Saralas: The Feywild Chapter 8

Translated from the original Elvish by the historian Steve Block

Initial bullet points captured during the translation process can be found below.

The Watchtower

The little magmin kept chattering at us but we couldn't understand what it was saying. I waved hello at it, and turned to ask Clapperclaw if there was much else to see in Downfall.

He shrugged. "Other than Bavlorna's cottage there's the watch tower. That's about it."

"What do they watch?" asked Baerwin.

"Everything," was his only response.

"I suppose we should investigate it and see what we can see," I said. "Clapperclaw, can you point us in the right direction?"

He looked annoyed, for a gourd. "You people and your directions," he said, pointing into the mist.

We headed a short ways down the path towards where he pointed, and came to a 10-foot high raised wooden platform on a mound of mossy earth and mud. Two large bullywogs lazed atop the platform, and a frayed clothesline ran from one corner of the platform off into the mist over the lake. Occasionally one of the bullywogs would look through a spyglass mounted on top of the platform.

As we approached Baerwin suddenly decided to announce us, yelling "Party approaching!" at them. They jumped and started bustling about, trying to look busy. They appeared anxious, and as we were still wearing the livery of King Gullup's court I decided to play the part of the "inspector" to gather some information on what they were doing.

"Please show me what you are doing," I asked.

"We're keeping an eye on the townspeople. That's our job innit," one replied, shifting nervously.

"Very good, show me how it works," I replied.

"Well, we look through the telescope," he gestured.

"May I?" I asked, and stepped up to look through. The telescope was pointed at the cottage with the plotting rebels. Clearly their secret plot was not entirely secret, and they were under surveillance.

I swung the telescope around to look at the rest of the town. With the fog it wasn't easy to see much, but as I peered through I noticed that the fog was ever shifting. If I was just a little patient I could make out most things. Over by the throne I saw a large cauldron being filled with liquid. Likely oil. Unfortunate.

I turned to look along the clothesline, to where it and the others we've seen in Downfall seemed to converge. Through the fog I could make out a cottage built above the lake on 35-foot tall stilts. There was a stone column in the middle of the cottage leading into the lake, perhaps a well, and a staircase leading from a small wooden landing at the base up to the cottage. It was clearly Bavlorna's cottage, and seemed we could most likely approach by boat and take the stairs to an entrance.

I finished looking, and told the bullywogs I would relay to King Gullup that they were doing a good job. They looked relieved, and I climbed down from the platform to confer with the others.

Raksha Appears

We talked a while about what to do next. I was fairly certain we would need to visit Bavlorna's cottage if we wanted to find Clapperclaw's head and maybe get some of the information we needed to free Prismeer. Baerwin suggested we try to trade the book for the head, which seemed like a decent idea. If only we could be sure how Bavlorna might react to visitors.

While we talked, a wet sound came from the platform and the two bullywogs on the tower slumped over and fell, dead, to the ground. A shadow sat there for a moment, then zipped across the lake. It was definitely Raksha.

Baerwin looked at the dead bullywogs. "Most of their bones are broken," he relayed. "It's like they were crushed."

"Should we go after him?" I asked. We could try to find him, fight him, but that seemed potentially disastrous to me. We could also try to find Min and get the daggers from her.

"We should travel through time again to when I wanted to destroy them using the hammer in Ythryn!" said Baerwin.

"No more time travel!" I said. "And it was the Anvil of Disjunction, not the Hammer."

While we argued, we saw a bullywog guard walk up the path from the other direction. He saw us, and the dead bullywogs at our feet. He looked shocked, starting, and then started backing away.

"Who goes there!?" shouted Baerwin.

He turned and started running, but before he could go more than a few steps a commanding voice rang out. "GROVEL!" It was Baerwin. He came back to Baerwin and threw himself on the ground at his feet. Baerwin promptly tied him up.

I tried to get the guard on our side. "You must warn the king," I said. "A shadow has come to town and is killing people, including these two." But he refused to believe us.

Korag searched for the badge he got from the king to try to convince him of our authority, but the bullywog wasn't having it. While he did this I noticed two figures slink out of the rebel's cabin and disappear into the fog.

I pointed them out to the others, asking "Do we want to go after them? Where do you think they're going?"

"I think I know, but I need to decide whether we're going to kill this bullywog," said Baerwin. The bullywog looked suddenly terrified and tried to flop away.

