"Ooh, we should stay at the grand inn! We can afford it, right?" 

"You can afford it. I can afford it, for now, but I don't know how much gold we'll be pulling in."

"I suppose I could, but I would rather not. I do not even need to sleep right now, really."

"Oh, alright. It's not like I'm going to be able to ask my parents for more money, am I? The lesser inn, then?" 

"It serves our purposes."

The lesser inn is a noisy place, with a variety of options for the aspiring adventurer. For example, places to sleep can be cold, cramped, and private, or warm, noisy, and in the common room. Food can be reheated stew or roast chicken (very little) and vegetables (lots, mostly zucchini and squash), all served with the profusion of condiments normal to fallen tower cuisine. Drinks include beer that tastes like piss, sour wine, extremely strong local apple spirits, and ice-cold water that probably won't give you cholera. The patrons come in "secretive huddle of adventurers", "surly dwarves", and "drunk local", all willing to hold forth at length about the inn's inadequacy to anyone who will listen. The prices aren't even particularly good. Ossa has to be left with the wagon to prevent thefts while they sleep. The owner is a middle-aged orc with a missing eye who will cheerily inform the party of all of this - but it's still better than camping out in freezing rain or snow. 

Well if the prices here aren't great just imagine how much money they're saving not staying at the fancy inn!

Sida gets some stew and vegetables and finds a table.

They are saving So Much money!

Dyva will have chicken and vegetables, all doused in prodigious amounts of sour berry jam and chilli crisp, and a glass of the apple spirits. 

"Since we're now, you know, traveling and working together and everything, I invite you both to call me by my informal name. It's Sida."

"Oh nice! Thank you Sida! We don't have anything like that here, I think. Maybe dwarves do or something." She would have offered it to Sida months ago if she did, being chronically informal as she is. 

"I did not know you had more than the one. As you like, Sida."

"I would be kinda surprised if anyone here used canaanite naming conventions. Just one of the thousand little things that are different. I like some of them, though. The food here—in this world, not just this inn specifically—sucks a lot of the time, but people use a lot more flavors. The cuisine has got a lot more pizazz, or adventurousness, here than at home."

She takes another bite of some vegetables.

"Necessity turns the water-wheel of innovation, I guess. When you've got to eat a bunch of mushrooms, you'll find a way to make it work."

"Yeah! I love how every place I eat at has something new to put on my food! It's great! Variety is the spice of life, and spice is the variety of cooking!" 

After they finish eating, Sida gets a room and prepares to sleep. Shortly after, she returns.

"The rooms here are pretty cold. Hey Tarka, do you want to cuddle?"

"...No."

"Hey Dyva, do you—"

"Nope!" 

"Oh, well. Good night, fellas."

Obviously she can't use fireballs to stay warm, but maybe in the future she can work out a good way to transfer the heat into some kind of heat sink...

Inventing niche new spells to aid dubious life choices is the ritual mage's watchword! But probably someone has already invented this one. She can check the next time she's in a city, or maybe one of these little villages will have a local mage with a solution. 

The night will pass, eventually. The morning is clouded, gloomy, and totally failing to warm things up. Breakfast by the the fire helps. The inn provides unspiced stewed apples, overcooked scrambled eggs, and oily marinaded mushrooms for breakfast. It's almost tasty. Dyva has a coffee-pot and a supply of beans in the cart, so at least the morning can begin with stimulants as well, a fact for which the party gets a few envious looks. 

Soon enough, they are back on the road, moving through what is transitioning from orchards to empty rice-paddies. Still, many people can be seen hard at work. By mid-morning, it has started to snow, lightly, as the clouds above grow ever darker and denser. 

Dyva and Tarka not wanting to cuddle is an unfortunate choice on their parts, but she wouldn't go so far as to call it dubious.

Sida will gladly accept coffee. (Though the stimulants she could get at home were way better. She misses them.)

"Ooh. Snow is fun. It's a bit of an unfortunate time to be traveling, though. If only I had been hit by that truck a few months earlier... We should still make it to the mountains before it gets too cold, right?"

Tarka doesn't drink, or need, coffee.

"We cannot afford to take too many detours, but it is only a couple of weeks travel. We will make it."

There are many superior stimulants on the market, but they get real expensive if you want something that's going to reduce your reaction time to a negative number. 

"There's usually a month or two between the first snows and things getting properly frozen over. I'm more worried about my plants! My poor orchids." 

The next time they stop, she's going to go move a bunch of the smaller and more fragile pots into the carriage. 

"I feel like maybe you should have thought this through more? Anyways, do you want help with that?"

"I mean, I did think this through a lot! I didn't bring anything super-fragile and I can heal things that get majorly damaged and a lot of stuff is just going to shut down totally for winter, but like, being snowed on isn't good for lots of things even if I think I can get them through the winter! It's like - I have a plan for keeping them alive, I just need to execute the plan! And then have sympathy for anything that gets frostburn anyway, because plans aren't ever perfect. You can help if you want to, but I can handle it by myself."  

(She does in fact, have a carefully waterproofed crate for these pots inside the carriage, so they won't get dirt or water on anyone's possessions) 

"Oh, so when you say you're worried, you just mean generally anxious, not that there's something you haven't priced in."

"Yeah! Gardening is very intensive of attention and labour and then sometimes everything will die anyway for reasons you'd need to be superhuman to catch. Gods and figures of legend can garden without inexplicably dead plants, but I cannot. It's also a bit worse because I'm babying a smaller number of plants through a intrinsically risky scenario." 

