The Strong Raindrop
The Mire of Dead Men does not want you here.
It showed you that from the beginning — the water black as ink below the boats, the mist coming in so thick you couldn't trust your own sense of direction, the shapes sliding through the shallows that you were wise enough not to name. The lizardfolk knew every inch of it. They poled the skiffs without speaking, taking wide arcs around lairs you couldn't see, pausing for things to pass. Without them, you would have been ambushed a dozen times before now.
The lead lizardman told you tonight's camp with a single word in broken Common: "Strong raindrop."
You didn't know what that meant until you found it — a dome of smooth translucent force half-buried in the hillside, five feet across, covered in silt from years of flooding and settling. Moist's Detect Magic lit it up in Abjuration blue. A protective ward, still active. Someone had cast it a long time ago and it was still holding.
You wiped off the mud and put a torch close.
There was a book inside. A bedroll. And a face.
The face hit the barrier before you could step back — grey beard, most of the jaw rotted, the eyes gone cloudy but moving. It pressed against the inside of the dome and looked at you with the hunger they all have. Then something stronger than hunger pulled its attention away. It turned toward the north, toward where you were going, and started clawing at the wall that wouldn't let it through.
You recognized the robes. You recognized the backpack.
One of Griggen's scouts. Sent here to find whatever was wrong, trapped in his own last-ditch spell, undead and pointing at his own objective.
Moist walked up, raised her holy symbol, and said a prayer. The thing inside came apart. The dome came down with it. You took the book and the pack from the ground where the bubble used to be, and Moist sat by the fire reading while the rest of you tried to sleep.
She woke you in the night.
Fifty of them. Maybe more. Wading through the waist-deep water below the hill in a long slow column, shoulder-to-shoulder, dead eyes fixed north. They didn't react to the firelight or to you. They weren't hunting. They were going somewhere.
The same direction you were going.
Moist walked down to the water's edge and did it again — the prayer, the light, the command in her god's name. They came apart in the water, one after another, sinking without a sound. She came back up the hill and sat back down with the journal. The lizardfolk guards watched her go and watched her come back, and none of them said a word.
You reached the place the next afternoon.
The mire's largest hill. Water at the base, then a cemetery climbing toward a flat-topped structure of old stone. At the apex: a massive skull, not carved — strapped to the stonework with ancient leather bindings, a monument converted to a different god's use a very long time ago. Black tendrils growing from the hillside, the same as what you'd seen in the dark beneath the Toke Inn.
A pit at the center of the summit. Stairs going down.
And coiled around it, asleep — the dragon. Large. Black. Not dead. Her sides rising and falling in slow time, eyes shut but the pupils glowing faintly red even through closed lids. She didn't look blighted. She looked wrong in some other way: marks across her flank like thorns, the kind of wrong that had been there long enough to become part of her.
Falkor shifted on KeYs's shoulder and pressed close and would not explain why.
The lizardfolk docked at the waterline and did not get out of the boats. This was as far as they'd promised.
Ubys spoke a word through the Whisper blade and shadows gathered around all of you, muffling footstep and breath alike.
You climbed the hill through the cemetery, past the dead that shuffled past without seeing you, past the dragon that slept without stirring. You went down into the pit.
The first room: stone walls, a door to the right. Moist's light found the blood on the door immediately — old blood, a week or two, deliberately applied. A trap had been on this door and someone had already broken it. AC found infernal script on the wall, mostly buried under the blood smears. A desecration mark. Something had written it, and something else had crossed it out.
The door opened with a grinding crack that echoed further than it should have.
Silence.
And then a voice, from somewhere in the dark ahead:
"Who is there?"
A pause. Then, warmer, almost pleased:
"Someone else to play with."
A second voice laughed — high, ragged, wrong.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are. Ooh, this is when the fun begins."
Then the second voice, like it was asking about the rules of a game it had been waiting to play for a very long time: "What are the rules?"
First voice: "You will soon find out. Time for me to hide."
Then nothing.
You moved deeper. Down the long hallway. Down the stairs.
The door at the junction was not fully closed.
Something reached through it and grabbed Dhuxtyn.
Next session: whatever is in this tomb has been here long enough to stop being afraid of the dark.