Into the Lower Shaft
Torvin sent Kettra, Faro, Yenn, Brask, and Ilsevir into the East Mine to inspect its sealed lower shaft, check the bracing, and judge whether it could safely reopen. They began late, after Brask retrieved his forgotten pack and Kettra and Yenn disagreed over which supports needed attention first. Kettra took a coil of rope from a supply cart before they entered. The lower passage was cold and mostly dry until, beyond the newest supports, the tunnel narrowed and ankle-deep water covered the floor. Yenn again warned that the eastern bracing looked wrong, but the party pressed on. Twenty feet farther in, the left wall collapsed inward.
The Husks
Five pale, dog-sized creatures forced their way through the gap, their many-jointed bodies crusted with frost that did not melt in the mine air. The party came to call them husks. Kettra held the narrow tunnel with axe and shield, keeping most of them from reaching the others, while Yenn sent arrows past her into the creatures behind. Faro slipped around the side and drove his short sword through one husk’s neck, though it took further blows from Kettra to finish it. When Kettra suffered a bite to the arm, Brask discovered that the healing he had meant to use had already been spent; he answered with his mace instead, breaking another husk’s spine. From the rear, Ilsevir burned two more, and the last fled back through the breach after four of its kind lay dead.
The Buried Entrance
After the fight, Ilsevir examined the broken wall and found chisel marks along its seam, cut from the far side rather than made by a natural cave-in. Beyond it lay an older tunnel absent from the mine’s maps—the place the husks had come from, and where the survivor had gone. As rocks began to fall from the weakened passage, the party ran for the main shaft. They reached daylight before the worst of the collapse, but the slope above the entrance gave way as well. Kettra was knocked down in the slide, and Faro pulled her clear before the rubble buried half the mine mouth. Of the fifth husk, no trace remained; it might have been caught beneath the stones or escaped over the edge.
Torvin’s Offer
Before the slide covered the area completely, the party searched the husks they had dragged clear. Each wore an iron tag wired around its neck, marked with a circle crossed by three lines; they kept one, along with a few worthless remnants from the collapse. Kettra then found an old prospecting cut nearby, where an hour’s search uncovered a thirty-year-old journal page describing unnatural tremors and the sound of breathing beneath the rock. Torvin was waiting at the mine mouth, concerned first with the cost of the damage but forced to hear what the party had found. He claimed not to recognize the mark on the tag and insisted nobody should have been able to reach the far side of that wall after the flood. After Faro pressed for hazard pay, they settled on the original forty gold and a week of room and board; Torvin then offered sixty more if they could discover who had cut the wall and why. The party gave him no answer before returning to the inn in the dark.