04/23/2026: Rat Diplomacy and Dungeon Crawling

Jayce, Wilrick, and Jeff stand amid the wreckage of bones. Other skeleton warriors in the garrison prepare to attack. 

Then, something emerges from the mouth of a passage ahead.

It is enormous. Nine feet of scarred green muscle, moving with the unhurried confidence of something that has never needed to hurry. In one massive hand it carries a spiked club. A javelin rides across its back. A net hangs from its belt. It raises a whistle to its lips and blows.

The remaining skeleton warriors freeze in place.

Down the hallway, a second creature — much like the first, but somehow conveying an air of studied leisure — sits against the wall, daintily gnawing on what might have been a rat. It eyes the proceedings. It does not stop eating.

The first creature stops in front of Jayce, Wilrick, and Jeff, and cocks its boulder like head.

“I Mork Bone Shepherd.” A pause. “You trainers or food?”

Above, through the ragged hole in the ceiling, the other five companions stare down into the chamber in complete silence. They cannot see the speaker. But they can hear it perfectly well.

Jayce’s eyebrows travel toward his hairline. He sputters, “Um — trainer?”

Mork snaps to attention. His closed fist strikes his chest with a sound like a side of beef hitting a butcher’s block.

“Mork Bone Shepherd on duty, sir!”

The quartet regards one another across a long and complicated silence.

Finally, Mork speaks again. “Last trainer came from door.” He gestures, one large grubby hand sweeping toward the hole in the ceiling above. “You come from up.” Another pause, longer this time, while something moves slowly behind his eyes. “New trainers come through roof now?”

Jayce, brightening considerably, confirms that yes — through the roof. That is exactly how trainers will be arriving from now on.

Mork nods, filing this away as official policy. “Mork not get told about new roof way,” he says, without bitterness. “Mork not get told about lots of things. Green priest not tell Mork anything.”

He says this the way someone might observe that it has begun to rain. 

He gestures at the shattered remains of the skeleton garrison. “Okay. This Mork’s bone room. Some bones still good.”

Several of the remaining skeletons shift slightly, as if aware they are being evaluated.

One by one, the rest of the party drops down from the hole above. “Ogres,” Sean murmurs, landing beside Jayce.

⚔

“Hey, Mork,” Jayce says, watching the last of his companions descend. “Can you take us to the Green Priest?”

Mork listens with the earnest attention of a creature who takes orders very seriously and gives them the consideration they deserve. Then: “Mork cannot take you.” The regret appears genuine. “Mork’s order to not leave his room. Lord Castle Answer’s orders.” He raises one enormous arm and points down the passage. “Red Priest down there.”

The party attempts to bring him along anyway.

Mork does not move. He has the quality of a geological feature — present, immovable, entirely untroubled by the forces being applied to it. He has his orders. He will not be moved.

He does, however, have observations about Wilrick.

Mork circles the fighter slowly, with the focused attention of a man doing inventory. “He big food,” he remarks, not unkindly.

Several voices rise immediately in Wilrick’s defense. He is not food. He is a friend. He is a valued colleague. He is, emphatically, not on the menu.

Mork considers all of this. He completes his circuit of Wilrick, apparently satisfied, and picks up a dead rat from the sack tied to his belt. The matter is settled. He ambles off to join his companion — a second ogre, lurking in the passage beyond, who has been gnawing his own rat with the focused contentment of someone who has found his calling. This one is called Ogg.

⚔

Dante drops into the chamber. The landing is athletic. Not entirely graceful, but the warforged is among the skeleton warriors.

Mork and Ogg look up from their meal.

“Trainer or food?” Ogg inquires, thoughtfully, around a mouthful of rat. He chews. He considers his own question. “Doesn’t look like food, I think.”

“Partner,” Dante says, gesturing to their own chest.

Mork turns the word over. ‘Partner.’ He knows this word. He gives a slow, satisfied nod and goes back to his rat.

“Partner,” Mork confirms. He gestures vaguely at the hole in the ceiling. “Everyone who comes down — two more come, they are partners, too.”

And that is that. The certification process for dungeon access, it turns out, is largely a matter of confidence and a willingness to commit to a story.

Viktor drops in after, takes one look at the two large shapes hunched over their meal, and confirms, quietly, that they are ogres. Both of them. 

⚔

Sean stands over the two rat-crunching ogres and asks, with the air of someone who already knows the answer, whether they have ever eaten their rats cooked.

Two blank stares greet this inquiry.

Sean digs out his cooking gear. He pulls the torch down from the wall bracket, propping it on the floor, and begins to heat the skillet. In goes a dead rat, taken from Mork’s sack. He sautées it in lamp oil he’s carrying, seasons it from his cook’s kit, and tends it with an attention that the surroundings do not quite deserve but the moment demands.

