After the long and trying battle, you rest. Ibram plays a soothing melody, and soon your strength returns and the pain is but a fleeting memory.
Cyr takes a few minutes to perform a ritual, seeking divine guidance about how best to go about recovering the Obolus. The hand of fate's advice is clear: it points directly toward the nearby hut. Myri smiles a nasty smile, but her face goes slack when the haft of Rocco's axe clips her soundly behind the ear. She collapses, unconscious again.
Rocco and Aurak approach the small cabin first, followed closely by Ibram. Cyr, Silphyus, and Kryath bring up the rear.
The cabin is a simple, sturdily built affair of hewn logs, roughly squared by hand tools, and sealed with mud and pitch. The thatched roof is perhaps two feet thick and looks fairly new: the compacted straw is still green in places. Smoke billows lazily from a brick chimney to the east. There are two windows, facing south and west, of thick, bubbly glass, but heavy curtains on the inside prevent sight inside. The cabin has one door, centrally located on the north wall.
After failing to hear anything listening at the door and windows, and unsuccessfully trying to peer through the curtains, Rocco tries the door. He finds it unlocked, and carefully pushes it open.
The inside of the cabin is a single, snugly furnished room. A narrow cot with a straw-tick mattress sits against the south wall, tucked between a small bookshelf and a pot-bellied iron stove whose chimney-pipe leads up into a brick enclosure, its door open to reveal a cozy fire. Neatly stacked in corners are the tools of a woodsman's trade: axes, saws, wedges, spikes, and lots of rope.
In the northeast corner of the room is a large, shadowy figure, nearly twice the height of a grown man. The room is dimly lit, but between the flames and the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the curtains and the door, Rocco's dwarven eyes should easily have been able to penetrate the shadows and see the creature clearly, but strain as he might, all he can make out is that it has more limbs than it should. Many more limbs; and that they are longer and more flexible than arms should be.
Glowing green eyes lock onto Rocco's, and a heavy voice rumbles, Who you? You thieves to steal coin? Not take! I guard! Stay back!
Perhaps belatedly, you remember Nerve, the priest you spoke to in the Chapel of Obolus, mentioning something about a powerful guardian who had disappeared along with the coin...