What the Town Had Become
Session: 2022-05-04
Sildar Hallwinter, as it turned out, was a man who recovered quickly and talked even quicker once he had his strength back.
They had made camp a reasonable distance from the old cave — the kind of distance that says we are not sleeping near that without quite saying it out loud — and by the time the fire was going and the rain had held off for the evening, Sildar was sitting upright and speaking in full sentences. Respin poured him tea. He had learned, over many years and many fires, that tea was usually the right thing to do when someone had recently been held in a goblin cave.
Sildar talked for some time.
The short version: Gundrin had not left the escort job early out of impatience or bad manners. He had left because two brothers — Thardin and Nundro — had told him something that apparently couldn't wait. They believed they had found the entrance to Wave Echo Cave. This was, Sildar explained, rather significant. The cave had been lost for five hundred years, since the orcs came down from the north and ended what had been known as the Phandelver's Pact — a treaty between dwarves, gnomes, and human wizards who had shared something called the Forge of Spells. The cave had caved in. The location had been forgotten. And Gundrin had a map.
Respin turned this over in his mind the way he turned over rough coin — quietly, with his thumb, testing the weight of it.
There was more. Sildar was also tasked with finding a man named Larno Albrec — a human wizard, sent by the Lord's Alliance to help establish some semblance of proper governance in Phandalin. Larno had gone quiet. No word back. The Lord's Alliance was not what you would call unworried.
"He wouldn't have known about Gundrin," Sildar said. "Or the map. I was told on the road."
Respin nodded. He had begun to understand that this job, which had started as a fairly routine escort contract, had several additional layers he had not known about when he signed on. He did not say this out loud. It would have sounded like complaining.
Later, while Sildar slept, Helluva went walking.
She came back from the tree line with a particular look — the look of someone who had found something. She described it in pieces: an overgrown grove, not maintained, the kind that had once been tended and had since been left to go its own way. A flat rock at the centre. Small animals bringing things — flowers, seeds — and leaving them there. The faint trace of magic she couldn't quite place. A territory marker, she thought. The edge of someone's land.
She had made an offering and called out into the dark in something that wasn't quite any language Respin knew. Nothing had answered.
He thought there was something she wasn't saying — or perhaps something she was still deciding. He didn't ask.
Later still, as the camp quieted down, she spotted them: three pairs of eyes at the edge of the firelight, watching. The wolves from the cave. The ones that had run rather than fought when the goblin called Grog had opened their pit. They had, apparently, been following.
One came closer — close enough that it might have been called cautious rather than threatening — and then all three turned and were gone into the dark.
Helluva looked across the fire at Blix and said, very calmly, that he should probably not light anything on fire.
Blix said nothing. Respin assumed this was because he was considering it.
Morning arrived grey and drizzling. Blix woke up looking like a gnome.
No one asked about this directly. There are certain things, Respin had found, that go smoother if you let them pass.
The trail turned muddy within the hour. Four hours of walking, give or take, through thickening cloud and the particular sound of boots in wet earth. Midway through the morning, Respin looked up and saw — high, very high, moving west to east across the cloud cover — the silhouette of something large. Something that moved like nothing he would have called a bird.
He watched it until it was gone. Nobody said what they were all thinking.
Phandalin was smaller than expected.
That wasn't quite accurate — it was probably exactly as large as expected if you had good information about it, which none of them did. Forty, maybe fifty houses. It had clearly been more once. The bones of the place were larger than what currently lived in them.
The men by the provisions shop wore red cloaks. This was the first thing Respin noticed. The second thing he noticed was that they didn't look like a formal watch. They looked like men who had decided to take over, which is a different thing — the posture is similar but the eyes are wrong.
Barthen's shop was run by a man of about fifty, steady enough behind his counter, with two young adults working alongside him. He confirmed what the red-cloaked men had already suggested: the Red-brands had settled into Phandalin about two months ago and had not left. They were shaking down anyone worth shaking down. The town-master, a man named Harbin Wester, had not done anything about it. Nobody seemed surprised by this. Their boss was someone called Glasstaff, who was paying them — which meant this was organised, not merely opportunistic.
Respin thought about what Sildar had said about Larno Albrec, the Alliance wizard who had gone quiet.
He did not mention it out loud. It was the kind of thought that wanted more information before it became a statement.
At the Lionshield Coster, a woman named Linene Graywind confirmed that her company had been losing cargo to bandits on the trail for some time. She was not surprised, either, when Respin told her the party had found some of her goods in a cave.
It was that kind of town.
Standing in the street in the light rain, with the red cloaks moving slowly and deliberately at the edge of his vision, Respin noted, to no one in particular, that they would need somewhere to sleep.
He had been in towns that needed help before. They always looked exactly like this — the same quietness in the locals' eyes, the same careful way people didn't look at the men in the colours. The town was not defeated, quite. But it was waiting.
He was good at those towns. He told himself this the same way he told himself most useful things: without ceremony, and without much expectation that it would make the work easier.