Chapter 22: Triumph Over the Tuskwater¶
Prologue¶
The anger whispers. It always whispers.
I stand at the window of the half-finished town hall and watch the Thorn River run copper beneath the Lamashan (Oct) sunset. The construction crews have gone home for the evening. Their hammers are silent, but the sound of them lingers in the timbers, in the raw-cut joists still fragrant with pine sap, in the scaffolding that clings to the eastern wall like the skeleton of something not yet born. Stormfire Reach grows around me. I can feel it in the way the air itself has changed—thicker now, weighted with cook-smoke and tannery-stink and the low hum of a thousand small lives being lived within walls that did not exist a year ago.
And yet I cannot stop thinking about the one who escaped.
The Wyrmwatch Slasher. We know the name only by its absence—a shadow that moves through our farthest settlement, cutting and vanishing, leaving behind the kind of wounds that speak to something more than desperation. Something deliberate. Something that knows the geometry of a blade the way I know the geometry of a rune. The first reports came in fragments: a body in the marshes, throat opened with surgical precision. Then another. Then a third, and with it, the particular silence that descends upon a frontier community when its people realize that the danger is not outside the walls but within them.
We tried to find the killer last month. I poured the Pentarchy’s resources into the search—divination, informants, the whole apparatus of a young state flexing muscles it barely knows it has. And I failed. The trail went cold, the runes refused to resolve, and Wyrmwatch went another month with a murderer in its midst. The anger whispered, then. It said: You are a Runelord’s heir, and you cannot even protect a village of forty souls.
Xin’s words answer. They always answer. Wrath is not the fire itself, but the hand that shapes it. And a hand that strikes in frustration strikes nothing at all.
So I have prepared. This month, the anger will not whisper. This month, it will speak clearly, and with purpose, and the Slasher will have nowhere left to hide.
— Dravyn, Magister of Athanor, writing from Stormfire Reach
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I. The Furnace Burns Bright¶
2nd of Lamashan (Oct), 4710 AR
Autumn had settled over the Stolen Lands with the quiet authority of a season that knows its business. The leaves along the Thorn River had turned gold and copper, and the air carried the first honest bite of the coming cold—the kind that made settlers check their firewood stores and mend the gaps in their shutters. In the half-finished town hall of Stormfire Reach, where the scaffolding still clung to the eastern wall and the smell of fresh-cut timber competed with the sharper scent of ink and tallow, the Stormfire Pentarchy convened to conduct the business of their young nation’s eighth month.
The conclave opened, as it always did, with Perry Marlowe behind his ledgers. The Treasurer had developed a particular rhythm to these monthly convocations—arriving early, spreading his documents across the council table with the organized precision of a man who saw the invisible architecture of governance the way other men saw roads and rivers. His quill moved in short, decisive strokes as he tallied the kingdom’s accounts: revenues accrued, commodities in stock, the delicate balance of expenditure against ambition.
The news was mixed. Athanor’s fame continued to grow—word of the Pentarchy’s accomplishments had spread further along the trade roads, and settlers spoke the nation’s name with something approaching pride. But Wyrmwatch, the fledgling village in the eastern marshes, remained a persistent thorn. Disconnected from the capital by miles of unclaimed wilderness, the settlement imposed a strain on the kingdom’s administrative apparatus that could not be ignored. Perry adjusted his figures, noted the discrepancy with a frown that was more calculation than displeasure, and moved on.
Consumption, at least, proved manageable. Athanor’s two stretches of established farmland offset the needs of its two settlements precisely. The ploughs that had bitten into dark loamy soil months ago were now producing their first real returns, and the granary stores held steady against the coming winter. After some deliberation among the Pentarchs—Perry and Elroy debating the finer points of agricultural influence while Rust confirmed the numbers and Dravyn listened with the patient silence of a man who trusted his colleagues to resolve what his own expertise could not—the council affirmed that the balance held. Athanor would not go hungry this winter.
