Vrak#
The sword was right there. You could see it glowing from across the room — white, steady, the kind of light that says valuable in a language anyone can read. All we had to do was cross a room full of animated stone lizardmen, climb a ten-foot statue, and swap it for a different sword before anything went wrong.
Looking back, I can see where the flaw might have been.
We’d come for the flooded section. Morgan had heard there was something down there worth having, which in my experience is the kind of reasoning that ends with someone at the bottom of a hole, but she holds the purse, so here we were.
Siri touched her staff and it came up glowing. Nice trick. Better than torches, better than lanterns, and it didn’t eat into supplies. The stone door was already cracked open from some earlier group’s adventure — not ours, but the barrow doesn’t really distinguish between parties. We went in.
The room had three lizardman statues in it. Stone things, clawing at the feet of a carved elven warrior who stood looking up at a glowing sword clutched in his raised hands. We’d been warned about those statues by people who’d survived them, which is a short list. We gave them a wide berth.
Past the statues, stairs descended into the dark. The water had beaten them there.
Siri went in to scout. She can hold her breath longer than the rest of us, or at least she’s more willing to try. She came back up dripping and reported: mural work covering the walls, elves and forest animals and dryads and fae, all arranged in procession toward the north wall. At the center, one big figure. Rangerish. Clearly important to whoever carved it.
“One of mine,” she said.
She also mentioned there was a mummy down there on a stone slab.
Morgan said, “Treasure.”
I said that the mummy itself probably wasn’t treasure.
“What’s in it is,” she said.
We tied a rope around Thrain’s waist and he went in without hesitating, which is either brave or the particular kind of stubborn that looks like bravery from the outside. He came back hauling something that had once been an elf and was now — after several hundred years of swamp water — more of its own outline. Long. Squishy in places bones shouldn’t be.
“It’s squishy,” he said, when he surfaced.
“Yes,” I said.
“It really shouldn’t be.”
“No,” I agreed.
Morgan was already unwrapping it.
They dragged the mummy out into the sun and it steamed. Swamp water and time burning off in the noon heat. I stood upwind.
Thrain searched it properly, which meant putting his hands into places that were going to need a long wash. He turned up nothing. The elf had been buried with dignity and then soaked for three centuries until the dignity mostly dissolved, and he was not carrying anything we could sell.
Siri had several feelings about this. She kept them mostly to herself, but they were visible on her face.
The glowing sword was still sitting in the statue’s hands.
This was Caleb’s idea, technically, in the sense that he’d been staring at the sword since we entered and I’d been the one to make a plan around it. Clean enough: he climbs the statue, pulls the sword free, passes it to Thrain, Thrain passes it to me, I walk out fast. A relay. Logical.
Caleb had always wanted to be a hero. He said so once.
I gave him my longsword to use in the swap.
He made it halfway up before his grip failed. He didn’t fall noisily — just an absence of upward momentum, and then a sound, and then Caleb was not going to be wanting anything anymore.
“Well,” Pippin said.
“Yes,” I said.
Pippin is a halfling. Shorter than expected, more practical than most people give him credit for. He stepped on Caleb, reached the sword, got the rope tied around it.
The statues started moving.
You could hear it — stone finding angles of motion it hadn’t used in a long time. Three lizardmen, coming loose.
The first claw took Pippin across the chest. A halfling doesn’t have much chest to spare, and the claw found all of it. He went still with the rope still in his hand.
The other two went for Thrain. He’d been standing back, which at that moment was exactly the wrong place to be standing. Stone came down on him and the torch went out and I heard a sound that meant Thrain was finished.
The rope had weight on it.
Something was pulling.
I dug in. Whatever was on the other end had leverage and both hands and more patience than I had. Morgan was pulling at my arm. Siri was shouting. The thing pulled back hard enough to start moving me toward the door we were trying to leave through.
I let the rope go and ran.
This was the correct decision. I made it while already in motion.
They followed us to the entrance and stopped. Two of them came out into sunlight, stood there with their stone eyes, and went back inside. Apparently we weren’t worth leaving the barrow for.
I decided not to be insulted.
We waited twenty minutes in the ruins outside, at a distance that felt respectful of what had just happened. Morgan asked if I was all right. I was missing a longsword and three people, which I mentioned. She didn’t have anything useful to say about the longsword but offered to buy me a new one in town, which was something.
Siri wanted to go back and bury the elf.
I pointed out this meant returning to the place where the golems were. She pointed out she was going to do it anyway. Morgan said she’d help. I volunteered to stand watch, which is a post that requires watching things and not being underground — two areas where I currently excel.
The entrance was clear when we came back. The statues had gone back inside. The mummy was still there, substantially more decomposed than when we’d left it, doing what things do in the sun when they’ve been preserved in cold water for three centuries. Thrain’s wood was scattered — a golem had stepped on it leaving — but usable. We piled stones and wood into something that looked deliberate.
Siri carved a marker.
She got halfway through before Morgan spotted them — five zombies coming from the northwest at the steady, patient pace of things that don’t need to hurry. Not running. Just coming.
“Siri,” Morgan said.
“Noticed,” Siri said. She jammed the marker in — a board with something carved on it quickly, something Elvish. Here lies a great hero, she told me later.
We ran.
Four hours back to Helix. The road was quiet. Once, from deep in the swamp, we heard something that might have been moaning. We didn’t stop to find out.
Morgan bought me a longsword at nine gold, which is an oddly specific price. It’s a solid blade.
Siri found an elf in town — Valerian, who runs a bow shop directly in front of the mage’s tower and apparently nobody has gone to visit him in months. He knew the figure, or knew of him.
An ancient hero, Valerian said. Old as the barrowmaze, maybe older. The lizardmen had held the whole region once, and this ranger had driven them back — stood between the dead ground and the living, and eventually lost. The statue was his monument. The murals were his tomb. Without some physical relic, he said, it was difficult to confirm anything for the historians.
He looked at us with the careful expression of a man who deals in things that require authentication.
Siri did not mention we’d hauled the body up and let zombies eat it.
Some stories improve by what you leave out.
Three people down. My sword in the barrow. A glowing blade still sitting in that statue’s hands, waiting for whoever figures out the right approach.
Caleb had wanted to be a hero.
He almost made it to the middle of the statue.
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.