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| Haunted House, by Ulla Thynell |
Amidst a copse of trees sagging under the weight of hundreds of empty bird nests, our troupe came upon three multi-storied glass houses. They were all overgrown with vines and lichen beds, and filled with thriving flora of many different kinds. Two were boarded over, but one two-story house was accessible - after Eddie had pried the door off its hinges with his claymore. Through the rusted door-frame the troupe discovered a warm room full of ornamental golden bird cages, each the size of a full-grown person’s torso. The cages hung from the ceiling like glittering prizes, absorbing the attention of the troupe - right up until they noticed the skeletons on the floor. Human skeletons, this time, wrapped in vines and root systems that bound every joint and vertebra.
At the back of the hothouse was an iron stairway spiraling up to the second floor; Eddie trekked through the bones and climbed it, finding a room full of old tables. An open window looked out from the second floor over the front doorway. Downstairs, Lisabeth and John began detaching the golden cages from their hooks. If they could get enough of these back to the relative civility of Prigwort, they’d be rich overnight. Lisabeth could finally afford a proper bath. Eddie could ditch his job as a fletcher. It was worth any risk.
Glimmering kept watch of the room from just outside the door, and consequently was the first to notice the skeletons move.
The bones did not animate on their own. They were puppeteered by the vines and roots that covered them, making a mockery of human locomotion. Lisabeth and John dove through the door to join Glimmering outside, and the three of them backed up to let the plant-skeletons spill out of the hothouse. Eddie took up a position at the window above with his arbalest. Everyone set their weapons at the ready. The plant-skeletons charged out of the hothouse in silence.
Everyone quickly noticed that the cores of these ambulatory plants were kept within the rib cages, and focused their attacks there. John’s pike found its way through one, but he was mauled in the process. Glimmering was clawed too, and their bronze sword didn’t fare well against the coiled vines and bones. Lisabeth rolled around her attackers and turned her hatchet backwards to hammer the plant-skeletons with the blunt end, crushing their foundational bones and leaving them vulnerable to her sickle. And the two bolts that Eddie was able to fire each found their mark, obliterating the foes they struck. Eddie had always been better at shooting than fletching; these bolts had been made by his master, and they flew true. After a brutal scrap, the bones were broken and the creepvines were cleaved. Healing herbs gathered previously saved both John and Glimmering from bleeding to death. The garden was quiet once more.
Which meant that looting could be resumed. Eddie kept his post at the window, Glimmering kept watch outside, and John and Lisabeth resumed carrying out cage after glorious golden cage, stacking them in the fallen leaves outside the hothouse. It was estimated that the troupe could drag along up to ten of these things, with difficulty. John wove a rope through the upper bars of all ten to prepare them for transport. It was time to head back to Dolmenwood.
While the others worked, Eddie guarded the second-story window, which gave him a vantage point to spot some movement. A shadow, faint and distorted, was drifting across the leaves and vacant nests of the nearby trees. He traced it upwards, and gazed upon yet another malformed product of the garden. A giant, floating, glistening, iridescent, slimy jellyfish. It drifted through the air weightlessly, its tendrils slick with mucous. Eddie didn’t need to deliberate or call out a warning; one arbalest bolt was all the response that was required.
The bolt zipped through the jellyfish’s center, spewing translucent guts out the back. As if woken up from a dream, the jellyfish ceased floating instantly and tumbled down, landing directly on Glimmering. The elf was covered head to toe in stinging tendrils and gelatinous viscera, all of which burned like fire.
Everyone helped Glimmering remove as much of the stinging mess as possible (without getting any on themselves, of course) and made quick work of the rest of their golden cage-wrangling. Eddie descended, apologized to a remarkably composed (if welt-covered) Glimmering, and the troupe made ready to return home, each shouldering the rope in single file. The cages clanged and bashed against one another as they were dragged through the grass, but the rope held.
