imp

DM

A severed brass hand skitters over the rubble and springs at Tace. Its fingers snap shut on empty air beside her robes.

DM

The second hand claws up Petra’s greave, but its grip scrapes harmlessly from her plate.

automaton hand 1 falls.

Odo Lint

Again. The same two hands, whole on the same ruined threshold. Odo brings the mace down exactly where memory insists the wrist-seam lies; brass buckles flat beneath the blow. “That is three tellings,” he says, staring at the wreck rather than the others. “When this one is finished, tell me plainly: do any of you remember the first two?”

DM

Odo’s mace crushes the wrist housing. The hand spasms once, then lies still among the brass fragments. Its twin keeps clawing forward.

automaton hand 2 falls.

Petra Ostwick

“Two.” Petra stamps the claw flat against the threshold and drives her sword through the wrist-seam. She keeps the blade there when she looks at Odo. “Yes. Both. The hands came at this same door; you broke the left, Tace finished the right. Twice. I remember every telling.”

DM

Petra’s sword punches through the wrist seam and pins the last hand to the threshold. Its fingers curl inward and stop. Both constructs are destroyed; the party is unharmed, and the disturbed rubble still glints with salvage.