Session 1 Journal

Hesta handed me a satchel and seventy gold this morning, which is her preferred way of saying, “Leave town and do not ask why.” She watched me too closely when I took it. I kissed her cheek, called for G.L.U., and pretended not to notice.

The escort money was meant to buy me someone capable on the road. Instead, it bought me a mystery.

I found him in the market, a grung with a bow, a hound at his side, and the posture of someone who expected the whole town to turn hostile if he blinked wrong. When I addressed him in Grung he looked at me as if the stones themselves had learned to croak back. His name is K’roaa’ka. He took the job with the kind of honesty only desperate people manage. No bluff, no flourish, just the plain fact that he had nowhere else to be.

Echo was the stranger detail. A dog should not survive a creature like K’roaa’ka, not if the poison is as dangerous as he says. Yet she followed him calmly, healthy as any camp hound, and G.L.U. noticed her at once. Not in the way a machine notices motion. In the way a child studies another child through glass. That put my teeth on edge.

We bought practical things first. A fishing rig. Scale mail. A barrel full of water large enough to keep a grung alive on the road. Gunthar handled him during the fitting and survived because dwarves are offensively durable. I made a note of that. Sometimes the difference between scholarship and gossip is whether you remembered to write it down.

The road stopped being practical the moment the tribe found us. Four grung rose near the caves and demanded K’roaa’ka turn back. He answered by putting an arrow through the purple one’s eye. I followed suit with the sort of leap no responsible engineer should attempt, and for a few breaths the whole world narrowed to swamp mud, hammer blows, and the small satisfaction of not dying. One survived. He promised we would be marked for death. He said it like a ritual. I believed him.

In the cave, I showed K’roaa’ka the Soul Core. I have no habit of doing that. But there is only so long a man can watch one impossible companion study another before silence starts feeling childish. Echo died and returned. G.L.U. moves with a will that is not entirely mine. If the world intends to place those two facts in the same cart, I would rather meet the problem awake.

So we left for Weber Hollows with a cart, a glowing dog, a grung exile in a water barrel, and one secret too large to stay simple. It did not feel heroic. It felt more important than that. It felt like the first shape of trouble.