Chronicles of Klept: Chapter V
If there’s one thing the Humbledown Valley has always taken seriously, it’s the burial of important people in deeply inconvenient places.
The Whispering Crypts, for example.
Built into the sea cliffs northwest of Dawnsheart, the crypts were never just a cemetery—they were a statement. A place of solemn reverence, spiritual weight, and—most importantly—geographical hostility.
They are, by design, a network of interconnected sea caves, carved into the cliffside, expanded and sanctified over the centuries into a sprawling underground tomb. Above them rise the burial mounds—earthy monuments to the dearly departed and the aggressively prestigious.
But it’s not the dead that gave the crypts their name.
It’s the wind.
The ocean winds, forced through the cliffside tunnels and out of the stone vents in the mounds above, resonate through the chambers like the world’s most cursed church organ. A chorus of howls and wails and groaning tones that rise and fall depending on the tides and, presumably, how much the dead object to your presence.
To the spiritually inclined, the crypts are a place where the veil between worlds grows thin.
To the historically inclined, they are a remarkable example of posthumous architectural excess.
To everyone else, they’re a very good reason to find alternate burial arrangements.
Over the centuries, the valley’s most important figures have been laid to rest there: High Readers, old kings, legendary warlords, eccentric inventors, at least one man who claimed to have married a cloud, and several lesser-known members of nobility who were mostly important because their estates had really big gates.
Until recently, that tradition had continued—unbroken, uninterrupted.
But then… things changed.
The crypts grew loud. Louder than usual. The whispers became screams.
And now?
Now there are things in the dark that do not belong to any register of the dead.
And the latest would be resident, whose body has remained unburied for far too long, awaits his place among the honored ancestors… assuming the place can be made habitable again.
Which brings us—regrettably—back to our group.
Let the record show that while my own boots have never and shall never touch the damp stone of the Whispering Crypts, I have, through diligent questioning (and one begrudging round of drinks), assembled a reasonably coherent account of the group’s activities within.
It begins, rather ignobly, with a prank.
According to Umberto—who recounted this part with the smug satisfaction of a gnome who has never once regretted a decision in his life—the group played a practical joke on the guards escorting them to the crypts. While it had something to do with Day’s familiar taking the shape of a large spider, the finer details remain vague, as Umberto simply waved his hand and said, “You had to be there. Real classic. Din laughed so hard he snorted ale out his nose, and he wasn’t even drinking.”
Trunch, when pressed, offered only: “It was idiotic.”
Day added: “It was, technically, harmless.”
Wikis muttered something about one of the guards wetting himself. I chose not to pursue that thread.
The air was thick with brine and decay, the narrow tunnels sweating with moisture that hadn’t seen daylight in centuries. Trunch described them as being covered with“Old mosaics. Decorative funerary work. The kind you commission for people whose names get written down. It’s mostly gone now—weathered or scavenged—but the craftsmanship was fine. It meant something, once.”
Umberto chimed in saying they were “a disappointment that smelled like wet regret and dried barnacle”
Apparently, the acoustics were terrible. Everything echoed in that uncanny way that made it impossible to tell if someone was behind you or just thinking very loudly.
It was in one of these stone-walled passages—beneath a cracked relief of a long-dead High Reader mid-sermon—that they encountered the Kua-Toa.
For those unfamiliar, Kua-Toa are fish-like humanoids with bulbous eyes, slimy skin, and an unfortunate smell that I’m told lingers on the soul. More importantly, they are known for their unique theological quirk: if enough of them believe in a god hard enough, that god tends to pop into existence.
Naturally, this makes negotiations with them… complicated.
There were five at first, standing in a loose circle around a bed of slimy seaweed and barnacle-covered offerings. They didn’t attack right away. In fact, they seemed more confused than hostile, as if the group had crashed a particularly pungent religious ceremony.
And that’s when Yak disappeared.
“We’re not even sure he came in with us,” Din told me later.
“He did,” said Trunch.
“Did he?” asked Wikis, eyes darting about in paranoia. “Are you sure? Maybe he was already inside. Maybe, he’s here right now!”
There was a beat of silence before Din shrugged and added, “I’m not ruling out that he was one of the fish.”
“They were guarding something,” Umberto explained, gesturing with his pint tankard for emphasis.
“All flappy and twitchy and muttering in their weird fish language. We told them to move along. They told us to fuck off. It was a whole thing.”
“You don’t know for sure that was what they said” Trunch chimed in.
“I don’t need to know a language to understand when I’ve been told to fuck off” Umberto replied “It’s been said to me in more languages than anything else, it’s my love language.”
“You killed a lot of them,” I pointed out.
“Only the rude ones,” Umberto replied, as if this were a recognized diplomatic standard.
“They said we were trespassing. We told them they were squatting. Then Din blessed his hammer, Wikis shot a couple of them, and things went downhill from there.”
“Downhill?” I asked.
“Sideways. Into the seaweed. Lot of flailing.”
Din took down one of them with a blow that rang like a church bell through the tunnels. The second fell to a particularly creative barrage of eldritch blasts from Trunch, who tried to reason with them first but ultimately decided explaining theology to fish wasn’t worth the energy.
Yak reappeared mid-fight, silent and coated in salt, like a thought someone had tried to forget but couldn’t quite shake.
“Pretty sure he whispered something to one of them before stabbing it,” Day mused. “Or maybe he whispered after. Hard to tell with Yak.”
When the fight ended, only a handful of Kua-Toa remained—eyes wide, faith shaken. Somehow, Umberto convinced the remaining ones to leave.
No one remembers exactly what he said.
“It was something about Gods and damaged buttholes,” he offered.
Whether it was divine fear or just a collective survival instinct, the fish-folk fled, leaving behind their seaweed temple. Taking a moment to explore, and for Din to retrieve several pieces of Kua-Toa flesh afterward—presumably for research or culinary purposes (when I inquired, he simply called it ‘fish-man meat’ and offered me a strip which I politely declined), the group discovered the object of their reverence—a large, glowing, slightly pulsating egg-like structure, nestled in a bed of damp seaweed.
The group gathered around the egg, which now hummed with a warmth that no one trusted but no one refused. It pulsed faintly—alive, but not in a way any of them liked.
“We should leave it,” said Trunch.
“We should smash it,” said Wikis.
“We should cook it,” said Din, already taking notes.
“We’re taking it,” said Umberto.
Yak, who had been quietly carving something into the table during most of the retelling, said only, “We’ll know when it hatches. Or when it opens. Or when it screams. One of those.”
Din, ever the craftsman, constructed a simple metallic box lined with cloth and rune-scribed bolts to hold the egg during transit. He worked through the night as they returned to Dawnsheart, the box resting in the center of the cart like a sleeping secret they all tried not to look at too directly.
I saw them arrive back the next morning, just as the sun began to rise, casting a long golden beam across the quiet town.
The Chronicles of Klept 