Clan Säv hideout

At the back of a cave in the western mountains, a day or two short of the Valley of Doom, there is a crevice about four feet across that looks like nothing. Behind it the stone stops being stone the mountain made. Eighty feet of low passage runs in, worked and then deliberately roughened to read as natural, and it ends at a blank wall veined faintly with Mól metal. The wall is the point. The floor and ceiling in front of it are drilled with dart holes, and the only reason anyone came through the hallway alive was that an old shift in the rock had loosened the mechanisms and left them showing.

It was opened at all because a storm pinned the party in the cave for two days and Mikhail would not let the crevice alone. Koa hammered it wider, and Mikhail went through first.

There is a second pressure plate set in the wall, and it is not a trap. Pressed, it swings a slab of Mól stone aside on a pivot into a single small chamber, trap holes in that ceiling too.

One room, one chest, and nothing else. The chest holds rotted leather, rusted blades proportioned for very long arms, a spear or pike head, a curved dagger meant for flaying, and a broad pockmarked short sword that had kept its edge through the centuries the rest of it spent rusting. Beside them a spilled pouch of seven Mól silver coins, near pure and larger than anything minted since. Under the chest is a stone nook with slots for several things and only one still in it: a tarnished ring of the same metal that veins the walls, engraved on the inside in G’lin. The nook is what the chamber was built around, and the ring is what was left in it. Who emptied the other slots, and how long ago, was never discovered.

The gear is cut for bugbears, and that is what names the place. Clan Säv were bugbear by blood and one of the great clans of the Mól Empire, regents and administrators who worked by access rather than by force, and this was one of their bolt-holes. It accounts for the proportions in the chest, and it accounts for where the room sits: close enough to the keep in the Valley of Doom that anyone holding the one could reach the other without being seen on the road between them.

It is not a keep itself. There is no curse in it, no stair, no second door, and nothing that took more than an afternoon to search once the hallway was disarmed. The whole of it is a trapped corridor, a hidden catch, a room, and a chest.