March 22, 2025
As told by a wandering bard at the Inn of the Desert Winds, Tephu, who has now told so many tales of this party that the innkeeper has started comping her wine
They followed the ghost.
This is the detail I want you to hold onto as I tell you what happened next, because everything that came after — the courtyard, the centipedes, the wizard at negative eleven hit points, the part where Blade had to carry him out like luggage — all of it can be traced back to the moment when a translucent woman in a silk gown walked through a locked door and the party, collectively, decided that the correct response was to follow her.
Next time we see a lady in a dress, Iverson said afterward, standing in the courtyard among the centipede remains, let’s not follow her.
Everyone agreed. No one apologized.
But let me start from the beginning, which begins upstairs in the House of Sand, in the smelly room.
The party had cleared most of the house’s first floor already — the sandman, the Vargouilles, the headless body in the guest room that had died of what Iverson professionally described as natural causes, with the diplomatic implication that losing one’s head to a flying tentacled fiend might be classified as natural in Wati under current conditions. They had gone upstairs. They had found rooms. They had found a study full of dust where books had been, and in that dust, a brass key.
Rochelle Martham pocketed the key with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has learned that in abandoned buildings, keys unlock things that justify the finding.
Then they found the smelly room.
It smells yummy in here, Blade said, which the party understood to mean there is a creature in here that wants to eat us.
He was correct. A Vargouille — blackened, bat-winged, tentacle-chinned, the same breed of face-kissing horror they had encountered on the floor below — came floating out of the foul-smelling darkness with the romantic intent that Vargouilles have, which is to say it immediately tried to kiss Blade on the cheek.
Rochelle Martham was already shooting. Three arrows, three hits, critical threat, critical hit, critical hit, in the time it took Blade to finish registering the smell. The Vargouille was, before it had fully committed to its romantic overtures, categorically damaged.
Blade still got kissed. He made his fortitude save, again, which was becoming something of a personal tradition.
The Vargouille screamed. Xander Zeltz’s animal companion Striaka Fandar went paralyzed. Xander Zeltz himself went paralyzed. Smashy Smashy the stegosaurus went paralyzed. Three of the party’s most significant combatants stood frozen while the rest worked around them with crossbows and spells and the general determination of people who are used to being understaffed.
They killed it anyway. Blade sliced one clean in half — each half the flying head falling to the ground, making an eerie, squishy sound — and between Shavrak Asha’s crossbow, Iverson’s mace, and Lishka’s increasingly frustrated attempts with her scimitar, the second followed shortly after.
Lishka had not yet hit anything with her scimitar. She noted this out loud. The scimitar, for its part, declined to comment.
Another Vargouille had kissed Lishka in passing. She made her save. Her forehead itched.
The master bedroom was unremarkable except for one thing: three members of the party, during the brief moment of rest while Blade recovered his fatigue, saw a woman in a silk gown moving through the doorway toward the stairs.
She was translucent. She walked through the locked door at the end of the hall without opening it. She was, by every measure, a ghost.
Don’t steal the clothes off her back, Iverson said.
Gotta pay for this adventure somehow, Blade replied.
They followed her.
Down the stairs, through the main hall, out the double doors to the western courtyard — an L-shaped yard of dead trees and stone benches and a dry pool in the corner, all of it bleached pale by the Osirian sun. The woman was gone. The yard was quiet. The giggling started.
It came from near the pillars. Two shapes resolved out of the shadows, large and armored and segmented, and Xander Zeltz had exactly enough time to determine that they had reach before one of them bit him.
Giant Centipedes. Two of them, already positioned, already moving, already biting the sorcerer who had wandered closest to the pillars while investigating a ghost.
Xander Zeltz failed his fortitude save.
His dexterity began to drop.
What followed was the kind of fight that does not look heroic from the outside but represents, from the inside, an extraordinary collective effort to keep everyone alive in a situation that was deteriorating with the patient inevitability of a centipede’s venom.
Shavrak Asha cast Enlarge Person on Blade, who grew to enormous size and began attacking things with a hammer that was now rolling three dice instead of two. Striaka Fandar, enlarged and very pleased about it, engaged with the enthusiasm of an ape-shaped creature that has been waiting for exactly this kind of fight. Rochelle Martham fired arrows from cover, hitting twice with Rapid Shot, contributing what she would later describe as every little bit.
