The frost giant did not wait for an invitation. With a roar that shook the dust from the ceiling rafters, the behemoth smashed the stone archway of the kitchen entrance, widening it enough to force his bulk through. He wielded a greataxe the size of a tavern table, the blade frosted with unnatural rime.
“Scatter!” Zogg bellowed, diving to the left as the axe came down.
The weapon impacted the stone floor where the orc had stood a second before, sending shrapnel flying like arrowheads. Aurelio raised his shield, but the shockwave alone sent him skidding backward, his boots carving grooves into the floor.
Maven, still groggy from the ogre’s blow, stumbled to her feet, gripping her wood-splitter, but she was on the wrong side of the swing. The giant raised the axe for a backhand sweep that would cleave the room in two.
“Too big,” Nym muttered, watching the arc of the weapon. “Inefficient.”
While the others scrambled, the gnome moved. He didn’t run away; he ran in.
Nym dropped low, sliding on his knees across the polished floor like a curling stone, passing directly under the giant’s raised arm. As he slid, he depressed a hidden catch on his cane. The wood split, revealing a gleaming, needle-thin rapier.
” tendons,” Nym grunted.
He didn’t just stab; he surgically incised. He drove the needle-blade deep into the back of the giant’s ankle, twisted, and converted his sliding momentum into a tearing cut.
The giant howled—a sound more like a collapsing glacier than a voice—and his leg buckled. The massive swing went wide, smashing into a row of cabinets and exploding them into a cloud of flour and splinters.
The giant crashed to one knee, the floor trembling under the weight.
“Now!” Nym shouted, rolling clear of the flailing limb.
Zogg was already moving. Channeling arcane energy into his blade, he leaped onto the giant’s exposed back. His sword, glowing with shocking blue light, drove down into the junction between the giant’s neck and shoulder. At the same moment, Aurelio stepped in, swinging his flail with a grim crunch into the side of the giant’s skull.
The creature shuddered, let out one last, freezing breath, and collapsed face-forward.
The silence that followed was a physical thing, a heavy blanket smothering the echoes of the fight. It smelled of ozone, spilled flour, blood, and the unnatural cold that lingered around the carcass.
In the great, ruined kitchen, eleven of Jamandi’s loyal guards lay dead amidst the wreckage. Their lives had been spent buying the few precious moments it had taken for help to arrive.
Zogg stood over the corpse, prying his blade free. His breath plumed in the chill air. He pulled a small, charcoal-stained notebook from his belt pouch and began to sketch the creature’s likeness with quick, surprisingly deft strokes. It was a habit of his, this cataloging of monsters—a way of imposing order on a world determined to prove there was none.
“Messy,” Nym said, wiping macabre slush from his cane with a pristine handkerchief. “But effective. The bigger they are, the more gravity hates them.”
The matter of the dead, however, was more immediate. Their armor and weapons lay where they had fallen, a silent testament to the night’s brutality. Aurelio, his fine clothes torn and his face pale with exhaustion, looked away from the bodies. Looting the fallen was the work of battlefield jackals, not men of honor.
It was Gassi who spoke into the quiet, his voice holding its usual off-kilter resonance.
“The dead have no need of armor,” he stated, looking at Aurelio with his unnervingly direct gaze. “Their voices speak to me, you know. They do not mind if you take it. Your survival honors their sacrifice. To die for want of a breastplate when one lies here, freely offered… that would be the true dishonor.” He paused, his expression unreadable. “Besides, if you die, you are of no use to anyone. Except to me, perhaps. And most people do not enjoy being useful after they are dead.”
The strange logic, as always, was both mad and inescapable.
Nym, ever the pragmatist, nodded in agreement. “He has a point. And these rings, these jewels… they can identify the dead, should the question arise.” He began to deftly search the body of a fallen bandit captain, his nimble fingers finding a purse of coins and a finely wrought necklace. Giving up the dead was a necessary part of staying among the living.
With a sigh of resignation, Aurelio allowed Zogg to help him into a suit of half-plate taken from one of the less damaged corpses. The cold steel felt alien against his skin, a somber inheritance. He was no longer just the scion of a noble house; he was a survivor, dressed in a dead man’s shell. Maven, shaking off the last of her dizziness, stood watch at the shattered door, her wood-splitter resting heavily on her shoulder.
