The Crack

A cavern southwest of Haudh-Gwenn, deep enough that its lower reaches open into the Underôth, and the only site to have served both sides of the same war. The Ten Lashes held their auctions in its barred cage-hall. It now shelters thirty and more freed refugees under Edrick, who keeps it as a base and a bolt-hole both. They are the people smuggled out of Haudh-Gwenn, and the cave could not feed them on its own: Captain Jack of Harad agreed to send his town’s surplus up, with refugees rotating out to work Harad’s fields in exchange.

Behind the cage-hall lies a hidden Mól ruin: sarcophagi, an alchemy lab set alight during the raid itself (Joey put that fire down and saved the ledgers), and a pillared hall built around a stone basin. The party took the basin for a syrup fountain and the marks cut around it for decoration. Mikhail spent a night on the chamber afterward and read both as one thing: a device built to control water, and what lives in it.

How far the shaft runs beneath that hall was never discovered. Mikhail sent dancing lights and a lit torch down it and the light never reached the bottom, which put the drop well past a thousand feet. A climb down was weighed and set aside as too dangerous.