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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 9848325" data-attributes="member: 143">Thanks to everyone who posted or liked the story; it was fun to write. * * *Chapter 45A cold wind blew down off the mountains to the north. It whistled between the trees in the old wood, swirled down across the road, stirring the surface of the river and the rippling the many stagnant pools and tall weeds of the fens. It caught the web-laden branches of the Tamarack Stand, causing loose strands to sway and annoying the spiders awaiting fresh prey.The wind also churned in the ravine that housed the Caves of Chaos, whipping up sprays of dust and bits of rotten leaves that briefly formed into a dust devil before coming apart. The stinks of rot and death hung heavily upon the air, and trails of blood could be seen at a few of the caves where violence had recently been wrought. The strange and surprisingly complex ecosystem of the Caves cleaned up after itself, it seemed. A single raptor circled on the air currents high above, looking for a snack.The wind also blew in the faces of the four people who emerged from the woods that fringed the mouth of the ravine. One of them, a squat dwarf clad in a cloak that had once been fine but which now showed the signs of hard use, cursed and rubbed the grit from his eyes. His companions—a dwarf woman, a halfling man, and a human man with a patch over one eye—regarded the cave-pocked ravine quietly.“You’re sure that the Keep is done with this place?” the one-eyed man asked.“Relax, Mardan,” Jacko said. “Old Winvarle was only interested in the cult. Now that they’re gone—and the other locals have been culled—his focus will return inward. His primary mandate out here has been to keep things quiet.”“And you’re sure about the treasure?” Vinx asked. She’d found a new sword to replace the one that had been taken from her, but it was both longer and slightly curved, and she was clearly still getting used to it. Her hand kept dropping to the hilt, as if to confirm it was still there.“How sure can anyone truly be about such things?” the halfling replied. He seemed unconcerned, almost pathologically so in a place like this, but the sharp-eyed dwarf woman noticed a slight tightness along his jaw, a hint of tension that hadn’t been there before. She hadn’t forgotten what had happened on the road, but with Pral gone and her purse now as empty as her belly, she was willing to forgive, if not forget.She opened her mouth to offer a retort, but Jacko continued, “The so-called ‘Heroes of the Borderlands’ only looted about half of the caves,” he said. “And from what I hear, the haul that they brought back to the Keep was… well, less than one would expect, based on what I’ve heard about this place.”“You hear a lot, living out on those fens?” Haldryck said. He had given up trying to clear the dust from his eyes, and had shifted to fumbling with the catch on his heavy crossbow. He didn’t see the dangerous look that Jacko gave him, but Vinx did. The innkeeper was a good enough hunter with that oversized bow of his, and he’d been able to keep his connection to the cult of chaos concealed from the watchful eyes of his neighbors in the Keep for a long time, but if he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up with a knife in his back.“I hear enough,” Jacko said. “Enough to know that we need to tread carefully, here.”“And we split the haul four ways,” Haldryck asked. At Jacko’s nod the dwarf smiled, no doubt imagining his share of the loot, but again he missed the slight twitch at the corner of the halfling’s mouth. Oh, yes, this was going to be interesting, Vinx thought.“Where do we start?” Mardan asked. The former bandit had mostly recovered from his hard use at the hands of the adventurers, but he still seemed justifiably skittish. He’d rearmed as well, carrying both a stout billet banded in iron and a leather sling. Vinx didn’t sense any threat from him—he was too much of a follower to come up with anything as creative as a betrayal—but also didn’t give him much in the way of odds of surviving this place. But if he absorbed a trap or a monster’s arrow that would have otherwise caught her, that was fine as far as she was concerned.“The same as with any endeavor,” Jacko said, gesturing toward the closest cave on the right. “We start with what’s in front of us, and work our way up.”The four improbable adventurers gave their weapons a final check and made their way into the ravine, with two goals: to join the ranks of those other adventurers who had come before them and found wealth and glory in the Caves, and avoid the fate of those others who had come and never left. The only witness on that day was that solitary bird, uninterested in such distinctions as it continued its slow circle overhead.THE END</blockquote>

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