As the others sorted through the grim trove, Gassi’s voice called out from the north end of the manor. “I hear something. Breaths that are too quiet.”
He and Nym pushed through a heavy door into a pantry. The air was close, smelling of flour and dried herbs. Behind a barricade of sacks and barrels, they found them: the other adventurers, the ones they had spoken to at the feast.
The fierce barbarian, Amiri. The quiet elf, Valerie. And a dour dwarf named Harrim. All of them were bound, gagged, and unconscious, but alive.
Gassi knelt, his hands moving with quiet purpose. He didn’t have bandages, not in the traditional sense. His healer’s kit was a collection of pouches filled with dried leaves, strange-smelling herbs, and salves the color of moss. He worked quickly, and one by one, the adventurers stirred, groaning as they returned to a world of pain and confusion.
“The giant,” Amiri coughed, her voice raw as she struggled against the lingering dizziness. “Where did it go?”
“It is dead,” Aurelio said, stepping into the doorway, his new armor clanking softly. “In the kitchen. It tripped.”
Amiri blinked, looking from the paladin to the small gnome wiping his cane. A look of grudging respect flickered across her face. The three of them, humbled and defeated, did not linger. They gave whispered thanks and then fled, melting back toward the relative safety of their own chambers.
The path back to the Great Hall was a journey through a nightmare.
A thick, choking smoke filled the western corridors, turning the air to poison. They ran, heads down, their lungs burning, stumbling through the oppressive darkness until they burst back into the main hall. A lieutenant of the guard, his face grim and soot-stained, met them at a makeshift barricade.
“Where is Lady Jamandi?” Gassi asked.
“She took a squad of her best to clear the West Wing,” the lieutenant replied, his eyes filled with a weary relief at seeing them. “She ordered us to hold the hall. You should rest. We are safe here.”
“Nowhere is safe,” Nym countered, adjusting his goggles. “We were attacked in our beds, and we just killed a giant in the pantry. Safety is a myth.”
“Then help us,” the lieutenant urged, gesturing to the carnage behind him. “The fighting is thickest to the west.”
Before they could agree, Aurelio stumbled upon another door, this one leading to a small armory. Inside, racks of ordinary weapons stood waiting. He found a sturdy steel shield to replace his own, which had been shattered during the initial ambush.
Thus re-armed, they plunged back into the chaos.
The fighting was a blur of desperate, close-quarters combat. In a trophy room filled with the heads of monstrous beasts, they found Lady Jamandi. She was fighting back-to-back with another frost giant against a horde of cutthroats led by a woman named Nishkiv.
Nishkiv, the Stag Lord’s lieutenant, was a whirlwind of vicious steel. Her twin axes cleaved through the guards who stood against her, a brutal dance of death.
Jamandi saw the party arrive and roared a challenge. “I have this one! Deal with the rest!”
She moved with a grace that was terrifying, her blade an extension of her will. She ducked a clumsy swing from the giant and, with a single, contemptuous flick of her wrist, severed the creature’s hamstring before driving her blade into its throat.
The rest was a maelstrom.
Nym held up a pocket mirror, his reflection shimmering as he intoned a distant spell. The image broke free of the glass, stepping into reality until two Nyms stood side-by-side. They engaged the flankers with unnerving rhythm, a twin flurry of canes designed to cripple. To their right, Aurelio struggled. His heavy plate kept him upright, but a massive strike from Nishkiv shattered his defense, sending him staggering into a gray haze of unconsciousness.
Aurelio stumbled, but Gassi was already drifting into a trance-like focus. The scruffy man ignored the encroaching steel, instead tracing elaborate, invisible geometries in the air before tilting his head to whisper to a presence only he could perceive. “The threshold is yours,” he murmured, a tender invitation amidst the screaming chaos.
With a reverent pantomime, Gassi gripped a handle made of nothingness and pulled. The heavy, unseen door swung wide, and the invited power that, seemingly, had a mind of its own, tumbled through the gap . It flooded the hallway, hunting the bandits with blistering heat and golden light, yet split perfectly around Aurelio, washing over the wounded knight like a warm summer breeze.
