Bancroft was lying on the stone floor.
He had been lying there since the spider. He knew this in the abstract — the spider bite, the paralysis, Irulan cutting him down from the web, the floor coming up. He hadn’t planned to land face-first. That was just how things went.
The stone was cold against his cheek. He could see the grain of it — the fossil-something embedded in the limestone, the dust settled into the low spots over a few hundred years of quiet. The skeleton’s bag was two feet from his outstretched right hand. He’d been staring at that bag since Irulan cut him down. It hadn’t moved.
His shield was still glowing green. Steady, the same as it had been since the prayer. Sylvanus hadn’t taken that back.
Solix was beside him. He’d found a candle in Bancroft’s pack without asking, which was fine — it was the pack of a man who couldn’t say no — and lit it off the shield’s glow. It burned at the level of Bancroft’s face. Solix kept talking: about the flickering, about whether Bancroft could hear him, about whether there was something he ought to be doing. He sounded young in a way he hadn’t sounded before the spider. Maybe eighteen. Maybe younger.
Bancroft couldn’t move his jaw.
Distant sounds came through the far door — boots on stone, shouts, something that might have been a door swinging open in a corridor he couldn’t see. He could hear Riyou’s voice at one point. He couldn’t make out words.
He tried to wiggle his right hand.
Nothing.
He thought about Ertz, whose feet were still in his line of sight. Not moving. He thought about the prayer book Ertz had kept marked in his kit — passages in a different god’s language, the bow the man made every morning, brief and sincere. He thought about how Ertz had refused the healing, and how Bancroft had tried to give it anyway, and how Sylvanus had gone quiet on that one. You couldn’t heal a man who had already decided against it.
He listened. The barrow was still. No scraping, no footsteps beyond what he could account for. Clear, for now.
What Bancroft heard, at the time: shouts in the dark passage beyond the door. What he pieced together later, on the walk home:
Riyou had woken up.
She’d been out since Heinrich’s enchantment — carried over Slouch Ribs’ shoulder in absolute darkness, her weapons gone. But the bone-handle dagger was still there. They’d searched her and missed it. She was upside-down when she found it. She drew it anyway, in the dark, without light or leverage, and got it into her hand before Slouch Ribs knew she was awake.
She’d been pretending to be asleep until she wasn’t.
“Methinks she be awake,” Slouch Ribs said.
So much for that.
She stabbed him before he could react. Both strikes true in the dark, aimed at the soft places. Slouch Ribs didn’t go down. He bled, and kept walking, and didn’t even curse at her.
From the other end of the passage, SeaCrock tried to put Heinrich to sleep.
“Such simple spells.” Heinrich’s voice was clear and dry and patient. “You used it on me earlier — unsuccessfully. Unlike you, I am immune to such realities.”
He said it like something already settled.
Back in the spider room, Bancroft heard muffled shouting and what he thought was Riyou swearing. He listened for the barrow itself — the walls, the passages, anything moving that shouldn’t be. Nothing. Still clear.
Irulan ran into the dark after them.
SeaCrock’s Magic Missiles followed — the crack of each one sounding down the passage, brief light under the door. One mirror image gone, then another, then a third bolt that found the real Heinrich and changed the quality of his voice.
Irulan hit him with her sword. He should have been done.
“You’ll be next for the pit,” he said, anyway.
“You mentioned something about cold hard steel,” Irulan said. “Didn’t I.”
Riyou broke free. She ran south, hands finding walls by touch, and then Slouch Ribs hauled her back — bigger, enough to pick her up again. She stabbed him twice more blindly. The first missed. The second found something, barely.
Heinrich tried two spells in a row. Both fizzled. He looked at his hands.
Irulan found her flint and steel and the torch caught. First light in that corridor since the chase began. Bancroft saw the thin yellow line under the door brighten, and he knew.
He listened again and went very still.
Something was moving in the walls. The dry scrape of legs on stone. Not here yet. He knew that sound by now.
He tried to move his fingers again.
Nothing.
SeaCrock opened the door.
Bancroft could hear it — the creak of the hinges, the changed sound of the space. Solix drew a sharp breath beside him. SeaCrock walked into the corridor with the torch and found them: Riyou, struggling; Slouch Ribs, still carrying her toward wherever he was going in the dark.
The bone-handle dagger found Slouch Ribs through the gap in his ribs — the place where the bones were outside the body, where there was no armor, where a blade could go all the way in. He went down slowly.
“I just wanted to see the pit one more time,” he said.
Riyou said: “You should have let me go when I asked.”
Riyou drives the bone-handle dagger between Slouch Ribs' exposed ribs in the torchlit corridor
Irulan cut through the doorway and hit Heinrich again. He scooped SeaCrock’s dropped dagger from the floor without breaking stride, picked his way through the scattered ball bearings, and ran.
“I have my quarry regardless,” he called back. “The barrow maze has secrets only we know about.”
Riyou threw her dagger after him in the dark. Missed. The sound of his footsteps faded north.
The party gave chase.
Bancroft contributed to this by lying on the stone floor.
He was, technically, still the party’s navigator. He was also face-down on the floor.
He heard the sound of boots, receding. Then nothing.
Solix sat very quietly. The candle was burning lower.
“Do you suppose,” Solix said, “they’ll find him?”
Bancroft could not answer.
They came back from the chase disoriented — three-way junction, three cowering Mongrel Men who wanted nothing to do with any of them. SeaCrock attempted to negotiate. The Mongrel Men pointed south and scattered.
“I think we go southwest,” SeaCrock said, “and feel better.”
They turned back toward the rope room.
Solix saw them coming through the door before Bancroft did. “There,” he said, to no one. “There they are.” Relief in his voice, and surprise that it was there.
“He hasn’t moved in days,” Solix told the others. “It seems like.”
