Older Than the Land
Session: 2026-09-16
The dwarf came up in front of Zephyr and barked something short and hard at the rat beside him. The rat flinched at its own master's voice and swung its shovel wide enough to hit nothing at all.
A second shovel came at Pedro from the other side. He caught the haft on the crook of his arm, spun the rat clean off its feet the way a man hangs a coat, and let it go flying. He didn't even look at it land.
A rat charged Vath and he answered with the scimitar and cut air where its head should have been. He reset.
Victor had backed into what cover the trees gave him. He raised both hands, and something came down out of a clear afternoon sky and struck the dwarf hard enough that Vath felt it through the ground. Victor turned, already breathing harder than the spell should have cost him. "Keep them off of me," he said, and that was all the explanation Vath was going to get.
Cain's spiritual weapon cracked into the side of the dragonborn's skull. He grunted with the effort of it, then planted his feet and called up his guardians — a ring of pale shapes spinning into being around him, already reaching. Something came at his back; he stepped through it without turning to look, like he'd counted the seconds before it landed.
Somewhere behind him Cain's spirits kept turning the air to smoke and burnt hair, taking rats apart one at a time without moving from where they hovered.
Pedro dropped his hammer.
Vath saw it happen and didn't understand why until the dragonborn folded — one bare-fisted hit, massive force behind it, and the thing went down like something had cut its strings. Then it didn't just fall. It burst. A wet crack and a cloud of acid opened up where its chest had been, and the rat fighting next to it screamed once and came apart into the same cloud.
Pedro staggered back out of it, smoking at the shoulder.
That's new.
The dwarf turned from Victor with blood leaking out through the seams of his armor and came for Vath instead. Lightning cracked down on him again as he closed the distance, and Victor called out through the boom of it — "We gotta get this guy, Vath!" — like there had been any question.
He hit hard — Vath felt it in both knees — and Vath answered with the scimitar, opened him up, then closed the wound on himself before the dwarf could press it. They circled once more. Vath planted his feet, brought the blade around level with the ground, and took the dwarf's head off in a single motion. It rolled. The body dropped where it stood.
The last rat broke for a higher ground. Cain climbed after just enough line of sight and told it, flatly, that all its friends were being judged — then let Toll of the Dead finish the sentence for him. "Judgement is complete," he said, into the sudden quiet.
Somewhere behind him, low, Victor added, "The prosecution rests."
Quiet, after. The kind that rings.
Victor knelt by the dwarf and worked the helmet off. No beard underneath. Short red hair, and a face too plain and too young for the size of the armor around it. The plates weren't metal at all — bone, and something like insect shell, fitted and layered until it did everything plate would do. The two axes: one black glass, one wood that gave off the exact dull ring of iron when Victor rapped it with a knuckle.
Is this a dwarf. Something wearing one?
They went through the pack together. A waterproof backpack, dry rations, a burlap sack tied at the neck. Inside the sack: an old man's head, mouth open on whatever he'd been trying to say when it happened.
Beneath that, a small pouch — flowers, dried, wrapped round with catgut, and a smell strong enough to reach past the blood and the acid. Nothing Vath recognized, and he'd made a study of most things that grew nearby. He kept it.
Victor took the scroll case that had been resting against the head. The moment his fingers closed on it he made a small sound and pulled back, flexing his hand like it had gone to sleep. He kept it anyway.
It won't stay quiet in that pack forever.
Cain crouched over the puddle where the dragonborn had been and turned the ruined pick over with a stick. The head had survived the acid. The haft hadn't — dissolved to nothing, which told him at least it hadn't been iron either.
Then he wandered to the edge of the pit and looked down, and went very still.
Three stone boxes sat on a floor that had been swept clean at some point, long enough ago that the sweeping didn't show anymore. A skull was carved into the center of the floor, ringed in flowers. No walls. Just the floor, and the caskets, and whatever had been buried under a dug hill for longer than anyone standing above it had a name for.
"Those are some nice caskets," Cain said, in the reverent tone Vath had only ever heard him use for the truly old and the truly dead. "I'm something of a grave officianado. These predate the founding of Etheryn." He didn't touch anything yet. "We ought to wait a bit before we fill this back in."
Zephyr and Pedro carried Pedro's own weight over to Vath and Cain, and the two of them put some life back into him. Vath kept a hand on his shoulder a moment past when it was needed.
They went down. Vath sent his seahawk up instead, and stayed at the lip of the hole with it circling overhead, watching the tree line while the others climbed the fifteen feet into the dark.
Zephyr swept the room for undead and found none. Nothing down there was walking.
The left casket held a skeleton with both hands still locked around a mace, an aura sitting on it like heat off a stone. The skull inside the ruined helm was caged in worked metal, close enough to a crown that nobody in the party said the word out loud. Cain reached for it and for one moment the fingers tightened — resisted — before they gave up all at once and fell away into the casket. He lifted the mace out clean.
The middle casket held another body, and beside it an unstrung bow carved top to bottom in lilies and inlaid with silver, a quiver beside it that hadn't rotted the way three hundred years of anything ought to. Victor ran his hand along the carving. "I wonder who you were," he said, to no one who could answer him. The lid under Pedro's hands came away streaked with a strange piss-yellow paint he'd been trying to wipe off before he'd even opened it — the same ugly color he remembered from the temple where Kamosh had made his offers.
The third casket: a longsword, well made, the scabbard gone to rust and the hilt wrapped plain, like whoever carried it hadn't wanted it remembered.
All three bodies had been human. The middle one, from the shape of what was left, a woman.
Older than the land they're standing on. That's the part nobody's said yet.
Cain sent word up that they'd be resting where they stood. Vath didn't argue it. He settled against the lip of the pit with the seahawk on his wrist and the pouch of dried flowers still in his coat, and let the dark come down over the clearing.