Wraithblade Keep

One of the seven Mól curse-keeps, and the one known only by what came out of it. It stands north of Ridh on a hill at the end of a river that runs underground: four battered walls still upright, a tower at each corner, the two on the west side tall and the two on the east short. The ride from Ridh is three days. The Valiant Few came up the river instead and it took four.

What is said of the place is always the same. Few come back, and those who do say one of their own company turned on the rest. The keep was Clan Zarkhûn’s, the empire’s smiths and metallurgists, whose boiling-blood temper was held to be the thing that made their work good. Its relic is the Wraithblade Khopesh, and the name and the reputation both come off that blade.

The Keep

The main gate is shut and has been for a long while. The way in is over the wall at a low drop on the southwest corner, which is how both companies that ever got inside did it. The river runs straight at the walls and into a grated water-gate worked by a winch and gearbox; the grate reaches the river bottom, and there is a second one behind it, so nothing swims in.

The plan of the place is a garrison’s. A gatehouse built as a killbox. A great hall and a kitchen with an oven choked with soot. A stable fifty-five feet long. A manor floor above it, meant for whoever held the keep and latterly a goblin nest. A workshop and forge with a webbed basement beneath, where a giant black widow had settled and where the cocooned dead hung. A tower room on the north-east corner given over to dogs, with a carcass torn open in the middle of it.

The forge is the prize and everyone who has stood in it says so. It burns without smoke and it does not go out, and its three quenching buckets never empty, elemental crystals set into their stone bases so that what they draw is the water a smith would want. The Elder spoke of an eternal hearth somewhere in these walls, into which a crystal can be dipped to charge it, longer for more power; which fire he meant was never said plainly, and the forge is the obvious candidate. Hinta, who has since worked at it, values it for something else again. It makes electrum as workable as steam-bent wood, which would let a smith weave the metal through a whole blade instead of setting it as a core, and she means to come back for that. Behind a mismatched stretch of wall in the largest building a door opens on a stair down to a submerged platform and a grate mechanism: a dock, small enough for a raft or a rowboat, big enough to move people and stores in and out of a sealed keep without opening a gate. Who cut it, and when, was never discovered.

The Shrine and the Anvil

The last door was the interesting one. A well-made lock of no Mól make, added within the last hundred years, and behind it a shrine kept in the Peren style with furniture older than anyone alive. The altar at the far end carries no god’s marks at all. It carries a clean ring in the dust the shape of a sword, and the door was locked from the outside. Nobody stole the Wraithblade. Somebody put it away, turned the key behind them, and walked out.

The altar stone rang hollow and proved not to be Mól stone at all but a decoy cube. Tipped over, it gave up what it had been standing on: an anvil set into the living rock with electrum threaded through the stone and into the metal. A forge in the older, narrower sense of the word, and very probably the forge. What can be made in a place can usually be unmade there. A pair of Mól calipers came out of the same part of the keep, though whether from under a bench in the shrine or out of a craft room with rings and a coin beside them is told two ways.

The Goblins and the Residue

The keep was held by Zarkhi goblins, Clan Zarkhûn’s own blood-species: hairless, huge-eyed, every tooth a canine, thick through the neck, carrying weapons broken and lashed back together. Their sentries were G’lin dogs, keen in the dark, keen-nosed, hard to sicken, and reckoned by those who fought both to be the cleverer half of the arrangement.

They fought better than they had any business fighting. The blade has been gone from these walls for years and its old servants still move in concert. The curse takes the hungriest person in reach, the one who wants most, and seeds outward through whoever answers to them. The specters it brings can be seen only by someone who has already stood too near it. Those it has taken go sunken and dark-ringed about the eyes, quick to rage, and hard to put to sleep.

The sword always leaves. It had been physically broken once before, by the hundred men with a hundred hammers over a hundred days who hammered themselves to death doing it, and the curse came back regardless. It had come home exactly once as well, thrown back over the walls. By whom was never discovered.

It holds its own dead as well. Everyone the Khopesh has ever killed gathers here, and they come out of the walls and floors as pale translucent shapes that pass through a living man and do nothing at all. The dangerous ones are the dark ones, which have not fed: a touch takes the strength out of a body, and once a dark shade has fed it goes pale like the rest and settles for good. One of the two dark ones waiting when the party came back was recognizably Oshuun Karral, who carried the sword out of here and was killed for it. They cannot find a man they cannot see, they will not cross into the shrine over the anvil, and whoever holds the sword commands them.

Campaign Updates

Kithul walked its perimeter years before anyone else went near it and called the whispers there sinister but not chaos. He returned later to scout it properly, found it intact and thick with goblins, and pulled back. On the road not far from the gates, six people left him half dead.

That crew was Dwayne’s Idir Expedition, hired through Whent to strip the keep of Mól relics for a payout somebody promised would be enough to retire on. Two of the six came out. Jahi Rasi died there; his companion Eralan was still alive in a cocoon in the basement when the Valiant Few came through, and was carried out of it. Oshuun Karral came away with the khopesh and carried it to Beltran Grayeras, who killed him for it. Whent had questioned Kithul about the water-gate and about whether the keep could quietly hold a great many people, which is what Beltran wanted with it.

The party went over the wall at midnight and took the place room by room, subduing rather than killing because Koa insisted on mercy even for the goblins, and scattering the last of them at the end, so they are loose and not dead. Two days’ rest turned up the dock. They left through the map room without opening either gate, and the portcullis stayed shut behind them.

It was argued over afterwards as a fortress. Walls, a river, a forge, a fire that never goes out, and ground that would make an enemy march a long way and arrive tired. It was rejected, because breaking a keep’s curse recoils on whatever is standing in it, and this was one of the three the party meant to break together.

Koa and Hinta came back for that, riding up from a burning Ridh with the Khopesh in its lead-lined box on a horse. Because the portcullis had never been reopened, Koa stripped down, climbed the rusted water-gate and dropped thirty feet into the river to work the winch from inside, and the sword’s dead came out of the walls at him while he did it. They shut themselves in the shrine over the anvil, which the shades will not enter, and stayed there a full week: two people, two horses, a bucket and dwindling rations. The week was granted to the Elder at Aldo’s call, on the reasoning that they had one attempt and he would be stronger for the delay. Hinta spent it at the anvil and came out of it understanding how a Mól weapon is put together, and therefore how one comes apart.

At sunrise she broke the Khopesh, about a minute and a half after the ooze burned under Haudh-Gwenn. Gnolls who had tracked them north from Ridh had come over the walls in the meantime and set fire to the barricaded door beside the anvil, and the two of them went out through the map room with the room alight behind them and the hilt of the sword thrown into the corner of it. The curse over this keep went with the blade. What is left of the keep, and whether the fire ran past that room, was never written down.

Hinta grew up near Draazstone, a few miles from these walls, and never knew the place was there.