The sudden flash of gold was Maven’s cue. With the enemies flinching from the radiant fire, she dropped her center of gravity and exploded forward, the stone floor cracking beneath her boots. She closed the distance in a heartbeat, using the haft of her axe to hook a bandit’s shield and rip it aside, effectively opening the door for her blade. She pivoted on her heel, delivering a spinning, decapitating cleave that carried her momentum straight through the burning line, as she continued her charged at Nishkiv.
In the sensory overload of light and steel, Zogg vanished. His fingers blurred through a somatic weave, allowing the air around him to collapse inward. A thunderclap detonated where he stood, instantly answered by a second boom behind the enemy line as he snapped back into existence. Occupying Nishkiv’s blind spot before she could react to Maven charge, Zogg reversed his dagger grip and drove the point down through the gap in her pauldron, pinning her shoulder to her collarbone with surgical precision.
But Nishkiv fought like a cornered wolf. Spinning with unnatural speed, she smashed Zogg to the ground with a pommel strike that would have killed a lesser man, leaving him in a crumpled, dying heap.
It was Jamandi who ended it. With the giant dispatched, she turned her attention to the lieutenant. Nishkiv, fearsome as she was, was no match for the Lady of the Manor. The fight was over in three swift, brutal movements of Jamandi’s blade.
In the ringing silence that followed, Gassi crawled to Zogg’s side, pressing a foul-smelling poultice to his wounds. The orc coughed, blinked, and slowly, painfully, came back to the land of the living.
The dawn was gray and somber.
They had been granted a few hours of fitful, dream-haunted sleep amidst the wounded in the Great Hall. By morning, a miracle had occurred. Jamandi’s servants, working with tireless efficiency, had already begun to erase the scars of the attack. Bodies had been removed, blood scrubbed from the flagstones, broken furniture cleared away. The manor was still a wreck, but it was a house determined to live.
Lady Jamandi gathered the survivors. Her voice, though weary, had lost none of its steel. She spoke of treachery, of the cowardice of those who strike in the night. She spoke of the Stolen Lands, and how the attack only underscored the need for brave souls to tame its wildness and bring it under the rule of law.
Then she opened a heavy chest. “For your valor,” she announced, “a token of my gratitude.”
Each of them received a purse heavy with fifty gold coins and two potent healing potions. With the rewards given, she began to hand out the charters.
The Iron Wraiths were called first. Their commander, a man with eyes like chips of flint, accepted his letter with an arrogant smirk.
“Your charter,” Jamandi said, “is to establish a base in the Glenbon Uplands. You will deal with the Tiger Lords and open diplomatic relations with Pitax from a position of strength.”
As they left, the commander called back over his shoulder, sneering at the battered party. “Don’t forget to take your teddy bears, in case you get scared!”
Gassi just smiled, tilting his head. “Did you try adjusting your belts?” he asked their retreating backs, his voice carrying through the quiet hall. “I’m sure it shaved seconds off your draw time. You could have killed at least one frost giant with that kind of advantage.”
The commander shot him a look of pure venom but did not stop. Jamandi, Zogg noted, did a very poor job of hiding the smirk that touched her lips.
Next was Maegar Varn, the pragmatic nobleman. He was charged with brokering alliances with the centaurs and gnomes of the Narlmarches.
Finally, she turned to them.
“Heroes of the night,” she said, her gaze lingering on each of them in turn. “You have proven your courage. Your charter sends you southwest, into the region known as the Greenbelt. It is a true wilderness, haunted by bandits who prey on all who travel there. An old trading post, run by a man named Oleg, has been hit particularly hard. I suggest you begin there. Deal with the bandit threat. When you have secured the land, we will speak of founding a barony.”
She handed the sealed charter to Zogg. The weight of it was more than just paper and wax. It was the weight of a kingdom yet unborn.
The hall emptied, leaving them alone with the ghosts of the night and the promise of the morning.
They were no longer just survivors of the Black Banner. They were explorers. Founders. They had a mission.