Vorn
Vorn#
Look, I’m not an adventurer. I want to be clear about that up front. I dig holes, I carry things, and I try very hard not to die. The pay is decent when you factor in the hazard, which is the only reason I keep signing up for these jobs.
“It ate our friends,” Morrigan said, by way of explanation.
I nodded like that made sense, because when you work the barrowlands, you learn not to ask follow-up questions.
What followed was the most elaborate operation I’ve ever seen for moving a single book. First they shot arrows with ropes tied on, trying to drag it up the stairs from the crypt. The arrows kept popping loose on the steps. So Roderick—a man with a pencil-thin mustache and an oil flask he used for grooming, not lighting—took his shovel and spent twenty minutes building a dirt ramp up the staircase. They tried again. The book slid back down. They shot two arrows with a U-shaped rope. More sliding. Hours of this, while I stood at the top and tried to look useful.
Three giant toads blocked the road about an hour in—gray mounds that unfolded into something the size of a large dog, squatting in our path with the flat patience of things that had nowhere to be. They didn’t attack. They just sat there. We detoured through the bog, which cost us another hour and most of Morrigan’s patience.
We didn’t move fast enough.
Darkness caught us still on the road, the marshlands stretching out black and formless on either side. I’ve walked this road at night before. You keep your torch high, your eyes forward, and your mouth shut. That’s the protocol.
Aura, who apparently didn’t know the protocol, chose this moment to recite poetry. “Unseen and unknown,” she said, in a voice that carried across the marshes, “behind every face and door—what black worlds of pain.”
“Was that supposed to be inspiring?” Morrigan muttered.
“I found it in a story once,” Aura said. “The story was about death.”
“Wonderful timing.”
The murmuring started first. Broken words, half-formed, drifting out of the dark like someone talking in their sleep. Then three shapes emerged from the marsh mist—humanoid, but wrong. Each one had a single oversized claw where its hands should have been, curved and gleaming like a sickle blade. Their mouths moved constantly, whispering fragments that almost sounded like words.
“…souls… the binding… return what was…”
“What are they saying?” I whispered.
“Nothing good,” Aura said, nocking an arrow.
Clawed figures emerging from the marsh mist
We froze. The creatures didn’t even look at us. They waded into the swamp, those terrible claws dipping below the black water, and fished the book out with an almost gentle care. Then they turned and walked back into the darkness, cradling the book between them like something precious. The last thing we heard, drifting back through the mist, was two words in a voice like dry leaves: Our souls now.
Aura tried to shoot the one carrying the book. Her crossbow misfired—the bolt shattered on release, spraying wood splinters, and the string went slack with a sad twang. She shook it out, cursing. That was that.
Nobody moved for a long time after that.
“We should go after them!” Roderick said, still holding the only light source. “After I broke my back shoveling all that dirt, we just let them push us out of the way? Worst adventuring party ever.”
Morrigan didn’t even look at him. “They can one-shot me,” she said flatly. “I’m not going after them.”
That settled it. Roderick fumed. Everyone else started walking.
Dejected doesn’t begin to cover the mood on the road back. We’d lost the book—the whole reason for the trip—to things we didn’t understand and couldn’t fight. And then, because the barrowlands never let you have just one bad night, four skeletons came rattling out of the darkness.
They hit us fast. The adventurers fought back, blades flashing in torchlight, but skeletons don’t care about pain and they don’t hesitate. Torvin went down first—a bony hand punched through his guard and caught him in the throat. Dask tried to run and took a rusty sword between the shoulder blades. Two good men. Two guys I’d shared bread with that morning.
Skeletons ambush the party on the marshland road
The rest of us made it back to Helix, bloodied and quiet. I helped carry Dask’s pack. It still had his lunch in it. Half a meat pie, wrapped in cloth. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I left it on his bed at the inn.
While the rest of us were trying to forget the night, Roderick went poking around the inn and found the room that old Alandor had been renting before he got swallowed by the book. Everything was still there—his gear, his clothes, his personal effects, all waiting for a man who wasn’t coming back.
