Kingfisher Feathers

Ominous bird valentines.

Signs of spring, ranked.

(puts all the Saint of Steel's paladins in my pocket and rattles them around)

@beradan and I went to the Connecticut Renaissance Faire today as unnamed White Rat and Saint of Steel acolytes.

The only place left to go is down the stairs, so down you go. At the bottom, you find a smallish room with an alcove, a huge iron door that someone made specifically to be intimidating, and a sloping hallway to the south. You hear frog calls echoing in the distance from the hallway.

There’s a rusty faucet in the alcove. Jimmy says, “You know what’s weird?”

You are spoiled for choice, frankly, but you humor him. “What?”

“Every time somebody turns that faucet handle, it breaks. But every time I come down here, it’s wired back into place.”

You consider this. “Magic or plumbers, do you think?”

Jimmy makes a flailing gesture with his wings. “I don’t know. Maybe this is some kind of afterlife for plumbers and the bad ones have to stay here fixing the same faucet for all eternity.”

This is an interesting theory. It doesn’t body well for your dreams of treasure, but then again, plumbers get paid way better than adventurers.

Your search confirms your earlier suspicions—somebody left this room in a big hurry, probably when they saw you setting to work with your screwdriver. That’s good? Maybe? They were more scared of you than you were of them?

Is that good?

There’s a low brick shelf that contains jars labeled in a language you don’t read, something swirly. Wedding invitation levels of swirly. The labels look hand-lettered, not mass produced. You’re guessing it’s food, though you have no plans to try it unless you’re on very short rations. You took a semester long class in what foods are safe to eat in a dungeon, and the lecture called “Botulism And You” has left you extremely wary of canned goods of unknown provenance.

The footprint in the firepit is roughly human foot shaped, but that’s the most you can say about it. The ash-mud is too goopy to hold fine detail. You can be fairly sure they didn’t step outside the firepit afterward, though, because there are no muddy footprints. Which means the only way they could go was up.

You look up the dark shaft above the firepit. The walls are black with soot. Obviously it was used as a chimney for some time. You don’t see any handholds. Possibly they had a rope, and pulled it up after themselves? If you hold the lantern just right, you can see what looks like a distorted handprint. It’s not impossible that they climbed up by bracing themselves against the walls, though you have no idea how they’d have gotten up there in the first place. You certainly can’t follow, even if you wanted to.

You saved the desk for last. It was swept clean, whatever was on it grabbed in a hurry, and the drawers were cleaned out. Except… You spot something far in the back and pull out a couple sheets of loose paper. They are covered in dense lines of the swirly writing, and drawings. Careful sketches of the faces of several humans.

Sleeping humans.

“That’s Two,” Jimmy says, his wings trembling slightly. “And Five.”

The drawing of Five has a small bird tucked up under her chin. You’re no artist, but it has the sort of start-and-stop, ragged-extra-lines look of something drawn from life. Which would mean…

“Oh, that’s creepy as fuck.” You glance up the chimney and wonder if someone is watching you and drawing a portrait right now.

There is indeed a layer of thin black cloth pinned across the opening. You move it aside with your walking stick. No one attacks you.

The alcove is only about two feet deep, just enough for someone to stand and watch. The east side dead-ends against the wall, while the west side opens into a larger space.

Possibly the most unsettling thing about this is that it appears the concrete wall here is all of three inches thick. The architecture here all feels so solid, like huge slabs were just poured in place, and seeing that some of them are nearly hollow…it’s a weird feeling. As if the whole place is a facade over something bigger and emptier. Or as if the walls might be full of silent observers.

Jimmy, unasked, hops down from your shoulder and peeks around the corner into the larger room. He gestures with a wing to let you know it’s clear.

The room is not large, maybe fifteen by fifteen, and clearly has been occupied for some time. There’s a crude firepit made of broken concrete bits, a square smoke hole in the ceiling, and a nest of blankets in the corner. (There’s a drain in the far corner that was probably for more biological concerns.) Perhaps most incongruous of all, there’s a wooden writing desk pushed against the wall that wouldn’t be out of place in any study or or office back home. It’s been swept clean, but there’s still a candle on it.

You touch the wax. It’s still warm. And the firepit is full of soggy ash, as if someone hastily dumped water over the fire.

There is a single bare footprint in the ashes.

“Please don’t jump,” says Jimmy.

Good Lord, of course you’re not going to jump. Diving into water when you don’t know how deep it is or what may be lurking under the surface is just a fancy way of saying that you don’t value having unbroken bones.

“What’s calling down there?” you ask.

“Frogs,” Jimmy explains. “There’s a large room below full of them. They’re one of the nicest things in this place. But there’s another way! You don’t have to climb! Or dive!”

“Did you say it was boring so I wouldn’t come here and jump?”

Jimmy clears his throat and seems to avoid making eye contact. Uh-huh. You really think Basic Dungeon Survival ought to be a required class at Wentworth, not an elective.

You return to the passageway and are just coming up to the large metal grate when you don’t hear something.

It’s not exactly a sound. It’s more like a sound stopping, one that you weren’t aware you were hearing. You are almost certain it’s no longer coming from the other side of the grille.

The ironwork is delicate but worked closely together. It’s dark behind the grille…

Actually, it’s too dark. You lift your lantern and it’s still pitch black back there.

Jimmy makes a distrustful noise, but you’re already sliding one of the small screwdrivers of your Swiss Army Knife into a gap in the metal. It goes in about an inch, then meets a slight resistance.

“There’s a black cloth back there,” you murmur to Jimmy. He flutters something about sometimes having the feeling of being watched, then hunches down into his feathers.

The grille is held up by dozens of Phillips head screws concealed in the pattern. You could, possibly, unscrew them. There’s no way you can lower something that heavy quietly, though. And if Jimmy’s right, there might be someone on the other side.

Mind you, if they’re watching right now, they probably won’t be after you drop a three hundred pound metal grille on them…