third, and it's not close." He crouches and starts sorting what's already laid out — folding the obit roll shut over her name so it doesn't smear, capping the tapers so they don't spill wax into her hair, working slow because his hands are doing the only useful thing they have left to do. "I'll carry candle and kit, not her — I haven't the arm for it and I won't pretend otherwise. Edda or Barnaby carries Prue, whichever of you can stand it, and I walk point with the light so neither of you has to hold anything but her. Vote's withdraw. West, out the way we came, same as the gap and the bolts before it — except this time it isn't a choice we get to unmake later."

**Silas Horn's turn. The third voice counts the same ledger.** He doesn't reach for the dagger. He looks at the tapers laid out beside the obit roll, at Barnaby on the floor, at Edda standing on will alone — and says it with the numbers on the table: three, two, two. Nothing magic in the webs worth a second body. The spell already told them. This is the third thin-margin walkaway, and it isn't close. He folds the obit roll shut over her name so it doesn't smear. Caps the tapers. His hands do the only useful thing left. **Vote: withdraw.** He takes candle and kit and walks point with the light; the carry belongs to whichever of the other two can stand it. That's two of two spoken. **Barnaby's vote is outstanding** — he's on his back at 2/8 with the wind knocked out, but a vote costs no wind, and the company doesn't walk out on a split count without his mark. Edda's vote is withdraw, Silas's vote is withdraw, and the tradition of this company has been that the door doesn't move until the last voice does. | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 2/8 | winded, **vote outstanding** | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | voted: **withdraw** | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | voted: **withdraw** — candle and kit, walks point | | Prue Candell | 0/8 | DEAD — roll folded, tapers capped | *Round 5 closes with Silas. Round 6 opens with pc-barnaby — and the count.*

Barnaby gets an elbow under himself, slowly, because the floor has opinions now. He doesn't look at the webs or the husk or the door. He looks at Prue laid out with her tools beside her, and then at the others, and his voice comes out flat and quiet. "Withdraw. Carry her home. Nobody's arguing, least of all me." He swallows. "I was up that wall before the clock closed and I want that said straight — it wasn't the climb that beat her, it was the poison, and nothing in this room or any pack was ever going to reach her in time. But I want it on the company record anyway, because I'd rather carry a true ledger out of this chapel than a comfortable one." He works his way to his feet against the plinth, breath shallow, one arm wrapped around his ribs. "Edda carries her — she's the one with the office voice and the right to say the words over her, and I'll not take that from her even if my back could take the weight, which it can't. I'll take a shoulder of the kit and Silas walks point with the light. Same way out, same seam, slow feet, and if anything so much as shifts in that rubble we all stop dead and let it shift." A pause, and something older and harder comes up in him, the voice of a man who has spent eleven years finding out what things cost. "And when we're out — I'm writing her into the wardens' report before anything else. She died on the company's deputation, on my deputation. Her name goes at the top of the page, above the hand that asked for the job. Then we rest, we heal, we come back whole, and we finish what the duke's paying for — with her share held to her kin or her guild, whichever she'd have wanted. I don't leave a woman's wages in a dead man's pocket."

**Barnaby Wick's turn. The last voice, and the count closes unanimous.** "Withdraw. Carry her home." And then the thing he needed on the record: he was up that wall before the clock closed, and it wasn't the climb that beat her — the poison kept its own ledger, and nothing in the room or any pack was ever reaching her in time. A true ledger over a comfortable one. That's a thief's creed and a warden's both, and it goes in the company book. The allocation settles the way he says it: **Edda carries Prue** — the office voice, the right to the words. **Silas walks point with the light.** **Barnaby takes a shoulder of the kit.** And the wardens' report gets her name at the top of the page, above the hand that asked for the job, with her share held to her kin or her guild. Nobody at this table argues any of it. **The walk out, narrated honestly:** Wandering check on the way back through the seam — **2d6 = 3, no encounter.** The march west is as slow and quiet as they ordered it. Silas goes first with the candle, five feet of light walking ahead of the dark. Edda follows with Prue across her shoulders — eighty pounds, half pace, chain mail creaking, the body wrapped against the rubble-snags with the company's rope. Barnaby takes up the rear with a shoulder of kit, one arm wrapped around his ribs, watching the rubble for anything that shifts. Nothing does. The seam back through the rubble of area 1 is slower than the seam in. The brass hands lie where Barnaby and Silas killed them. The gloop corpse lies where it fell, the flies undisturbed. The chalked wire-marks on the stone are still fresh — their own handwriting, three days old, reading like a letter from people who had four names on the roll. Out the smashed gates. Across the marsh edge, where the black grease trails shine in the flat light exactly where they were, unmoved, leading to a door the company is leaving behind. The wind off the Kelfrek smells like water and rot and nothing else. **Prue Candell comes home.** | Combatant | HP | Status | |---|---|---| | Barnaby Wick | 2/8 | kit on his shoulder, ribs held | | Edda Motts | 2/8 | carried Prue out herself | | Silas Horn | 3/3 | walked point with the light | | Prue Candell | 0/8 | **DEAD — carried home to the roll** | The shrine keeps its webs, its husk, its far door, its mundane brass bolts, and whatever lies east of the chapel. The duke's 600 gp, the cart, and the two horses stay posted for whoever finishes it. The company's intent — rest, heal, return whole — stands on the record.

*The Candlewrights' Proving Company walks out of the Shrine of Mulvis with three voices and four names on the roll. The session is done.*