Harrim, the dour dwarven Viceroy, then took the floor. The dwarf’s monthly sermons had become something of a local institution—a peculiar brand of fatalistic preaching that somehow managed to calm the anxious rather than alarm them. Standing before a congregation of frontier folk who had every reason to fear the coming months, Harrim spoke of endings with the warmth of a man describing a favorite armchair. The world was coming apart, he assured them. Always had been. Nothing to be done about it. So why worry? The settlers filed out feeling oddly at peace, their civic anxieties dissolved in the gentle acid of existential acceptance. Unrest, which had threatened to climb, fell away entirely.
With the kingdom’s mood stabilized, the Pentarchy turned to the serious work of the turn. The activities unfolded with the practiced efficiency of a council finding its rhythm. Dravyn, serving as both High Pentarch and Magister, attempted to focus the kingdom’s scholarly attention on aiding Harrim’s folkloric efforts, but the arcane geometries of governance proved slippery that morning, and his attempt fell short. Undeterred, he turned to more familiar ground and prepared a contingency—channeling the Pentarchy’s magical resources into a reserve of arcane potential that could be called upon later in the month. The research consumed a significant portion of the treasury, but the investment was deemed worthwhile. The Wyrmwatch Slasher still lurked in the marshes, and the Magister intended to bring every tool at his disposal to bear.
Grotdor proved far more effective in his administrative duties. The Warden’s discipline translated well from the battlefield to the ledger room. His efforts to coordinate trade operations in support of Perry’s upcoming negotiations were flawless, earning a burst of fame for the kingdom and positioning the Treasurer for a spectacular month. When Grotdor then turned to the actual business of commerce—converting four units of stone from the kingdom’s quarries into trade goods—the result was nothing short of extraordinary. Merchants from Restov and the surrounding territories snapped up the raw materials at premium rates, and the deal yielded a promise of eight additional resource influxes the following month. The Pentarchs could scarcely believe their fortune.
Rust Freelox, the Counselor, managed Athanor’s existing trade agreements with characteristic competence. His negotiations with the kingdom’s trading partners yielded additional resource commitments and another point of fame, though the intensity of the dealings meant that repeating the effort next month would prove considerably more difficult. Still, the kingdom’s commerce was booming. Caravans arrived in greater numbers each week, their packhorses loaded with the tools, cloth, and manufactured goods that a young nation desperately needed. The market stalls in Stormfire Reach grew more numerous, and the sound of haggling drifted up from the riverbank like music.
Perry, meanwhile, orchestrated the turn’s construction efforts. He purchased lumber for the kingdom’s building projects and oversaw the raising of new houses in Stormfire Reach—entire city blocks of sturdy timber-frame dwellings rising along the riverbank, their fresh-cut frames golden in the autumn light. Families who had spent weeks in canvas tents moved into real homes that month. Children ran through new rooms. The first fires were lit in new hearths, and the smoke that rose from those chimneys joined the larger column that marked Stormfire Reach against the autumn sky—a signal visible for miles, saying: we are here, we are growing, we are not leaving.
Valerie, the Pentarchy’s Chief of Staff, focused her administrative attention on supporting Perry’s industrial operations, while Elroy Jenkins—Pentarch of Valor and General—lent his considerable enthusiasm to the arcane sphere, marshalling the kingdom’s military resources to bolster Dravyn’s upcoming confrontation with the Sensational Crime event. Elroy’s efforts were accompanied, no doubt, by a declaration audible from the far side of the town hall. The result was a robust bonus for the Magister and yet another point of fame for the kingdom.
With the primary activities concluded, the council turned to the kingdom’s lingering reputation damage. Linzi, the ever-cheerful Emissary, stamped down the last traces of criminal activity through diligent investigation and networking among the settler community. Perry himself scrubbed away the remaining corruption through a targeted campaign of public arts and cultural programming—performances in the town square, broadsheets emphasizing the Pentarchy’s commitment to transparency. Athanor’s civic record was clean.
The month’s most significant territorial achievement came from Rust’s hand. The Counselor called upon the kingdom’s magical surveyors to push into new territory, and his first attempt—the land surrounding Oleg’s Trading Post, that weathered frontier waystation where the Reclaimers’ story had first begun—was a spectacular success. The territory was incorporated so smoothly that Rust could immediately press onward, and with the expenditure of some accumulated goodwill, the hex containing the gold mine to the south was claimed as well. Athanor’s borders expanded by two marches in a single month. Elroy, with his remaining energy, cleared the Oleg’s hex for future settlement—the plains terrain yielding easily to the General’s engineering crews.
