Where the Wind Comes From
The candle leans. Not a flicker — a lean, steady, the same way for as long as your arm can hold it still, in a corridor with both doors shut and no lamp but yours.
You have watched it do that in four rooms now, and somebody has finally written down which way. Four arrows chalked on the back of a wax tablet, and carried on past each other they cross, roughly, north and west of where you stand.
There is air out there. Air has to come from somewhere.
The Way Out
The Labyrinth is four hundred feet of masonry under a palace and it ought to be still. It is not. Nearly every room has a draught and each one is going somewhere — to the forges, up the shafts, down into the sumps. Most of that is the maze breathing through its own lungs, which is worthless. Some of it comes in from outside, and that is a bearing.
A party that stops treating a leaning flame as atmosphere and starts treating it as a measurement — one reading per room, written down, six rooms deep — can carry the arrows on until they cross. They cross at the north stub of R062 The Mason's Unfinished Wall, at ankle height, where the dressed corridor cuts through an older temple wall and the builders back-filled the gap with rubble because nobody was ever going to look. Behind the rubble is a fissure in the living rock, four inches wide and five feet tall, and thirty feet beyond it is the quarry this building was cut out of: a worked-out gallery open to the sky, a cart track down the middle, a road at the end of the track.
Four inches is not a door, and making it one is mason's work — hours of it, with tools, and every blow rings six hundred feet down the corridors. This ending is not a discovery; the discovery happens mid-session. It is a shift of labour under a clock.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Something that shows air | A candle stub from R005 The Chandler's Rest; the mason's chalk in R062, still chalk after two centuries and beautiful in a draught; a feather from R061 Nest of Rustling Feathers; wool from R072 Loom-Widow's Parlor, tied to a nail at ankle height. No check — a leaning flame is not a skill, it is a fact, and the party either writes it down or does not |
| Six readings, compared | R068 Corridor of Held Breath (gas lying dead flat is a room with no draught, and a zero is a reading), R100 Antechamber of the Held Breath (forty seconds in, forty out — the maze's own lung, and it must be subtracted), R097 The Winnowing Floor (a threshing floor works only where there is wind, and this one still parts chaff from bone), R055 Vent of Sulfur Song (a source, not an inlet: discard it), R045 The Bellows Gallery (the ribbon on the iris, four wind-glyphs, and a compass rose cut into the floor to lay the arrows on), R010 Vault of the Salt Wind (the strongest draught in the maze, and the wrong one). Comparing six: Survival or Investigation DC 13, or no check for a party that actually kept the list |
| The fissure | R062, north stub, behind the back-fill at the ankle-height join. Pulling the loose rubble down is ten minutes and no check. Investigation DC 12 finds the slot once anyone looks at the right wall — the plumb-bob hangs dead still at eye height and a candle at boot height does not |
| Quarryman's tools | The mason left a punch, two cold chisels, and a mortarboard in R062, and two centuries of dry air have left the steel brittle as biscuit. R023 Forge of the One-Eyed: Ankos mends, and a chisel is not a weapon, so he will re-steel the set for his usual price of metal, fire, or two hours on the bellows pole. R067 Anvil of the Lame God has hammers, files, and a ten-pound sledge hung within reach of the anvil — ask across it and tell the truth, because lifting them unasked is how that room becomes a fight |
| Hands and hours | Four hours of one person's work, and the slot has room for three at the face. Nobody else can help and nobody can hurry it. Everything below is a consequence of that sentence |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | Your candle leans. Steadily, one way, for as long as you hold it still, in a corridor with both doors shut. |
| Trace | An olive leaf on the floor. Dry, brown, curled, entirely ordinary, four hundred feet under a palace, and nothing down here has leaves. |
| Sign | A tuft of wool tied to a nail at ankle height beside a doorway, standing straight out from the wall. There is another in the next room. Somebody was measuring. |
| Proof | Everyone still and silent against the north wall: through the rock, a mattock. Two blows and a pause. Two blows and a pause. Somebody is working stone and they are not in the Labyrinth. |
| Path | The party's own sheet — six rooms, six arrows, two struck out — and where the rest cross is the unfinished wall. Twelve courses would have done it. I laid eleven. |
| Door | The back-fill down in a heap, and behind it a slot four inches wide and five feet tall with a line of grey daylight in it. Put a hand in: cold, dry, and it smells of rain on cut stone. Somewhere out there, a cart. |
Resolution Scene
Twenty minutes, and the decision is how many of you are swinging and how many are holding the doorway.
Phase one — the face. The slot must open to eighteen inches to pass a person with their armour off and their pack handed through after them, or two feet to walk out like a human being. Draw twelve boxes where everyone at the table can see them. One box is twenty minutes of one character at the face, three can work at once, so the fastest possible open is four turns — eighty minutes. Each turn every worker makes one Strength (Athletics) check, DC 13, with advantage for mason's or stonemason's tools proficiency, and each success fills a box. Two more boxes buys the two-foot gap.
| Tools in hand | Effect on the twelve boxes |
|---|---|
| Punch, two cold chisels, a sledge | Twelve boxes. As written |
| A crowbar, pry-bar, or the mason's own line and lever | −2 boxes; the back-fill's unmortared blocks come out whole |
| Daggers, shield rims, the brittle chisels unmended | Twenty boxes, and every box destroys one implement. After three, work stops until they find more |
| Stone shape or the like | −4 boxes per casting. A party that prepared for a maze made of stone prepared correctly |
Failures. A missed check costs the box and nothing else. Failing by 5 or more, roll d6: 1–3 a chisel snaps (with one left every box costs two successes; with none, the party is on the twenty-box row); 4–5 the slot chokes and a filled box must be dug out again; 6 the lintel slips — Dexterity save DC 14, 2d6 bludgeoning at the face, and a filled box is lost. The dust costs a Constitution save DC 12 or a level of exhaustion after two consecutive turns, unless somebody rigged a wet rag or a fan-tube.