"I think we have to kill it," said Kaira, surprisingly bloodthirsty. I didn't like the idea.

"If you swear an oath to leave now and never come back I may let you live," Baerwin told him. "But if you ever speak of this or ever return then I will find you and I will kill you." The bullywog wet himself in terror, and nodded enthusiastically. Bearwin untied him and he ran as fast as he could off into the fog.

The cruelty seemed unnecessary to me. But I decide to not press it. After a moment, I asked instead "Do we want to continue to Bavlorna's cottage, or follow the rebels to see what they are doing?"

Baerwin wanted to ignore them. Resda thought we should maybe follow. Korag shook his head. "I don't see how it matters to us. Neither Gullup or Illig seem better than the other, I'd rather not get involved."

That decided, we moved on to arguing about how to get into the cottage. Should we sneak in or knock on the front door? While we talked, a shadow appeared out of the woods before us.

Baerwin turned, shouting "I told you to never come back here!" But the figure wasn't the bullywog guard returning. It was a literal shadow with white points for eyes. The shadow appeared to regard us for a moment, they flew off to Bavlorna's cottage.

"That wasn't the bullywog, was it?" Baerwin said.

"No, it was not the bullywog," said Skant, sarcastically.

"I don't want to be where that thing is," said Korag, seemingly changing his mind from a moment before.

I started to lecture. "If we don't move forward, if we just avoid anything that appears like it may be dangerous than we'll never get anywhere." I went on for a while and afterwards we set out to find a boat.

Entering Bavlorna's Cottage

We headed back to the boat we left at the landing by the tree blight. I climbed in and took the oars, and once we were all loaded in I rowed us to the cottage to landing at the stairs underneath the cottage. The stairs were rickety and had no railings, the staircase twisting its way up to a hatched door in the bottom of the cottage.

"There is no way I am going in there," said Clapperclaw as we started to unload. "Bun and I will wait in the boat."

"Will you be safe here?" I asked.

"We should be OK here, but we aren't going inside." I nodded at this, and clapped Bun on his tiny shoulder before stepping onto the landing. "Stay alert."

Baerwin made his way carefully up the stairs to the bottom of the cottage by the trap door. He knocked on the door, but heard no reply. "I'm coming in!" he called, then opened the door and pulled himself inside.

I quickly headed up the stairs with elven grace, joining Baerwin inside the cottage. Inside was a large recessed pool lined with moldy tiles that took up most of the square room. Water filled the pool, about a foot deep, and in the center of the pool was the head of a well. The well itself smelled quite unpleasant. A wooden walkway surrounded the pool, and was crowded with shelves, junk, and bric-à-brac. In one corner 7 human shaped dress dummies were pushed together. In another a spiral staircase lead up to a floor above. There were several closed doors around the edge of the room as well.

Shortly after I entered the rest of the crew filed in, looking around. "Do you think she knows someone is in here?" Korag asked after squeezing his bulk through the trap door.

"I think it's fair to assume she knows," I replied.

We started exploring, keeping our voices down in case I was wrong. Baerwin and Korag walked to the nearest door and opened it. It opened onto a balcony running the length of the cottage. The balcony was absolutely covered in frogs, and at each end one of the clotheslines attached to the railing, the lines trailing off into the mist. "Nothing here," muttered Bearwin, closing the door.

While they looked outside, I walked over to the well to get a closer look at that. Other than the smell it appeared calm and perfectly still, and was filled to the brim with water. It was similar to other wells we'd seen in the Feywild, but those weren't so full up. It seemed like this well should be filling the pool, but it wasn't working right. I couldn't see anything blocking it though.

Baerwin and Korag came back into the room, and Baerwin went to stand on the lily pad in the water. It didn't even move when he got on it. He is not a small man, and it seemed likely that the pad was magical in nature. Korag meanwhile wandered over to look at an odd mirror standing on the walkway surrounding the pool. I gave up on the well for the moment and joined him. A quick detect magic spell and it was clear the mirror was powerfully magical. It reeked of conjuration magic, as did the lily pad.

"The mirror is very magical," I said. "Conjuration school. The lily pad too."

"I could have told you that," Korag sniffed. "I'm not going anywhere closer to that mirror than I have to." He turned "We should put a frog on the lily pad."

I was surprised. "Korag, you are adamant you won't touch the mirror because it is magic, but you want to go grab a frog and stick it on the magic lily pad?" After some grumbling he relented. I turned back to look more closely at the mirror. The frame was intricately carved with circus symbology. I braced myself and said aloud "Professor, what is your opinion?"