And tucked under the bed, wrapped in a scrap of wool, an egg. A big one—leathery shell, faint greenish tinge, warm to the touch like something alive was waiting inside.
Roderick adopted it immediately. Slept with it that night, apparently—curled around it between his legs, which is a detail I wish he hadn’t shared over breakfast. He also announced, in a conspiratorial whisper, that we should all stop calling it a griffin egg and give it a less interesting name. Just in case word got out.
“Are you sure it’s not the griffin egg?” Aura said, at full volume, in the middle of the common room.
Roderick’s mustache practically vibrated. “Shut the fuck up!” he hissed. “We’ll talk about this later!”
He stood, twirled his mustache, and walked away from the table with what he clearly believed was dignity.
The next morning, they hired us again. Same crew, minus two, plus whatever fresh bodies they could scrape together. I should have said no. Torvin and Dask were still cold, and here we were heading back out like nothing happened.
But the pay is the pay.
The book was gone, of course. Whatever those clawed things were, they’d taken it somewhere we couldn’t follow. So instead, the leaders—and I use that word loosely—took us to some kind of crypt they’d found before. Underground, stone walls, the smell of dust and old death. There was a staircase hidden behind a mechanism in the wall, one of those clever ancient contraptions that the barrow builders loved. Previous expeditions had started digging out the mechanism, but someone—or something—had filled the hole back in with rocks and packed dirt.
“Somebody doesn’t want us getting through here,” Morrigan said, examining the damage.
Roderick sighed, unslung his shovel—his second excavation job in two days—and spent ten minutes re-digging the hole while muttering about how nobody appreciated manual labor. Once the mechanism was exposed again, Morrigan hunched over it, muttering about counterweights and trigger plates, their torches throwing long shadows down the passage.
I was watching the corridor behind us. That’s my job when the smart people are busy—watch the dark and hope nothing watches back.
Something watched back.
I looked at my friend Cade. He looked up at me—and I do mean up, because Cade’s a halfling, barely reaches my belt buckle. Don’t let the size fool you, though. He’s stronger than me, smarter than me, and he knows it. Normally he runs caravans between Helix and the Motte, but the barrow jobs pay better when the merchants aren’t moving. We get along because we think the same way about most things, which is to say: practically.
“Run?” he said.
“Run,” I agreed.
We don’t get paid enough for this shit.
We came back after the groaning stopped. The adventurers were fine, of course—they’re always fine, the mad bastards. They’d dealt with the zombies and moved on to their next bit of insanity: they’d found an axe somewhere, and now they were using it to hack a hole in the wall.
“There’s something behind here,” Roderick said, covered in stone dust, swinging away like a man possessed.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“The wall sounds hollow.”
I stood well back and watched. In my experience, when you find hidden things in the barrowlands, the hidden things don’t want to be found, and they express their displeasure in creative and violent ways.
Sure enough, whatever was behind that wall had been sealed for a reason. The explosion wasn’t huge—more of a sharp crack and a blast of hot air that knocked everyone back a step—but it sent chunks of stone whistling past our heads and filled the corridor with choking dust.
When the air cleared, everyone was still standing. Singed, dusty, ears ringing, but alive.
“Well,” Morrigan said, brushing debris from her hair. “That could have been worse.”
The wall explodes in the crypt corridor
They paid us on time, at least. Full day’s wages, plus the hazard bonus, counted out in copper and silver on the tavern table. I pocketed my share and ordered an ale.
Cade hopped up onto the bench across from me, his feet dangling a good six inches off the floor. He had dust in his hair and a fresh burn mark on one sleeve from the explosion, but he was already grinning.
“Same time tomorrow?” he said, raising his mug.
I looked at my coins. I thought about Torvin and Dask. I thought about clawed things whispering in the dark, and books that eat people, and walls that explode when you look at them funny.
Cade was already thinking the same thing. I could tell by the way he shrugged—a small, resigned gesture that said yeah, I know, but what else are we going to do?
“Same time tomorrow,” I said.
This session report was written with the help of AI. For details on the process, see Transcribing D&D Sessions with WhisperX and Speaker Diarization.