In Episode 11, The heroes were faced by many challenges in the caverns below the O’Lú compound in the ClearWater District.

The Spinner that they had seen before entering, with its child-sized bundle suspiciously bound to its web, first confronted them, then moved between them and the dying blue unlight of the woken Builder stone.

A shadow of Ddurn – one of Those Who Stood Apart – emerged from the Builder Portal that Aía had used to escape into her own Tuhál of the Morning. This pale-robed white figure with a small silver hand sickle, known as The Stranger on the Road, filled the room with its terror as it emerged and surveyed the heroes.

Acting quickly, Clayborne helped the legless Cesseal out of the cavern through the O’Lú’s basement.

The Stranger on the Road soared across the room, no body visible but the bony protrusions of a body visible through the underwater-slow flow of its robes, and laid its sickle at Cían’s neck. Only to declare he is Not the One, and then demanding several times that he Open the Way, and at last, having been denied, sailed off into the tunnels that led out from that place.

Following that, they had an encounter with a shadow. This was the somewhat independent shadow possessing many of the memories and powers of The Hound, its true form – that was even now imprisoned below the tunnels under Tuhál in a place he referred to as The Maze, drawn into some kind of trap from which he could not escape at the very doorway of the Prison of Terror, set in place by the One Who Stood Apart, Ternir, the Spinner of Prophecy.

The Hound revealed – if his shadow is to be believed – a long past of power and guardianship in Mawr, and a kind of jailor’s warden for the humans there.

Eventually, their strange recent events cast in some small light of understanding, the heroes released the child being guarded by the Spinner, emerged into the light (Yay, Sissyphus for opening the way!), saved the O’Lú baby from its dead mother’s arms, and won the acclaim of the ClearWater families most particularly in their bullying self-appointed leader with a shillelagh, Darra.

The heroes take some days to rest and recover and wander in their own pursuits before whispers from the Shadow of the Hound into Clayborn’s ear (that he left behind!) draw them back together, and back down into the dark under Caer Cuval, the capitol city.

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