THE LIBRARY · THE VALE

A Coward's Field-Guide to the Vale's Barrows

aka The Swag-and-Survival Almanac, Quill's Guide

An anonymous Finder's irreverent, frequently terrified guidebook ranking the Vale's barrows by what they're holding against what they'll cost your hide — the closest thing the trade has to a map of who dies where, and for what.

Every barrow is a deal: what it's holding, against what it takes off your hide. I have done the arithmetic so that you need not die learning it. I am, by trade and temperament, a coward — which is precisely why I am alive to write this, while the brave are furniture in the rooms below. Read on, and be a coward with me. We live longer and drink warmer. FROSTMAW CAVE — an honest hole. Cold, beasts, and a few desperate skinners who'll cut you for your boots. Survivable, if you bring fire and keep shallow. You will want to go deep, because something pale is fused into the blue ice that catches your lamp like a coin-purse left open. Don't. The skinners have exactly one rule — never dig toward the shine — and they are fools about everything except that. THE SERED CATACOMBS — House Vandahl stacks its dead by bloodline and keeps three-quarters of the castle shut for a reason it will not give. There is a grey blade in the deepest niche worth a manor and a name. The proud thing still holding it has had a hundred years to practise, and it keeps count. Your funeral; possibly literally. THE ASH-SEALED BARROW — the tribes won't say its name. Take the warning they're too polite to spell out. The dead in there are older than the Wright's own empire and older than the rules that govern the rest, and there is a faceless metal mask that lets a living fool walk among them as kin. Reaching it means passing the ones the mask does not fool. The Cinder Quorum digs here; if they're friendly, it's because they'd like you to go first. TIDEWRACK SINK — a drowned church that floods twice a day. Mistime the tide and the sea keeps you with the rest of the faithful. Time it right and there's a censer below that lets you breathe water, which — flip back through this guide — you are going to want. The Tide-Pickers run the slack; they'll share a tide and pocket your half. VALLEN'S BARROW — the big one. The one they frighten children with, and the children are right. The Wright's own broken shard lies past the wight-halls, a dead god's own broken work, and every power, every guild, and your own grandmother wants it. Here is my counsel as the Vale's foremost coward: do not. And if you do, do not keep it. A thing pulled whole out of a god's grave teaches whatever holds it to grieve the same way he did, and I have seen what's left of a man when it finishes teaching him. Rob a smaller barrow. Take up farming. Take up anything else at all. That is the whole of my wisdom, and it cost more lives than mine to gather. A Finder always delivers — so I have delivered you the only thing worth carrying out of any of these holes: the way back to the door. Use it. Quietly.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →