Of Pipers and Pests
After the celebrations at Margaux’s Farm, the party gathered their belongings and prepared to depart. Igraine Margaux, the lady of the manor, called Burley to her, and addressed him shyly:
‘Thank you Burley, you bestowed upon my love and I a great gift last night. I am in your debt, though I know not how to repay you. My prince would have you know that you may wield his weapon with honour.’
‘There is perhaps one more thing that I can tell you. Spirits are drawn to you, like moths to a candle. I can see another, lurking at your back, haunting your steps. He is shadowed from me, and I cannot see his face. But you should be wary; I know not what he desires of you.’
The party joined the throng of revellers making their journey home. For a little way, they trekked beside the slow moving caravan of their friend, Robard Blandish. Pebbles, feeling a surge of fellowship, invited Blandish to join them in celebrating his birthday; an invitation that the wizard gladly accepted.
Eventually the crowds peeled off, making their way back to their smallholdings and farmsteads. By the time Blandish turned south on the Wind Way, the party found themselves marching once more alone.
After an hour or so of gentle strolling amidst the hedgerows, vaulting over stiles, and cutting across paddocks, they found themselves once more surveying an immense, rippling, golden field of wheat, stretching away as far as the eye can see.
At its heart, a lonely scarecrow teetered atop a high pole. It appeared to be strangely garbed, not in old farmers’ clothes, too worn through to be decent, but in strange billowing purple and orange robes that fluttered flag-like in the merry breeze.
Nearing the strange figure, they were shocked to discover that it was not an inanimate effigy, but the mysterious tiefling, Gallowglass, perched on the scarecrow’s pole. He addressed them with a wink, ‘You’ve untethered one soul from eternal bondage, but there are more in this land, who’ve made a bad bargain, who’ve signed away more than they knew…Would you help them too, if you could?’
The party nodded their assent, but Gallowglass only smirked and said, ‘Then carry on the way you’re heading and, mind you, keep an ear out!’ He tugged mischeviously on the lobe of his ear and flipped backward off the back of the pole, leaving it swaying wildly. The party darted forward, but the strange man had disappeared into the high wheat.
The party trudged onward until they crested the rise that overlooked Goblinhead Ranch, the home of Boskin Morrow and his famous clangers. The stables looked tranquil in the warm haze of mid-morning. Ponies and Dire Ponies, as Boskin Morrow humorously called horses, cropped the grass contentedly. Strangely, no one seemed to be working the fields.
The Ranch’s backdoor, where the party had only recently enjoyed a delicious lunch, swung in the gentle breeze. It had been left ajar and unattended. Inside, the kitchen was a mess, with flour strewn across the floor and cold clangers scattered on the ground, knocked from a now empty cooling rack which lay disordered on the kitchen counter.
The party searched the kitchen, discovering hundreds of tiny rat-tracks in the flour, scurrying in all directions. They also found a brown glass jar, with a label on it, bearing a skull and crossbones and the words Rat Poison. Though the house was, it seemed, utterly deserted, they could hear, very faintly, a strange, hypnotic melody coming from somewhere within.
At the top of the basement stairs, Enid blocked her ears with wax, for the sounds of the melody were clearer here. Descending, the party met with a disturbing sight: a farmhand tottered strangely, whirling in a horrible dance, arms swinging, knees brought up high. His whole body seemed to be writhing, their clothes undulating. In the dim light, the party eventually saw that the poor wretch was covered in swarming rats, that scuttled up and down his body, in and out of his clothes, nibbling and biting at his flesh.
The dancer didn’t seem to flinch at these incessant rat bites. Perhaps because when they looked into his face, they saw that he was quite dead. His eyes were rolled back into his head, which lolled unnaturally. They also noticed that his shoes had been shredded, as though he had spent a year on the road.
As the party moved closer, they heard a horrid voice, strangled and far away, seem to come up from deep in the man’s chests. He sung an old folk ditty, one they’d heard a hundred times before, and with that, they felt an irresistible urge to dance.
Enid, her ears plugged, watched as the party fought the irresistible urge to dance; some were pulled deeper into the dark basement, toward the sound of the flute. As they moved, they were battered by the windmilling arms of the undead revellers.
Deep in the subterranean levels of Goblinhead Ranch, a wall had been toppled, leading to a great warren, a hollowed out cavern made by some large burrowing creature. In that place, the party once again encountered that fetid, unnatural mutation of wild magic: Lord Skittering. Once an ordinary rat, he was warped by the strange curses of Wicklow Mill, feeding on the Witch Owl’s filth, and become a horrid bipedal rat-creature, with pretensions of royal authority. He was not alone, a teeming multitude of rats swarmed around him, and at his side was a terrified halfling piper, desperately blowing a ragged tune through split and blistered lips. The owners of Goblinhead Ranch, Boskin and Winnie Morrow, danced an exhausted jig, their eyes pleading for release.
Though battered and in disarray, the Lost and Foundlings overcame the lure of the enchanted pipes, and the menace of the swarming rats, and struck down Lord Skittering at last.