Speak of the Devil
The dead were quiet.
You'd searched the rest of the floor while the adrenaline faded — the cracked fountain room with its blackened basin, the old sleeping quarters collapsed into damp heaps, the ancient kitchen sealed for centuries before the Knights of Vindictus pried it open. Nothing moved. Nothing lived. Level 1 of the Tomb of Orcus belonged to you now, and there was nothing left in it worth fighting over.
So you made camp.
Lessie grew the doorway shut — thorns and bramble packed floor to ceiling, not impassable but close enough. Ubys settled in to meditate, blade across his lap, listening for sounds that didn't come. Falkor found something edible in the provisions the knights had left behind. The rest of you tried to sleep, or rest, or whatever it is you do when you're in an underground shrine to a demon lord and you're down to your last luck points.
Crowley read the journals.
They told the story the bodies couldn't. A chapter slowly peeled apart — entries that started crisp and orderly, then shorter, then erratic, then nothing. One of them spent three pages worrying whether his cloak was clean enough to pass inspection. Whatever the Tomb does to you, it starts small. You found that more disturbing than the fighting.
Four hours in, a howl reached you through the brambles.
Not a wolf. Not anything close to a wolf. Something lower than that, older, that made the part of your brain responsible for run light up before the rest of you could think about it. You'd heard it before — or something like it. You knew what it was.
Five hell hounds entered the Level 1 chamber. They didn't howl again. They tracked directly to the corpses of the vampires, sniffed each one with unnerving efficiency, and then — with no confusion, no hesitation — dragged all six bodies down the stairs.
Crowley watched the whole thing through the brambles. When they were gone he was quiet for a moment.
He knew those dogs.
He told you what he could: the hounds belonged to someone specific. Someone high up. Someone from Avernus — Zariel's chain of command, close enough to the top that only a handful of names were above that one. That those dogs were here, in an Orcus tomb, was not an accident.
He said he wanted to take a look. He said he'd come back if there was trouble.
Most of you said that was foolish. He said he knew.
He went anyway.
What he found below, he didn't tell you yet.
What you know is what you woke to: a full rest, the kind that shouldn't have been possible in a dungeon at half strength with thirteen unaccounted knights somewhere in the dark below you. And Crowley standing in the doorway with the brambles pulled back, looking like a man who has just initialed something he's been carrying for a very long time.
And a hell hound sitting at his heel.
The thing looked at each of you in turn with flat amber eyes. It didn't growl. It just waited.
Crowley said it was with you now.
Next session: whatever he agreed to down there, it starts here.