More of the treasury was applied to the ongoing construction of the town hall, bringing its walls closer to completion. The Pentarchs noted with satisfaction that the following month’s windfall should allow them to finish the project and begin new ones. The furnace metaphor that gave Athanor its name had never felt more apt: the heat was rising, the metal was beginning to glow, and something was being forged.
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II. The Slasher Unmasked¶
Late Lamashan (Oct), 4710 AR
No new crisis emerged that month—the kingdom’s fortunes held steady, and the event horizon passed without incident. But the lingering shadow of the Wyrmwatch Slasher still demanded resolution.
Dravyn had prepared for this moment. Armed with Elroy’s tactical support and the arcane contingency he had established earlier in the month, the Magister turned the full weight of the Pentarchy’s magical apparatus toward the marshes of Wyrmwatch. His first approach—conventional investigation, informant networks, the mundane machinery of law enforcement—fell short once again. The criminal was cunning, the territory vast, and the swamps surrendered their secrets reluctantly.
But Dravyn was not a conventional investigator. He was a Runelord’s heir.
The arcane contingency activated. Where informants had failed, scrying succeeded. Where conventional investigation had stumbled over the trackless marshes, divination cut through the murk like a blade through fog. The runes resolved at last, tracing patterns of movement and violence across the wetlands until they converged on a single point—a figure, a location, a name that the marshes could no longer conceal. The magical approach proved devastatingly effective. In one focused night of arcane detective work, Dravyn unraveled what months of conventional effort had failed to accomplish.
The one-person crime wave was over. The Slasher was identified, located, and apprehended. The criminal stain on Wyrmwatch’s record vanished from the kingdom’s ledgers, and the Pentarchy earned another measure of fame from a grateful citizenry. The marshes were quiet again—though the question of who, exactly, the killer was would soon be answered in dramatic fashion.
With the crisis resolved and milestones achieved—territorial expansion, civic construction, the resolution of a kingdom-threatening event—Athanor crossed a threshold. The young nation had grown beyond its infancy. Its resource capacity expanded, its administrative apparatus matured, and the council rolled their projections for the coming month of Neth (Nov) with barely contained anticipation. The result was staggering: a treasury swollen past anything the young nation had yet had to count, and ore and stone besides from the season’s yields. A massive war chest for the months ahead.
Perry allowed himself a rare expression of satisfaction as he recorded the figures. The Pentarchy deferred their strategic planning to the coming weeks—warfare and defense training were the leading candidates, the General having a feeling that an army might be needed before long—but the message was clear. Athanor was no longer a frontier experiment. It was a nation.
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III. The Court at Stormfire Reach¶
1st of Neth (Nov), 4710 AR
The town hall was not yet finished, but it was functional enough to hold court. The Pentarchy received petitioners that morning from a raised dais of fresh-hewn oak, the smell of sawdust still sharp in the air and the autumn wind finding its way through the gaps in the unplastered walls. Outside, Stormfire Reach hummed with the restless energy of a settlement that had grown faster than anyone had predicted. The Thorn River ran high with autumn rain, brown and swift, and the smoke of a hundred chimneys rose into a sky the color of hammered pewter.
The first petitioner was Edrist Hanvaki, a local merchant who approached the dais with a bow and the particular expression of a man who has rehearsed his words but still fears they will not be enough. His brother, Temin Hanvaki, had been part of the trade caravan to Varnhold—one of the routes the Pentarchy had recently established. Temin had been missing for nearly two weeks now, somewhere along the road north through the Rostland Hinterlands and back south again. Edrist described his brother’s distinguishing mark: a mother-of-pearl brooch, worn always at the throat. The route was not long, he said. Not terribly far. Something must have happened.
The Pentarchs accepted the petition without deliberation. A missing merchant on an Athanoran trade road was not merely a personal tragedy—it was a test of the nation’s ability to protect its own. Edrist bowed again and stepped away, visibly lighter for having been heard.
The second petitioner was a more complicated matter. Old Bokken, the eccentric alchemist who had long operated from his hut near the northern trading post, shuffled forward with the particular gait of a man who has spent too many years talking to his own experiments. He could see the writing on the wall, he said. With Oleg’s now claimed, his homestead would soon fall under Athanor’s authority. He was willing to offer his services—his potions, his expertise, his not-inconsiderable knowledge of the local flora—in exchange for the Pentarchy’s protection.
But Bokken had more than commerce on his mind. Pulling at his beard with the nervous energy of a man about to betray a confidence he had kept for a quarter century, the alchemist confessed that he believed he knew the identity of the Wyrmwatch Slasher. His own brother. The man was mad, Bokken said—had been since they were young. A demon inside him, a little voice that told him to hurt and maim and kill. He had murdered their mother when they were children. Bokken had not seen or heard from him in twenty-five years, but he was certain—certain in his bones—that the killer lurking in the swamps near Wyrmwatch was his brother.
“Kill him if you need to. He’s gone mad. More animal than man. More beast than person.”
— Bokken, alchemist of the Stolen Lands
Elroy offered to bring the man in alive, if that was what Bokken preferred. The old alchemist shook his head. Wyrmwatch did not have a jail. It did not have gallows, either. What were they going to do, he asked—feed him to the frogs? The frogs were nasty this time of year.
Court was adjourned. The Pentarchs had their marching orders: the dire wolves who had ambushed them months ago still roamed the plains to the south, Bokken’s brother lurked in the eastern swamps, and Temin Hanvaki was missing along the Varnhold road. The itch that had been building for months—the restlessness of warriors forced into administrators’ chairs—finally found its release. It was time to stop governing and start adventuring.
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IV. The Vengeance Ride¶
1st of Neth (Nov), 4710 AR
They set out from Stormfire Reach on a bright but nippy Neth (Nov) afternoon, riding south through country they had bled for and now, at last, governed. The plains rolled away beneath a sky of thinning blue, the grass gone tawny with the season, and the distant hills rose in gentle swells dark with pine and oak. It felt good to be moving again. Seven months of kingdom-building had sharpened their minds but dulled their edges, and every one of them—even Perry, who would never admit to anything so undisciplined as restlessness—felt the pull of open country and unfinished business.
The business, in this case, was personal.
Months earlier, before Athanor existed even as an idea, a pack of dire wolves had caught the party on the open plains. The beasts had killed their horses, scattered their supplies, and left the fledgling nation’s future founders licking their wounds in the mud. That humiliation had festered through every council session, every construction report, every polite diplomatic exchange. Now, at last, they were coming to collect.
Perry had spent the intervening months studying. His research into the wolves’ behavior and physiology was exhaustive—he knew their defenses, their weaknesses, their hunting patterns with the intimate precision of a man who believed that knowledge was the sharpest weapon in any arsenal. He shared the intelligence with his companions as they rode, his voice calm and methodical in the autumn air, and each Reclaimer filed the information away with the quiet intensity of professionals preparing for a job.
They found the wolves in a clearing south of the capital, gorging themselves on a giant vulture they had lured with an elk carcass—a clever trap, the work of predators intelligent enough to bait their prey. Clever beasts. Not clever enough.
Perry struck first. From extreme range, the halfling investigator loaded Infernis—his custom-built crossbow—with an acid-laced bolt, calculated the angle with preternatural calm, and squeezed the mechanism. The bolt struck the lead wolf square in the sternum. Black, necrotizing flesh spread from the impact like ink in water. The wolf’s fur sizzled and peeled. The creature staggered, already dying on its feet, its body beginning to dissolve from the inside out.
What followed was not a battle. It was a reckoning.
Elroy surged forward with his shield raised and his war cry splitting the autumn air, activating the martial aura that flooded his allies with renewed purpose. Dravyn traced burning sigils and unleashed twin rays of arcane fire that seared two wolves in rapid succession—one blast critically catching the nearest beast and setting its fur alight, the other connecting solidly with the second. Rust shaped cold iron needles from his divine focus and sent them streaking into the most grievously wounded wolf, reducing it to a single desperate heartbeat. Grotdor ignited his kinetic aura and finished what Rust had started—a lance of fire that turned the wounded wolf into a smoldering ruin, followed by a jet of acid that dissolved the creature Perry had shot.
