Bancroft
Bancroft #
The screaming started with the dog.
Bancroft was deep in a dreamless sleep when the sound reached him—a frantic, high-pitched barking from down the hall, followed by the crash of something heavy hitting a door. Then came Seacrock’s voice, raw with panic, echoing through the thin walls of the inn.
“Wake up! For the love of all the gods, WAKE UP!”
Bancroft rolled over and pulled the blanket tighter. “Is it breakfast already?” he mumbled into his pillow.
The pounding on his door was insistent, desperate. Seacrock’s fists hammered against the wood like a man trying to beat his way through solid oak. “BANCROFT! There are DEAD THINGS in my ROOM!”
“Dead things can wait until morning,” Bancroft yawned. But some deeper instinct—the same one that had once told him when the frost would come early, back when he was still a farmer—dragged him upright. He blinked in the darkness. The pounding had stopped. Seacrock had retreated to his own room, barricading himself in with whatever furniture he could move.
Bancroft finally managed to shake the fog of sleep from his mind and stumbled into the hallway. Seacrock’s door was shut tight, but the sounds from within told the story plainly enough—the scrape of dead fingers on wood, the wet gurgling of a throat that had stopped breathing weeks ago, and the whimpering of a very frightened dog.
He shouldered the door open. In the pale moonlight that filtered through the window, Bancroft saw Seacrock sprawled on the floor, unconscious, with a zombie crouched over him like a vulture over carrion. The thing’s head swiveled toward Bancroft with a slow, grinding motion, its milky eyes fixing on him with dull hunger.
Bancroft raised his holy symbol. The words came easily—they always did when the need was real. “Sylvanus, drive back this corruption from your sight.”
The divine light blazed green and fierce. The zombie didn’t so much fall as come apart, its rotting flesh sloughing away from brittle bones, the whole wretched assemblage collapsing into a heap of dust and foulness that scattered across the floorboards.
Riyou appeared in the doorway, already crouching over the remains with professional interest. Her small hands sifted through the debris. “Rusty lantern,” she reported, holding it up. “That’s all it had.”
Bancroft knelt beside Seacrock, gently turning him over. The man’s eyes fluttered open, wide and wild. “Is it—did you—”
“You’re fine,” Bancroft said, his voice steady and warm. “Just a close call. Nothing broken.”
But the screaming from below hadn’t stopped.
They rushed down the stairs—Bancroft in the lead, his sword still glowing faintly with residual divine energy, Riyou close behind with her dagger drawn. The common room was a wreck. Tables overturned, chairs splintered, and the bartender backed into a corner, jabbing a pitchfork at the last remaining zombie with the grim determination of a man defending his livelihood.
“Little help here?” the bartender grunted, narrowly avoiding a swipe of grey-green claws.
Seacrock, who had followed them downstairs on trembling legs, raised a shaking hand. A dart of pure arcane energy shot from his fingertips and struck the zombie square in the chest. The creature staggered, its dead legs folding beneath it, and collapsed face-first into the sawdust. It did not rise again.
In the silence that followed, they took stock. The sapphire gem they had recovered the night before—the one from the collapsed chamber that had cost Mirumi and Luxsley their lives—was cracked, a hairline fracture running through its center like a frozen lightning bolt.
“Mazzah might know what it does,” Bancroft suggested. “Even cracked, there’s something about it.”
The grumpy wizard accepted their twenty gold pieces with his customary warmth—which is to say, none at all—and promised to identify the gem’s properties. While they waited, Bancroft sold the trap crossbow they had recovered from the barrow for a handful of coins that barely seemed worth the trouble of carrying the thing to market.
With time to kill, they wandered to the outskirts of town, where a statue of Herne stood by the roadside. Or what was left of it. The figure had been chained and disfigured, its features chipped away by deliberate hands, iron links wrapped around its stone limbs like shackles on a prisoner.
Bancroft studied it in silence. Even he could feel that something was wrong here—something older and deeper than simple vandalism.
Seacrock, meanwhile, had developed an unexpected interest in local property. “I’ve been thinking,” he announced, approaching a cluster of farmers near the market square. “A man needs roots. Somewhere to settle down. Any houses for sale around here?”
The farmers regarded him with cautious interest until Riyou wandered over to join the conversation. Their eyes went to her tattoos—the swirling, arcane marks of her former cult—and their expressions hardened like setting mortar. Doors closed. Conversations ended. Within five minutes, Seacrock couldn’t have bought a chicken coop in Helix.