The smell, against all reasonable expectations, is extraordinary. Against every reasonable expectation, it smells like hamburgers. In a dungeon. At three in the morning. From a frying pan rat.

Sean passes it to Mork.

The ogre wrinkles his enormous nose. He nibbles, very tentatively, at the tiny, crispy haunch.

A pause.

It is, he announces, the best rat he has ever eaten.

He shoves the sack at Sean. Five more dead rats are inside. Mork would very much like Sean to cook all of them, please. Sean obliges. The second batch smells, if anything, even better than the first.

When the cooking is done, Mork accepts his portion with something approaching reverence. Then, in a gesture of genuine appreciation — the highest honor he apparently knows how to bestow — he bites one of the remaining rats cleanly in half and offers the front end to Jayce.

Jeff appears at precisely the right moment and receives the back end.

Between the two of them, they have assembled one complete rat. They regard it for a moment. They stash their fried rat halves in their packs. Nobody mentions this again.

⚔

Viktor, Jayce, and Dante press on together down the right-hand passage, leaving behind the warm, rat-scented domesticity of Mork and Ogg’s corner of the dungeon.

At the four-way intersection, group goes right while Jeremiah heads left. 

The passage ahead is quiet, torchlit. They move carefully, eyes down. The floor of the corridor tells a story: the tracks of previous travelers run clear and steady through the center of the dusty stone — until, at a certain point, they don’t. The footprints veer suddenly, sharply, toward the walls. Suspiciously close to the walls. Pressed against them, almost.

“Pit trap,” Viktor says.

The trap runs half the length of the corridor, which bends around the corner ahead. Nobody falls into anything.

This is, by the standards of the evening so far, a genuine triumph.

They push through a door at the far end of the passage and stop.

The room is enormous — the size of a gymnasium, its ceiling swallowed by darkness high above. Stone and shadow in every direction. And in the center of the floor, visible from the doorway: a symbol.

Not just a symbol. The symbol.

The same one scratched into the stone of the mausoleum. The same one on the back of Bolinda’s door at the Ship’s Prow. The same one scrawled in Dalton Wyrm’s notes in his cramped, urgent hand — connecting the green-robed priests, connecting the Cassalanters, connecting the disappearances from all across Waterdeep. The same symbol found at every kidnapping site, from the Dock Ward to the North Ward, wherever someone was taken and never came back.

Here it covers the center of the floor. Painted in what was once bright red blood, now dried to the dull, flaking brown of something old and patient and utterly deliberate.

Seeing it at this scale is a different thing entirely.

Along every wall: polearms. Glaives and halberds, arranged in careful rows. Shields stacked beside them, each bearing the Cassalanter coat of arms: a swan rampant on a green field. 

The armory, assembled in the dark, is waiting for something that has not yet arrived.

Dante crouches to examine the symbol, giving it a perceptive sniff. The blood is human. 

Nobody lingers.

The small group moves on toward another door — silent on its hinges, elaborately carved, the brass fittings green with age.

Inside: an altar, stone and cold, its surface bare. Above it, suspended from a hook in the shadows: the symbol again, rendered in something that catches the torchlight and throws it back wrong. And beside the altar, a cage. Iron. Large enough for a person.

Currently empty.

Something about the room suggests it may not always be.

⚔

While the others move through the dungeon’s lower passages, Jeremiah takes the stairs.

The staircase is long. The door at the top is closed. He presses his ear against it and listens.

The voice on the other side is cultured, controlled, and very close to losing both. “You have lost the sacrifices. You have lost the sacred blade.” A pause, tight with fury held just barely in check. “But we still have the offering. That will have to be enough.” Another pause. When the voice continues, it is quieter, and somehow worse for it. “By this time tomorrow, Waterdeep will be ours.”

Jeremiah, without meaning to, draws a sharp breath.

Silence from the other side of the door.

Then: “Did you hear that? Check. See if anyone is there.”

Heavy footsteps are moving toward the door. 

Jeremiah’s blood freezes. The staircase is too long—there is no time to descend. Jeremiah looks around once, fast, and makes his choice.

 He presses himself flat into the shadow at the hinge side of the door, in the space where it will open and cover him.

He hopes.

He waits.

The door opens slowly. A guard steps into the stairwell, peers into the dark, and sees nothing.

“There is nothing here, my lord.”

A pause.

“Lord Cassalanter — may I be dismissed?”

The door closes. The footsteps recede. Jeremiah counts his heartbeats slowly returning to a reasonable speed, until silence returns.

He has confirmed two things. Cassalanter is here — just beyond that door, close enough to hear a single unguarded breath. And whatever is being built in these halls, whatever the symbol means — he knows about all of it.

Tomorrow, Cassalanter said. Waterdeep will be ours.

Jeremiah moves back down the stairs to find the others.