The Oubliette at Ak Min Tor

Part 6 I am Shaddron

I'd already been at the Tinnic village for about six months. In all that time, the only outsiders that came here were the weekly River Rats that came through and asked the usual questions about what they had seen, and who came past the village besides them. Sometimes they would beat someone up, and sometimes they would take one of the girls. There was nobody to stop them.

Most of the men in the village were already gone. The older people were here, and the girls that stayed in the open weren't much on the pretty side for the most part. There were a few, but the ones that were likely to attract the attention of the bandits knew to hide when they came calling. To survive, these Tinnic had to become like the cockroaches or the chirping lizards in Wynnit Falls. When someone started looking for them, they just faded into the trees and the swamps.

The Tinnic people had their canoes, and they went fishing almost every day, and they didn't need any trade with other people to get by. They were far enough out of the line of traffic on the river for anyone to come back among the islands to meet with them too ... especially with the bandit camps that were known to be in these islands.

My weight has been steadily growing with all the good food that they serve around here.  My strength was increasing daily too.  I've even started fishing a little bit to help the village.  Now I was just waiting for a good opportunity to find a way back to Wynnit Falls again. Wynnit Falls, the place where I lived before all this Oubliette stuff happened. It was the place where my wife and son were ... those many years ago.

Every time I thought about going home, I was of two different minds on how things could go. Even this late in the game I still didn't know what I was going to do when I got there. It's not like I could just go home and act like nothing ever happened. There might not even be a home to go to. Would it be better to remain hidden and see things from a distance?

A group of adventurers came in with high hopes of breaking into the old council chambers of the Ak Min ruins. There was supposed to be a scroll in the old library that gave the location of something-or-other in the Shadowlands. Everybody already knew that you didn't go into the Shadowlands, but these guys were chasing the dream of riches. It was written all over their faces and in their eyes.

It wasn't riches that they were going to find in the Shadowlands. Bad dreams is what they would find there, and insanity, and death after that. But before they could even hope to head in that direction, first they had to get past all the Redbrands, and then they would have to find their way into the depths of the ruins. All the passageways were either filled with water, or rubble from the fall of the city in the time before man.

I didn't even bother trying to talk them out of it. What was the point? They had already come this far, and an old man in a Tinnic village wasn't going to be able to deter them from anything anyway. They prepared themselves and left for the old ruins before dark.

On the third day, it was pretty obvious that they weren't coming back. They were either imprisoned or killed by now. It just so happened that they had left their boat covered with branches and leaves where it couldn't easily be seen. It would be a shame to let a perfectly good boat go to waste, and I started planning to make the trip up-river.

If I waited any longer, then the River Rats would probably find the boat and then it would be theirs. They usually came by at least once a week, and it should be any day now. The Dead Man Rocks kept the bigger boats from making the pass around the northwest point of Dickers Island, but the River Rats had something that they did over at the old mines on the Red Cliffs on a pretty punctual schedule and brought smaller boats through the rocks to do whatever they do over there.

I ended up discussing it with the village Elders. They told me that the main currents in the river wouldn't let me leave the Isles without going right past one of the bandit camps, but if I would take two of their girls with me, they could show me the way. There were supposed to be some special water currents that they knew about.