Doors, a Broken Deal, and Seven Orcs

The session opened mid-fight, exactly where Session 5 left off: one last ochre jelly waiting in the dark at the end of the rubble hallway.

Sage opened with an arrow down the corridor. Rut — still Wild Shaped as a rat from the session before — ran the length of the hall on all fours, slipped past the jelly entirely, and found a third secret door seamed into the wall beyond it. He climbed the frame, hauled on the mechanism, threw himself at it again and again, and could not move it a fraction. He was audibly squeaking with frustration by the end.

The fight behind him went quickly. Dax sprinted in and staggered the jelly; Bean put a shot into it from across the chamber without being spotted. The jelly climbed the wall and onto the ceiling to creep past Dax, who opened it further on the way by. Barnaby stepped into the mouth of the passage and let his breath weapon go — and the lightning tore a piece of the thing loose, which promptly stood up as a second jelly. Sage came in close with dual daggers to finish the one on the floor; Hamish sheathed his bow, drew his shortsword, ran, jumped, and drove the blade up into the one still clinging overhead. A heavy glop of it slid off his coat as the rest came apart.

He picked Rut up by the tail on the way out. Rut twisted around and snapped at his hand, hit the floor, and ran off into the room without comment.

What was behind the doors

Rut’s door opened easily for someone with hands and a shoulder. Beyond it the passage straightened out and ran east to a cave-in, floor to ceiling, with a plain door on either side.

Hamish took one and found a skeleton half-buried in fallen stone, a holy symbol resting on its collarbone — a small jeweled dagger on a silver chain, worked with Dwarvish runes. Lifting the chain rolled the skull loose against his boot. He pocketed the symbol.

Barnaby took the other and found two more dead dwarves laid out in red vestments. Their armor came apart in rotted chunks in his hands and the robes spilled spiders. An empty stone font jutted from the wall, dry for centuries, and behind it was another seam — a sleeping chamber with three bed frames, a body crushed under a section of collapsed ceiling, and, half-buried in dust, a longsword. Whatever else had rotted in that place, the blade had not.

Dax held the mouth of the passage while the others spread out, listening into the black. Behind him, the party. Ahead and faint: footsteps and voices — the dwarves, moving somewhere in the ruin, looking for them. When Thom brought a light down, Dax found what the dark had been hiding — a stretch of smooth, seamless wall with a mechanism behind it. One good pull swung it open onto the main chamber and its altars. The temple loops back on itself; every hidden passage the dwarves ever built here eventually comes home.

Rut spent the hour trying to force both cave-ins, squeezing into gaps and digging at loose stone, and got nowhere — the rock is packed tight and too large to shift. Thom, Sage, and Bean followed another branch into the same wall of rubble, and found a dead dwarf with a few coins around him and a tattered book half-buried beside the body.

The deal breaks

Norbus and Dazlyn came for their share.

They found Hamish first and asked what the party had turned up. Not much, he told them. Jellies. They took it badly, quietly, and went looking for everyone else. Dax gave them dead bodies and rubble and no gold at all, and they heard the shape of the lie before he finished it. Thom talked over the top of it — loud, fast, generous with detail: bones, secret doors everywhere, an altar, a medallion, all dead ends — and they believed him. They believed only him. Everyone else made it worse in turn. Rut, still a rat, darted in and bit a dwarf’s ankle and was not even noticed. Barnaby tried intimidation and got nothing.

Then the dwarves stopped talking and put their hands out: we had an agreement, sixty-forty, we’ll let it slide — split it now. Bean dug five gold pieces out of her own purse and handed them over.

They looked at the coins, at the party, and at a temple full of doors these adventurers had spent all day opening. Then they turned and stamped out through the entrance hall and were gone.

The ledger

Sage took the book off on her own. It was a temple ledger, written in an older dialect than she’s fluent in but legible: page after page accounting the gold, gems, and offerings laid before Abbathor across generations. Two things stood out.