"Do you ever wish you were a giant, with pitted skin made of stone or metal, that plants could grow all over your body and you would carry them with you everywhere you walked?"

"Oh I read about some warforged of the 10th generation doing that! It sounded pretty cool! Old warforged can do some pretty interesting things with their bodies, sometimes. I think it could be pretty interesting - maybe when I end up undead I'll try doing something like that."

"What type of undead are you thinking? I was under the impression that becoming a lich is really hard and most of the other ones have severe downsides."

"Becoming a lich *is* really hard, but that's the dream - when I get strong enough, I'm going to ask great-grandfather for his notes, he says he's figured out a way to do it more ethically. Otherwise ... realistically, the obvious answer is having one of my relatives reanimate me as a deathknight, which is simple enough. Main downside there is just the constant decay of your body and mind. Aunty, that is, one of great-grandfather's old travelling companions, has made a pretty good job of adjusting, she loves to mess with her body. So I do know the problems can be beaten. There's always being a ghoul or a vampire, but I don't think I'd find the hunger very enjoyable. There are lots of weirder options, but none of them have leapt out at me as particularly compelling. Being a morgh or a mummy or a barrow-wight or something would mostly just suck, you loose all your flexibility and the process fills you up with hostile instincts. I guess I could invent my own type of undead, people have done that, but I think plans for that should wait until after I've actually got some necromancy going. I've studied theory, but my soul isn't strong enough to sustain two casting systems at once yet..." 

She laughs.

"They're all such shitty forms of immortality. Still, arguably better than freezing people's heads. Oh, important question—are vampires sexy?"

"Depends a *lot* on the vampire. Some of them are supernaturally attractive, some of them have the approximate appearance of a porcupine that's been left to rot for a month, and there are examples of all of the range in between. A mix of their personal skills and the bloodline they're descended from. I think there's a small clan under the tower mostly hovering around 'tastefully preserved corpse of someone who starved to death'." 

"I think being a sexy vampire might be fun. As long as they don't get sexually transmitted diseases, which I think would make sense but then again, magic."

"Vampire metabolisms are a mess, I know they can be asymptomatically contagious for bloodborne diseases sometimes? So probably they're like that for sexually transmitted ones as well. Main problem aside from the hunger for a vampire is the long and slightly unpredictable list of weaknesses, and the fact that you're hooking yourself into an ancient mind-control-enforced hierarchy. You can dodge that last one if you're careful, but it's certainly a pretty big risk. I'm not actually sure the average vampire manages to extend their lifespan to a meaningful extent with the transformation. That's true of a lot of attempts at immortality, I think, actually? You either take a lot of risks and end up dying within a century anyway, or you don't and you end up living a profoundly limited life that doesn't achieve very much." 

"I retract my previous statement. Mind control is no fun at all and I want nothing to do with it."

The back-and-forth conversation continues incessantly over the new few days, Sida and Dyva comparing opinions on everything from geography to music to historical figures. 

Over the next week, intermittent snows continue, but never for long, with a warm afternoon or bout of rain always coming to preventing it building up too much. Several of Dyva's plants suffer frostburn; some are healed with spare magic, some are left to reduce down to roots and bulbs, and some just die. Overall, she considers it a success. 

Sida spends more time walking alongside the wagon than sitting on its bench, although she can't keep it up all day. Unfortunately, after more than a year spent mostly with her nose in books, her stamina isn't what it used to be.

When Tarka isn't sleeping (he sometimes does this, curling up in a nook inside the wagon, on no fixed schedule) she often sings. Sometimes songs from home, in canaanite no one but her understands, sometimes songs she learned in the city. She also composes (improvises, really) a few new ones. It's actually not very difficult to get your desired meter and rhyme scheme when you can draw upon words from... apparently all of the languages spoken on this planet? Well, the ones that are pronounceable enough to be sung, anyways.

One day, about a week and a half after setting out, the road passes through a stand of managed woodland where the land is too rough for rice-paddies, and a rustling in the bushes gives way to the terrible roar of a giant boar, maybe 5ft tall at the shoulder and possessed of razor-sharp tusks and tons of muscle. It charges at Sida walking alongside the cart. 

Ossa moves to intercept, taking the charge on his shield but being shoved back by the weight of the boar, only barely avoiding falling over entirely. 

"Ahhh it's a giant animal!"

Sida has, at Tarka's insistence, been casting Mage Armor on herself on a regular basis, so she has some protection. However, that boar is still much larger than her! She opens the arcane channels encoded onto her soul to trigger a reserve ritual, causing—

...a small flame to spring from her fingers, fly towards the boar, and crash against it's side, bursting into a ten-foot-wide fireball. This is rather less devastating than one might imagine.

Tarka jumps down from the wagon bench, runs up to the boar's other side, and slashes at it with his (kobold-sized) sword and knife. This has a greater effect.

The boar roars and squeals with pain, it's fur burned off in great patches by the flame, and rounds to try and crush Tarka into the ground with it's weight. 

Dyva also begins to cast, filling her own hands with fire, which she prepares to throw. 

Tarka makes for a small, fast-moving target. He is able to dodge the hooves bearing down on him.

Sida decides to try her crossbow, rushing to grab it off the wagon's bench, draw back the string, and load a bolt.

"I said you ought to carry that with you!"

"Yes, yes, you've made your point."

She aims, shoots, and misses.

"Fuck!"

