Shadowmaze -- Session 48

Two barrow guardians. Three giant scorpions. One doorway, blocked by a wall of chitin and stone. Bancroft’s mind raced through the options the way a drowning man’s hands search for something to grab.

Beside him, Irulan brought her longsword down in a savage arc against the nearest guardian. The blade rang against stone like a cathedral bell, but the strike glanced off the statue’s shoulder without leaving so much as a scratch. She cursed and reset her stance.

Bancroft tried to pray. The words of the Light spell formed on his lips—they needed to see, needed the emerald glow of Sylvanus’s blessing to fight in this pit—but a barrow guardian was already stomping toward him, each footfall shaking dust from the ceiling. He threw himself behind the altar, the stone fist passing close enough to ruffle his hair, and the prayer scattered like startled birds. The darkness closed in tighter, their last torch guttering in the tomb air.

Irulan moved with the calm practicality that Bancroft had come to admire about her. She lit a fresh torch from the embers of the old one and wedged it into a crack in the altar, keeping the stone block between herself and the nearest guardian. The flickering light carved the chamber into sharp angles of shadow and amber.

Bancroft didn’t argue. He saw the gap—a sliver of space between the nearest scorpion and the barrow guardian that had turned to track the scattered gems—and he ran for it. His shoulder caught the scorpion’s claw and he bounced sideways, stumbling, his plate armor scraping against chitin with a sound like a knife on a whetstone. He pushed through, ducking under the guardian’s reaching arm, his boots finding purchase on the ancient stone steps.

The entrance. He could see it—pale starlight filtering down from above, the promise of open air and escape. Three more steps. Two. One—

A hand of cold stone closed around his ankle.

The grip was crushing, inhuman, the fingers grinding against the steel of his greave with enough force to dent the metal. The barrow guardian from the crypt had followed him, emerging from a side passage he hadn’t even seen, and now it dragged him backward with the mechanical patience of something that had been doing this for a thousand years.

Then Riyou’s arrow sang through the air from outside the barrow.

The shot was extraordinary—threading through the narrow entrance, past Bancroft’s flailing body, and burying itself in the guardian’s eye socket with a meaty crack. The stone figure staggered, its grip loosening for just a moment, one eye now a ruin of shattered obsidian and feathered shaft. But the fingers tightened again, dragging him deeper.

Behind them all, the scorpions and the remaining guardian had turned on each other. The sound was tremendous—stone smashing against chitin, stingers striking granite, claws scrabbling against enchanted rock. Whatever intelligence governed the guardians had decided that the scorpions were the greater threat to the tomb’s sanctity, and the scorpions, unable to distinguish between enemies, fought everything that moved.

The struggle at the entrance became a contest of raw strength. Bancroft braced his free leg against the wall and pulled. The guardian pulled back. For a long, horrible moment, neither gave ground—Bancroft straining with everything his farmer’s body could muster against stone muscles that never tired and never weakened.

He lost.

The guardian wrenched him free of his handhold and dragged him back down into the darkness. Riyou fired again, another arrow finding its mark, but the guardian kept coming, kept pulling, its shattered face a mask of mindless purpose.

It was Irulan who turned the tide. She had fought her way clear of the melee at the altar, and now she threw herself at the guardian holding Bancroft, her hands finding its arm and pulling with a strength born of desperation. The guardian’s grip shifted—just enough. Bancroft twisted, kicked, and tore free, scrambling up the steps on hands and knees.

Bancroft raised his holy symbol and prayed for light.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, reaching deeper, searching for the familiar warmth of Sylvanus’s blessing. Instead, he felt something cold and vast, like a winter wind blowing through the hollow spaces of his faith. The wood of his holy symbol cracked—a sharp, splintering sound that made Irulan flinch—and into Bancroft’s mind came not words, exactly, but understanding. A vision of darkness and corruption. A figure in black robes skulking near the main entrance to the barrowmaze. A Nergulite—a priest of the death god—poisoning the land that Sylvanus protected.

Kill it, the vision said, with the patient certainty of roots breaking stone. Kill the Nergulite, and my light will return to you.

The Brazen Strumpet was packed that evening, as it always was when adventurers returned from the barrows with coins to spend and stories to tell. Seacrock made it his personal mission to ensure that Bancroft drank enough to forget Sylvanus’s holy directive, or at least to postpone thinking about it until morning.

“Another round!” Seacrock called to the barkeep, waving a hand with theatrical generosity. “My friend here has received a divine mission to go kill a death priest, and I think that calls for celebration!”

“That calls for preparation,” Irulan corrected, nursing her own mug with considerably more restraint. “Not pickling.”

“Preparation, pickling—they both start with P.” Seacrock pushed another tankard toward Bancroft. “Drink.”

Bancroft drank. He drank rather a lot, in fact, which is how he ended up in an arm wrestling contest with a man twice his width and half his sense. The challenger was a caravan guard named something-or-other—Bancroft had stopped remembering names three tankards ago—who had been boasting about his exploits in voices loud enough to rattle the shutters.

“You?” The guard looked Bancroft up and down, taking in the farmer’s honest face and the callused hands that owed more to a plow than a sword. “You want to arm wrestle me?”

“I do,” Bancroft said, with the serene confidence of the profoundly drunk.

They clasped hands across a battered oak table. Someone counted to three. The guard strained, his face going red, the veins in his neck standing out like ropes. Bancroft simply pushed—and the man’s arm went down so fast, so hard, that the table shattered beneath them, mugs and coins scattering across the floor in a spray of splinters and ale.

The common room erupted in cheers.

“That’s two!” the barkeep called out, already nailing a plank to the wall beside the trophy from Bancroft’s nude footrace victory. “Bancroft Barleychaser—arm wrestling champion of the Brazen Strumpet! Drinks on the house!”

Bancroft beamed. This, at least, he understood. Not divine missions or death priests or cracking holy symbols. Just honest strength and the warm approval of good people.

None of them noticed Riyou slip away from the table early in the evening.

She was found later in a back alley off the market square, cornered by a fortuneteller—a woman with wild hair and wilder eyes who had seized Riyou’s wrist and wouldn’t let go.

“You have a destiny,” the woman hissed, her fingers tracing the lines of Riyou’s palm with feverish intensity. “I can see it. Written in your blood, in your bones. But you’ve been running from it.”

Riyou tried to pull free. The woman’s grip was iron.

“To achieve what you seek,” the fortuneteller continued, her voice dropping to a whisper, “you must become again what you once was. The marks you’ve covered—they are part of you. Denying them denies your power.”

When Riyou finally wrenched her hand free and stumbled back to the tavern, Bancroft noticed that her face was drawn and pale. He also noticed—couldn’t help but notice, even through the pleasant fog of ale—that her skin was marked with fresh tattoos, the ink still swollen and angry, layered carefully over much, much older ones that she had clearly gone to great trouble to hide.

She didn’t explain. Nobody asked. Some things, Bancroft had learned, were best left alone until the person carrying them was ready to set them down.

He ordered her an ale instead, and they sat together in comfortable silence, watching the fire burn low, each of them carrying their own burdens into the small hours of the night.