Bern
We rested and recuperated for a few days. I was still hurt, but not badly, when the blood moon was starting to set; Rowan and Pisha worried that might be a time limit for the missing children, so we needed to act quickly. We formed a plan.
Morin would sneak trough the window into the gatehouse, grab the monk’s body, and sneak it out the window. Rowan and Pisha would use spells to create a distraction to draw the attention of the gargoyles. Sanfire and I would try to kill one of the gargoyles (the wounded one at least) and keep them away from Morin. I loaned Sanfire my sword so he would be a threat.
Everything went smoothly at first. Morin successfully snuck into the window, located the monk’s body and a gargoyle watching over it. Rowan and Pisha tried their illusions… and the gargoyles did not react at all. I moved closer and saw that two of them were on either side of the inner gate, motionless. Sanfire handed me a sack, and I put it over the gargoyle’s head… but the creature animated and swiped at me before I finished. The fight was on… but Sanfire suddenly realized he was badly wounded, and dropped my sword to run for his life, leaving me facing the gargoyles alone.
I took several claw swipes as I bent down to retrieve my sword, and struck a mighty blow at one of them. After that, I noticed Morin sneaking out of the window with the monk’s body. I let them swipe at me once more time to keep their attention, then fled. Rowan and Pisha covered my retreat with a Wall of Fog, and Morin dropped the body into the first open grave we found.
The monk led his own burial service, and then disappeared. His final words revealed his secret: Brother Barris obsessively stole from the poor box for years and hid coins inside skulls in the undercroft, which he marked with a red cross.
The rest of the group had seen that room before and did not seem tempted to go back. But it seemed to me that it was better knowing where to find treasure than not knowing.
After assessing our situation we decided it would be best to head back to town. We know of several other requests from the ghostly monks which we might be able to fulfill. One wanted us to pray at a specific chapel: “pray on his behalf at the tomb of Prior Jerome Gust at Maidenhead Priory”, which we might need to find with due research, and another to “paint the walls of the abbey with ale”, which could be fulfilled by simply buying a barrel of ale.
Since the blood moon was in fact setting, though, we decided to check out one last unexplored building before we left, the bell tower where we had previously seen a strange crow-like creature land. And that’s where things got tense again.
Our sneakiest folks, Sanfire and Morin, approached. The rest of us, nursing our wounds, watched from a distance. The pair told me later how it turned out. The first floor was empty, but had been cleaned thoroughly to remove most of the fire damage… as long as that damage was not much higher than four feet above the floor.
The next floor up had three kids, all talking about tasks they had been given by “Mr Rag-and-Bones”. Things like collecting teeth from the graveyard. Strange, but good that we had found the missing children! Sanfire continued upstairs while Morin introduced herself, sat down for tea, and tried to convince the children to leave quietly with us.
The next floor contained strange taxidermied animals with human teeth, and the one after that, a golem of raw muscle and crow feathers that Sanfire presumed to be Rag-and-Bones himself. He snuck back down without appearing to awaken the creature.
