March 11, 2025
The Ballad of the House of Sand, the Flying Heads, and the Wizard Who Nearly Died Before He Was Important
As told by a wandering bard at the Inn of the Desert Winds, Tephu, on a warm evening when the wine is good and nobody has anywhere to be
I should tell you something before I begin.
This tale does not take place in Wati’s necropolis, with its grand tombs and its ka pulses and its necromancers on platforms. This tale takes place in a house. An old house, in the living quarter of Wati, occupied by the sort of things that move into abandoned buildings when nobody is looking and make themselves very much at home.
It was early in the party’s story. They were not yet the people who would survive mummies and obsidian floors and a stegosaurus’s resurrection. They were, at this point, the people who had just killed a sandman and a roomful of flying heads and were feeling cautiously optimistic about their morning.
That optimism was, as optimism tends to be in Wati, premature.
The house was called the House of Sand in the party’s notes, though it had no name above its door. It was the kind of building that exists throughout Wati’s older districts — grand once, in the way that buildings are grand when a wealthy family lives in them and tends to them and fills them with lacquered furniture and silver goblets and potted palm trees. Then the family dies or leaves, and the desert moves in, and the things that like the dark move in after the desert, and after enough decades the building is simply a place where adventurers go to get poisoned.
The party had already dispatched a Sandman on the lower floor — a creature of animated desert grit that had tried to sneak up on Rochelle Martham and received several arrows in response. They had killed a room of flying heads on the same floor — horrible, bat-winged, tentacle-chinned things called Vargouilles that kiss their victims and spread their condition through said kiss, which is perhaps the least romantic method of disease transmission ever devised. One of those kisses had landed on Blade, and he had made his fortitude save through what everyone agreed was a combination of good constitution and sheer bloody-mindedness.
Then they went upstairs.
The upper floor of the house was quieter. It was also more interesting.
Blade found a ring on the floor of the main room. He picked it up. The room dissolved into a ghost-vision — translucent furniture, a young man, a young woman clasping hands, speaking in ancient Osiriani. I can’t find the ring. I bought you anywhere. It’s all right, my love. Come with me, Araceti. Come across the river where we’ll be safe. Not yet, darling. My father says we’ll be safe here. She touched his forehead. Are you burning up. The scene faded.
Everyone stood in silence for a moment.
Well, Blade said, with the philosophical brevity that is his gift, what the heck?
The ring was not magical. It was a wedding ring — or rather, a would-have-been wedding ring, purchased and then lost before it could be given, lying on the floor of this house for what the dust suggested was a very long time. The woman’s name was Araceti. The party pocketed the ring and moved on, because Wati is full of sad ghosts and you cannot stop to grieve all of them.
They found a body in the guest room — a year old, headless, lying down as if he had simply decided to take a rest and never gotten back up. Iverson examined him with professional thoroughness and concluded that he had died of natural causes, which was the party’s polite way of noting that the flying heads from downstairs had probably visited him before they moved downstairs.
They found a study with a collapsed desk and bookshelves reduced to dust, which is what happens to bookshelves in the desert after sufficient decades. They found a key in the desk. Rochelle Martham pocketed it with the quiet efficiency of someone who has learned that keys in abandoned buildings always unlock something worth finding.
They found a room with a foul, cloying smell, and in that room, the next Vargouille — a larger one this time, blackened and bat-winged and floating toward Blade with the romantic intent that Vargouilles have, which is to say kissing him on the face and hoping the poison takes hold.
Rochelle Martham put three arrows into it before anyone else had finished processing that the fight had started. Critical threat, critical hit, critical hit. The Vargouille was, in the technical language of the battlefield, extremely damaged before the rest of the party had fully drawn their weapons.
It still managed to kiss Blade anyway. This is the Vargouille’s one talent, and it is committed.
Blade made his fortitude save again.
The master bedroom. A large room, ruined furnishings, a hornet’s nest in the corner long since abandoned. And then — Blade looking across the room — a figure moving toward the stairs. A woman in a silk gown, translucent as the vision from the ring had been, walking with quiet purpose through the locked door at the end of the hall as if the door were not there.
Several members of the party saw her. They followed.
The door was unlocked. The door was not trapped. Beyond the door was an exterior courtyard, dry and dead, ancient tree-husks along the walls, a pool empty of everything but sand. The woman was gone. Where the courtyard wrapped around the building, two shapes stirred in the shadows, and then began to giggle.
Oh, said Iverson.
