Worm's Old Crew

At the Rusted Mermaid in Saltmoor the party crossed paths with a band of relic hunters — the crew that raised Worm and, when he was a boy, used him to slip into the tight spaces on their jobs that none of the grown members could reach.

Seeing him alive plainly surprised them. By their telling, they had left him behind during a job at ruins outside Aristonia when the site turned deadly and its keepers threatened to kill any intruder on sight; they waited only a couple of hours, took him for dead, and moved on. Since then they have taken in another young boy to do the same work, and call him by the same name. Still working the relic-hunting trade, they had come to Saltmoor drawn, like so many others, toward the fabled Vex Caves.

Into the Vex Caves

The crew did not stay in Saltmoor. Learning the party meant to brave the caves, they followed on the same low tide — six of them, the stolen boy riding a strong man's shoulders — and deep in the flooded passages they caught up at last.

They are no longer only relic hunters. Their spokesman, a hard and familiar figure the crew call Greedy Ghent, and a robed, cold-mannered woman named Moxie, told Worm they now answer to a "higher calling," and had come to recover a particular artifact from the caves — something they insisted must not fall into the wrong hands. They moved as though acting on outside knowledge, seeming to know already where to go and what would open. The party took the thing they meant to seize to be the throttle at the caves' heart.

They pressed Worm to abandon his companions and rejoin the family — Worm alone, for there was, they said, no room for the rest. He would not. With the tide rising and the way ahead newly swung open, the two bands stood facing each other across the flooded chamber, the child held between them, and it did not look as though it would end in words.

The Reckoning in the Caves

It did not. The standoff broke into open battle in the flooded tide chamber, and it went hard against the crew. Moxie proved a robed spellcaster; she broke from the fight and ran for the artifact at the caves' heart, and Worm ran her down. She knew him even as they fought — "You've certainly grown up... I didn't think you would" — and fell to him before she could reach it. Greedy Ghent, who had spent the whole fight locked in a personal duel with Biz, was killed as well.

With two of their number dead, the rest lost their nerve. The remaining crew — a rogue called Urkle, a hard fighter named Calvin, and the burly, gentler Bill, who had carried little Worm through the whole fight — gathered up their fallen and fled up a shaft to the clifftop, little Worm still with them, leaving the party the artifact everyone had come for. Climbing away, Bill called back to Worm that they had been wrong to leave him for dead: "We should have come back for you. I told her." It was afterward suggested — by Bill, and taken only on faith — that Moxie had been the one who argued against keeping Worm with the family, though nothing proved it.