>>5316483>15Your kobolds are small, light-on-their-feet, and they are used to hiding sounds of passage from their raiding and hunting lifestyle. Together with them, you pass in near-silence, your few fumbles muffled-enough to pass for regular forest-noise. Even now, at night, there are so many living things—plants, animals, fungi—in this surface-world! It seems enough to disguise the marching of an army at times, to one such as you from the empty halls and barren stone of the underpopulated underdark.
>4Your own size, weight, armour, and your lack of aptitude for matters of stealth and subterfuge… All this is what conspires against you. It is not the kobolds, but YOU who ultimately spoils your approach. You reach the headman’s cabin quite readily, ad the kobolds lift each other in to scramble through the windows. You, however, are too large; you circle the building, and attempt to enter through the back door. Your heavy boot sets the raised floorboards to creaking, however, and raise the attentions of one of the human sleepers.
“Hm? Armod, is that you?”
You freeze. An armoured human is still asleep at the table where you once treated with—and ultimately destroyed—the Dragonwrought. You can still faintly smell the scent of Hako’s burning body here, lingering like an olfactory monument to your victory over the demon-dabbling heretic; the table is scorched along one side by the splash of your fiery breath as it engulfed his body, cracked where you toppled it over in your scuffle prior. None of this seems to have stopped the well-built man in his leather-and-chain from sitting there to eat and to drink: his partly-drained bottle is yet before him, his fingertips brushing against it, and a metal travel-plate seared with greasy food-residue has been pushed to the middle of the table. It was not THIS human, still in prolonged mammalian torpor, who called out.