Dyva finishes readying her handfuls of fire to throw, and misses her first throw. The second one hits the boar in the face, not exploding into a fireball but nonetheless causing the boar to further squeal in pain. 

Ossa has regained his balance, and goes for a stab deep into the flank of the boar. 

The boar dies, but while it is still noticing this, it takes out its pain with a swipe of its tusks at Tarka. 

Tarka is unable to evade them completely, and suffers a cut on one of his legs.

He grimaces in pain.

[THE PRICE OF PROGRESS.]

"Dyva, this is within your ability to heal, correct?"

"Yeah, should be!" 

The boar being dead, or at least no longer moving, Dyva will rush forward to cast a healing spell on Tarka. It will be sufficient - the wound will glow with golden light, and then close. 

"Ah. Thank you."

"So, uh, we survived our first fight. Yay?"

"It would have been easier had we seen the boar coming from farther away. Or heard it."

"Yeah, I have magic for calming animals, but it doesn't really work if they've already attacked you, most things are really insistent about finishing fights already in progress."

"Anyone know how to butcher a pig?" 

"I have to admit, that is really not something my life has prepared me for. I think the tenderloin is located along the back half of the spine, near the pelvis. That's probably the main piece of meat we want to grab."

"We cannot take most of this with us. Just the ivory and some meat, I think. I would rather not bother with the hide, given..."

He gestures towards the extensive cuts and still-burning hair.

"I guess I'll have to figure things out from first principles, then. Can't be any harder than fleshcrafting, I've had a bit of practice at that, when one of my relatives needed a spare pair of hands."  

Dyva sets to work bleeding the pig, extracting internal organs, removing skin, cutting out the ivory, etc. It's not perfect, but nothing about boar-meat makes it particularly delicate. 

"Does someone want to start a fire? We can do a big cookup, eat some of what we can't carry now?"  

Sida helps with the butchery. She has nearly zero experience with dead bodies of any species, but she has read a few anatomy books lately, and a lot of curiosity about how the pieces fit together in practice. You can read all you like, but you never really know what something is going to look like until you cut it open.

Tarka gets to work building a fire.

Then a meal will be had! Roast pork for everyone! It is extremely gamey, but otherwise pretty good. Dyva will break out stored condiments to eat it with. Some of the leftovers can be wrapped up and stored for future lunches, it'll last a while in this cold weather. 

"I kinda want to try carving one of these tusks but I don't know how valuable they are, or if it's worth taking that out of my share."

"They're probably not worth that much until they start to get really big. I'm fine if you take one!" She glances at Tarka, expecting him to be the stickler over treasure distribution. 

He shrugs.

"Alright then. I've got a few ideas..."

The party resume travel, making good pace along the road, staying at the inns regularly dotted along it, and mostly avoiding trouble. The river-valley they move through slowly slopes up into the mountains, and the forests that sit on the slopes beyond the fields slowly transition from bare-branched mixed forests to evergreen pines, and eventually this slope is too much for the gentle slope of the river, so there is a lock. It's a grand old thing, made of snow-white stone that's quite unlike the grey-and-green rock that's local to the city of the fallen tower. In places, the lock has been repair with wood or that local stone, but where they haven't been replaced, the stones have been worn smooth by the ages, the footprints of two thousand years left as marks in stone stairs. This is the first, and smallest, of the locks that give the kingdom of locks it's name. 

The lock is accompanied by a rise in the level of the entire bottom of the river-valley, as rice-terraces have been cut to match it. The road becomes a long switch-back, promising a long and tedious process of turning the carriage and chivvying the oxen to get it up to the top of the lock, there the land can continue more-or-less level for a while longer. Some enterprising sorts have set up stalls up and down the road, and at the top and bottom of the lock, selling refreshments, trinkets, and additional teamsters to the travellers.  

"How old is this?"

The vendors are happy to exposit to travellers about their local wonders. 

"They say it predates the fall itself! Now, I don't know about that, but it absolutely was here in the first records of the old empire exploring this far north, and who could have built such a wonder but the ancients themselves?" 

"Um, it would take a long time, but it's not actually that complicated. Seems kinda weird to say it wouldn't be possible for anyone else to build something like this. Dyva, am I missing something?"

"It's really expensive to do something like this, especially with non-local stone. Like *really* expensive. I'm not well-studied on what exactly the dark era dwarf-kings were up to around here, but I'll bet they were much more focused on survival than expanding the economic reach of their holds. Also this is the smallest and least impressive of the locks, so they say?" 

The vendor looks a little bit put out, but agrees that this lock, as impressive as it is, has nothing on the ones in the mountains proper. 

"Yeah, I suppose the system as a whole could get to be pretty costly, and it would take a long time to repay the investment." Sigh. "Everything's fucked up, I guess."

"The world of today is not the world of a millennia ago! Some modern powers could afford infrastructure projects on this scale today, but only the big ones and we're not in a big one." 

"What's fucked up is that there isn't enough of a financial system or enough long-term stability for the money to go where it's needed most. Well, that's what's implied from what you're telling me."

"That is certainly true! Though also I think generally the people with the money would disagree with you about where it is needed most, most of the time?" 

"Okay, maybe I should take a few steps back. It's entirely possible that in ancient times they had used up all the opportunities that were better than building giant infrastructure projects, so they built giant infrastructure projects, and the reason why giant infrastructure projects don't get built anymore is that there are better things to invest in. In which case it sounds like it's not that we modern day people can't do stuff like this, but that we don't have a sufficiently compelling reason to."

