Haudh-Gwenn Mól ruins

A collapsed Mól keep stands in the middle of Haudh-Gwenn, walled, roughly fifteen hundred feet to a side, and it has been rubble long enough that the town grew around it rather than clear it. One section of wall is still up, about thirty-five feet of it, and anyone who tries it finds out how loose the courses have gone. The rest is heaped stone with paths worn through by people who have reason to be in there. The gray is metal-veined Mól work, the same grain that runs under Loshev, and it is by centuries the oldest thing in the town.

Under the rubble are catacombs. Under those run the old Mól sewers, and behind the sewer wall, sealed in stone they offer no door into, stands the Haudh-Gwenn curse-keep.

The Quarter

On the town’s own reckoning the ruins are a district: uninhabited remnants of the ancient Mól city, a haven for vagrants and criminals, ground the general populace avoids. All of that holds. The district runs two ways at once.

The first is the tents. Makeshift shelters stand among the rubble and against the one partly standing building, put up by people with nowhere better, and they are the reason the district is inhabited at all in the face of the official word that it is not. The second is the trade. The catacombs beneath are thieves’ ground and have been for as long as anyone in the town has bothered to keep track, which is what makes the ruins worth holding: a walled square in the middle of a trade town that the guard does not enter and the respectable do not cross.

The Holding-Cave

At one edge of the rubble a wagon wheel and a few boards lean against what reads as more collapse. Behind them is a basement, and in it two cages, a table and a small campsite. Crews feeding the Ten Lashes used it as a staging cellar, holding people there for as long as it took to arrange the move out of town.

It is not the holding site in the sparse woods southwest of town. That is a separate compound with two ways in, a concealed cave mouth and a creek-side stone ruin, with a chasm between them.

The Valiant Few found the cellar because Aldo let a slaver contact walk him out to the ruins on the promise of merchandise to sell, with the other two following him at a distance to see who turned up. Three of the crew turned up, and the meeting was an ambush both ways. The company walked away from it with two prisoners, and Casper gave the cellar up under questioning the same night. Willie went into one cage. Messy went into the other before the night was out. They slept there, and for the rest of that week it was their ground in Haudh-Gwenn: where Casper came back to report, where Malik was brought to meet the rest of them, and where the raid on the auction was planned.

They call it the sock place. Aldo had gagged Willie with a sweat-soaked sock, the sock stayed behind when they left, and the name attached itself to the room rather than to the prisoner.

Campaign Updates

The slaver crews are finished and the ruins did not stay empty. The Silver Web holds them now, and holds them like a house: a token at the door, lookouts posted along the standing wall, a doorman who wants to know who sent you. Below the ground floor the ceilings drop to about seven feet, Mól height, with newer timber propping the stone and stairwells still trapped after seven centuries. The guild keeps an armory and a bunkroom down there. There is also a door on the upper floor that the guild says is not there.

The Valiant Few went in through that front door, as a smuggling crew with a token and three false names, and were inside two hours. What they were after was under the floor rather than in the guild’s rooms: the sewers, the green flow on the water, and the grate at the ruins’ edge, chained and rusted past picking. They left by the way they came and put the guild down as people who might be turned against Beltran Grayeras later.

Later, hunted through Haudh-Gwenn with the guard offering coin for their whereabouts, they went back to the cellar. It was still the safest room in the town for them: the guard does not patrol the ruins, whatever else does. The sock was still there.