The surviving wolves fought with the desperation of cornered predators. One landed a vicious bite on Grotdor’s leg—a strike of terrible force that would have felled a lesser warrior. Another closed on Perry, catching the halfling with a snap of broken teeth before the persistent acid and bleeding that Perry’s bolt had inflicted consumed it from within. The creature melted and bled out simultaneously, collapsing into a puddle of goo and viscera at Perry’s feet.
Dravyn finished the penultimate wolf with a bolt of lightning that crackled across the clearing, followed by a glare of focused wrath—his draconic eyes burning with righteous fire—that left the beast staggering and ablaze. Rust shaped one final volley of cold iron needles, and the darts riddled through the last wolf’s body as it collapsed, lifeless.
Four dire wolves. The same pack that had terrorized them months earlier. Dead across the clearing in various states of dissolution—acid, fire, lightning, and cold iron had left little in the way of salvageable pelts. Elroy surveyed the carnage with something between satisfaction and disappointment. He had wanted trophies for the cart. The acid had other ideas.
Vengeance had been served. The Reclaimers cleared the hex without further incident and pressed southward.
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V. The Barrow in the Hills¶
1st of Neth (Nov), 4710 AR — Late Afternoon
The next hex offered something unexpected. As the party reconnoitered the hilly terrain south of the wolf clearing, Perry’s keen perception—the halfling’s eyes missing nothing, cataloguing every anomaly in the landscape with the reflexive precision of a born investigator—caught something half-hidden among the brambles: an ancient cave entrance, recently exposed by shifting snowfall and crumbling worked stones. The fitted masonry was unmistakable, even beneath centuries of accumulated earth and root.
Elroy’s adopted dwarven heritage stirred at the sight. His knowledge of stonework and ancient construction confirmed what his instincts already told him: this was a barrow—a burial mound for a warrior chieftain of some long-vanished nomadic culture. Pre-Earthfall, almost certainly. Perhaps even Age of Legend—over ten thousand years old. The barbarian equivalent of a pyramid, built to inter a great leader alongside their treasures and loyal warriors.
“This belongs in a museum.”
— Perry Marlowe, upon examining the worked stones
Dravyn cast a light upon a pebble and tossed it into the darkness beyond the entrance. The soft arcane glow struck the walls and ceiling, illuminating hundreds—hundreds—of roosting bats. The colonies erupted in a shrieking, flapping mass, three distinct clouds of leathery wings hurtling toward the intruders in a whirlwind of fangs and fury.
Elroy waded into the cave mouth without hesitation, his boots squelching through a thick carpet of guano as the sharp tang of ammonia seared the air. The General activated his martial stance and banged his shield with a thunderous challenge that drew the farthest swarm’s attention. The bats engulfed him in a frenzy of tiny fangs—twice—but Elroy’s reflexes proved exceptional. His heavy armor and the instinctive discipline of a lifetime spent absorbing punishment turned aside every nip and scratch. The General stood unmoved, bats swirling harmlessly against his raised shield.
Perry, recognizing that Infernis was poorly suited to the diffuse mass of a swarm, drew a flask of alchemist’s fire and hurled it into the nearest cloud of bats. The glass shattered, spraying liquid flame through the colony. Rust advanced and unleashed a burst of divine sonic energy—a concordant chord that resonated through the cave and tore through the swarms with devastating effect. Bats dropped from the air like singed leaves.
Grotdor had been waiting for this. The Burninator’s kinetic aura still flickered from the wolf fight, and with a sweep of his scarred hands, he unleashed a cascading wave of flame in a broad cone that engulfed both remaining swarms and, unavoidably, caught Perry and Elroy in the blast. The bats did not merely die—they ignited mid-flight and rained down as tiny cinders, popping like sparks from a forge. Perry took the worst of the friendly fire, staggering slightly from the heat. Elroy, having witnessed this particular maneuver before, weathered the blast with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and the weary acceptance of a man who had long since made peace with his ally’s methods.
