Corpselights

The Blood on the Floor

The party followed Beans into the lighthouse. Apart from the pool of blood at its centre, the place was immaculate.

Rygel knelt to examine the blood. It was fresh, he was sure of that much, but he could not find where it had come from. There was no body, no sign one had been dragged away, and nothing dripping from above.

Gauntlight's Lantern

A staircase wound a hundred feet up the tower to an iron trapdoor. The party climbed through it into the cupola at the top. Black iron bars ringed the chamber like a cage, with shimmering walls of force between them that looked almost like glowing glass. In the middle stood the only thing in the room: a human-sized casing of glass and iron, flickering with a sickly pale blue light. Gauntlight's lantern.

From up here the view was enormous: the whole of the Fogfen, the town of Otari, the open sea, and far off on the horizon, the great city of Absalom.

The lantern gave off an immensely powerful necromantic aura. Ja-ja decided the simplest thing would be to smash it, and swung his sword at it. The lantern shrugged off the blow without a mark.

Rygel thought it over. The ruins around the lighthouse had weathered 500 years of wind and rain, but the lighthouse itself looked new. Something very strong was protecting it.

The Office and the Sanctum

Back on the ground floor, the party opened a door into what had once been an office, long since rotted to ruin. Beans quickly found a hidden door behind a faded tapestry, with a staircase leading down, and turned up several unlabelled potions besides.

The next room had been somebody's private retreat, its divan and armoire decayed by years of rain through the arrow slits. Shiro found a ring of rusty iron keys there, only one of which still looked usable. Another hidden door led into a narrow passage, and at its end was a second hidden door, held ajar by the hand of a corpse.

The Chapel

The passage opened into a chapel, colder and damper than anywhere else in the ruins. Water ran down walls carved with countless skulls, and a dead man sat slumped against one of them, his hands still wedged in a crack as if he had died trying to pry a brick loose. Steps led up to a white stone altar, and behind it four towering stained-glass windows showed ghosts rising from overgrown graves toward a four-pointed orange star. Nobody recognised the god.

Corpi sensed magic in three places: on the slumped corpse, on the altar, and on something around the corner beside it. He went up the steps to look and found two long-dead acolytes slumped against the wall. As soon as they saw him, their skeletal bodies rose and attacked together.

Corpselights

The acolytes were strong. They hit hard, they dodged most of what the party threw at them, and they went straight for Corpi, who was reading the Raven Queen's divine rites at them. Twice they knocked him to the floor.

Beans, the party's fairy "ally", was not there for any of it. He was in the other room, busy wondering what was at the bottom of the stairs.

Just as the tide seemed to be turning, blue light poured from the acolytes' mouths and eyes, and they drew the party's strength back out of them and into themselves.

When the first acolyte finally fell, a blue wisp slipped out of its mouth: a corpselight, the thing that had been driving the body all along. Corpi's cold blessing of the Raven Queen obliterated it on the spot.

When the second acolyte fell, a second corpselight escaped, and this time the party was too slow. They were still arguing about whether to trap it in a bottle when it flew across the chapel into the dead thief slumped against the wall. The corpse lurched up as a zombie and turned on Finn.

The party put it down. When the last corpselight left the thief's body, Ja-ja was ready, and caught it in his bag of holding.

Then the party searched the chapel. The thief had been carrying a +1 rapier, four daggers, a silver ring, a minor healing potion, and a lesser darkvision elixir. The acolytes wore an amulet set with a purple stone that nobody could identify. On the altar were a scroll of restore senses and a wand of heal.

The Scorpion

Battered and exhausted, the party turned to leave. They opened the chapel's main door and found a makeshift kennel on the other side, holding a 15-foot scorpion.

They slammed the door shut and went back out the way they had come, through the secret passage.

The Way Home

In the main hall of the keep, the party gathered up the short swords of the fallen mitflits. Herald built a bridge across the gap where the drawbridge used to be, out of broken beams and pieces of mitflit. The walk back to Otari passed without incident.

Back in Otari

Beans sold his many treasures to Wrin for a large sum of gold and had her identify the potions he had found. Then he took the gold to the Osprey Club and bought himself a bag of holding. The rest of the party was not thrilled to see him with that much money.

Shiro gave Wrin a reading, and she gave him one in return. Going deeper into the lighthouse may bring suffering, it said, but not going will surely be worse.

Finn told Yinyasmera that the party had been to Gauntlight Keep, but had seen no sign of the Osprey Club members who went there a few days ago.

Ja-ja took the mitflits' short swords to Blades for Glades. He tried to talk up the price and was so uncharismatic about it that Carman noticed how poor the swords were and paid him less than he had first offered. The second sword had been stored in his bag of weasels. When he pulled it out, it was a weasel.

Rygel bought a backpack in the market from a vendor who scowled at him the whole time, for no reason Rygel could see other than his ancestry.

Herald went to the Rowdy Rockfish and walked straight into Brelda's kitchen. Brelda, who had never noticed him in there before, demanded to know what he was doing. He explained he would cook for her, then offered her a cup of coffee. One sip and she was won over: coffee, she decided, was how she would finally compete with Tamily, whose fishery is always full of people drinking it. She asked Herald for four pots of coffee for the festival tomorrow, in exchange for free lodging at the inn.

Corpi took a long rest at the inn to recover from his injuries.