"It probably goes to the carnival, based on the carvings," Professor Skant said. "Maybe you should recite the words again."

I dug through my memory and recited "Hither thither, here and there, wander yonder, show me where." As I finished the rhyme a shimmering vortex opened right in front of us. I tried it again but rather than close the portal simply reset. This seemed like a possible way out, maybe back to the Witchlight Carnival, but we were wary to test it. I assumed (or hoped) that the spell would dissipate after a short while.

Baerwin Strikes Again

While I was examining the mirror and Korag was itching to grab a frog, Baerwin walked closer to the dress dummies. Six were adorned with shoddy garments. The last was bare except an ugly black pointed hat. This seemed unuusal. I saw Baerwin reaching for the hat in the mirror, and turned, alarmed, Korag following my gaze. But before Korag or I could say anything or I could see if the hat was magical in any way, Baerwin touched it.

Shock! It was not a hat at all, but a darkmantle. It moved quickly, jumping onto Bearwin's head like an ugly parody of a hat. Before we could react, Baerwin turned and a huge blast of cold air erupted from him, hitting me square in the face. This was the second time this day that Baerwin (or some facsimile of him) had hit me with a cone of cold. Resda and Korag were caught in the blast as well. Kaira was quick and dove out of the way.

Resda angrily retaliated with a chromatic orb aimed at the creature, which killed it immediately. Baerwin was freed, and Resda pitched forward onto the floor unconscious. After a few moments she pushed herself to her feet.

"Resda, are you alright?" I asked. "What happened?"

"Did any of you experience that?" She asked, dazed.

"What? To us you just blacked out."

"I was in a long, narrow hall, it must have been 100 feet long. Chairs lined the walls, and people were sitting on them. They stared at me with gaping mouths, maybe they were surprised to see me. There was a window on one wall and I could see clouds streaming by. To my right there was a strange door, and I could hear a humming noise. When I went to look at the door I woke up back here."

I shook my head. "Very strange. Another consequence of wild magic I suppose. I'm glad you're alright."

I looked towards Bearwin. He also seemed to be OK, but he was holding his head like it hurt. Though glad he didn't seem hurt, I was angry at his carelessness. The man needed to think before touching.

I stalked over and punched him hard in the face. Then I went on a long rant about the consequences of his actions for the rest of us. I nearly died in Sunblight's fortress because of his reckless touching, nearly died again in the Caves of Hunger when he went off on his own and dragged a brace of murderous snowmen back with him, and now today I was blasted twice by mirror images or controlled version of him.

"Just think before you grab things or run off on your own, Baerwin." I said angrily. He looked chagrined but did not apologize, apparently thinking the punch was enough.

Taxidermy and Treasure

Baerwin walked over and opened the door on the far side of the room. Inside the room was a rough taxidermy workshop. A horse's head leered at him from the other side of the door. It was affixed to an armature made of wicker and wire. There was a wooden crate near it, and flies buzzed around the room. There was no sign of Clapperclaw's stag head.

I joined him in the room. A closer look at the wooden crate showed Bavlorna's name scrawled on one side. Baerwin opened it, and a huge swarm of flies emerged. Inside, besides the flies, was the carcass of a strange creature, curled-up: an 8-legged reptile with spikes running down its back. I thought a moment and then recognized this as a basilisk carcass. "Better dead than alive, if we're this close," I mused.

I looked at the worktable in the room. It was covered in tools and specimens, as well as a small box with tiny drawers. I poked through the drawers to find them filled with glass eyeballs, except one which was wooden. Baerwin looked through the collection, and found a glass eye that seemed to fit his empty socket.

I was not sure why, other than it was wooden while the rest were glass, but I pocketed the wooden eye.

We returned to the others to relay what we found, and kept exploring. Behind another door we found a closet stuffed with scraps of cloth and bundles of yarn. Another door went outside, revealing a flight of stairs with a rickety railing, leaving up and down. With a closer look I warned that the stairs looked rotted and probably wouldn't support our weight. We closed the door.

Behind the last door on the floor was a room with a large cupboard. Scrollwork framed the two cupboard doors, which were bridged by a circular panel of dark wood. The panel was inlaid with an hourglass sigil. Baerwin pulled, but the doors were locked and there was no keyhole.