"I think giant infrastructure projects do still get built occasionally, but all the low-hanging fruit in that regard has been taken? And they certainly wouldn't be built *here*, this trade route is nice but it's not *that* important, and there isn't a big enough government controlling it. Lots of governments focus on repairing ancient infrastructure over building new things anyway, it's more economical." 

Sida starts laughing.

"I just realized how stupid this conversation is. No one in the present is capable of building these locks, because they already exist! We don't have—" Breath. "economically viable construction opportunities like we used to. Curse this fallen world we live in!"

Dyva will break into sympathetic laughter. 

"Ha, when you put it like that." 

Eventually, they are able to get the wagon up the switchbacks and continue upriver of the lock. Several days later, the party approaches a crossroads. Tarka takes a look at the milestone.

[UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, HONOR RECOMMENDS YOU VISIT. IF THE OTHERS ARE AGREEABLE, GO THERE.]

"If neither of you mind, I would like to take a detour. There is a village a few days travel west of here I ought to visit. And no doubt there will be monsters to slay along the way."

"Fine by me. Leaving the main road is probably a good idea anyways, we haven't seen much action so far."

"Yeah I felt a bit bad about only going where everyone else was going, we were never going to find something interesting like that. So yeah, let's go!" 

They take the turn away from the main highway, following a tributary of the main river up into the hills. For a while, the geography follows the same pattern - paddies cut into the lower reaches into the valleys, with fields and woods further from the river and desolate pasture visible on distant hilltops, though the towns get smaller and predominately dwarf. Eventually, they need to turn off from even this road, and, with a few instructions from the locals, find themselves in a little town where they produce rothe, oats, and herbs from the local forest, along with all the various little products every small town produces. 

Tarka excuses himself, asks a few locals for directions, and makes his way to Pethric's family's house, a two-room mud brick building on the outskirts of town. It's evening, and they ought to be finishing the day's work soon, or have finished already. He knocks.

A middle-aged woman opens the door, looks confused for a moment before gazing down at Tarka, and says, "Hello. Who are you?"

"My name is Tarka, madam. I am an adventurer, formerly out of the Fallen Tower. I have news about Pethric."

She blanches. "What is it?"

"He has perished. Three weeks ago."

"I—what happened?"

"I can tell you the full story, though perhaps there are others who would like to hear it?"

"Right. Of course. Come on in, I'll... tell everyone." She exits through the backdoor, with some haste.

When Pethric's mother, father, and sister have gathered inside, Tarka begins to speak.

"During the last several months, I made several delves into the Fallen Tower. Usually with the same group, consisting of Pethric, myself, and two others. On our third and last delve, we encountered an ankheg, laying in ambush. They are not easy to detect before their trap is sprung, but it is possible to evade them, given enough situational awareness. Unfortunately, the others panicked." (had no idea how to react and made it much worse) "Pethric did not make it." (was eaten alive) "We were not able to recover any remains," (as they were inside the ankheg's stomach) "and I regret to say I do not have any of his personal effects to return to you either." (his landlord having decided to keep them) "I did not know him for long, but I considered him a good man," (albeit naive) "and I wish I could have done more." (much as he tried) "My condolences."

"Foolish boy, he—we told him not to follow that path."

"It is an inherently dangerous career." (though Pethric could have been more careful)

"Thank you for bringing us this news."

"I was in the area, it was little trouble. I had best let you have your privacy. If you have no further questions?"

"No. Safe travels."

Tarka departs.

[YOUR PRESENT COMPANIONS ARE MORE SENSIBLE. THEY MAY SURVIVE LONGER.]

Sida is with Dyva at the wagon, carving one of the boar tusks. So far she has eaten away at enough of the surface for two thirds of it to be textured like scales.

"Hey, Tarka. Did you have fun with your, uh, whatever you were doing?"

"Just delivering a message. And no, not really."

The party travels from here up into the hills, planning to take a small road from one river valley to the next one up, and thus avoid needing to retrace their steps back down to the main river. This will save a few days travel, and moreover, it'll be interesting. The villages they're travelling through now are separated by stretches of wind-swept moorland, or little forests tucked away in small valleys and hollows where the weather is less harsh, and the party has to stay in barns or spare bedrooms rather than proper inns. Still, they're keeping ahead of the pace they need to set in order to make it to the mountains before winter sets in.

Eventually, they arrive in a small village, no more than a dozen houses set along the road around a manor, whose solid stone construction looks impressive only by comparison to the mud-brick of the other houses, and one of the many dwarf peasants of the region will approach them. 

"Excuse me Ma'am, but you are adventurers, correct?" 

"Yes," says Sida with absolute confidence. Does it matter that they're almost completely inexperienced? Of course not.

"Ah, well, that's good then. We've had a bit of trouble, see. Some folks have set up out near our shrine to the Green God, they have some sort of ritual planned and threw fire at us the last couple of times we went over there. If you could go deal with that, we'd be very grateful, and we could scrape together a nice reward for you, I'm sure." 

"Throwing fire isn't even that hard... Tarka, you think we can handle this?"

"Quite possibly so. We ought to take a look."

"Let's do it then! After we park the wagon."

"Finally, something interesting! Let's go!" 

(Dyva will make sure the wagon is securely parked and so forth, properly locked up. She's not that worried, but Ossa will be coming with them, rather than staying with the wagon as he usually does)

They are directed to take a goat-track out of town, past some gardens, and some flocks of surly-looking goats, to a place where a sturdy wooden fence separates the moor from a dark and overgrown patch of forest. The path continues into the woods; people not as short as dwarves will find that they have to duck under a number of vines and branches along the way. 