Centipedes. Not small centipedes, not the decorative kind that scurries under a stone when you lift it. These were Giant Centipedes of the variety that Wati’s abandoned buildings breed in their lower rooms and courtyards — creatures the length of a man, armored and fast and possessed of a poison that attacks dexterity with the patient cruelty of something that has been perfecting its bite for several million years.
One of them bit Xander Zeltz.
Xander Zeltz failed his fortitude save.
Then he failed the next one.
Then he failed the one after that.
The poison ate his dexterity in steady increments while he staggered around the courtyard contributing what he could, which at that point was acid splash and burning hands and the kind of determined optimism that keeps a man upright when his body is politely suggesting that lying down might be a better option. He went to negative hit points. Blade grabbed him bodily and dragged him back through the door while the rest of the party held the line, which is the sort of heroic act that gets left out of most ballads because it involves carrying someone rather than hitting something.
Lishka used the wand of Cure Light Wounds on him. Xander Zeltz did not wake up. She used it again. He stirred. She used it a third time. He opened his eyes, stood up, and immediately fell back down because his dexterity was four.
That, said Iverson, studying the wound, is not healing normally.
It was not. The centipede poison had done four points of dexterity damage that would not heal through normal means — not through magical healing, not through rest, only through Lesser Restoration, which nobody in the party had yet. Xander Zeltz would have to limp through the next several days with the agility of a well-dressed boulder, trusting to his companions and his rather good fortitude saves to keep him among the living.
Meanwhile, also in the courtyard, tiny giggling heads had made themselves known.
These were Vargouilles of a different variety — smaller, redder, meaner-eyed, floating in the shadows and emerging at inconvenient moments to bite people and kiss them and generally make the courtyard feel even less welcoming than it already was. Shavrak Asha cast Enlarge Person on Blade, who grew to enormous size and began hitting things with a hammer the way only an enlarged bloodrager with a reach weapon truly can. Smashy Smashy — paralyzed for several rounds by the Vargouilles’ scream ability, standing in the courtyard like a very expensive garden ornament — eventually recovered and joined the fight with the particular enthusiasm of a stegosaurus that has been unable to do anything for six rounds and has opinions about this.
Smashy Smashy killed the final large centipede with its tail. Then it killed one of the tiny floating heads. The creature that had been ignoring the giant lizard for the entire fight turned out to have made a strategic error in that assessment.
Blade turned the last Vargouille into a Vargouille pancake, which is a phrase that requires no further elaboration.
The party searched the house in the aftermath. They found a hope chest in a closet — white silken robe inside, fragile with age, beautiful in the way that objects meant for occasions that never happened are always beautiful. Araceti’s hope chest, presumably. The robe they left undisturbed. The scroll tube they found nearby bore her name at the bottom — a letter, written in ancient Osiriani, sealed and preserved and never delivered.
They found a false dresser that turned out to be a box concealing a bronze chest. Shavrak Asha tried the brass key. The chest opened and immediately shot a crossbow bolt into his face, because Wati rewards curiosity with property damage. He made his fortitude save. Inside the chest: twenty small gold ingots.
Worth it, Shavrak Asha said, wiping blood from his forehead.
Nobody entirely disagreed.
They came out of the house in the late morning, into the warm Osirian air, carrying gold ingots and a stegosaurus and a barely-conscious sorcerer with dexterity four and a wedding ring that belonged to someone whose name they now knew. They were not yet the people who would face Nebta-Khufre on his platform. They were not yet the people who would crawl across obsidian to save a cleric, or grapple a necromancer with a bat, or raise a dead dinosaur in a temple in Tephu while a priest of Thoth beamed about outdoing the Sanctuary of Nethys.
They were, at this point, just a party of adventurers in a dead city, carrying treasure out of a haunted house, wondering what was giggling in the next room.
But you can see, perhaps, who they were going to become.
The bard pauses. The inn is quiet. The wine is almost gone.
Someone asks about the woman in the silk gown.
The bard says: she was a ghost, in the loose sense of the word. An echo. A woman who stayed when she should have gone, and died when she stayed, and kept walking the halls of her father’s house for however long a ghost walks.
Someone asks if they ever found out what happened to the young man. The one who told her to come with him across the river.
The bard looks at her cup.
She says: he didn’t come back for her. That much was clear from the ring still being on the floor. But whether he lived or died, whether he crossed the river and survived or whether he was taken by the same catastrophe that took her — that, the house did not say.
She says: Wati is full of stories that don’t finish. That is part of what makes it Wati.
She orders the last of the wine and does not say anything else for a while.