[game-notes version here]

IX.

Frostmere 16, Hearthday, Year 731.

“What are you waiting for? Help her!” Vessa blurted. Tears streaked her cheeks as she sat by helplessly. The stone floor bruised her knees and the cut on her arm burned, but none of that mattered right now. All that mattered was her friend.

Maelen lay sprawled on her back, arms splayed as if after a night of carousing. Bloody drool trickled from the corner of her mouth and down to one ear. Maelen’s skin looked ashen and sallow, her closed eyes sunken. For some reason, most disturbing to Vessa was the wide lock upon Maelen’s head that had turned a dull gray amidst her otherwise black hair. What had Sarin done to her? She couldn’t die and leave Vessa all alone. And yet, Maelen’s desperate and hopeless scream would haunt her dreams for years to come. How could she still be alive after the Nightwight’s dread touch? Was Vessa doomed to witness all the Larkhands’ deaths but never join them? Was she… alone? New tears blurred her vision.

The scribe hadn’t answered her. He had a hand on each side of Maelen’s head, above each ear, and he was murmuring something, eyes closed. Vessa wanted to throw him off her friend and beat the boy senseless, but she knew on some level that he was trying to help. Had he banished Sarin’s darkness, or had the magic disappeared when the Nightwight vanished? Vessa could have sworn she’d seen Alric, as the blackness had dissipated like lingering smoke, with eyes closed and murmuring just as he was doing now. Could he use magic, this lamed, ink-fingered scribe?

Suddenly, Maelen inhaled once, sharp and deep, her back arching. Then she exhaled with a moan and stilled. Alric’s eyes fluttered open and he looked down, releasing her head and frowning.

“I… I’ve done all I can,” he said weakly. He sounded… uncertain. Fragile. “She lives, for now. But I’m no healer, and don’t truly understand what’s hap–”

Before she realized she was doing it, Vessa lunged at Alric and fiercely embraced him. It was awkward with them both on their knees, and they almost toppled over. He stiffened, and then hesitantly returned the hug, patting her back with one hand.

Vessa released him without a word, sniffled loudly, and set to caretaking Maelen. She wiped the drool from her face, cut the shirt from the tracker she’d killed and used it to wrap Maelen’s hip where she’d taken a sword wound, and then pushed her friend’s bedroll beneath her unconscious head. Tatter, still nestled in a belt pouch, appeared unharmed. She left him there, hoping his presence might comfort Maelen. That done, she used yet more Lanternless shirt to bind her arm wound, then went about carefully extinguishing two of the torches to extend their chances at retaining light. When she felt satisfied, she looked up to find Alric’s back to her. He was studying the black, basalt door at the back of the room.

She stood, limbs protesting, and approached him. “This torch won’t last much longer,” she said into the silence. “And the other two won’t either. We need to get ourselves and Maelen out of here.”

“Mmm,” Alric said thoughtfully, his voice his own again. “And yet, wouldn’t Maelen want us to see what the Lodge has been hiding, all these many years? I can almost hear her berating us for not opening the door.”

She cocked her head. “For all we know, a whole host of silent zombies will spill out of that door.”

“I doubt it,” he said, turning to regard her. “The knights Meren and Edran had volunteered to guard this place for eternity. I don’t imagine that there is another company of noble warriors waiting beyond. The documents in this room are fascinating, but it’s not why Thornmere Hold was built.”

“What do you think is there, then?” she asked. Her stubbled scalp was still novel and startling, and she found herself rubbing a palm across it, watching him.

“I… don’t know, honestly,” he exhaled. “But I can sense… something. Some sort of power.”

“Which could be something that will tear our limbs off…” Vessa said with a smirk.

She had meant it as a joke, but he scoffed with irritation. “Aren’t you a thief?” he said, mouth twisting. “Don’t you want treasure? There is something important in there.”

The palm rubbing across her scalp stilled and she regarded the man before her. He leaned on his staff with both hands, knuckles white as they clutched the wood. His dark eyes almost pleaded with her, though they darted around, never lingering on one thing overly long. He was terrified, this young scribe, and yet desperate to see what lay beyond the heavy black door. Vessa considered for a moment whether Alric had known all along what lay in Thornmere Hold and had withheld it from them but quickly discarded the idea. It was the mystery beyond that door that was battering at him.

“Fine,” she shrugged a shoulder.

Before Sarin and his Lanternless had arrived, Vessa had worked out how to slip past the arcane seal on the vault door without triggering whatever would happen if opened. She’d also already unlocked the two wheel-locks, untrapped, with her tools. As a result, it took her remarkably little time to open the large, black door before her. She barked clipped instructions for Alric on the position of the dwindling torch, and, thanks to a series of fingertip presses in a complex pattern she’d worked out based on the slight wear of the inlaid bronze. The seal hissed like escaping steam, rotated with a click, and pulsed once with a sickly green light before fading.