Tarka leads the way, avoiding all the branches and making very little noise.

Sida follows a short way behind him, crouching low to the ground in a partially-successful effort to avoid hitting the branches and making noise.

Dyva will follow carefully, only ceasing to natter about the botany of the forest when prompted by her more-stealthy friends. 

Ossa will walk into several branches, and prove that he's entirely unsuited to quieting the clanking of his armour. 

"Does Ossa have a quiet setting? Or are we just doomed in that department?"

"... Unfortunately, no, the body wasn't any good at stealth and honestly stealth in heavy metal armour is a doomed endeavour even for experts." 

"I should have considered this."

"Ossa is probably sufficiently useful in combat that it is not worth leaving him behind. The next best thing to stealth is speed, so I suppose we should just jog to the shrine."

"That makes sense, if we're only expecting a single fight." 

"I do not know what we should expect, but as long as we avoid tiring ourselves out, I think it is desirable to come in fast and disorient any enemies. In this terrain, they will not see us coming from very far."

"Okay. Let's go, then!"

Moving at pace only increases the number of accidental collisions with tree-branches that occur, but people can figure things out and get moving. After half an hour of moving at a decent clip, the path they're on opens out into a clearing, a cathedral of trees where sunlight filters through the arches of tree-branches meeting high above to frame a place of natural beauty. At the centre of the clearing, is a large monolith, twice the size of a human, engraved with runes of classical dwarven script. This is the shrine that they were told to expect. 

This is not all that is in the clearing; around the monolith a circle, with accompanying runes, has been carved into the dirt and filled with ash, that glows a sickly green colour. Inside the circle is a giant snake, with jewel-green scales and a bright red jewel in it's forehead to match its eyes, maybe 30ft long and 2ft wide, writhing in pain of an unknown cause. A elf man and a raptoran woman are peering at the circle, discussing something, while a third person, a human, is keeping watch over the path the party approaches from. They give a shout:

"Hey! Who're you!" 

It's possible that the villager they spoke to was lying to them, and these people are here on perfectly innocuous business. But it sure looks like they're doing magic to the shrine and torturing this snake, which seems bad. She throws a fireball at them.

"You may surrender at any time!"

[NEGOTIATION MAY PROVE USEFUL—]

Oh, okay then. Tarka runs forward to attack the nearest target.

One of the druids will go down flailing with a face full of fire! Another will say a word of power, and the forest reaches out to grab the party, and also their unfortunate guard, just before Tarka reaches them. That guard does their best to ignore the mess of vines they're tangled up in, and instead does something to make their walking stick grow a mess of vicious-looking thorns. 

Ossa struggles and rattles, but is held fast. 

Dyva will curse and try to throw fire, and fail, her hands to well-bound to make the right motions. 

Tarka is fast enough to avoid the vines and run for the druids, attacking the one Sida hit while he's busy being on fire.

Sida doesn't need her hands free. Having inscribed her fire ritual onto her very soul, she has achieved one of the dreams shared by mages everywhere: the ability to throw fire with her mind. Have some more fire, druids.

Tarka can cut down the on-fire druid, and the other one will decide to cower on the ground rather than continue to fight with severe burns, leaving only the guard-druid, who has a very spiky stick, but is as immobilised as everyone other than Tarka.

"Release the vines!"

Issuing demands like this is pretty fun. Another person might think, 'I hope this doesn't awaken anything in me', but in Sida's case that ship has sailed.

The person who created the vines really isn't thinking about them right now, they're mainly thinking 'ah, ah, I'm on fire, it burns'. 

But with a little external prompting, they will release the magic, and the vines and branches binding everyone will wither and return to their original places, leaving only dishevelled adventurers and churned earth to show they were ever there. 

The guard-druid will glance back and forth, and then make a break for the woods. 

Seems kinda unethical to attack a fleeing enemy... But what if he has information? Or what if he's going to contact reinforcem—whatever. Fireball.

"I said you could surrender, not run away!"

[HE MAY POSSESS USEFUL INFORMATION OR VALUABLES. CAPTURE HIM.]

Tarka runs to chase the guy running away.

The fleeing druid is set on fire, and then tackled to the ground. They will stop resisting. One druid is lying on the ground groaning in pain; one is lying on the ground, growning in pain and also being sat on by a kobold. The third is still alive, technically, but rapidly approaching levels of blood loss where this will no longer be the case.

Dyva will get up from where the entanglement magic had her pinned and dust herself off. 

"Well! I think that went pretty well, all things considered." 

"Yeah, I thought it would be harder. Dyva, could you..." she gestures vaguely in the direction of the dying person. "Make sure they don't bleed out?"

And to the guy Tarka is sitting on, "Okay, talk. What were guys doing here, with the shrine, and the giant snake? What was the plan?"

"Oh, right, sure, I'll get on that!" 

Dyva will heal the bleeding druid with the literal bare minimum possible amount of healing magic; enough to stabilise him, but not a drop more. He is still unconscious and heavily injured, but no longer at immediate risk of death. 

The druid that Tarka is sitting on does not seem immediately inclined to talk.

There are ways of making people talk, but Sida doesn't know very much about them. She walks over to the other other druid, the one who is neither on the brink of death or being sat upon.

"Hey. You heard me."

They groan in pain. 

"Ah, we were, trying to bind it?" 

"Yeah, I figured. Why? What was the plan? What were you going to do with it?"

