Episode IV — Seven Adventurers, a Mule, a Ruby, and a Baby
With Zhellin gone and the cart reclaimed, the survivors did what survival demanded: they kept moving.
The donkey that pulled the cart—once thought to belong to Zhellin—was renamed with the blunt affection travelers reserve for burdens that do not argue.
Muellner.
There was debate about where to go next, but not much. Their cargo—nearly fifty pieces of Dragonglass—was too volatile to linger with. The consensus formed around a single direction: Silversea, a coastal city where law still pretended to exist and where rumors might be turned into answers.
At sundown, they made rude camp beneath a sky that promised weather. Sleep came in fragments.
Morning arrived hot, damp, and heavy with brewing storm.
They were not far along the road when the rattling began.
Gravos Etnad heard it first—a dry, warning sound ten or fifteen feet off the path. A rattlesnake lay coiled in the scrub, too close to Muellner for comfort. Gravos, worried the mule would panic, threw a spike and pinned the snake dead.
The road answered.
More serpents poured from the brush in swarming clumps, moving like living rope. One came straight for Gravos. Others surged toward Thorin Windfurrow and Basarios Heros.
The fight was immediate and ugly.
Grimgrun Blunderforge blasted a swarm apart. Zovis cracked the air with lightning. Thorin stomped and struck, trying to keep the snakes from climbing. Bas smote one knot of serpents with fierce, radiant force.
They turned to the swarm on Thorin.
Zovis electrocuted half of it.
The other half sank fangs into Thorin until he collapsed.
Even then, the survivors prevailed—barely—and Muellner did not bolt.
Later, the road forked.
A skeleton hung from a weathered post, its arm stretched toward the left branch as if the dead itself offered directions. A sign hung below it, scratched in a spiky script unfamiliar to most of the party.
But not to Grimgrun.
The box dwarf read it aloud with unsettling certainty:
“Go left.”
“All parties go left.”
Gravos said what everyone should have been thinking.
“This is a trap.”
They went left anyway.
The next day, Thorin spotted a ruby along the road—large, clean, and strangely placed. It was not dragonglass. It did not spark with lightning. It simply waited, red as fresh blood in sunlight.
Thorin checked for wires and pits, then lifted it.
A voice began thanking him.
The ruby insisted—repeatedly—that it was not a talking ruby, even as it continued talking. It asked Thorin’s name. Then Basarios’s. Thorin dropped it mid-conversation.
Bas picked it up.
The ruby resumed talking immediately, as though the interruption had never occurred.
It became clear that the gem could only see and hear while held—like a mind trapped in stone, waking only when carried.
Basarios became, in the ruby’s opinion, its “bestest friend.”
They asked its name. It had none. Names were proposed, argued over, and finally accepted.
Ruben.
Grimgrun immediately suggested eating Ruben, preferably on rye.
Gravos looked visibly haunted by the thought that he now traveled with a talking gemstone and a dwarf who spoke of gemstones as lunch.
Ruben’s memory was incomplete. He could not recall how he came to lie in the road, and his knowledge—vast as it seemed—contained holes like missing teeth.
But what he did know made the road feel older.
He spoke of an ancient Dragon Empire, once vast enough to mark borders with colossal statues. Its people worshiped dragons as gods—until, by some mysterious cause, the dragons all died.
Ruben warned them not to use magic on or near dragonglass. Then he paused, frustrated, as though reaching for a memory he could almost touch. Bas noticed a small chip missing from one of Ruben’s facets.
A wound.
Perhaps the source of his forgetfulness.
Bas asked about The Hero Journal of Lady Eleanor Sunhelm—his idol, his muse, the voice that shaped his notion of glory. Ruben answered with reverence: Lady Eleanor, he said, was among the greatest paladins who ever lived. To help others was her highest deed. To die in glorious battle was her final perfection.
Basarios listened like a man hearing scripture.
Not long after, Thorin spotted movement on the road ahead.
A massive scorpion pulled a six-wheeled carriage—round-bodied, bulbous, and strapped with packs like a traveling storehouse. The driver wore a conical hat and a robe sewn with moons and stars, singing as he guided the creature.
He slowed, called greeting, and offered trade—magic items, he said, salvaged from nearby ruins.
Then Ruben began to speak again, explaining more of dragons and empires and borders.
The driver heard the ruby.
He did not like what he heard.
Whatever courage carried him into Osweg did not extend to traveling beside a talking gemstone. He urged his scorpion onward and left them behind without another word.
Zovis, however, was captivated. She listened to Ruben’s lore as they walked, as though the road itself had become a lecture hall.
By the next day, Bas passed Ruben into Zovis’s hands.
The heat became brutal.
The air shimmered. Sweat dried into salt. Even Muellner seemed to resent the sun.
It was then they saw a dead tree beside the road, and a woman standing near it with a bag.
Zovis called out. The woman asked her to come closer—just for a moment—just to hold the bag. She claimed she had been carrying it all day.
Ruben did not want to be near what he called “a baby.” Zovis handed the ruby back to Bas.
Gravos—perhaps to be helpful, perhaps because he did not know what else to do—found a snake rattle and offered it as entertainment.
The woman smiled.
Zovis took the bag.
The woman drank from a vial, vanished, and fled—footsteps pounding away into brush.
Zovis nearly threw the bag after her.
Then the bag cried.
Inside was a baby boy.
Pointed ears.
Elf-blood.
No note. No explanation. No mercy in the act.
Gravos announced, loudly, that perhaps they should shoot the stork that dropped it off and eat that for dinner instead.
No one laughed.
Ruben—still in Bas’s hand—declared they were near an inn called The Crooked Crown and that they could likely reach it by nightfall.
As they approached, they saw their welcome.
A man wearing nothing but a towel sprinted from the inn, chased by an angry dwarf woman wielding a rolling pin with murderous intent. The man—skinny, gaunt, black-haired, perhaps thirty—looked half-dead from panic alone.
Grimgrun tried to trip him.
The towel-clad man avoided it with humiliating ease, then stopped near the cart, breathing hard, and looked them over. The dwarf woman caught up and glared at all of them as though they were newly delivered problems.
She introduced herself with surprising politeness.
“My name is Molly,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Can I have the baby?”
The towel-clad man—who identified himself as Donald—remarked grimly that Silversea was going to hate him again. When asked why, he revealed more: he was one of the Queen’s Rangers.
A ranger.
Bas produced a robe. Donald donned it with visible gratitude, then asked if someone could retrieve his clothes from the inn. Bas agreed—and summarized their story in the way heroes do when trying to sound reasonable.
Donald asked what Zhellin looked like.
Bas described him.
Donald frowned.
“That sounds like Velek the Sly,” he said.
A new truth settled into place:
Muellner wasn’t Zhellin’s ass at all.
Muellner belonged to Velek the Sly.
By the time they stepped toward the ramshackle inn, the survivors had acquired:
- an elf baby with no origin and no explanation,
- a talking ruby encyclopedia with missing memories,
- a half-naked Queen’s Ranger with a history in Silversea,
- and a dwarf innkeeper named Molly who asked for the baby too quickly.
They also carried a cart of dragonglass.
And somewhere behind them, the road kept its secrets.
Recorded Consequences
- Muellner’s true ownership called into question
- First contact with Ruben, the talking ruby
- Confirmation of ancient dragon-empire lore
- An elf infant abandoned into the party’s care
- Encounter with a Queen’s Ranger and the name Velek the Sly
Connected Entries