SeaCrock crouched and stared at Bancroft’s lips for an uncomfortable amount of time. He appeared to be contemplating something involving a whistle. He did not act on this, which was a relief.
Riyou tried to harvest the spider’s silk. The battle had cut it too badly. She tried for the poison gland instead, worked at it with her knife, her back to the room. She got a large poison sack out of it. Heavy, wet, the size of two fists. It wouldn’t keep long.
She was an ex-cultist of a death cult. Of course she tried.
Irulan took Ertz’s chainmail from his body. She paused before she did it — stood still a moment over the prayer book in his kit, the marked passages. She held it for a moment longer than looting required.
He saw it. He could see that much from the floor. He couldn’t say anything about it.
They grabbed the skeleton’s bag on the way out. Eighty gold pieces, split four ways. SeaCrock weighed his share and said nothing, which was how you knew the number disappointed him.
The bones rattled in the walls, closer than the last check.
They tied Bancroft to the rope. Irulan climbed first, hauled SeaCrock up behind her, and then Bancroft — tied to the line, the stone wall sliding past his face, the rope doing the work his arms would have done if they were working. He went up like a sack of grain. It was not dignified. It was extremely effective.
Solix and Riyou climbed out behind him. They were all out before the bone sounds arrived.
Irulan hauls Bancroft up the rope shaft, his armor slack and arms hanging, Bancroft going up like cargo
SeaCrock carried him the whole way home. Slow going — six hours for a walk that should have taken three.
Bancroft watched the ceiling of the passages from over SeaCrock’s shoulder, and then the sky when they got outside, and then the road. He could see but not steer. He could breathe but not direct any of it. He was cargo and he knew it and there was nothing to do about that except wait.
An hour or two from Helix, something changed.
His head moved.
He hadn’t planned it — a small turn, involuntary, like a man waking up. Then his eyes blinked without deciding to. Then he became aware that his lips were numb, which was different from not being able to feel them, which was progress.
“Put one foot in front of the other,” Irulan said, when he stopped moving forward.
He put one foot in front of the other. The feet felt like they belonged to someone of approximately his size who had lent them temporarily. He walked the last stretch in.
Back in Helix by nine. Ertz was dead. Everyone else had made it.
There was no next of kin for Ertz — nobody left him a name to give. The bag SeaCrock had looted from his pack sat on the table. Nobody knew what to do with that, so nobody said anything, and eventually no one had to.
Solix walked away that night. No announcement, no explanation. He sat with them for one drink, said nothing to anyone, put down his cup, and left. Bancroft watched him go and didn’t try to stop him. The young man had held a candle over a paralyzed man for three hours in a room with a dead body in it. He had earned the right to be done.
Riyou drank aggressively. SeaCrock joined and eventually slid over sideways. She kept going. Someone at the bar was talking about the Mongrel Men guarding some fabulous treasure deep in the barrow. Bancroft filed it away for when his tongue worked well enough to ask questions.
He went to bed early. He’d had a full evening.
Morning came.
Bancroft prayed for the sense he’d had since the first time he’d felt it — the directional pull toward Heinrich, clear as water running downhill. He’d relied on it for weeks. He prayed for it carefully, in the way his mother had taught him: not demanding, just listening.
He got nothing.
The words went out and came back empty. Either Sylvanus was withholding, which happened, or Heinrich had moved outside whatever range that sense covered. He didn’t know which. He sat with it for a while and didn’t pretend it didn’t matter.
Riyou slipped out alone that morning — before anyone else was moving, back in less than an hour with a smell of alleys about her and twenty gold in her hand. The spider’s poison gland. She’d known someone who’d take it. She pushed five coins to each of them.
“Thanks,” SeaCrock said. “Welcome aboard.”
“You’re kind of my family now,” Riyou said. “Don’t make it weird.”
They restocked. Repaired things. Bancroft paid to have Ertz’s chainmail mended and didn’t examine why.
The second trip was the same afternoon, with five new hirelings. The temperature dropped as they approached the entrance. Breath fogged.
“Last time it was this cold,” Riyou said, “we found ghouls.”
The Nergal obelisk was there at the entrance, black stone in the gray afternoon. SeaCrock read the runes: Life in death. Life in death. Not magical — just stone. Someone’s conviction about the nature of things, repeated until it felt true.
The door was heavy bronze with a skull of Nergal embossed at the top and pentagrams worked into the frame. Old, purposeful. The kind of door someone had built to stay closed. SeaCrock’s Detect Magic fizzled once, then again, then the third attempt lit up the whole door like a coal — strong, deep, the kind of aura that meant whoever had made this had been serious about it.
Riyou looked at the door for a moment before she said she remembered it from her cult years.
She tried to pick the lock. Every time she got halfway through, the tumblers reset. Back to the beginning. Back to the beginning. The lock knew what she was doing and declined.
The Nergalite bronze door glows with sinister magical aura, skull of Nergal embossed at the top, pentagrams framing the keyhole
The five hirelings looked at each other.
They’d come back when they had the key.
He thought about it on the walk in.
Sylvanus had sent him here to kill a man. That was how he’d understood it — the pull, the direction, the kind of certainty you didn’t argue with. Find the priest. Stop whatever he was doing.
He hadn’t done it. He hadn’t come close.
Heinrich had walked past him twice. The first time, Bancroft was on the ceiling. The second time, he was face-down on the stone floor with the skeleton’s bag two feet from his hand. Both times, Heinrich had taken something and gone. Both times, Bancroft had been the wrong shape to stop him.
The sense was gone now. No direction. No pull. Just the road back to Helix and the sound of boots on gravel.
He’d have to find the man without it.
That was all right. He’d found other things the hard way. The road to Helix was not the kind of road you ended up on by accident.
He kept walking.
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.