Seven Points
Session: 2025-12-10
The reach found nothing clean.
He stood in the underground room at the bottom of the stairs — the two dead skeletons at his feet, the large hole yawning to the north — and ran Detect Magic the way he'd learned to run it in spaces that felt wrong. Not a sweep. More like listening for the shape of a sound. Something was in this place, or had been. The usual clarity didn't resolve.
He opened his eyes and looked at the skeletons.
Their eyes glowed blue. Not brightly. Not threateningly. Just present — a faint cold light, seated in the sockets, that stayed after the bodies stopped moving. He'd seen something like it before. The road skeletons east of Vogler had it. The thing in the Silverport sewer had a version of it. Same color. Different quality, different location on the body, but the same blue.
He didn't know what it meant. He made a note of it and kept moving.
They went deeper.
There were doors set into the rock — old construction, solid, not in any style he recognized. The workmanship was of a piece with the stairwell: proportions slightly off, made by someone for whom this material and this form were simply what you used. The doors had portholes cut into them — circular, like the oculus windows on a ship — but set with skulls instead of glass. Carved or cast, he couldn't say. Each skull had a seven-pointed star, precisely incised into the forehead.
The eye sockets on the skulls glowed blue.
He looked at them for a long moment. He looked back at the dead skeletons. He made another note.
They went through the doors.
There was a book in the room beyond. He took it before he decided to — the way you take something when a situation is still unfolding and standing still feels wrong. The contents would keep. Right now the room needed them present.
Victor moved to the opals.
He registered that and moved on. Everybody had their thing.
The next room opened into a basin.
Twenty feet long. Ten wide. He thought of it as a basin because of the shape, though he didn't know what it had originally held. What it held now was bones. A great quantity of them, and they were moving.
The swarm took a while.
That was the accurate description and he didn't have a better one: it took a while. It behaved the way a swarm behaves — distributed, no single center, reforming every time a section of it was destroyed. He used what worked. He stayed upright. He concentrated. Cain's light drove it back each time it spread wide. Across however many rounds it took, the party wore it down until it stopped.
The room was quiet.
The scroll was near the back wall.
He could tell it was religious text from the structure of it — the way certain passages were set apart, the visual rhythm that devotional writing has regardless of what language it's in. The script itself was a different problem. It looked familiar the way a word sounds familiar when you hear it in a foreign language — close to something, not quite resolving into anything he could name. He turned it over in his hands. He couldn't place it. He put it with the book and moved on.
He wasn't sure exactly when he noticed Victor had broken off.
It wasn't announced. The party moved north, roughly together, and at some point the party was moving roughly together but smaller. Victor had gone north separately. On his own.
That's a poor decision. He thought it plainly, without comment. Going north alone in a structure that was older than the land was something you could choose to do. It wasn't a sensible thing to choose. He filed it and kept moving. Victor made his own judgments. They usually had some internal logic, even when that logic was opaque.
The statue was farther in.
Life-sized. A human man — or shaped like one — with arms spread wide and palms turned outward. The posture of offering, or of welcome, depending on what you brought to it. The face was serene in the way that sculptors make a face serene when they've decided what serene should look like from the outside, looking in.
He stood in front of it and thought: this is some god of death.
He knew that the way he knew some things — from the accumulated weight of what the space was saying around the statue. The bones in the basin. The seven-pointed stars on the skulls. The whole aesthetic of the place, which had a consistent opinion about something, and that opinion involved the dead. It wasn't Kelemvor. The iconography was wrong, the quality of the devotion was wrong, the whole register of it was wrong. Kelemvor's spaces had a quality of order to them, of accounting — death as a ledger. This was older than ledgers. Less interested in accounting for anything.
A name moved through his mind. He'd heard it wrong before, or heard it imprecisely, and he didn't trust it yet.
He found the mushrooms in a side chamber.
Black stems. Tops that were white shading into blue at the edges — a blue that rhymed with the eyes in the skull doors without quite matching them. He crouched and looked at them for a while, going through what he knew about fungi that grew in sealed spaces without light. He came up with nothing that fit. They didn't look poisonous, but that was meaningless this far down. They looked like something he had never seen before, which was the thing that actually mattered.
He collected six. Straightened up. Put them in the part of his pack where they wouldn't be crushed.
Somewhere ahead, something required his attention.
He took a breath, lifted the hand that held the light of Moonbeam, and began counting.
Five.
The sound came before he finished.
North — Victor's direction. Not Victor's voice. Something else registering an intruder.
He moved.
The corridor curved and opened into a room he hadn't cleared yet, and Victor was in it already, and so was the problem. They reached it from opposite sides at roughly the same moment. No signal, no plan. Just people who had moved toward the same sound and found each other on the far side of it.
It took longer than it should have. Some problems do.
After, neither of them addressed the separation. Vath ran a count. Everyone present. He looked north — the direction Victor had come from — and decided whatever was there could wait.
Not again.
He didn't say it. Victor was already closing the distance back to the group, which was the same thing said differently.
They kept moving together.