The Jungle's Claw #040

Game date: 8th day of the Bull, Year 13945  

---

 

General Summary

  The Rustleech nosed through the stagnant canal-docks of Grizburg beneath a bruised and weeping sky, her iron hull coughing smoke into air thick as grave-shrouds. Captain Malista Tinmaw's coin had purchased the silence of guards whose disinterest bore a price—within these hundred-foot walls of corroded steel and fungal stone, the city breathed like some ancient forge, iron lungs sighing ash into the perpetual twilight. Already the massacre at Greenglade had taken the shape of legend in dockside whispers. Fouk Shadim, master of whispered deception, tended their crafted lie like a gardener pruning poison vines, inserting details that made fiction bloom into accepted truth. In Grizburg, where every insect wing and rusted pipe might carry rumor to listening ears, controlling the story meant survival. The city revealed her secrets in fragments: cable cars swinging like hanged mortals across the upper reaches, furnaces belching blue-black smoke into the eternally gray sky, crooked bridges spanning the Sko River's oily sheen. Goblins filled the twisted streets—more hob than bog—and every surface fought for the same cursed ground.   Valdin departed briefly to tend diplomatic formalities, his papers buying freedom of movement where others might find only chains. When he returned, Kurgan led the company into the heart of Dreadmil, the great iron fortress that crowned the city like a cancer.   There waited Slazgar Two-Eyes. Smaller than his bloody reputation suggested, yet the chamber filled with menace at his presence. One flesh eye burned bright as forge-fire; the other, a jeweled parasite that whirred and clicked, never ceased measuring truth from falsehood. His grin was a scar given voice.  

Yer pasts lie on this table—maps, routes, faces ye once swore to. Prove t' me ye've cut 'em loose. Give me somethin' sharp, somethin' useful—or ye'll burn in me furnaces.

— Slazgar Two-Eyes

The tests began with the weight of judgment. Each member of the company faced Slazgar's grinding interrogation:   Fouk answered with cold arithmetic when pressed about loyalty versus profit—restraint sharpened by greed, the kind of calculus Slazgar respected.   BöötMóöntch met questions about the Whispering Depths with silence heavy as a tomb, the stink of darkness clinging to his flesh like proof of passage through forbidden places.   Sherman spat defiance when challenged about his brother's ghost, the fire in his words earning Slazgar's approval: a rage that spits in the face of death itself.   Valdin's diplomatic knowledge proved thin, drawing the narrow-eyed suspicion of the jeweled eye.   Thronn laid bare hidden knowledge—that the Eyes of Tezra had presence in Grizburg, and his intent to destroy Chief Gruznak the Ruthless. The revelation that Gruznak still bore the teeth-marks of Thronn's dead brother Gherman drew Slazgar's hungry attention.  

So Gruznak's wearin' yer brother's teeth-marks, eh? Ye talk o' swayin' th' Bloodclaw? Then ye'd best show me how t' turn scars into levers.

— Slazgar Two-Eyes

  From there, plans uncoiled like serpents. Slazgar spoke of the Whispering Depths, the mythic undercity reached only through hidden gates requiring artifacts from the Black Fire War. The party had delivered one such key: the Harmonicon of Eternal Dissonance, a night-black obelisk singing with the echo of Dead Gods. Two more keys remained to be found.   The goblin lord then named a test of loyalty more immediate: a debtor in Barnacle Hill whose contract had soured. Resolve it, he commanded, and prove your bond to me.   When the crew returned to the streets, the Clockwork Titan loomed silent across the river—six centuries dead yet ever-watching with rusted eyes that seemed to follow Sherman with particular attention.  

---