Bancroft #
The morning of April 15th was cold and gray in Helix. Bancroft woke early, already thinking about the barrows.
They had hired five henchmen from the Gray Company, a local band of adventurers who took on lesser jobs while their better-equipped brethren sought greater treasures. The cost was nine gold, and Bancroft hoped it would be money well spent.
Gillix and Ragnar were both mute men-at-arms — Gillix with a spear and a battered Viking helmet and a habit of gesturing at people’s crotches that Bancroft decided not to ask about, Ragnar with a crossbow and a devotion to St. Yig. Hengest was their torchbearer, a big man who talked enough for all of them. Landersooth carried a club and smelled of fish and kept looking over his shoulder. “They can’t find you in there, right?” he said, when asked why he was going into the barrows. Mordu was the last — burned badly down his left side, skin still raw, who would not hold a torch on account of his nerves. Bancroft lent Gillix his own sling and tried not to think too hard about what he was leading these men into.
Bancroft bought a lantern and supplies and told Hengest to keep the torch lit at all costs. SeaCrock spent a long time explaining an elaborate rope harness system that nobody else understood but seemed to make perfect sense in his head.
Bancroft reminded the party of Sylvanus’s mission: find and kill the Nergulite priest who had taken residence in the barrows, and bring an end to his dark rituals once and for all.
The path to the Barrowmaze was quiet. They gave a wide berth to a pond full of giant toads — huge things, big as dogs — and lost an hour for it, but nobody wanted a fight that early in the day.
They reached the Barrowmaze without further trouble and entered through the secret door at the skull barrow — the one with the sarcophagus mechanism. Hengest lit the first torch and Bancroft took the lead with his shield up.
The zombie corpse they had left in the hallway last time was gone. That was not a comforting sign. Some things were better left undisturbed, and once a zombie had been killed it should stay dead. But whatever magic held these barrows together had other plans.
They could hear squeaking from the east — rats feeding on a corpse somewhere down that passage. Buzzing from the north — flies near some kind of statue. Neither sound was particularly inviting.
In the north passage they found a small chamber with a pyramid-shaped cairn made of uniformly-sized stacked rocks. Crude writing on the wall next to it read: “Beware the dark water.” Bancroft didn’t know what that meant, but he knew better than to ignore a warning in a place like this. Gillix investigated the cairn with his spear. Nothing inside but dirt and old stone.
Bancroft cast Shield of Faith before they opened the north door. Sylvanus heard his prayer and granted him a little extra protection — not much, but enough to matter.
Bancroft kicked open the north door. At the same moment, they heard cries of “Please help me!” and a baby wailing from the south passage. He knew a trick when he heard one — those were not real cries. The barrows played games with sound sometimes.
The room beyond held three piles of rocks with coins embedded in them. Then two of the piles stood up.
They were hunched-over things, about four feet tall, with long claws and cloaks made of rubble and debris. Three creatures total: one with a single eye, one with too many tusks, and one with enormous feet. Before anyone could do anything, they bolted into the darkness, dropping coins behind them like breadcrumbs.
SeaCrock tried calling after them in Thanian — “Wait!” — but his voice echoed off the stone walls and came back empty. The creatures were gone.
The henchmen scrambled to pick up the scattered coins. Landersooth was shaking his head the whole time. “That was some ghost shit right there,” he said, and Bancroft could not argue with that.
They searched the rooms the creatures had fled through. Bancroft found nothing — his eyes kept drifting to the dark corners where they had vanished. But Irulan turned over a rubble pile and found an emerald hidden underneath. Good eyes on that one. The henchmen gathered what coins the creatures had dropped, and by the time they finished, Bancroft’s Shield of Faith had worn off. He felt its absence like taking off a warm coat.
The buzzing led them toward a statue that had been broken and defaced, its head missing and its arms reduced to stumps. Then the sound swelled into something alive.
Horse flies the size of cats. Five of them, their bodies segmented, their wings glistening in the torchlight. Giant carnivorous flies.
They attacked first.
A fly dove at Ragnar and missed, its mouthparts clicking as it passed. A fly hit Landersooth in the face — its barbed proboscis burrowed into his mouth and his screams were cut off as blood spurted from his nose and ears. He was dead before he hit the ground. A fly hit Mordu in the neck, its hooks digging into his flesh and dragging him down with a wet tearing sound. Dead before Bancroft could even raise his shield. A fly hit Irulan for a glancing blow, drawing blood but nothing worse.
Two men dead in seconds. The torchlight flickered across their bodies and the flies burrowing into their open mouths, and Bancroft felt something go cold inside him.
Irulan swung and missed. Bancroft’s sword passed through empty air. He ordered Hengest back and the men-at-arms forward.
SeaCrock cast Sleep. The spell fizzled. He snarled something under his breath, reached deeper, and tried again. Three flies dropped out of the air and hit the ground with wet thuds. The two already inside bodies were unaffected. But Gillix and Ragnar went down too — caught in the spell — and when they woke moments later they were furious. They stayed in formation, though. That was something.
Hengest’s torch burned out mid-fight.
Bancroft cut down the fly on Gillix with his Elvish longsword. SeaCrock’s Magic Missile struck another dead center — ichor sprayed across the ceiling — but the thing bled and kept flying.
Then Ragnar went down. The last active fly crawled into his mouth, and the crossbowman who had been devoted to St. Yig made a choking sound and was still.
What Irulan did next was necessary, and Bancroft would never fault her for it. She brought her longsword down through Ragnar’s body to kill the fly inside. The blade bit through flesh and chitin and came up red. Hengest and Gillix stared in open-mouthed horror.
