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Ander Vale

Right. I step to the ruined door and put myself between the others and the first brass hand, shield up, and cut at the thing with the sword.

DM

Ander’s sword rings from the brass palm and throws sparks across the ruined threshold. The hand is untouched. Its fingers spread against the rubble, and the matching hand tears free from the other doorpost with a grind of metal.

DM

The first brass hand scuttles up Ander’s shield and snaps shut at his throat. He wrenches the shield sideways; metal fingers scrape across his chainmail and close on empty air.

DM

The second hand lunges low and tries to clamp around Ander’s sword arm. His shield boss knocks it into the broken masonry, where its fingers claw furrows through old stone.

Brea Thornwick

“Vale. Left one.” Brea draws on the first hand and sends an arrow at the narrow joint behind its brass palm.

DM

Brea’s arrow punches through the narrow wrist joint. The first hand locks open, tumbles from Ander’s shield, and lies still among the stones.

Mira Ashdown

I keep well back from the threshold, off the line between the second hand and anything it might lunge at — Ander has it engaged and Oskar stands next in the order, and a copyist's dagger is no help against brass. Wand in hand, I move along the outer face of the ruined doorway instead, and look at what the hands left behind: the posts, the lintel, the torn sockets where they tore loose. The gnomes who built this door wrote on it if they wrote on anything, and two hands were mounted on two doorposts — I want to see how many more fittings this frame carries before any of us steps over the threshold stone.

DM

From outside the threshold, Mira traces the ruined frame without approaching the surviving hand. The two torn sockets—one in each doorpost—are the only hand-shaped fittings she can see. The lintel bears no matching socket, and the outer stone carries no visible Gnomish writing. Broken brass spindles remain inside both mounts, but they run inward beyond her sight.

Oskar Fenn

Swords ring off brass. Hammers don't. I step up level with Ander, shield covering his sword side, and bring the farrier's hammer down on the second hand — full swing, on the knuckle-plate, the way I'd seat a shoe-clip.

DM

Oskar’s hammer caves in the knuckle-plate. The second hand spasms once, its fingers hammering uselessly against the threshold, then collapses into a heap of bent brass. Both constructs lie still; the ruined doorway is quiet.