Session 2: On the Case

General Summary

Their boots still damp from Loammarket rain, the party pressed onward toward the Soot-Eyed Cistern, an old drainage maw scorched by some long-dead fire. Smoke scars still blackened the archway above its iron gate, which hung crooked on rust-sick hinges. The fire had raged once out from the tunnel, its flames staining the stone with ash-colored kiss. A strange thing for a cistern to remember.

Padget’s sharp eyes caught the glint of something metallic on the far side of the bars, the symbol missing from Cricket's bag, a symbol of House Dalomir. Nerissa, silent as thought, lifted a scrap of paper from a crack in the stone, thin, oil-stained, and unmistakably wrapped once around salted bread. The scent of vinegar still clung to it. Pan Ni Tata’s mark, clear as day. Salt and secrets, both sold in Kahayupan Hollow.

Blood, too, dark and rusted, marked the threshold, not yet dried. Someone small had passed through. In a hurry.

Brikk set upon the gate with giddy violence, eager to prove the bars no match for his shoulders. At first, they held. Then, with a snarl of iron and a crack of dislodged stone, he tore the thing free. The echo rang down into water and silence.

Padget carefully examined the stone in front of her, looking for yet another clue. A shadow on a stone, barely more than a smudge seen out of the corner of her eye, a charcoal relic painted upon the rock in the coded symbol of the Fangs of the Shadow. Thieves, brigands, liberators; they all found refuge here.

A rope tied around her waist, Padget slipped into the cistern stairwell, half-submerged in black water. The tunnel stretched on, pitch-black, silent as a forgotten memory, the faint tickle of salt filling Padget's nostrils. Though freshwater filled the passage, ocean coral grew along the walls, out of place, blooming pale and soft in the dark. They found no torchlight, no echo of footfalls, only silt disturbed by motion.

Padget swept the riverbed with her hands and came face to face with a pair of glowing eyes. A shape surged forward from the murk, a tangle of spines and pale fin. Something struck her boot. Pain. Poison. Instinct drove her upward.

Brikk hauled her up the rope, hand over hand, eyes locked on the surface. A heartbeat later, Nerissa stood beside the pool and summoned a surge of pressurized magic. The water exploded inward—a hydraulic blast smashing into the creature mid-lunge. It did not rise again.

The corpse floated to the edge, heavy with salt and venom. A Caltrop, a saltwater ambush predator, rarely seen inland, known to nest in the sand under the tide, and to draw blood from the careless.

The party, shaken but alive, made for Pan Ni Tata in the Hollow. Lolo Ambo sat where he always sat: under the awning, feet in a wooden crate, half-blind and far too aware. He remembered Cricket.

Nerissa extended her hand to Lolo Ambo,, a gift in her palm, an invitation to remember her. She pressed a sprig of marjoram into the old Maharluini's hand, and his feet danced on the leg of the stool as he took a deep inhale of the fresh herbs. His murky eyes lit up for a moment, and Nerissa's gift of health found her a new friend, somebody who would not forget her again.

“He was in a rush,” Ambo told Tolliver, cracking bread between calloused hands. “Bought the vinegar roll. No coins. Paid with a fishbone charm. Said something odd too… ‘Safehouse beneath the brick lady who don’t sing no more.’ Thought he was being poetic. Always was.”

The party shared glances. They knew the place: an old shrine to Rii-Ella in Brambleward. Long-since closed. Silenced after one of its priests was found helping halflings slip their chains.

And so they turned toward Brambleward, toward a place that once sang, and now waited in stone and silence.

Character(s) interacted with

Lolo Ambo at the Pan Ni Tata bread stall