Lishka used the wand of Cure Light Wounds on Xander Zeltz. He did not wake up. She used it again. He stirred. She used it a third time and he opened his eyes, stood up, and immediately fell back down because his dexterity was four and the ground was further away than he remembered.
Unconscious, Xander noted, in the detached tone of a man who has been watching himself lose dexterity points for several rounds, but looks like he’s breathing a little easier.
Blade carried him out. This is the part the songs leave out — not the battle, but the aftermath, the bloodied Bloodrager gathering up the poisoned sorcerer like an oversized piece of luggage and hauling him through the courtyard door to safety, because what else do you do.
Then a larger Vargouille appeared beside Blade.
This one was bigger than the others. It tried to charm him. Blade did not fall for its wiles, because Blade’s will save was apparently adequate to the task of resisting supernatural romantic overtures from tentacled heads, which is a sentence I never expected to deliver in a bard’s tale but here we are.
The larger creature bit him. He made his fortitude save. It bit him again. He failed.
Four hit points. Four hit points that would not heal through magical means, that required Lesser Restoration to clear, that Iverson could not cast. The wound sat in Blade’s side like a promise of future medical expense, resistant to the wand, resistant to channeling, waiting for a cleric of sufficient level in a city that was currently half-dead.
That wound isn’t healing, Iverson observed, examining it with professional concern.
I know, Blade said.
I don’t know why this one won’t heal.
I do, said Iverson, who had by then identified the poison. That’s less comforting, not more.
They killed the large Vargouille eventually. Smashy Smashy, who had spent several rounds paralyzed while the fight raged around him and had presumably developed opinions about this, recovered his mobility and expressed those opinions through his tail with extreme prejudice. The stegosaurus finished the creature by stabbing it with the spiked fork of his tail and ripping its head off, repeatedly, until it was definitively gone.
Now I understand, the GM said, why anyone would want a stupid dinosaur. It all makes sense to me now.
Lishka did not say anything. She just looked at Smashy Smashy with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has been making this argument for several sessions.
The master bedroom yielded its final secret: a false dresser that was actually a box concealing a bronze chest. Rochelle Martham’s brass key fit the lock. The chest was also trapped — a cocked crossbow that fired into Shavrak Asha’s face the moment he lifted the lid, which he had identified in advance as a risk and proceeded with anyway on the grounds that twenty small gold ingots were presumably worth a crossbow bolt to the face.
Worth it, he said, making his fortitude save.
They divided the gold. They argued briefly about shares. They gathered up Xander Zeltz, who could walk if he held onto things. Iverson put a hand on Blade’s shoulder and looked at the wound that would not close.
Head back to town, Iverson said. The clerics there might know what to do.
Might, Blade said.
It’s Wati, Iverson said. Might is the best we have.
They came out of the House of Sand in the late morning, into the warm dry air of the necropolis, carrying gold ingots and a hope chest with a wedding gown inside and a Coal of Uncanny Discernment and a ring that belonged to a ghost named Araceti who had waited in her father’s house long after there was anything left to wait for.
Xander Zeltz had dexterity four and was currently being steadied by Blade, who had a wound that would not close, who was being watched by Iverson, who was out of spells. Lishka was carrying marbles in case they needed to set off future traps. Smashy Smashy was covered in something that had recently been a Vargouille. Shavrak Asha had a crossbow bolt wound in his face and no regrets.
Next time, Iverson said, we do not follow ghosts in silk gowns through locked doors.
Everyone nodded.
Nobody made any promises.
The bard sets down her cup.
She says: they never did return the wedding ring to Pa-Han-Hat, whoever that was. The ring stayed in the party inventory, listed simply as the wedding ring*, carried through dungeons and tombs and undead uprisings without ever finding its way back to the family that lost it.*
She says: some things in Wati stay lost. That is part of what the city is.
She orders another cup and stares at the candle for a moment.
Outside, somewhere, a ghost in a silk gown is probably still walking through a locked door, leading someone somewhere they shouldn’t go.