The bat swarms were annihilated. Rust tended to Perry’s burns while Dravyn laid healing hands on Grotdor, and Perry brewed a quick restorative elixir to close the gap. The benefits of having an alchemical scientist on the team.
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VI. The Trap-Maker’s Art¶
1st of Neth (Nov), 4710 AR — Evening
With the bats eliminated, Dravyn cast his light upon Elroy’s shield, and the General led the way deeper. The tunnels slanted downward, choked with cobwebs that parted in gray curtains before Elroy’s advance. The air grew colder, heavier, tasting of stone and the particular stillness that accumulates in places that have not been disturbed in millennia.
The first chamber was octagonal, its walls encrusted with grime but bearing glimpses of a detailed mosaic beneath the filth. Biers lined the walls—the resting places of respected warriors, their forms long since crumbled to dust. The culture that had built this place was clearly martial and nomadic: the mosaics, where they could be discerned, depicted scenes of mounted combat, pillage, and conquest rendered in pigments that had faded but not entirely surrendered to time.
Beyond the entrance chamber, the party found a circular room with four tunnels exiting in the cardinal directions. Between the entrances, each wall bore a different large, monstrous stone face—leering and grimacing into the room with expressions of frozen malice. A skeleton lay sprawled face-down in the center, clearly a previous tomb raider who had not been so fortunate.
Rust eyed the stone faces and voiced what everyone was thinking: they looked exactly like a trap. Perry’s perception confirmed it—barely. Every one of those faces was rigged with a breath mechanism designed to activate when anyone stepped into the chamber. Ancient, lethal, and still functional after ten thousand years.
Grotdor stepped forward. The Warden’s unexpected talents with delicate mechanisms—a legacy, perhaps, of the precise control required to master fire—made him the party’s unlikely trapsmith. What followed was a masterclass in disarmament. Four traps, four clean disables. The Warden threaded his way along the walls of that ancient death chamber with an acrobat’s grace, his scarred hands working the mechanisms with a deftness that belied their size. Each stone face surrendered its threat in silence, and the chamber was rendered safe.
The dead tomb robber yielded a curious magical ring—a ventriloquist’s device that Rust claimed, noting its potential synergy with his own talents for misdirection. The party pressed deeper.
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VII. Guardians of the Tomb¶
1st of Neth (Nov), 4710 AR — Late Evening
Dravyn led the exploration southward, where the mosaic scenes continued beneath layers of grime. The burial biers here were occupied—and as the arcane light fell upon them, two skeletal warriors in ancient chain mail rose from their alcoves. Their shields bore dragon-wing designs, chased in bronze that had long since gone green. Ancient blades gleamed dully as they raised them with the mechanical precision of warriors who had drilled the same movements ten thousand years ago and saw no reason to stop.
Then two more emerged from the northern passage behind the party.
Perry reacted first, as Perry always did. His assessment of the undead was immediate and comprehensive: armored, shielded, resistant to the piercing and slashing damage that comprised most of the party’s arsenal. Their lowest vulnerability was to bludgeoning—and they were entirely immune to lightning. He shared the intelligence with quick, clipped words, and the Reclaimers adjusted.
The halfling loaded acid into Infernis and fired. The bolt struck the nearest champion, and acid began eating into ancient bone. Dravyn, testing the waters, unleashed an arc of lightning across the two southern champions—and watched it dance harmlessly across their bones without effect. The Magister absorbed the lesson with cold efficiency and pivoted to other strategies.
Grotdor ignited his kinetic aura and opened with an acid blast that melted through one champion’s ancient armor, then overloaded his aura in a cascading wave of flame that caught three skeletons and Elroy in a broad cone. The fire damaged the undead, but Elroy—caught in the blast—absorbed the full force of his ally’s flames. The General bore it with the particular resignation of a man who had accepted this as a regular feature of combat.
The skeletal champions advanced with disciplined precision, raising shields, closing to melee range, and striking with longswords that had last tasted flesh when the world was young. One connected with Elroy. Another engaged Dravyn, catching the Magister with a blade that found the gap between his plates.
