Vorn
#Cade and I had been standing outside the barrow for a while. Which, strictly speaking, put us on the right side of things — fresh air, no immediate monsters, exit readily accessible. Our employers were on the other side of a sealed stone door doing something complicated with mechanisms, which is where the dead things are. We could hear them but not help. Standard arrangement, really.
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A crack appeared. Six inches of orange light, and then the sound of metal grinding and something hissing. Morrigan had gotten a dagger into the mechanism and forced a gap — the dagger didn’t survive the experience. Something in the gears ate it, dissolved it, left a chemical smell that stung my eyes from three feet away.
Morrigan DEX (nat 20 crit). Pries door open 6 inches with Roderick's dagger. Dagger melts into gears.
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Roderick pushed a burning rope end through the gap. I lit a torch off it, which improved my mood considerably. Then I tried the skull mounted on our side of the door — one of those ancient mechanisms, a stone head you’re supposed to turn. It spun freely, no resistance, no click. Whatever it had been connected to, the acid had eaten through it long ago.
Roderick burns rope, passes it through for Vorn to light a torch. Skull mechanism turns freely, does nothing — acid ate it.
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Cade put his shoulder into the door. For a halfling, he’s strong, but this was six inches of stone on corroded hinges. It moved, barely. Morrigan threw her weight in from the other side and between the three of them they forced it open far enough to squeeze through. Roderick jammed his shovel across the gap at floor level, which was either clever engineering or optimism. I didn’t ask which.
Cade STR: partial push. Morrigan STR 17: forces door open enough to squeeze through. Shovel braced low.
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The room beyond was full of statues. Old stone gods with their faces knocked off, altars cracked down the middle, giant rats watching us from the shadows with their eyes like wet black beads. The rats didn’t attack. They just watched, which was somehow worse. Morrigan spent ten careful minutes examining the floor in front of the main altar and found a pit trap — a stone slab balanced on a central pivot, ready to tip either direction. Roderick tested it by pressing the center with his boot. The slab dropped. He caught the edge and hauled himself back, breathing hard, while the rest of us stared at the ten-foot drop beneath.
Morrigan WIS: finds pit trap (10 min). Roderick tests pit trap center: DEX save, uses luck, barely avoids falling. 10-ft seesaw pit.
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The altar had held something once. You could see the outline in the dust — a rectangular shape, maybe a box, maybe a tablet. Gone now. I tried to get a closer look at the statues, but the rats closed in when I moved, chittering and showing teeth, so I backed off. Someone had arranged human teeth on the floor in a line pointing west, which was either a message or a warning or the work of someone who’d been down here too long.
Searching altar: Morrigan WIS 20, Roderick WIS 11 — nothing. Something already taken. Vorn tries statues; rats agitate. Teeth arrow pointing west.
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The next room smelled like a butcher’s shop left in the sun. Barrel-shaped alcoves lined every wall, sixty or seventy of them, each one holding bones — gnawed bones, cracked lengthwise, the marrow scraped out by something with very large teeth. I searched my section and found absolutely nothing, which felt about right. Morrigan pulled twenty-five gold coins out of the debris in the time it took me to examine three alcoves.
Roderick, meanwhile, was pushing splinters of bone under the straps of his leather armor. Building himself a costume. He stood up and spread his arms, grinning through the ribcage he’d constructed around his chest.
“Skeleton disguise,” he announced.
I had thoughts about this. I kept them to myself.
Vorn WIS: 2 — finds nothing. Morrigan WIS: 20 — finds 25 gold. Roderick straps bone fragments to armor to look like a skeleton.
The barrel tomb room, alcoves full of gnawed bones, torchlight casting long shadows
Somewhere deep in the barrow, something with leathery wings was moving. The sound echoed off stone and came from everywhere at once.
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When we opened the door to leave, they were already there. Giant flies — each one the size of a cat, bodies like oil drums with wings, drawn straight to the torch. They came fast. Morrigan didn’t hesitate. She was through them and into the next room before anyone could speak, swallowed by the dark.
Door opens: giant carnivorous horseflies swarm toward torch. Morrigan bolts into next room in the dark.
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We heard her shout — “I need light!” — and then nothing. Just nothing. The kind of silence that means someone stopped being able to make noise.
Aura shut the door. We sat in the barrel room with the gnawed bones while my torch burned down to nothing. Someone passed me a new one. I lit it. Nobody said much.
Huecuva attacks Morrigan in dark with advantage: hits, Touch 2 damage — unconscious. Morrigan calls 'I need light!' then silence.
Giant flies swarming toward torchlight in the barrow corridor
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We couldn’t stay. When we opened the other door — the one we’d propped with the shovel — the corridor was full of robed figures. Tall, still, blue light flickering in their eye sockets like cold flame. They hit at me and missed, bony hands passing close enough that I felt the air move. I tried to push through. They were stronger than they looked — dry sticks wrapped in mildewed cloth, but they didn’t give an inch.
Huecuva attack Vorn (AC 11): 7 and 10 — both miss. Vorn tries to push through: fails twice (STR -1 vs Huecuva).
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I jammed the torch into the nearest one’s chest. The robe caught immediately, fire climbing up the cloth, and the thing staggered back trailing flames.
Vorn torch attack: STR 18, hit — 3 damage, skeleton catches fire.
Vorn drives a torch into a robed skeleton in a dark corridor
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Cade went for the gap. He was fast — always was — but the burning skeleton was between him and the corridor, and in the dark, at that size, he couldn’t get around it. The fire caught his clothes. He went down fast. Faster than I could reach him.
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.
Cade tries to push past burning skeleton: DEX disadvantage in dark: 3 — catches fire, 1 HP, dies.
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Behind us, Aura lost the door. More of them pushed through. One caught my shoulder — not a hard blow, barely felt the impact — but something went into the wound. Not poison. Something colder. Something that moved under the skin like it had its own intentions.
Aura holds door: fails (disadvantage in dark). Huecuva hit Aura: Touch 5 damage — CON save success. Huecuva hit Vorn: Touch 1 damage — CON save fail (something enters wound).
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Aura went down next. Then Roderick, his bone costume doing exactly as much good as I’d expected. They were coming from both directions now, filling the corridor, and the cold thing in my shoulder was spreading through my chest like water soaking into cloth.
The last one hit me harder than the first. I’d known the odds were going to catch up eventually. I’d been practical about that — you work the barrowlands long enough, you make your peace with the mathematics of it. Every trip down is a roll of the dice, and the house always wins if you keep playing.
This was that.
More Huecuva from behind. Huecuva hit Aura: Touch 3 — down. Huecuva crit Roderick: max 6 damage — down. Huecuva crit Vorn: max 6 damage — Vorn had 4 HP. Down.
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Morrigan was the only one who walked out. She told me that later — no, she didn’t. She couldn’t have. I’m telling this from somewhere else now, and the details are getting unreliable. She woke up alone in the dark, sick with something that had gotten inside her. She crawled out. She survived.
Good for her. Somebody should.
Morrigan survives: wakes in darkness, crawls out, vomits black liquid, burns maggots off her stomach.
This session report was written with the help of AI. For details on the process, see Transcribing D&D Sessions with WhisperX and Speaker Diarization.