I took a closer look at the panel and the sigil, and realized this wasn't really a lock but an ornamental latch. I rotated the symbol upside down, and the cabinet doors opened freely. Inside were numerous shelves filled with small compartments, which were themselves stuffed with pouches and other containers. I found a tiny model cauldron in one, with a scrap of paper with "spittlespew" written on it. It looked just like the cauldron we found by the lake, and I guessed it might be the password to open the lid. I memorized the word and put the small cauldron back.

We riffled through the rest of the contents, finding unopened letters, pressed flowers, loose cutlery, feathers, a horseshow, and a chipped teacup among the collection, but nothing appeared to be of value or offer any clues about this place or the spell on Prismeer. I closed and relatched the cabinet.

The Shrinking Hallway

There didn't seem to be much else to see on this lower level. Baerwin headed towards the spiral stairs. "We should go up," he called back over his shoulder as he stumped up the rotting staircase. Kaira and I both followed close behind. At the stop of the stairs we found ourselves in a dank hallway filled with portraits. They depicted grumpy, sad, frightened people of all types: human, elves, bullywogs, halflings, goblins, and more. These distasteful portraits were framed in gaudy gilded frames, and an oval mirror two feet wide and five tall hung on one wall.

"Another mirror," Korag rumbled, looking at it out of the side of his eye but not touching it. Suddenly he stilled, seemingly surprised.

""What do you see, Korag?" I asked.

"I look dour in my reflection," he said.

"You look dour in real life." Intrigued I looked at my reflection, and saw an emotionless version of myself looking back. I made faces at the mirror, but nothing changed until I smiled. At this the mirror clicked and opened, revealing a hidden passage behind it, a moldy scent hanging in the air.

Bearwin just couldn't help himself and walked down it. As he walked down the hallway, he became smaller and smaller from our perception, outside the passage.

"Wow Baerwin you're getting smaller!" Resda said.

He turned a corner and disappeared. Shortly afterwards he returned to us, his normal size as he exited. "You guys seemed huge, but now you're normal," he said.

He headed back down the hallway, disappearing for longer this time. Finally he returned. "There's a door at the other end, but it's stopped up by a gigantic sewing needle. None of you responded when I asked if I should open it, so I came back."

"It was probably a normal sized needle Baerwin," I said, "and you were just tiny. That's probably why we couldn't hear you. I'm hesitant to go through the door but we should keep the hallway in mind just in case."

There were a few more doors off this dank hallway. I opened one, finding a dusty, uncluttered room behind it. It seemed like a disused bedroom. Shadow boxes hung on the walls, the glass of one broken and contents missing like someone did a smash and grab. The rest contained mummified pixies, pinned to boards like some mockery of a butterfly collection. I took a closer look at the smashed box, but besides the smashed glass and missing contents it didn't seem unusual compared to the others. There didn't seem to be anything else of note here.

Back in the hallway I tried the door across from the bedroom. Behind it was a dining room. There were severed goblin heads mounted to wooden plaques above each door in the room, and in the center was a large dining table covered in half eaten and rotting food. A chandelier hung above the table, and six mismatched chairs flanked it. A quick search of the room turned up nothing useful in the sideboard, in the cupboards, or on the table.

"I want to know what it's like to be small," Korag said, and headed back into the hallway, Baerwin following. After a while they both returned to the dining room, normal sized.

"I went all the way down the hallway, though not before watching Baerwin as I got smaller," he reported. "It's an odd feeling, not being a giant." Korag continued his description of what he saw. "I opened the door at the other end, and found myself in a massive room, under a giant piece of furniture. I think the door must only have been a few inches high, and I shrunk to tiny size in the hallway.

"I saw two creatures having a conversation in the next room. One was a tall lean woman, gray skinned, in black clothes and a wide brimmed black hat. The other was toad-like. She had bulging eyes, cracked skin, and flies flew in and out of her mouth, which just hung open when she wasn't speaking. She wore a shapeless garment, and like the rest of this place we have seen the furniture looked like it was once fine, but everything is ugly, moldy, and falling apart."

He shook his head at the state of the place. "The toad-like one was Bavlorna, I'm sure of it. She was complaining about Gullup's ineptitude, said he was 'same as the old king'. I don't know who the other was."

"Do you think they knew we were here?" Resda asked.

"They didn't seem to, I mean we're just on the other side of the door but they were talking normally," he replied.

"I think we should still assume she knows," I said warily.

