What Happened Last Session
Blades at the Round Table
The swords were already out when the morning resumed. Abran turned on Kelwun the Iron Knight before anyone else could, reminding her that he had fed her from his own stores and held her hand, and gave her to Arthur. The Marshal answered for her, and badly. “Kelwun! What are you doing? This is not what we planned.”
Kelwun raised her hands and walked into Arthur’s Circle. When a guard tossed a sword at her feet she would not touch it: “I came to this realm to serve honestly. And I will not buy my freedom with a blade in the council hall.”
Everyone else fought. Ro’an’s hooked club opened a guard’s chest, Seeli took a head clean off with the white sword, and Arthur shot a third man through the neck from inside the Circle. Bray arrived late and failed to sneak. Before the end the Marshal shouted the line nobody could forget, “We’re searching for the door for you!”, and then Brave Sir Robin’s flail came down on his helm and he dropped.
A Room That Obeyed
Then Abran told everyone to put their blades down. Every guard in the hall was branded, and every one obeyed him at once. Bray alone said it out loud: “Why are they listening to this command?” Abran called it a mystery they would solve together, and told Arthur his Seer knew where the door was.
In the Circle, Kelwun had told Arthur something quieter. Abran had welcomed her himself on the night she arrived, walked her to her room, and taken her gloves to dry them by the fire. Arthur held a torch to her palm and saw that the brand was not raised. He said nothing, and kept his eyes on Abran.
That afternoon Abran showed Ro’an and Seeli a memory crystal from his Seer that glows as the door draws near. In the Marshal’s room Robin and Arthur found plans to expand the dungeon and an undated letter in Kelwun’s name about finding the door and claiming the City. The Carved Seer laughed, said the war was not finished, and carved wheat fields and snowy mountains into itself; the carving went on below its belt, and nobody looked. Bray called on the Marshal’s wife, who had a black eye. She took his bite for a kiss and shut the door in his face.
Two Women in the Snow
Sheriff Howell was left holding Dowell, with the dungeon and the missing families to search. Abran’s ship carried the company to 0106, a harbour nobody had known about, under cliffs with a great spire above them.
Two old women came staggering through the snow with half-woven baskets strapped to their bodies and welded iron collars under their hair. Ro’an fed them. “We were captives in the ogre’s castle,” they said, somewhere past Hynere, turned out when they grew too old to be useful. Their son Hugo and daughter Aluna are still inside. Ro’an promised to free the land of ogres; Abran reminded him they had a door to find.
They spent the night in Hynere Towers, a city as hungry as Dowell, where carts went down the streets collecting the dead.
The Face on the Back of His Head
In the morning Abran led them east into a cave where the crystal burned bright. Only Ro’an, Seeli and Bray kept pace on horseback. The cave opened onto a hidden valley walled in by cliffs, full of enormous trees under the open sky, and on one of those trees was a fleshy door.
Abran stopped and stared at it. Isaac started screaming on Ro’an’s shoulder. “Finally, it’s time. Time to go home.” He didn’t turn around. A face grew on the back of his head, half Abran’s and half Kelwun’s, and the rest of him came apart into something twisting and shapeless.
The shapeshifter hid nothing now. The real Abran was “within me.” The door did not lead to the City. The company had brought it here when they opened the river, it said, drained its lakes, then sealed it away, and all it wanted was to go home. Kill it, and Abran died too. The company argued briefly about whose fault the river was, then decided to kill it.
Hold the Door
Seeli’s thrown dagger passed through a hole in its body and stuck in the tree. It split into five. Arthur arrived and cut one down with his friends behind him, and another swallowed the pieces, then Ro’an’s last fever-dream mushroom. A form caught Bray at the door, “This is not your home,” and Arthur threw his shield to save him; it is still lying in the grass. Seeli’s white sword cut another form in half, and when the last one stretched out to take the pieces back, she threw herself in front of the bigger one. The smaller went back in. Robin coughed up a puff of dust in the middle of it all, and nobody noticed.
Then Bray opened the door. There was nothing behind it but black, and screaming, and shapes coming toward him that he could smell. He threw a twig through and never heard it land. He slammed the door shut, and something on the other side began pushing back.
Looking Ahead
One shapeshifter is still standing in the valley with Abran somewhere inside it, and Bray has his whole weight against a door that something wants open. Back in Dowell the Sheriff has a dungeon full of branded men and families still missing, and Kelwun sits in custody, cleared in Arthur’s eyes and accused on paper. Past Hynere, two children are waiting in an ogre’s castle.
Next session is the last. Whatever comes out of that valley, the realm will remember who held the door.
A thing that only wants to go home will say anything, and some of it will be true.