“Perhaps,” Riyou said flatly, “I should wait around the corner next time.”
They gathered their gear and set out for the barrowmaze, spirits dampened but resolve intact. They hadn’t gone far when the first frog attacked.
It wasn’t one of the small, croaking things that sang in the marshes at night. This was a giant toad the size of a hunting dog, its warty hide glistening with slime, its mouth wide enough to swallow a halfling’s head. It launched itself from the reeds with a wet, meaty slap, and three more followed close behind.
They fought them off and pressed on, but the frogs kept coming. It was as if something was drawing the creatures toward them—or rather, toward something they carried.
Seacrock was the one who figured it out. She stopped mid-stride and rummaged through her pack, her face going pale. “The gem,” she said, holding up the cracked sapphire. “The one we left with Mazzah. It’s here. In my pack.”
They stared at it. None of them had touched it since leaving the wizard’s tower.
“That’s not possible,” Bancroft said.
“And yet.” Riyou gestured at the gem with the tip of her dagger.
More frogs erupted from the marsh, six of them this time, their croaking building into a deafening chorus. Seacrock threw a sleep spell at the largest cluster, dropping three of them into the mud, while Bancroft scattered caltrops behind them as they ran. But the remaining frogs simply went around the caltrops, their bulging eyes fixed on the party with single-minded hunger.
They ran all the way back to Helix, burst through Mazzah’s door, and slammed the gem on his table.
“It came back,” Bancroft panted. “We left it with you and it came back.”
Mazzah peered at the gem over his spectacles. His perpetual scowl deepened into something that might have been concern. “Cursed,” he said simply. “I don’t do curses. You’ll want the priests of St Ygg for that.”
“Can you at least tell us what it does?” Seacrock asked.
“What’s the point? You can’t use it until the curse is lifted, and lifting the curse will probably destroy it.” The wizard waved them away. “Go bother the Yggians. That’s what they’re for.”
The priests of St Ygg were more accommodating, though the half-orc Gamrac fixed them with a penetrating stare as he worked the ritual of uncursing. “You visited the statue of Herne today,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
Bancroft shifted uncomfortably. “We were just passing by.”
“Herne’s followers have been growing bolder,” Gamrac continued, his eyes never leaving Bancroft’s face. “Defacing holy sites. Spreading their influence. If you encounter anything… unusual… the Church would appreciate hearing about it.”
The curse lifted with a sharp crack, the gem shattering into worthless fragments on the altar. Whatever dark magic had bound it to them was broken, scattered like the dust of a turned zombie.
They left the temple lighter in both pocket and burden, the mystery of the cursed gem behind them—though Gamrac’s questions about Herne lingered in Bancroft’s mind like a shadow that wouldn’t quite fade.
Irulan #
The night was exciting, apparently. Some slimy green zombie climbed in Seacrock’s window and attacked him. Another one came up from below. Seacrock was knocked unconscious after killing one, and woke up with a strangle scar around his neck. Bancroft turned one and went downstairs to go after the one down there, but Riyou beat him to it. The St. Ygg priests killed a bunch outside that were trying to come to the tavern. I slept through it all. It’s weird that they were all coming to the tavern.
The card this morning was the 8 of wands. Action and progress. Well, we certainly had action this morning. Seacrock cast detect magic on the gem, and it glowed, so we took it to Mazzah. He said it was cracked and only worth 10 gold. We paid for an identify, and he said to come back tomorrow. The guys wanted to see the Herne statue, so we went there. Seacrock talked to farmers about any available house for sale. Until they saw Riyou’s tattoos and then nobody wanted to talk to us.
We headed into the barrow, going through the secret passage in the skull barrow (D10). Then Seacrock found the gem in his bag. The one we left at Mazzah’s. As we were lighting torches, 6 giant toads came at us. We took it as a sign that the gem was cursed and we needed to get rid of it. We ran, but 4 caught us. I tried to hit one that attacked Seacrock, but my sword hit a stump and got chipped. We kept running until we got to town. We headed straight for Mazzah’s. He said he didn’t do curses, and there wasn’t a point to finding out what the gem did if we couldn’t get rid of the curse, so we went to St. Ygg to get rid of it. I tried to say we just found it in the maze and brought it right back, but Seacrock didn’t catch on. So instead of selling it to them to destroy, we had to pay them to remove the curse, which destroyed the gem. Riyou headed out on a mysterious errand to fix her tattoos.