Jun 12, 2025 8:54 pm
GREYBARROW | THE THIRSTY LANTERN | RAIN-SWEPT NIGHT
The rains come early in Greybarrow.
They sluice through small town like a second tide, rattling every warped shutter and pooling in the cracked cobblestones outside the Thirsty Lantern. Salt, rot, and resignation hang heavy in the air. The harbor beyond is no more than a smear of dull iron in the night, its breakers hidden under fog, but every few heartbeats a flash of sickly witch-light plays across the masts, and you glimpse half-sunken hulks wallowing at their moorings, nets of flotsam tugging at their bones. Farther out, the Sea of Pelluria bellows; its wind howling down the alleys with such force that the gulls cling to rooftops rather than brave the skies, for even these carrion birds know the water gives back more corpses than fish in these parts.
Arrival
When you step beneath the hanging driftwood lantern it creaks on a single rust-eaten chain, throwing warped silhouettes across the quay. A briny rivulet snakes past your boots, swelling with each gust; the scent is a cruel mix of dead kelp, bilge, and faint rot from crab traps left untended on the lower docks.
The halfling lookout—bare toes white from cold, oilskin cloak several sizes too large—doesn’t speak at first. He only studies your faces in turn, searching for slips: a prayer whispered, a ring too bright, the slightest gleam of defiance. Then, almost swallowed by the storm, comes the passphrase:
"Storm’s hungry," he murmurs.
Your countersign unlocks more than the gate. A subtle easing of his shoulders tells you the halfling has weighed your souls and—at least for now—found nothing that would damn him when the Shadow’s eyes sweep this street at dawn.
Inside, the Thirsty Lantern is a corpse of an inn: beams sagging under black mold, lantern chimneys cracked, barrels of ale long since soured to vinegar. Salt crystals bloom on the hearthstones where driftwood has burned low and cold. Yet every loose board, every smoke-choked corner, feels clean beside the secret iron throat that yawns open when the halfling drums on a salt-caked cask.
The Hidden Cellar
The stair plunges steeply, each step slick with condensation. For a breath the smell is all wet stone and sour yeast, then something sharper bleeds through: bitterroot wine, the charcoal tang of pipe-leaf imported at great risk downriver from smuggler kin, and underneath it all, the earthy sweetness of glimmermoss spores, an herb prized by resistance medics because it glows when blooded.
Lanterns burn low: tiny, fat-wicked troughs whose oil smells vaguely of tallow and crushed shell. Their glow shivers over three figures waiting in the gloom.
Wexley Thorn, a wizened gnome in a battered, cone-shaped hat stoops over the map. Round wire-rim spectacles magnify keen, sable eyes; a long white beard spills down the front of his charcoal cloak and brushes the parchment like trailing smoke. His clothing is plain ;a weather-dark tunic cinched by a wide leather belt, trousers tucked into soft river boots, but the set of his shoulders marks him as one accustomed to storms and subtler dangers. The only adornment is the faint gleam of brass buttons and the patient steadiness of hands that have traced too many forbidden coastlines.Serah of the Loom, to Wexley’s right sits an elder woman swathed in a threadbare shawl. Deep-set eyes watch the play of lantern-flame across the room while her fingers worry a pouch of dried herbs. In the muted glow her weathered features seem cut from river-stone, but a quiet warmth lingers whenever she hums the half-remembered lullaby.
Looming just beyond the table edge, a Masked Watcher stands wrapped in a hooded cloak that swallows most of the lantern-light. A single yellow flame glints across the iron half-mask, tracing the curve of an old dent, proof of past violence or past vows, perhaps both. His helmet cannot mask the shadows doing the work of an unseen frown.
Wexley’s map is stitched together from water-spotted vellum and newer scraps of sailcloth. At its heart coils the Ishensa River in oily strokes, the hills of the Basin rendered as knife-slashes of charcoal. In one margin, a smear of aurum ink still glitters; blood, Wexley says, paid to buy the scrap from an orc quartermaster who fancied it mere art. The runes themselves are elder Sarcosan script overlaid on elven glyphs, an uneasy marriage that speaks of hurried hands in an occupied land.
Grandmother Serah’s practiced eyes widen at the sight, an unexpected outburst, "Elven, but older than the Third Age. Here: kehl, ‘mirror,’ and here: eist, ‘guardian.’ Together they read as a warning—‘mirror-bound guardian.’ And this—" she traces a half-erased swirl, "—halaeth: not just ‘holy weapon’ but ‘weapon that sings.’ Perhaps, a relic meant to channel song-magic, perhaps a blade or a horn?" She says as she covetously hovers over the map.
In Midnight’s Last Age, such relics were items of legend, invaluable tools for fighting the Shadow; today, most that endure are siphoned dry by the black mirrors or sealed behind armies of orcs. Yet somewhere upriver, on the edge of the Northern Marches, there are claims a power lies sleeping, close to Gasterfang, the Black Warren where Izrador’s oldest mirror still drinks magic by the draught.
Wexley's voice drops to a rasp: "If there’s a chance this weapon exists, someone must claim it. I can get you upriver by barge. I won’t promise safety; I can only promise the slightest chance to find something to wound the Shadow in a grand way. Few are ever given get such an opportunity, these days..."
A floorboard above groans. You count three sets of boots: they’re heavy, deliberate, pausing as though to listen. Every heart in the cellar stutters. Then a chair scrapes, voices murmur, just patrons seeking dry benches upstairs. Still, the disturbance leaves silence in its wake.
Serah say’s nothing, her eyes dancing around the room, awaiting what will come.
The Masked Watcher remains ever motionless. You notice his cloak shifting, as though restless in a breeze only he can feel. When your gaze meets the iron mask, the lanternlight inside its eye-slit flares, revealing a single Dornish blue eye rimmed with old burn scars.
Wexley breaks the silence. "My barge leaves at moon-set. We’ll follow the smuggler ducts north, posing as eel-mongers hauling spent nets. Keep silent by day; the deckhand who crews her is brave, but the Eye of Shadow watches the Ishensa like a lover. We bank south of Gasterfang. Kaelith will meet you a half days march west from river’s edge, near the half-buried pillars locals call the Giant’s Teeth. From there, it’s a bone-numbing trek across frost-seared ash heaths and iron-salt bogs sheathed in black ice, the north wind carving through every seam of your cloak until the ruins rear up like frozen teeth on the horizon."
He affixes you with expectant eyes.
What do you do?