"We may have to just talk with her," mused Baerwin. "But let's see what else is here before we do." He headed through the door at the far side of the dining room. The room behind it held a large contraption made of tangled copper tubes and a pot-bellied boiler, connected to more tubes that fed into buckets. Barrels were stacked in the corner of the room, and sickly light shone through a green-painted pane of glass in the far wall. This was clearly a still, seemingly fed by rotten potatoes. Bavlorna's private stash, I supposed. There was a door at the far end of the room.

Before we checked it though, we decided to see what was behind the last door in the dining room, but it was just a small balcony. Our choice seemed to be to head straight in to see Bavlorna, or keep avoiding it as long as we could.

Raw Notes

• The little magmin is talking at us but none of us understand what it is saying
• I ask Clapperclaw if there's much else to see
• Clapperclaw shrugs and says "Other than Bavlorna's cottage there is the watch tower."
• "What do they watch?" asks Baerwin.
• "Everything."
• I ask Clapperclaw to point us in the right direction. "I guess we should see what we can see."
• "You people and your directions," he says, and points into the mist.
• We travel that way and come to a 10 foot high raised wooden platform standing upon a mound of mossy earth and mud. Two bullywogs laze atop the platform. A frayed clothesline is attached to one corner of the watchtower.
• The bullywogs occasionally look through a spyglass on top of the tower.
• "Party approaching!" announces Baerwin.
• The bullywogs are startled and start looking busy.
• I climb up and say I'm inspecting, please show me what they are doing.
• They tell me they are keeping an eye on the townspeople as they are instructed to.
• I ask them to show me how it works.
• "Well, we look through the telescope."
• I look through the telescope, and see them peering at the cottage with the plotting rebels. They are under surveillance.
• I look around more, but with the fog it's not easy to see a lot. But as I watch, the fog shifts around, so if I wait long enough I can see most anything I want to see.
• Over by the throne I see a large cauldron being filled with a liquid.
• I look along the direction of the clotheslines, towards where they converge.
• I see a cottage built in 35-foot tall stilts with a well built up in the middle of it, a stone column above the lake. This is without a doubt Bavlorna's cottage. It may be approached by boat, and there is a staircase leading up to it.
• I tell the bullywogs that I will tell their king that they appear to be doing a good job. They look visibly relieved.
• We talk about what to do next, and it seems likely to be visiting Bavlorna's cottage. Baerwin thinks we can maybe try to trade the book for the head. It's not the worst idea.
• While we talk, we hear a wet sound and the two bullywogs on the tower slump and fall, dead. A shadow sits there for a moment, then zips across the lake. It is definitely Raksha.
• Baerwin looks at the dead bullywogs, who appear to have most of their bones broken.
• What should we do? We could try to find him, fight him, but that seems potentially disastrous. We could try to find Min and get the daggers from her.
• Baerwin says we should travel through time to when he wanted to destroy the daggers using the anvil in Ythryn.
• A bullywog guard walks up the path from the other direction, and suddenly sees us, and the dead bullywogs at our feet. He looks shocked, and makes to run.
• "Who goes there!?" shouts Baerwin.
• He turns and runs.
• "GROVEL" Baerwin commands him. He comes back to Baerwin, throwing himself at Baerwin's feet.
• Baerwin ties him up.
• We tell him that he must warn the king, a shadow has come to town and is killing people.
• Korag searches for the badge he got from the king. While he does this, I see two figures slinking out of the rebel's cabin, disappearing into the fog.
• "Do we want to go after them?" I ask.
• "I think I know, but I need to decide whether we're going to kill this bullywog."
• The bullywog looks terrified and tries to flop away.
• "I think we have to kill it," says Kaira.
• Baerwin tells him to leave and never come back. He wets himself in terror. Baerwin unties him and he runs as fast as he can into the fog.
• "Well, do we continue to Bavlorna's place or see what these rebels are doing?" I ask.
• Baerwin wants to ignore them and head to Bavlorna's Resda thinks maybe we should follow the rebels. Korag thinks maybe Bavlorna.
• So, let's go up to the cottage. How do we want to get in? Knock?
• A shadow appears before us, out of the woods. "I told you to never come back here," shouts Baerwin, but it is not the bullywog. It is a literal shadow, with white points for eyes. It regards us for a moment, then flies off to Bavlorna's cottage.
• "That wasn't the bullywog, was it?" Baerwin says.
• "No, it was not the bullywog," says Skant, sarcastically.