As they backtracked into the rose bushes, though, the noise attracted unwanted attention. The troupe halted as soon as they spotted the two creatures, and sap-coated weapons were readied once again. These creatures were birds of fabulous plumage, bursting over with lavish color and elegance. Their claws were larger than Glimmering’s, proper talons meant to maim and crush. And their beaks, hooked and blood-stained, were wicked beyond compare. If the common peafowl had taken a page from the cassowary's playbook and then started hunting antelope, they still would have been outclassed in every way by the Ynnian peahawk.
Facing what amounted to dinosaurs with fashion sense, John Rhys-Davies did the only sensible thing: he struck up a friendly conversation with them. He’d always had a knack for bird-speech, after all. The two peahawks were startled at first, but proved amenable enough to negotiate with. John promised them that a fine kill was up ahead, just waiting for something to come by and eat it. Humans and elves were far too stringy for their palates, after all - and moss dwarfs were practically salad! The peahawks agreed with his reasoning, and got a hungry glint in their eye. They began following the troupe to this supposed kill, giving the clanging bird cages a wide berth.
Back to the Fountain Court with Those Idiots’ Corpses
Emerging from the rose-bush rows, Eddie (currently at the front end of the rope) nearly stepped on a turtle. Everyone halted. This turtle looked poorly, as if its shell had been partially crushed. And from the large split near the shell’s peak, a gnarled little bonsai tree sprouted, nearly taller than the turtle that bore it.
(GM’s note: I misremembered the bonsai turtle’s details mid-game. According to the bestiary description, the shell was supposed to be intact and bowl-shaped, and the turtle was supposed to be as big as a cart! These things happen when you skim text during a long session.)
The bonsai turtle looked up with weeping little eyes, and croaked loudly at Eddie. At least, that’s how he experienced it; he was a burg-soul through and through, and talking animals never made sense to him. But the others heard the turtle perfectly well, as it chided their careless manner. “Have you no respect for those around you?” it wheezed, continuing to trundle past. “Honestly, you meet the worst sorts of people these days ... ” The troupe gave a few apologies and condolences, which didn’t seem to register. A piercing shriek from a peahawk, however, did.
With trembling horror, the little reptile spotted what was following the troupe. The peahawks clawed at the grass in anticipation. “Oh, mercy, please, nooooooo!” screamed the turtle. Every fiber of its broken body propelled it towards the hedges as fast as it could manage, and it flopped over the pathway's edge and into the bushes. The peahawks dove after it, ramming their long necks under the hedge and shredding branches with their claws. Everyone continued hauling their cages as fast as possible, leaving behind the fountain and its corpses before the peahawks could realize that bonsai turtles and rotting adventurers made for a poor supper.
(If only the turtle had been properly giant, it could have survived!)
Back to the Burned Shadow Theater
Their hands were chafing against the rope, and the clattering of the cages was distressingly obvious. But these cages were going to give our troupe the good life. They couldn’t abandon that.
As they passed the shadow amphitheater, the hole left in the hedges by those white apes allowed a familiar horror to wander in; seven more plant-skeletons, stepping shakily across the charred wreckage. There was nowhere to hide. A fight broke out.
Luck was fully on the troupe’s side this time, and they knew what weapons would damage these fiends best. Most of the plant-skeletons went down swiftly. But as Eddie reloaded his arbalest to eliminate the final one, his shadow finally found the perfect moment to betray him. It tore its feet from his, and broke free across the stone pavement of the amphitheater, wheeling and prancing in wicked delight. Eddie grew pale, having just lost a valuable chunk of his soul. The shadow vanished, outpacing the troupe on its way back to the door, to Dolmenwood, to its new un-life as a free-roaming specter of doom. This particular troupe would never see that particular Shadow again.
The last vine monstrosity was dispatched by the others, and they all took a short breather to ensure everyone was ready to go on. While his mind was marred and his spirit splintered, Eddie’s arms were still able to haul the troupe’s golden prizes. They carried on clanging towards home. This time, the hidden basket with the pheasant was left undisturbed.