"We'd be strong? Strong enough to win fights? Didn't know which fights yet." 

Ughhh this is annoying. She is going to take a look at the binding circle and try to figure out how to release the snake.

Sida is aware that most binding circles will fail if you break them, but in this case failure would mean that a very large, very angry, possibly magical, snake would be released, when this happens.

Right, but is there a way to stop the part that's causing the snake pain and making it angry? Or...

"Dyva, could you cast Calm Animal?"

Well, these bits are doing the containment work, probably, so maybe the rest of it is doing whatever's causing the snake pain? 

"I can try? I'm not sure I'm strong enough or the snake could be too magical?" 

She will cast. The magic will not take. The snake remains angry and in pain.

"I could try again, but then I'd be out of 1st level spells for the day. I feel like I should save some proper healing, all things considered." 

She tries destroying the parts of the circle not responsible for keeping the snake contained.

The snake ceases to be in pain! It does not cease to be angry, but now it has enough focus to start testing the boundaries of its confinement. 

Ooh, the intimidation factor of the snake's imminent escape seems like it could be useful.

"So, what kind of snake is it? Where did you get it?"

What is Sida doing? Does she have a plan?

[FOR NOW, ALLOW HER TO PROCEED.]

More groans of pain. 

"Ah. I think it's called a deathtongue? Something like that. Venomtongue? Found it eating wild boars somewhere, lured it to the shrine." 

"So, you three found a magic snake, decided to enslave it, and seized this shrine to do so. I'm with the snake on this one."

To Dyva and Tarka, "You guys want to just take their stuff and leave them to the snake? There's a chance at least one of them will survive."

"I was wondering what the plan for dealing with them was. Not like we could leave them to hang around menacing the village. I like it!" 

"It is agreeable to me."

The druids had a small camp, with simple shelters arranged around a fire. Going through their pockets and bags for valuables yields a modest but unimpressive amount of coinage and some cheap jewellery, but Dyva finds that they have been harvesting and preserving various useful herbs and plants from the local forest. She can't identify everything perfectly, but everything wrapped up and stored is only a couple of bags of material so she takes it all, foisting them onto Ossa. If it was worth preserving, probably someone in the next proper town will be willing to buy it or find a use for it. 

The snake doesn't seem like it's going to escape imminently, so after packing up the loot and herding the druids into the center of the clearing, Sida destroys a few more of the runes on the circle and books it.

Hopefully this is a good idea?

The snake is certainly not considering pursuit it's top priority, but with the whole party getting out of there as quickly as possible, it's hard to tell what exactly happens. There is a scream, which might be considered a good sign. A sign of some kind, certainly. 

Once they've reached a safe distance, Sida says, "Probably we should have had more of a plan going into that."

"I was hoping you had a plan. It seemed like you had a plan. It still does seem like you just executed a plan. And I did not want to get in your way if you did have a plan."

"I did have a plan, sort of. I was making up as I went along, but there didn't really seem to be many other options than what I did. Just, maybe it could have gone better if we thought about it ahead of time."

"Oh, I feel like things went pretty well? We didn't really have the intelligence needed for a more complicated plan than that, did we?" 

"I'm not entirely sure if you mean intelligence as in knowledge, or intelligence as in cognitive ability. One of the reasons I dislike this language, but anyways. I was kinda confused about the social-philosophy stuff and realized pretty much immediately we should have thought about it first. Like, that villager was probably telling us the truth, but we didn't know for certain and should have had some idea of how to evaluate whether or not those guys were in the wrong. Which I did, and I think I made the right choice, but it was stressful and annoying and could have gone better. We also didn't think ahead of time about what was an appropriate response to their hijacking the shrine. I think releasing the snake made sense, but possibly wasn't very safe for us. Maybe it would have been better to randomly select two of them to die, one to live, and set up the snake to escape the circle after a couple of hours so it wouldn't be able to eat us."

"Ah, I mean intelligence as in strategically relevant knowledge. I assume we were just going to kill them, because the villagers seemed legit and were willing to pay us to do that?" 

"Uh, if you want people to surrender to you, they need to expect to be better off if they surrender than if they don't. And if you're not willing to lie—which I don't want to and it doesn't work in the long term anyways—that means they need to actually be better off on average for surrendering. If they hadn't surrendered, we probably would have just killed them all, and instead they got to face the snake and possibly not die. Which is better, I think, if not by much, and I didn't see much reason to give them more than that."

"... Oh, huh. I guess so? I'd think the fact that like, most people haven't heard of you, you're mostly just dealing with the common pool of expected responses to surrender, right? I guess in the long run a reputation for mercy is advantageous but that wasn't really the sort of thing which gets you a reputation for mercy?" 

"It's not about mercy, it's about not giving people cause to regret doing the things I want them to do. And I may have miscalculated that, if they had a better chance of surviving us or a worse chance of surviving the snake than I thought, but if I got my estimates right I succeeded in making it slightly better for them to surrender than not."

"Well yeah but if that doesn't cash out in people actually knowing you're like that then it doesn't do anything for you, right? Most people do not try and do that." 

"Most people do not try and do that. I think it's some combination of that strategy not working as well in this world as in mine—for a variety of reasons—and people just being stupid. And also because of the religious aspect, that plays a pretty big role. Personally, I am planning on, but not expecting, to become a great name eventually, at which point having such a reputation for honor would be immensely valuable. And if I do succeed at making it home, whatever people here think of me will form the basis of their expectations for my entire culture. So this has the potential to matter for me a lot more than for most other people. But even if that weren't the case, I would still behave honorably, because that's the kind of person I want to be. If you're only honorable when it's convenient for you, you're not really honorable, and you can't honestly say you are."