• "I don't want to be where that thing is," says Korag.
• I lecture for a while, that if we avoid everything that seems dangerous we'll never get anywhere.
• We head back to the boat, and take it to the cottage, to the stairs underneath the cottage.
• Rickety stairs with no railings ascend up to a hatched door in the bottom of the cottage.
• "There is no way I am going in there," says Clapperclaw. "Bun and I will wait in the boat."
• Baerwin makes his way up the stairs carefully. He finds himself at the bottom of the cottage by the trap door. He knocks on the door, but there is no reply.
• "I'm coming in!" he calls, and tries to open the door and goes inside.
• I head up the stairs with elven grace, joining Baerwin.
• A recessed pool lined with moldy tiles takes up most of the square room. Water fills pool, and from the center is the head of the welll, which smells unpleasant. There is a walkway around the pool. It is crowded with shelves and brickabrack. 7 human shaped dress dummies are pushed together in one corner, and a wooden staircase spirals up to the floor above. There are 5 closed doors in the room. Six are adorned with shoddy garments. One is bare except an ugly black pointed hat.
• The others join us shortly after.
• It is eerily quiet in here.
• "Do you think she knows someone is here?" Korag asks.
• "I think it's fair to assume she knows," I reply.
• Baerwin and Korag walk up to the door nearest the trap door and try to open it. On the other side of the door is a 10 foot wide balcony running the length of the cottage. It is covered in frogs. At each end of the balcony is a clothesline attached to the cottage. The lines head out into the mist.
• I take a look at the well, holding my nose as I do. It is calm and perfectly still, and is filled exactly to the brim with water. It looks somewhat similar to the other wells we have seen, but this one is oddly filled with water.
• Baerwin goes to stand on the lily pad. It doesn't even move. It may be magical.
• Korag goes to look at an add mirror.
• I look at the well and the pool, I think it should fill the pool, but isn't working properly.
• I look into it but nothing visible appears to be blocking it.
• I detect magic, and the mirror reeks of conjuration magic
• The lily pad is also conjuration magic. It can be attuned to.
• Korag wants to grab a frog and stick it on the lily pad. I try to talk him out of it. "Korag, you are adamant you won't touch a magic mirror, but you want to go grab a frog and stick it on the magic lily pad?"
• I go to investigate the mirror more closely. The frame is carved intricately with circus symbology. "Professor, what is your opinion?"
• "Perhaps you should recite the words again?"
• I recite the words we got from Mister Witch and Mister Light, and a shimmering vortex opens in front of us. Reciting them again appears to reset it. Perhaps it is time limited.
• Baerwin goes to look more closely at the dress dummies. Korag starts to say something, but before he or I can do anything further he touches the hat. A darkmantle appears.
• The creature jumps onto Baerwin's head, like a hat.
• It uses him to cast cone of cold on us, hitting Resda, Me, and Korag. The second time. Bearwin is going to get a punch in the face when his face reappears.
• Resda retaliates with a chromatic orb, killing it.
• Then she blacks out, falling to the floor. She later describes what she saw to us
  • Resda stands in a long hall, narrow but 100 feet long
  • There are chairs lining the walls, with people on them. They stare at her with mouths gaping open
  • She can see clouds through a window
  • There is a strange door to her right
  • There was a humming noise
  • She looks at the door, and wakes up on the floor of the cottage
• Baerwin seems to be ok, but is holding his head like it hurts. I walk over and punch him in the face.
• I go on a rant about him touching things and how it's almost got us killed. The armor in Sunblight's lair, the snowmen in the Howling Caves, now this.
• Baerwin walks over and opens the door on the far side of the room. Inside the room is a taxidermy workshop. A horse's head leers at him. It is affixed to an armature made of wicker and wire. There is a wooden crate near it. Flies buzz around the room.
• Baerwin looks around but doesn't see a stag's head.
• The wooden crate has Bavlorna's name scrawled on one side. Baerwin opens it, and a huge swarm of flies emerges. Inside the crate is a carcass of a curled-up 8-legged reptile with spikes running down it's back. It is a basilisk carcass.
• I look at the worktable. It is covered in tools and specimens, as well as a small box with tiny drawers. I poke through the drawers. They are filled with glass eyeballs, except one which is wooden. Baerwin finds a glass eye that seems to fit.
• I pocket the wooden eye.
• We return to the main room, telling the others we found a taxidermy workshop but no sign of the stag's head.