Back to the Burned Herb Garden
There were no more unburnt herbs left to gather, and even if there had been, the troupe had bigger, angrier things to worry about. A swarm of large bumblebees, colored reddish-brown like rust, had been rousted from their hidden hive by the clanging of the cages. But safety was close at hand, and our troupe put every speck of might they had into hauling across the burned garden, with their ten roped treasures getting battered and bashed with each bump in the path. The bumblebees were far behind, but the meandering hedge paths did little to slow them down.
Back to the Vine Trellises
The source of the delicious blue fruits was no longer vacant. A marble statue of a sidhe stood beneath the trellises, gazing solemnly at the fruit while singing a piercing operatic melody. The living stone turned to face our noisy and thoroughly exhausted troupe, and its song grew even more ear-splitting than before. It seemed displeased with the intrusion. Whether or not it was hostile was unclear.
John produced the ornate music box that he had found before, and began cranking it to life. The discordant and atonal notes of the box broke the statue’s composure, and its face contorted into a snarl of chiseled contempt. It was certainly hostile now. John kept playing the box; if this was a fight, might as well annoy the enemy. Lisabeth turned her trusty hatchet backwards once more to bash apart the stone. Glimmering was still covered in welts from the giant jellyfish, and stayed back. And Eddie, having lost his shadow, his lunch, and his fear of death, turned his claymore around to hold it by the blade like a club. Backed up by John’s music box, Eddie and Lisabeth dodged past swinging marble fists and brought their weapons down on the statue’s leg, which fractured and broke in two. The statue tumbled to the ground.
Now it couldn’t pursue them. Weapons and music boxes were stowed, the rope was taken up again, and our troupe of four unlikely explorers started on the final leg of their returned journey, leaving the shattered statue to wail amidst the trellises.
And then the bees caught up to them.
Back to the Fountain Court and the Doorway Home
The troupe sprinted, badly denting their cages in the process, but the piglet-sized rust bees were swarming at their rear. While the cages seemed to be immune to the rust bees’ influence, the same could not be said for the our troupe’s metal gear. The insects corroded the blade and chainmail of Eddie, and the heater shield of John Rhys-Davies.
Rather than bother trying to fight back, everyone just put their all into hauling on the rope. The door in the wall was still wide open, the dark rainstorm still raging on the other side. With bees rusting their gear and stinging their hides, our troupe charged through the doorway, and the golden cages crashed along behind them, tumbling into the thick mud of the forest roadway.
Lisabeth scrambled back to the door in the tree and slammed it shut. The rust bumblebees that made it through didn’t like the rain one bit, and quickly scattered through the dripping treetops in confusion at their new environment. The troupe caught their breath, lungs burning, legs shaking, skin swelling from toxic bee-stings. They were barely alive. That was enough.
It would take many long hours of marching and shivering for our worn-out adventurers to drag those dented golden cages through the mud all the way back to Prigwort. But even as damaged as they were, the reclaimed gilding of the cages would be enough to set these four up for a good while. Lisabeth Sunderman would finally get to visit a proper bath house and move up in society. John Rhys-Davies would be able to give up his thieving ways, at least for a bit. Eddie would be able to strike out into the world on his own terms, though his lack of a shadow would always haunt him.
As for Glimmering-of-Sun’s-Turning-Tide, well ... elves don’t age, you see. For you and I, time flows like an ever-quickening stream. But for an elf time rushes past like a waterfall, each droplet a day or year or century. The thrill of Glimmering’s short time in Ynn would never be forgotten entirely, but it would fade. They had developed a taste for the ephemeral moments of adventure, those fleeting bursts of wonderment and peril. The eternal land of Hypnagogia was stagnant; this mortal world, and all the worlds it led to, were full of possibilities.
Maybe it would be a few years, maybe fifty. But some time later, the avian elf called Glimmering would once again find themselves trudging down a muddy road in Brackenwold, in the company of a troupe of mortals, seeking out foolhardy adventure and new discoveries.
The Gardens of Ynn was written by Emmy Allen.
The Ynn Generator I used was made by David Schirduan.
During the session, we listened to a bunch of music from the soundtrack for Hollow Knight composed by Christopher Larkin, which can be listened to in long unbroken videos here.
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