Rust commanded Dog forward, and the wolf’s jaws crunched through ancient bone with devastating effect. Then the oracle cast a pulse of healing energy toward Elroy, mending the worst of the General’s accumulated wounds. Elroy himself switched to his warhammer—thinking, as the situation demanded, with the right tool for the job. His first swing connected with a sound like a thunderclap, bludgeoning damage passing cleanly through the skeleton’s resistance. A second swing landed solidly, and the champion teetered on the brink of destruction.
The next exchange was decisive. Perry, unsatisfied with a poor initial assessment, burned through his reserves of fortune and invoked the Stag’s Helm—channeling Erastil’s blessing to render his target vulnerable—before loading acid and firing. The bolt struck with devastating precision. The skeleton’s bones dissolved in a spray of caustic fluid. Dravyn, having learned that lightning was useless, struck with his glaive at the wounded southern champion. The blade caught the ancient warrior across the ribcage, and its bones scattered across the stone floor. Grotdor rechanneled his kinetic gate and launched a flying arc of flame that tore through both remaining champions—one lost its head entirely, though the body continued to animate in a grotesque parody of martial discipline.
Elroy Jenkins ended the fight. Two warhammer swings, two shattered champions. Bones exploded across the crypt in a shower of ancient fragments.
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer came down upon their heads.”
— Elroy Jenkins, upon destroying the final champions
The party looted the remains: four suits of chain mail, four longswords, four lances, and four steel shields bearing dragon-wing designs—all well-oiled and preserved despite their immense age. Rust performed healing on Dravyn and Elroy while the others explored the northern and southern burial alcoves, finding exquisite painted murals beneath layers of grime. Scenes of a warrior culture from the deep past—battles, conquests, the pageantry of a civilization that had thrived and fallen before the first stone of Absalom was ever laid.
Perry, whose own displacement across time gave him a particular perspective on antiquity, noted that even his era—some seventeen hundred years in Ustalav’s past—was relatively modern compared to these pre-Earthfall relics. Elroy suggested that Harrim, the fatalistic Viceroy, would appreciate seeing the barrow. The murals, the party agreed, represented a site of extraordinary historical significance—a future museum piece for Athanor’s cultural heritage.
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VIII. The Lonely Warrior¶
1st of Neth (Nov), 4710 AR — Deep Night
To the east, Dravyn’s light glinted against something metallic.
The innermost crypt was a chamber of terrible grandeur. The walls were adorned with a plethora of weapons, shields, and armor, interspersed among tattered banners and battle standards that had once flown over campaigns now forgotten by every living soul. Carvings of battles, of pillage, of conquest covered every surface, caked in flaking pigments—many of them defaced, apparently by repeated weapon blows, as though someone or something had spent centuries in this darkness, striking the walls in mindless rage.
To the far eastern side stood an elaborate sarcophagus, covered in an inch of dust.
The Reclaimers approached with weapons drawn and spells at the ready. They had learned, in this barrow, that nothing rested peacefully.
A cloud of dust billowed from the coffin. The heavy sound of brass scraping against stone echoed through the chamber—a low, lonely sound, like a door opening in a house that had been empty since before the world was young. A skeletal warrior rose from the sarcophagus.
This was no mere champion. This was something older, something greater, something that had been placed in this tomb not as a servant but as its master. It carried a bastard sword—broken at the tip, ancient beyond reckoning—and as it drew the blade from its scabbard, the rusted metal caught fire. Not the red-orange of honest flame, but blue fire—cold, spectral, wreathing the broken edge in light that belonged to no natural source. The warrior clanged its burning sword against its shield, and the sound rang through the barrow like a challenge issued across ten thousand years of silence.
Elroy, as a warrior and a student of blades, recognized the weapon and the stance immediately. This creature had fought with a bastard sword in life, and it intended to fight with one in death.
The lords of Athanor stood face to face with the tomb’s true guardian. The blue fire reflected in Dravyn’s violet eyes. Elroy shifted his grip on his warhammer. Perry’s hand moved, almost imperceptibly, toward Infernis. Rust steadied Dog with a touch. Grotdor’s scarred hands began to warm.
The Lonely Warrior waited. It had been waiting for a very long time.
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