Chapter 1: The Knaves Visit the Spudfields

"Good dog, Doris!" comes floating into the chilly lower chamber, just as Watters bundles some cloth around the staff to lift it. It doesn't scream this time, but the child's face is twisted in a fury as the woman takes possession of it.

Clomm is now on his feet, and Endrei helps him towards the exit, past the open sarcophagus as Audree feels the staff vibrate slightly in her hands, almost as though it wants to leap from her grasp towards Clomm...

The infant's head calms when Clomm's clammy grasp once again closes around the cold metal staff. The woozy adventurer can feel the power in the thing once more, the nebulous and yet undeniable energy that lies with in. It speaks to the man, somehow, though not in any language spoken by mortal tongues. And he knows, then. Knows that he can dispel the foul sorceries that animated the brothers. He can rob them of the unlife that haunts their broken bones -- with a gesture and an arcane utterance he can put them to rest.

The stone chamber, already frigid from the presence of the two fiends that now lay in piles at Clomm's feet, grows colder still as the man speaks and holds the magical staff aloft. Endrei and Audree see their breath as frost suddenly forms on the walls and the open sarcophagus, and there's a terrible chorus of sounds as the brothers wail and keen and thrash, and as the child's head opens it's mouth wide. Vapors, almost impossible to see, flow from the two wights to the yawning maw of the infant, and within seconds the sounds and damned spirits of the pair have been consumed. The light is gone from their eyes... the motion from their bones.

A thick silence descends on the room as the trio finds themselves truly alone.

Holding her torch high, Audree leads the trio out of the room, away from the remains of the dread brothers. Through the narrow, dark passage they go, into the unknown, into the final recesses of the gloomy tomb.

After perhaps fifty feet, the cramped, low-ceilinged tunnel opens into a room -- one not unlike the chamber where they just fought for their lives. Another broken-open stone sarcophagus rests on the floor, its lid in pieces, and at the opposite end of the room a wooden box and a large, decorated clay urn are visible. At that far end of the room, a few steps can be seen as well, leading up into heavy shadows.

Approaching the side of the crumbling stone coffin, Watters sends shadows dancing all about the crypt as she raises her torch over the partially intact remains of the thing. She spies something interesting immediately -- gold! Glinting from beneath the partly fractured bottom of the sarcophagus, it looks like a number of coins... but it will be difficult to say for certain unless the woman climbs in for a better look, or leans in from the side, putting her weight on the edge of the vessel.

While Audree searches, Endrei peers at the shifting shadows, uncertain if some of them are about to take shape and descend on them. For Clomm, more worrying is the suddenly defeating silence that fills the vault. A silence that is broken by Watters's careful movings -- but also by something else. A clicking, perhaps a chittering. Coming from the urn on the far side of the room.

When the group quiets, the sound is unmistakable. A chitter here, the sticky click of insect legs, a tweedle there. All coming from the other end of the chamber, perhaps the clay urn.