Chapter 3.a: Citadel Infiltration

After distributing equipment and potions and saying your goodbyes to the members of the distraction party, Willitan and the young man Alain whose father was taken by the Crows lead the group to the door that should lead into the basement of the citadel. Alain informs you that, to the general knowledge of the townsfolk, this door leads into a storage room in the basement that once held food and general supplies for the citadel. No one knows whether it is currently in use or not, since no one's dared go through it since the Crows came to town. It is known that none of the Crows have ever come into the tunnels via this door, which is kept barred and under surveillance at all times by the townsfolk.

It is a simple but stout door, wooden with heavy iron bands that hold it together. A stout timber is used to bar the door shut, but there does not appear to be any sort of lock on it as far as you can tell.

There do not appear to be any traps on the door, at least on this side. As far as you can tell, the only thing keeping you from safely opening the door is the bar, which is easily lifted from this side.

As expected, this room was clearly once used primarily for storage: shelves dominate the space. But there's no longer much being stored here, certainly not enough to sustain much of a population in the citadel for an extended period of time. Your initial guess is that whatever supplies were here have been taken elsewhere, and not very carefully. A few boxes of random household items are lying on the ground, their meager contents spilled on the stone floor.

As you look around, you notice that the walls and floor are made of seamless stone construction. Not that this is unusual; most significant buildings were constructed at least partly with the sort of magic that could make this happen. Even someone without a lot of knowledge about building or engineering could see, however, that if the rest of the citadel is constructed in a similar way, it could withstand just about any sort of mundane attack you could think of.

Assuming the magic in its bones holds fast.

There is a single door out of this room, which is currently ajar. A bit of light from the corridor outside spills through into this room.

There is a vague sort of shuffling noise out in the corridor. Not really like someone walking, which would have a more regular cadence, but more like something sitting or lying on the ground, moving sort of aimlessly.

The corridor is wide, lit with lanterns every twenty feet or so, which makes it easy to see what's outside the door. That doesn't mean it's easy to identify what's outside the door...

Sitting on the floor of the hallway, leaning against one wall in the vague shadows between lanterns, is a humanoid shape. But even from here, you can see that there's something wrong. Maybe it's the way the arms don't quite line up like you'd expect, or the strange tilt to the head, the unnatural twist to the torso. The fact that it seems to be trying to move toward the other end of the corridor from where you are -- you can see a stairway up -- by dragging itself along the floor rather than standing up and walking, is definitely more than a little eerie.