The offerings thin out over the years, and the entries beside them grow defensive — Abbathor will be pleased with our investments. And there is a description of a room the party has not seen: a sacrifice chamber, dark, flanked by two statues. Nowhere in the ledger does it say where the wealth went.

Hamish found her in the hallway and showed her the holy symbol. She turned the little jeweled dagger over and read the runes cut into it.

Greed is good.

They talked about leaving and decided against it. Whatever’s left here is behind the rubble, so they got down and started moving it — bare hands and Thom’s shovel, the larger pieces heavy enough to need two or three of them at a time. Somewhere in that hour Rut let the rat go and came back to himself, still crouched on all fours and still making the noises, until the others stopped digging and stared at him in open disgust and he looked down at his own hands.

Sage went outside with the ledger to see whether the dwarves could still be talked around. The camp was stripped bare — bedrolls gone, tools gone, the fire kicked apart and cold. They had packed and left without a word, and nobody is likely to learn where they went.

Standing in the empty camp, she heard footsteps carrying through the rock of the mountain and echoing off the canyon walls. More than two of them. Coming their way.

Seven orcs

Hamish, Sage, and Bean slipped out the main doors and worked their way into the ruined town, and there they were: seven orcs coming up the canyon at a raider’s pace, armed and unhurried, looking the place over. This’ll make a good fort, one of them was saying. Good new base. Then one of them saw Sage. Fresh meat, boys.

The three of them ran. The orcs came after.

Dax dropped his end of the rubble the moment they came through the door. He was a soldier once, and whatever he can’t read about an enemy at distance, he understands a doorway: the entrance is a funnel, so the orcs would have to come through one and two at a time. Archers behind the pillars, where the stone gives full cover. Everyone else back and out of sight.

The first orc through was the biggest, and it stopped when it saw Dax. Something moved behind its eyes.

Were you near Gnomengarde?

“Why do you ask?”

Answer the question, maggot.

“I was.”

So you killed our men.

“I sure did.”

It came at him roaring and buried its greataxe in him.

What followed was long, ugly, and very nearly killed the party. They put the leader down fast — Hamish and Thom softening it, Sage finishing it with an arrow through the front of its skull — and after that nothing came easy. Barnaby scattered a bag of a thousand ball bearings across the entryway, and orcs went down hard on the stone all fight trying to cross it, which is most of what kept the fight winnable. But the axes kept landing. Hamish took a javelin and went down. Dax took an axe across the chest and dropped where he stood, bleeding out with nobody close enough to reach him.

Thom, working from behind the altar, sent a mage hand across the room with a healing potion and poured it into Hamish’s mouth, and in the same breath dragged sleep down over the orcs at the door, catching one. Barnaby crossed to the sleeping orc and killed it where it lay, then went down himself.

Rut took the shape of a wolf and fought at the front line, killed one outright with his teeth in its throat, and when an axe finally broke the shape he came back to himself bloodied and standing. He spent everything he had left healing Barnaby off the floor. Barnaby got up and went straight for Dax, taking a swing on the way, and knelt and pushed the last of the light in his hands into him — six points of nothing much, and enough.

Dax got up. Too battered to trust his own hands, he used the Clockwork Amulet to guide the blade in, and it bit deep. Rut put a dagger through another orc’s ankle and Hamish opened its head. Bean — who spent the entire fight behind one pillar and was never once found or hit — put an arrow through another and killed it.

Then there was one. Barnaby went to meet it and caught a full-strength swing that dropped him a second time. It stood over the bodies and promised to kill every one of them and take the temple and that fine new sword. Rut sprang at its face and split its eye open with a dagger. It was still standing, barely, when Dax stepped over the leader’s corpse and came for it.

I killed your brothers before, and I’ll continue to kill everyone I come across.

He took its head off.

Rut got to Barnaby and worked over him until his breathing steadied, then lay down beside him and did not get up again.

Seven orcs and three jellies dead. The dwarves gone, the deal broken, their fate unknown. And somewhere behind all that rubble, a sacrifice room with two statues that nobody has found yet.