Lonto Bargherris was dead and rotting quietly in a gibbet. It wasn’t his first time and, it had to be said, it probably wouldn’t be the last time either. As gibbets went it wasn’t the worst he’d ever been hung in – that honour went to the one overlooking the harbour entrance which soaked him and hosted the vicious gulls that roosted in the lighthouse. It was, perhaps, his third favourite. It gave him a view of some of the market and wasn’t too plagued by rats. When he was alive, he would have been quite alarmed by that observation. Now, he supposed, he lacked some of the bits that would have made him care.

As an errant breeze from the docks rocked his cage, Lonto watched the small group of living adventurers who had just disembarked. They were accompanied by a hulking Bone Knight, so that automatically marked them as Not Prey for the more feral inhabitants of the necropolis. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be – a consequence of having no remaining eyeballs – but there was a noticeable energy to one of the figures that drew his attention. It felt like a coiled and barbed lullaby that could call him to song if unfurled. It wasn’t a glow, more a pull on his attention, like an urge to keep looking at an object and ignore everything else.

Behind his raw eye sockets, the Queen noticed and looked out. She watched as two figures – one tall and made of wood and metal, the other burly, short, and crowned with braided red hair and matching beard moved towards a bar. Two more figures, a halfling and a dragonborn, remained with the Bone Knight. A fifth figure slipped past Lonto’s gibbet and into the dark streets beyond. At the Queen’s command, shadows without accompanying bodies slipped and shifted to follow. Then she pulled her attention elsewhere, leaving Lonto to continue watching.