Phase two — the clock, run in the open. The blows carry roughly six hundred feet through corridor and further through the vent hoses, and everything within earshot now knows where the party is and that they are not moving.
| Turn | What the noise has brought |
|---|---|
| 1 | Nothing. Let them hear the blows come back off three separate corridors and understand what they have told the maze |
| 2 | Scouts. Two bodies of the nearest warband at the edge of the light, counting the party and not fighting. They leave to tell. Stop them silently and everything below slides one turn later |
| 3 | First arrival — Medium (~6,600 adjusted XP for six at APL 9), drawn from a warband the party has already annoyed |
| 4 | A voice on the far side of the rock, in Knossian, asking who is in there. Answering is a choice and it is theirs |
| 5 | Second arrival — Hard (~9,600 XP). If the party has met the Cult of the Thread (W18) it is them, with a lamp and a barrow of block, because they do not want a hole in their maze either |
| 6+ | One Medium arrival every turn, and the honest sentence: you can leave the way you came, or you can finish this |
Every body off the face is twenty minutes they do not have; every body left on it is a body not holding the door. That is the scene — do not solve the rotation for them.
Phase three — coming out. Thirty feet of fissure, then the gallery: tool-marked benches, wedges swollen in their slots, a spoil heap, a cart track, and thirty men who are palace property, with two spearmen and a tally-clerk who counts blocks and not people. Decide what hour it is before the last box is filled, not after. Walk out and talk is Persuasion DC 13 — they are labour, not soldiers, and the clerk is the only problem in the quarry; it costs a name in a book. The noon rest is free and costs forty minutes with the maze still arriving behind them. The change of shift is group Stealth DC 15 across ninety feet of open bench, and nobody out there is watching the rock; they are watching the road. At night it is one watchman and a dog, no check.
Fallback
No tools, no hours, or the rock simply will not give. The fissure stays four inches, and it is still the way out, because noise goes both ways.
- Shout through it, and keep shouting, and bang the rock on a count so it is obviously a man and not a rockfall. They have cut stone all their lives and they know a voice in a bench when they hear one. They will cut in from their own side in about two hours.
- The foreman's terms are flat and not negotiable through four inches of rock: everything the party carries that is worth carrying, or a day of their own labour on his face, or their names and their business written in his book for the palace. One of the three, and they choose.
- What it costs meanwhile: two hours in the stub with the noise clock still running from turn 4 — two arrivals, fought in a 30-ft room with their backs to a hole they cannot fit through. Fire-setting buys some of that time back for goods: every torch and all their oil against the face, a butt of water flung at hot rock, three boxes in one go, and R062 full of smoke at Constitution save DC 13 or a level of exhaustion.
- The party still gets out, through a hole somebody else cut, at whatever hour it happens to be, owing a quarry foreman. Never a dead end.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The draught sheet. Rooms, arrows, two crossings-out, and a mark where the rest met. The only map of the Labyrinth that does not depend on the corridors, because air does not care which rooms rotate. Anyone holding it can find this hole again from anywhere in the maze.
- The hole itself. Eighteen inches of second mouth into the Labyrinth, in the side of a working quarry, and nobody in the palace knows. It is also a draught that was not there yesterday — in a month the gas in R068 will have thinned, and something down there that could never smell the outside can smell it now.
- A quarryman's set, re-steeled — and the gang's silence, or their goodwill. Thirty men, a tally-book with thirty names in it, and not one of them chose to be on that bench.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Eight boxes, DC 11, and the back-fill is already half down. A previous crew left a sound sledge in the stub. Turn 2's scouts run rather than report, and the turn-3 arrival is a single wanderer rather than a pack |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Sixteen boxes, DC 15, and the Cult keeps a standing watch on R062: the clock starts at turn 2, arrivals land on turns 2, 3 and 5, and the turn-5 arrival brings mortar and means to seal the slot behind the party |
| 15 | As APL 12, and the far side is hostile — a warden's guard on the gang, awake, the gallery lit. One Medium arrival every turn from turn 2, and something is in the fissure itself: it came in the same way, it is thin, and it has been waiting four inches from daylight for a long time |
- The reading is the game; the digging is the bill. Give the arrows away freely — every room the party checks has an answer and the answer is free. This ending turns on somebody choosing to write six of them down, and asking for a check is how you refuse them that.
- R010 is the trap and you must not correct it. The Vault of the Salt Wind has the strongest draught in the maze, it points at the sea, and it is a true reading of a real opening nine inches wide in a cliff face. Let them argue about which arrow to strike out.
- Run the twelve boxes and the turn count where the players can see them. The scene is only tense if it is legible. Fill boxes out loud, say the turn number every twenty in-world minutes, and never quietly adjust either one because a fight went badly.
- The noise is the price of the exit, not a punishment for a mistake, and the party knew it before the first blow. Say this is going to be heard when they start, then let it be heard on schedule, and let them spend bodies on the doorway rather than dice on luck.
- Four inches of daylight is the image. A grey line in black rock, cold air on the back of a hand, and a cart going past out there while filthy adventurers kneel in limestone flour with a chisel. Nobody on that track has any idea what is under the hill.
- Never let the slot become a wall. If the tools fail or the table has had enough, go to the Fallback at once and let somebody else do the cutting.
- If the party is out of time, run six boxes, three workers, one arrival on turn 3, and make it night so the quarry decision costs nothing. Ten minutes, and end on the cart track.