"And even if not for any of the things I just mentioned, you two witnessed what I did and me killing all three of the druids after they surrendered would have given you reason to distrust me. Although maybe you haven't realized how yet."

"Fair enough - that's why mercy, though. Reputations have to be legible, and following a unique code of honour is good and all but it doesn't spread like a reputation that easily cashes out to real terms." 

"I don't understand social-philosophy very well and am pretty underprepared for the circumstances I find myself in and I'm mostly going off of what I remember learning about and what I'd expect people from home in situations like mine would do, but. At it's core, it's supposed to be basically a single thing. Which is that you keep the commitments you make, and in situations where you definitely would have made a commitment, you normally want to keep those too. Like, I asked those guys to surrender, if words mean anything at all there's an implication there that surrendering is something I wanted them to do and something which might be in their interests to do, so if I hadn't acted the way I did it would be sort of like I was lying, or implicitly lying, when I asked them to surrender."

"...I'm not explaining this very well because I don't understand it very well, and I'm definitely not going to do a perfect job implementing it. Um, if I were the kind of person who went around breaking my word, and lying, and betraying people, and so on, but I said 'don't worry Dyva I wouldn't do that to you, you can trust me', that would not be very plausible, because 'willing to betray literally anyone except Dyva' is incredibly arbitrary and transparently bullshit. The more complicated someone's purported commitment process is, the more difficult it is to verify, the less predictable and dependable they are, and the more likely it is that they're just picking whatever is convenient for them at the time. And if you start with the idea of 'what would it be useful for people to believe about the way I will behave' and generalizing it by getting rid of all the arbitrary boundaries, you end up with something that best translates as 'trustworthiness' or 'honor'. At home, people would recognize this as a simple, primitive thing. Someone who cuts in line at the grocery store is also more likely to lie to their spouse. Someone who finds someone else's lost wallet at the train station and mails it back to them is also more likely to keep secrets, when keeping something secret is the honorable thing to do. Stuff like that. I suspect that this will seem a lot more complicated and illegible to people here than it does to Hadarites, where this idea is a core part of the culture, but it's how I intend to act anyways."

"Pretty sure I know a lot of people for whom 'trust and rely on only this single-digit number of important people and screw the whole world' is in fact how they work. But I wouldn't trust any of them with anything that mattered, so you have a point. My point is, that you're going to encounter a lot of people in your life that aren't going to sit down for a discussion of ethical philosophy when they assess you behaviour, so if you can frame it in terms like local honour and mercy that makes your life easier even if something gets lost in the translation, or you end up obligated to do a few things you might not otherwise do for the sake of your reputation." 

"Trusting only a single-digit number of people is fine and makes perfect sense in many cases. Only being trustworthy to a few people is suspect. If you simply don't make commitments to most people, that's probably fine, but if you're perfectly willing to break agreements made with people you don't care about, then the agreements made with people you do care about are a lot less meaningful."

"Your point about framing my behavior in terms more legible to local cultures is a good one, and I would appreciate any advice you'd have about how to do that. Although the notion of doing things purely for the sake of making people think well of me is offensive to my instincts, so I'll have to take some more time to think about it."

"It's never really been a focus of mine. Figured I'd end up spending half my time in southern countries where necromancy is somewhere between reviled and outright illegal, so having a good reputation, eh. Not worth the effort. But it does seem like if you want to seem like you're giving people a good deal by surrendering, that you shouldn't half-ass it by saying 'well, technically that made their odds of survival better', unless you want to pair that with a general aura of terror and particularly dire consequences for the people who you do have to kill to the last, which doesn't really seem like your vibe." 

"It sounds like you're thinking of this in terms of what moves to make to get people to believe certain things, which at a high level is sort of what this is about, but it's not really the way I think about it. To me, substance is what matters, not appearance. And the substance I'm targeting, the person I'm trying to be, is someone who acts according to a coherent principle, not someone who does whatever they think will cause other people to like them, or fear them, or whatever."

"Well, fair enough! I hope it works well for you!" 

The party continues to return to the village, where they are rewarded with a modest feast and a purse of gold; the reward is less profitable than the loot, but this is not a rich little village in the middle of nowhere.

Their travel continues after that, continuing through the hills and then back down to the main river valley. After another week, in which the weather continues to decline, and occasionally threatens to snow them in before they get to their destination, they finally reach the foot of the mountains, where the last and greatest of the ancient locks is present. It is a shining structure of white stone, consisting of seven locks in order that collectively raise the boats or wagons loaded onto barges halfway up the outmost mountain, to where the river's source has been re-directed to the underground port that is the first true city of the Kingdom of Locks - Gol-Viorum. It has been looming on the horizon for days now, when the sky is clear enough to see it. 

Sida spends several minutes gawking at the magnificent stonework before gathering her wits about her.

"Right. We need to... find a place to stay and park the wagon, feed and water the oxen, and then I suppose look for leads before nightfall. Or, our completely arbitrary underground bedtime, I suppose."

Dyva gawks for a bit as well, but gets distracted by some interesting moss after only a minute or so of gawking. 

"Well, we've still got to get up the locks, that'll be a few hours at least. And are we going to be spending winter here or on the other side of the mountains? Or I guess in one of the cities in the middle somewhere, we could do that too." 

