Part 3: Investigating the Moathouse Ruins

Examining the room quickly, Gilly can tell that this partially collapsed chamber, contains the remains of cots and plain wooden chests, indicating that this was once a barracks room for castle guards—undoubtedly the human sort.

In the southern corner of the room a chest sits closed.

Gilly opens the chest, which contains the following items:
•33cp
•a chainmail tunic
•a light crossbow
•a case of 24 quarrels.

Gilly gilly retreats to the other corridor, which runs south, to give herself some time to grieve Alice's death while Eltrezar struggles to wrestle the heavily armored cleric's body on top of a horse in preparation to leave. Meanwhile Elmo and Angel are working at getting the loot they collected fastened to the horses. The wizard's grunts and curses echo through the castle.

As everything is finally leaded and Gilly is getting herself collected again, she senses a movement on her peripheral view and glances over to look at the open room at the end of the hallway, which she believes is the room where the smaller, halfling-sized hole in the castle's southeast corner wall was located. As she looks, she sees nothing out of the ordinary. But then she glances to the hallway's floor where she can see the distinct evidence of boot prints and something heavy being dragged down the hallway in the dust that has settled in the ruins.

Gilly walks to the end of the hallway and peeks her head around the corner. In the southeasternmost corner of the room a small hole appears from the collapsed moathouse wall, resulting in a pile of rubble leading down to the moat below. The hole is small enough for Gilly to squeeze through, but it's doubtful the rest of the party could.
In the east side of the room the arrow slot, typically used by archers defending the castle from attackers outside, is cluttered with debris, including a number of unidentifiable bones. A foul odor seems to be emanating from the debris.
In the southwest corner lies what appears at first to be two humanoid-shaped bundles, wrapped up in a spider's cocoon, sitting on the floor. They appear to be dead inside but as Gilly watches them further she notices one then the other squirming slightly, as if struggling to get free. As well, there appears to be faint muffled noises coming from the cocoons, and as he eyes adjust to the dim light of this room she realizes they're not wrapped in spiders' silk after all, but bound tightly in rope...

Gilly approaches the bundles, and begins cutting at the ropes of one of them when suddenly a lightning quick flash of white darts out from between the bundles and lunges for her extended sword arm! Gilly's instincts are sharp and she gets the arm back in time, only to look down again and see a tightly coiled adder ready for another strike. The snake is huge, probably over a dozen feet in length if stretched out, and while it doesn't seem large enough to capable of eating either of the trussed up bundles, it could probably swallow a halfling. Why it was peacefully curled up between the two bodies isn't clear, but Gilly's first though is it may have been sleeping, trying to warm itself against their body heat.
The giant snake gives Gilly a threatening hiss to warn her to back off, showing two huge fangs both dripping with a viscous, deadly-looking venom and she realizes that a strike from this animal could prove to be a quick end to her life indeed. The sound of it's warning carries through the castle ruins to the great hall beyond.