March 1, 2026
3 Khordrak, the Pink Unicorn
With a leer, Ilsabei Michels, daughter of Wiebeke, told Oskraks that a damsel in distress was asking after him. He met a servant named Barba clad in blue. She told him that someone was trying to kill her mistress. They retired to a private room, where she told him that one of the other servants had already been killed. Trembling, she collapsed into his arms.
When he did not return for some time, Annais muttered something about his putting a dragon in her dungeon. A prolific lover, Oskraks and Annais once shared a night, but broke things off when he couldn’t meet her demanding and rather unfair expectations.
Oskraks eventually emerged, and Barba led them to Eberlin Manor. Standing on a narrow lawn on Greenhill Street in Knightswall, the dilapidated manor shows that what was always a small noble family has fallen into poverty. The stone wall that once separated the grounds from the street is now crumbling, with only a thin and a fat iron grotesque now flanking the entrance.
The Pink Unicorn Four (missing Gerald) met with the lady of the house, Amélie Eberlin. She believes she is the last remaining member of the house, as her brother Milo disappeared seeking a treasure to pull the family out of debt. Her other servant, Barba’s sister Henn, is also present at the discussion.
Positing a motive, Annais asks about rival houses. Amélie confirms that two other houses of minor nobility have been encroaching on Eberlin’s territory.
Aida asks to check the body of the cook. The corpse had strangulation marks on its neck. There were no conventional defensive wounds, but it had a dark leathery material under its fingernails. Scuffs on the boots indicated that the stout woman had been lifted bodily off the ground, suggesting an attacker both tall and very strong.
The party continued to examine the crime scene. The cook had fallen as she passed from the pantry to the kitchen. Henn had been first on the scene that night.
In the pantry, the party found that a ham hock had been moved from the pantry ceiling to a countertop and then not touched. Behind the pantry, a buttery is open to the chilling air. Aida found mud marks on the buttery windowsill; checking the rest of the house, she found more marks at shoulder height on one of the back doors.
The party sat down with the three inhabitants of the house to draw up a timeline of events. Over the past week, they had heard a large animal on the roof, and the house had been broken into on multiple occasions. On the first, Amelie’s late mother’s jewelry box with several plain golden rings had been stolen from her bedroom, the more valuable jewelry already having been pawned or sold. On the second, the mother’s winged medallion, of silver set with an emerald and granted for her charity work after the Flood of ’09, had been removed from its display in the family trophy room. A few days past, Barba had seen a dark figure, like a halfling but bent double, passing quickly through the yard.
Expecting the pattern of attacks to continue, the party decided to remain and stake out the manor. Oskraks also staked out Henn, whose appetites had been roused by Barba’s recounting of that morning’s romp.
That night, while those two were in bed together, Annais patrolled the ground floor and Aida sat watching a balcony from the shadows. A roof tile slid onto the balcony, and Aida investigated. Going outside, she saw a small figure with massive froglike haunches on the roof above. Running inside, she rang an alarm bell.
Annais came up to see Aida, while Oskraks quickened his handiwork lest his premature departure make him an ungenerous lover. Annais helped Aida rig a belaying rope to explore the roof, but was surprised when Aida told her to check on the lady of the house.
Aida went on the roof and was startled by the thing. It wrapped cold, leathery tendrils around her throat. She cut herself free, but, in her haste to escape, slipped from the roof and fell to dangle from the line. The thing followed her and dexterously untied the rope, dropping her heavily to the ground.
Annais found Amélie uninjured and returned to the balcony, with Oskraks finally joining her. Seeing the untied rope, they peered over the edge and saw Aida’s unmoving form. A window shattered at the back of the house, and Annais went to check it while Oskraks went downstairs to check Aida.
Aside from the broken window, there was no sign of intrusion. When Oskraks went out the front door, he found Aida’s body gone; following drag marks, he found her facedown in the rain gutter behind the house.
He pulled her unconscious body from the water, and was leapt on from behind by the thing. From her vantage point at the back of the house, Annais loosed a crossbow bolt that passed through its skullless cartilaginous head, spraying hydraulic hemolymph everywhere and killing it.
While the inhabitants of the house tended Aida, Oskraks and Annais studied the carcass. It was indeed roughly humanoid and halfling-sized. Its arms were boneless tubes that ended in a mass of forked suckerless tendrils; its legs were froglike, capable of great leaps, ending in masses identical to its hands. Worst was its face, remarkably humanlike but with its skin pulled tight over cartilage that gave it a skulllike visage. Its mouth was full of crystalline needle teeth, and its eyes, nestled within so many folds and layers of eyelids that the creature appeared blind, were actually quite large and appeared to possess firesight, which would let it stalk the body heat of its victims in pitch darkness.
4 Khordrak
In the morning, the party investigated the backyard. They guessed that the boneless creature would be able to squeeze through gaps only an inch wide, so they dismantled the grating where the rain gutter fed into the hillside. Sure enough, they found a pile of gnawed bones, the missing treasures from the manor, and several gathered shiny objects besides.
They took the carcass to the Golden Talon, where an anatomist identified it as an aberration from the deep underworld. Its migrating to the surface was not unheard of, but was a rare turn of misfortune all the same.
And it implied that the undercity was making deeper connections than ever before.