"I am imagining that we keep following the road north, stopping for various adventures along the way, and it will be spring by the time we get to the other side of the mountains. I expect I could spend at least a month in Azgazan, and something tells me we'll be exploring the forests of Jurgich for a while too."

"Yeah, that sounds fun! But does mean we'll be spending a lot of money at inns, I guess? To store the wagon at least, while we go on expeditions. If we were going to spend a season in one city, we could probably rent a house for the duration?" 

"And if we try to select a single city you and I are going to have a long argument about which one and I'd much rather just spend some extra money."

"I can think of no way to prevent or settle said argument without arbitrarily picking a side myself, which seems like a poor way to settle intraparty disputes."

"... yeah, okay, that's fair. Travel through various cities it is." 

With the itinerary thus planned, the party enters Gol-Viorum, properly. While the locks are well-maintained, the same cannot be said for the great land-gate next to the canal that allows boats lifted by the locks into the mountains. The land-gate is made of the same white stone as the rest of the city and it's infrastructure, but it hangs open, it's mechanism long-failed and the gate itself far to large to be practically moved any other way. Instead, a smaller fortification and a wooden gate has been built across the open space in the mountain-face that the gate leaves, and it is through that lesser wooden gate that the party fares. They are charged an adventurer's tariff for entering the city with a wagonload of unappraised goods and possessions, steep but not beyond their means. 

The entrance-hall of Gol-Viorum is a busy docklands in nature, though made a little absurd simply for being half-way up a mountain. Boats are unloaded, wagons repaired, and goods are ported into warehouses build into the mountainside. The hall are alight with magical flames in glittering red and blue, kept firmly within iron cages throughout the building. From here, as travellers and not merchants, the party continues up the way to the grand bazaar, where the majority of the actual bargaining and trade takes place. Vendors sell carved stone, steaming dumplings and copper wrought into every manner of tool and appliance, but the finest stalls sell gems. Jewellers flanked by heavily armed guards compete against each other to sell wonders cut from ruby and sapphire in every manner of cut and sculpture, with the finest pieces using cascading masses of fine gems or single whole gems the size of a fist, each worth as much as a peasant might make in a lifetime. Not all is well with the city, though; the cavern in which the bazaar is located is a bowl-shape, with buildings creeping up the sides in every direction, but the arcane light that illuminates every main road and well-maintained house is first patchy, and then totally absent from the edges of the cavern, where the buildings appear in the gloom to be in equally poor repair. 

The party cannot spend forever in the bazaar, unfortunately, travel-weary as they are, and find themselves moving to an inn in a side-cavern. In this cavern, the decay is even more visible; the main roads are well-lit and busy enough, but for every inhabited block, there's another behind it, dark, silent, and presumably abandoned. The inn is modest and affordable, compared to those located more centrally, and compared to the huts of rural villagers, it seems like a paradise, with it's downright tolerable mushroom ale and heavy-stacked plates of oily mushroom preserves and mystery-meat dumplings doused in strong vinegar. 

Here, the party can rest for a while, before getting ready to seek out their next adventure! 

Sida makes a face when it comes time to pay taxes, but says nothing. Once they reach the inn, she tries some mystery meat dumplings—passably tasty—and mushroom ale, the flavor of which is better left undescribed.

"I have a good feeling about this city. The place is falling apart. I think we won't need to look very hard to find something to fight."

"That is not actually a desirable trait, Sida."

"Oh I don't know, fights are often profitable, and if they can't get locals to do useful work then they're more likely to want to hire us instead. It's not like we're looking to settle down here, we just need to find profitable things to do for a few weeks, so the city can be as much of a decrepit wreck as it cares to be and it's not really our problem." 

"What I meant is that, it being easy for us to find things to fight also implies it being easy for those things to find us. There seems to be danger here, but it may not be the right kind of danger, and we may not find it at a convenient time or place."

Being a risk-averse adventurer, despite its oxymoronic quality, makes a lot of sense. To much sense to argue with, really. But it sure is fucking tedious. Sida chews on a dumpling and ponders this, and related topics.

"Oh it'll be fine, we can take an ambush or two, that's what Ossa is for." 

"Sure, that sounds plausible and reassuring. Let's go for a walk in the dark and see if there are any abandoned houses we can explore!"

"Oh, I thought the plan was to find paying work and then get whatever loot comes up in the course of that, rather than just looking for it directly." 

"What I am proposing is not an advancement strategy. It is a fun strategy."

"Maybe 'strategy' is too strong a word."

"I feel like there are better hobbies out there, like shopping. Or reading. Or gardening." 

"There were hardly any abandoned buildings where I grew up, so I never got to stomp around inside one, and now that I can it feels like a good idea. If you guys don't want to, oh well. Wandering out alone seems a bit too foolhardy for me, so it will just have to wait."

"I overheard mention of a temple to Civilization in one of the adjacent caverns. Perhaps we could inquire there about jobs or bounties?"

"As good a place as any!" 

Sida quickly finishes the rest of her food, takes a swig from her canteen, and stands up.

"Sure, that's a decent idea. Let's go."

It's easy enough to find direction to the temple of the god of legions, roads, healers, and prosperity-through-obedience; it has a side-cavern to itself, where the temple, all fine columns and white stone, stands surrounded by a small underground vineyard beneath a cavern ceiling studded with arcane lights like red and blue stars above, keeping the entire place well-lit enough for the grapes, if barely. Acolytes in white robes hurry about, tending to the matters of the temple both mundane and divine.