Then silence.

The dying flame of the torch was almost entirely gone. She lit a second torch from the first just before it died, the new flame sputtering weakly. Alric took it, but it already burned with a desperate flicker.

“We don’t have much time,” she said. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

Legs straining, she leaned forward and pushed the central wheel lock. There was a crack as the seal of the vault door broke free from its frame, but the door swung open easily and without incident.

“By the Herald,” Alric whispered in awe. He stepped forward, torch held aloft.

It was a small room, perhaps five or six strides across each side, with the same high ceiling as the previous chamber. Flickering light showed three iron-bound wooden chests upon the stone floor and a fourth, smaller than the others but entirely iron, lay nestled in a corner. Upon the wall, displayed by two iron hooks, hung a large, spiked mace that was entirely black and unlike anything Vessa had seen before. A fancy gilded lantern hung from a hook near the door, but upon inspection it contained no oil with which to light it. She did spy, however, the detailed, inscribed emblem of the stag upon the lantern, a symbol of the Princehold of Calvenor, not Oakton or one of its guilds. She didn’t know why a symbol of the Princehold hung here, so far from the Tower of Public Record, but she’d seen that stag stamped on royal warrants before, and if the lantern’s filigree was real gold… the lantern itself might be worth more than Alric was paying them for this job.

Her lips tugged into a grin. Alric had been correct to push them to open the vault door. She guessed that at least one of those chests contained coins. There could be ancient artifacts here. Magical trinkets. The contents of this place might even pay off her and Maelen’s debt to the Latchkey Circle!

“We don’t have much light left,” Vessa said, clapping Alric on the shoulder and stepping into the center of the room. “Let’s see what we can carry, and we’ll come back for the–”

She paused. Alric stood still and unmoving, staring up and wide-eyed. She followed his gaze.

The ceiling was vaulted with stone ribs, like the previous one, meant to prevent collapse. Yet here, strung across the space above was something like spiderwebs, though appearing jet black in the fading light.

Clinging to those dark webs was an enormous spider. Its massive, bloated body looked as large as a person and covered in chitinous black plates, the smooth surface reflecting the torchlight below. Perhaps most unnerving, unlike a spider it had absolutely no eyes… just a black, shiny ball for a head, bristling with mandibles. At first Vessa thought it was a desiccated husk, until one long limb twitched, cracking the webbing as it moved.

Without consciously deciding, Vessa was backing up, moving as silently as she’d been trained to do. Alric hesitated a heartbeat, then did likewise. Once they both had exited beyond the vault door, the scribe stumbled and backpedaled with a gasp.

Whether it was the sudden sound, movement, or a chance at freedom, the enormous eyeless spider dropped to the stone floor. It bobbed once on its long, shiny black legs, and then it advanced without sound.

Vessa dashed towards the room’s entrance. When she’d stripped him of the shirt she’d used to bind both her and Maelen’s wounds, she’d placed the tracker’s bow and quiver of arrows aside. Vessa was a competent shot with a bow, though she generally disliked the feel of wearing them on long journeys and the labor involved in maintaining the bowstring. She had no desire to engage the enormous black spider in melee, however.

By the time she’d raised the bow and nocked an arrow, the creature loomed over Alric, two long legs raised like it was going to embrace him. Once again, she found herself impressed at the young scribe’s moxy. He held the dwindling torch in front of him, swinging it back and forth and yelling to keep it away. As she pulled back the arrow’s feathers to her ear and aimed, however, the spider lunged forward, its head descending near Alric’s shoulder. He cried out and she loosed. The arrow buried itself in the thing’s bloated body and it jumped off Alric as if shocked. It didn’t make a single sound, however, just like the zombies. Whatever magic was corrupting the creatures in Thornmere Hold, it seemed to rob its victims of their eyes and voices. The effect was wholly unnerving.

With practiced grace, Vessa pulled a second arrow from the quiver lying on the floor at her knee. From the crouch she readied another shot. The giant, shining spider reared up again, raising its two front legs over Alric’s stagging form, torch faltering and almost out, and Vessa fired.

The arrow punched through the black shell of its head, and the spider reared violently. Its limbs curled as if in pain, then it collapsed in a heap, twitching once more before going still.

Only Alric’s shuddering gasps and the hammering of Vessa’s heart broke the silence in Thornmere Hold.

Next: Unlit Procession [with game notes]