• We open another door. Scraps of cloth and bundles of yarn are piled in this small room. It's a closet.
• Behind the next door is a flight of stairs with a rickety railing, and doors up and down. The stairs do not look safe. They look rotted, and probably can't support our weight.
• Behind the last door in the room is a large cupboard. Scrollwork frames the two doors, which are bridged by a circular panel of dark wood. The panel is inlaid with an hourglass sigil.
• Baerwin tries to open it, but it's locked. There is no keyhole.
• I investigate the panel. Rotating the symbol will unlock the cabinet doors. I do this, and the doors unlock.
• The inside is divided into rows with small compartments, stuffed with pouches and other containers. Inside one is a tiny cauldron, with a scrap of paper with "spittlespew written on it." It looks just like the cauldron we found by the lake. This may be how to open the lid. I memorize it.
• There are also unopened letters, pressed flowers, loose cutlery, feathers, a horseshoe, and a chipped teacup.
• Baerwin goes over to the spiral stairs. "We should go up" and he does so. Kaira and I follow.
• The walls of this dank hallway are filleed with portraits depicting grumpy, sad, frightened people. The figures include all types, humans, elves, bullywogs. All are framed in gaudy, gilded frames. An oval mirror two feet wide and five tall hands on one wall.
• Korag looks around the mirror, not touching it. He seems surprised by his reflection.
• "What do you see, Korag?" I ask.
• "I look dour in my reflection."
• "You look dour in real life," I say. I look myself, and see an emotionless version of myself looking back. I make faces at the mirror. When I smile, it clicks and opens, revealing a hidden passage.
• Bearwin walks down it. A moldy scent hangs in the air. As he walks down the hallway, he becomes smaller and smaller from our perception, outside the passage.
• "Wow Baerwin you're getting smaller!" Resda says.
• He heads to the door at the end, which is tiny sized just like him. He returns to us, his normal size. He then heads back in and tries to open the tiny door at the other end. It is barred by a tiny sewing needle.
• He squeaks back at us "should I open it?" but it just sounds like squeaks to us. He comes back and asks in his normal voice. I suggest keeping the passage in our back pocket.
• I check another door off this hallway. Behind it is a dusty uncluttered room. Shadow boxes hang on the wall. Most contain mummified pixies pinned to boards like a collection of butterflies. The glass of one has been broken and its contents are missing.
• I inspect the broken shadow box more closely. It looks like someone did a smash and grab.
• Korag asks if they were about the size of the door, but I don't know.
• Back in the hallway I try the door across from the bedroom. I find a dining room. Above each door is a severed goblin head mounted to a wooden plaque. There is a large table covered in half eaten food. A chandelier hangs above the table, and six mismatched chairs flank the table.
• I head into the room, but nothing useful is in the sideboard or cupboards, or on the table.
• Baerwin wants to check the door on the other side of the room. Korag wants to go down the tiny door to see what it feels like to be small. Baerwin goes with him.
  • Korag goes down the hallway to the other side, unlatches the door, and goes through. On the other side is a massive room, and the door is under a piece of furniture. He realizes that the door must only be a few inches tall, and he has been shrunk to tiny size.
  • Baerwin, curious why he hasn't returned yet, also goes down the hallway.
  • In the room, two creatures are having a conversation over tea in the middle of the room. THe first is a tall lean woman of gray complextion, dressed in black, with a wide hat. The other is a toad-like creature with bulging eyes and cracked skin, clad in a shapeless garment. Flies flit in and out of its mouth, which hangs agape when it isn't speaking. The room is filthy, the furniture was perhaps once fine quality, but is not in disrepair, ugly and moldy and patched.
  • Bavlorna is complaining about Gullup, "same as the old king."
  • Korag comes back to relay what she said.
• Baerwin suggests checking the last two doors before going in to talk with Bavlorna. This seems like a reasonable idea.
• He heads through the door at the other side of the room.
• A contraption made of entangled copper tubes is connected to a pot-bellied boiler. This is connected to more tubes that feed into buckets. Barrels are stacked in a corner of the room. Light shines through a green painted pane of glass in the far wall. There is another door on the other side of this room.
• The contraption is clearly a still, rotting potatoes appear to be used to feed the machine.
• We exit, and check the last door in the dining room. Behind it is a small balcony.
• The question now is whether to keep exploring, or just go introduce ourselves.