Before We Left
Session: 2025-09-10
None of them were saying it directly, but they were all coming to the same conclusion.
Cain said it first, which was right — this was his ground, evil and what to do about it. Vath agreed with him, but not for the same reasons. Cain was thinking about purity. Vath was thinking about whether leaving a thing like this room intact made sense when they were about to walk out the door. Both of them arrived at the same answer.
They decided to look further first.
The tunnels were short. He'd half-expected them to go further — down and further down, becoming something. But they didn't. Two rooms at the end of short tunnels and then stone.
The first room was small. Inside it: a book. No marks on the outside, leather clasp, the kind of thing you'd pass by. But there was something in it — some quality he noticed without touching it, the way you notice a room where someone just left. He picked it up.
"Her journal," someone said.
He took it.
The second room had water damage and old rope and the smell of seawater that had gotten in and never found its way back out. Somebody's collected junk. But in the middle of it — not mixed in with the garbage, set apart from it deliberately — a chest.
Open. Whatever lock it had was gone.
Gold and silver, gems, jewelry, the kind of thing that ends up in chests. He registered it without caring much. But the other things:
A spy-glass, scratched and battered, with a name engraved on the barrel — the Whispering Tide. He turned it over. He knew that name the way anyone who'd ever talked to someone who'd been near the water knew it.
A painted wooden snuff box, gaudy as a wedding cake, mermaid on the lid. He opened it. Nothing inside — the nothing of a container that became something much larger when prompted.
A mask. Sea shells pressed into the shape of a human skull, a sea captain's tricorn built into the top of it. He looked at the name scratched inside: Brother Veyran. The mask was either a joke or it wasn't. He couldn't tell which.
A silver necklace with a pendant — cloud shape, lightning bolts off the ends, the tips snapped clean off. He recognized it. Valkur's symbol. He held it for a moment, looked at it, set it down.
A pair of dice, always damp no matter which surface you tried.
A cutlass, barnacle-encrusted on the guard and the flat of the blade, edge still clean. He picked it up and felt the weight shift in his hand. He didn't put it back.
He passed the spy-glass and the snuff box to Pedro. The mask to Cain, who took it with the focused look he got when he was already thinking about how to use something. The dice to Victor, most likely.
He put the cutlass through his belt.
He also took the corked jar of black ichor sitting in the corner — waxed shut, set there as if someone had placed it with intention.
There was no line he could find between the Whispering Tide and a corrupted church and the room beneath it. He looked for one while they gathered their things and couldn't pull it out of the air, so he stopped pulling.
They set the tunnels on fire on the way out.
It was the same process he'd done before with places you didn't want to leave behind. He thought about structure: where the heat would find purchase, what would take and what wouldn't. He didn't find it satisfying the way Cain did. He didn't find it difficult either.
They stood at the entrance long enough to confirm.
The sphere. The eyes in it were starting to pop — not dramatically, just finding the moment when the thing keeping them intact had stopped keeping them intact. The fire found them and they went, one after another.
He watched until he'd seen enough.
Then they turned and walked out into the church.