Bancroft swung at the fly still inside Landersooth and missed. SeaCrock tried to rally the surviving henchmen, but his voice came out thin and desperate and convinced nobody. Hengest and Gillix fled into the darkness without looking back, dropping the torch.
Then the second torch sputtered out. Total darkness.
The fly emerged from Landersooth and hit Bancroft, and he felt his knees buckle. The pain was blinding, and the blood was warm, and he could feel how close to the edge he was.
Irulan fumbled for flint and steel. Her hands shook. The flint sparked and died. She tried again — same result. The torch would not light.
Bancroft prayed. In the absolute dark, with blood running down his side and the buzzing of the last fly circling somewhere above them, he prayed for Light. His shield erupted in the warm green glow of Sylvanus’s blessing, and they could see again.
SeaCrock did not waste the moment. Another Magic Missile — another perfect strike. The fly staggered in the air. SeaCrock hit it again, and it dropped dead.
Bancroft tried Cure Wounds on himself. The prayer didn’t take. He tried again, gave it everything he had left. Nothing. Sylvanus had given him light, but no healing. Not today.
Two sleeping flies remained. Ugly work, killing things in their sleep, but Bancroft had seen what these creatures did to men and felt nothing about it. The first woke thrashing when Irulan’s blade found it, and SeaCrock had to finish it with Magic Missile. Irulan killed the last one clean.
Five flies dead. Three henchmen dead: Landersooth, Mordu, Ragnar. Two deserted: Gillix and Hengest, gone into the dark. They took Ragnar’s crossbow from his body. Gillix had run off with Bancroft’s sling.
Bancroft studied the broken statue while Irulan kept watch. He knew this one — a statue to Nergal, the old god of death, defiled but still recognizable. This was connected to Sylvanus’s quest. The Nergulite priest was close.
They searched the room, but Bancroft’s concentration was shot — blood loss and exhaustion making everything swim at the edges. Behind a double door to the south: more buzzing. More flies.
SeaCrock peeked through the ajar door and put the two flies inside to sleep before they knew he was there. The room beyond was enormous — burial alcoves from floor to ceiling, fifty or more, each one holding preserved organs laid out with terrible care. Two zombie corpses lay on the floor where the flies had been feeding.
They slipped inside and closed the door behind them. Bancroft lit his lantern and set SeaCrock to watch the sleeping flies while he and Irulan searched.
What they found turned Bancroft’s stomach even as it filled their packs. Gold coins stuffed inside the mouths of preserved corpses. More wedged into their stomachs, as if someone had fed the dead. A ruby in the palm of a mummified hand. A dull gray potion that nobody could identify. More gold than Bancroft had ever seen in one place, and all of it taken from the bodies of the dead.
SeaCrock went quiet after that. When he looked up his eyes were different.
“I can take a hit now,” he said, grinning. He’d been puzzling over something, and when he tried a spell Bancroft hadn’t seen before — Mage Armor — it took hold on the first try, settling over him like a second skin. For a moment, things felt almost manageable.
They had about ten minutes before the sleeping flies would wake. That was when the door burst open.
The three dead henchmen — Landersooth, Mordu, and Ragnar — stood in the doorway. Their eyes were flat and empty and their arms hung loose at their sides, and two of them still had their mouths hanging open with small flies buzzing inside. They were not alive. They were not even pretending to be alive. They were zombies, and they had come back for the people who had left them behind.
A zombie caught SeaCrock with a glancing blow. SeaCrock, who had grown stronger perhaps twenty minutes ago, pointed out through gritted teeth that this would have killed him before.
Two other zombies swung at Irulan and missed. The third zombie — what was left of Ragnar — lurched toward one of the sleeping flies and struck it, waking it up. The fly’s wings buzzed to life.
They ran.
Irulan grabbed SeaCrock by the collar and dragged him out of the room, his feet barely touching the ground. Bancroft stood in the doorway and raised his holy symbol, calling on Sylvanus to turn the dead. Nothing happened. The zombies kept coming. He tried again, spending the last of his divine reserves. Still nothing.
Sylvanus’s power was not with him today. Not for healing. Not for turning the dead. Not for anything that mattered.
Bancroft slammed the door shut and braced it with his weight. Behind it, he could hear the zombies and the flies colliding — the wet crunch of dead fists hitting chitin, the buzz of wings beating against stone walls. Let them sort each other out. One zombie had not made it through the door in time, and it stood before them in the hallway, its dead eyes fixed on the green light of Bancroft’s shield.
The zombie swung at him and missed. SeaCrock’s Magic Missile punched into its shoulder. Irulan drove her longsword into its chest — the thing staggered, dark fluid leaking from the wound. Bancroft brought his sword around and connected solidly. The zombie went down.
It shuddered once, trying to rise. Then it was still. Permanently.
They moved east and south toward the skull barrow exit, stepping over the debris of their earlier passage. Bancroft’s shield still glowed with Sylvanus’s light, casting green shadows on the walls, and his side still bled where the fly had bitten him, and somewhere behind them the sounds of zombies fighting flies echoed down the stone corridors.
Something was ahead of them now. Something between them and the way out. They could hear it in the dark — a sound they could not yet identify, growing closer with each step.
Bancroft gripped his sword and kept walking. Three dead henchmen, risen as the very things they had come here to fight. Two more fled into the barrows, maybe dead already, maybe worse. And now something new waited for them in the passage ahead, and they were wounded and spent and a long way from the daylight.
The green light on his shield flickered once, and held.
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.