003 - Delve 1 - Beyond the Door

The boat continued to carry the heroes forward into the deadly ambush. Nym used his eldritch blast to strike another of the red-eyed creatures. The eyes went dark, and the head disappeared behind the rocks. The remaining set of red eyes stretched up and shot another of the small, barbed arrows. This one found its way to Vinny with perilous accuracy.

With Vinny still unconscious in the back of the boat, the heroes rowed into the cavern where the ambush took place. From their vantage down on the river, they could see a little bit of what they were getting themselves into.

The cavern was lit by more of those glowing mushrooms. The river flowed straight ahead and disappeared into a tunnel in the wall under a small bridge that connected the two halves of the cavern together.

The right side of the cavern was empty save for a small pile of rocks and the remains of an old wooden wall. The left side of the cavern had a set of wooden stairs leading up about fifteen feet from the river to the cavern floor. In the middle of the cavern floor on the right side was a stinking pile of refuse and bones. Straight ahead, above where the river disappeared into the wall, a wooden walkway led to a small round tunnel that disappeared into the underground blackness.

From where she stood on the stairs, Ishmee had a pretty good view of the ledge upon which their attackers had perched themselves. She could see no sleeping creatures and no bodies of the ones they killed.

The skull was small, the skull of a child, but it also looked a bit deformed. Perhaps that was because the bones had been slowly warn and crushed over the ages or perhaps it was the skull of some other creature, a halfling or something else entirely. The other skulls and bones around the ledge looked equally small.
The boards sagged and creaked, but the bridge held Nym. The other side of the cavern chamber was much less interesting than the one he left, largely empty. As he made his way to the front of the cavern to see the spots where their ambusher had taken up their positions, Nym saw the scorch marks from the magical flames and the remains of several broken arrows, one of which must have been Ishmee's. He also saw drag marks in the dust and what might have been footprints.

Ishmee's search turned up little that she didn't already know. The area was littered with small bones, the bones of children or some small creatures. There were also rotting clothes here, the droppings of creature, some large and some small. Ishmee couldn't tell how fresh the bones might be, but the whole place certainly smelled "fresh" once she started digging around.
The tunnel was small and empty, as far as Calvas could tell. The tunnel was large enough for a tall man to crawl comfortably on his hands and knees. Smaller creatures might have been able to walk in that tunnel it they stooped their heads. The tunnel appeared to be naturally occurring, carved by the flowing of water over the centuries. But now the tunnel was dry. It stretched straight into the rock wall, and then turned to the right out of sight right at the limits of Calvas' vision.

Nym, likewise, looked around at the footprints and the drag marks. They all led from the front of the cavern room toward the back. Other footprints he found that went both ways. The area appeared to be well-trodden.