September 3rd, 973
The morning after receiving the encrypted letters from M. Crezia, the party reconvened at their usual haunt, the Rusted Nail. Pfinder, as usual, was late. The others, nursing yawns and lukewarm tea, picked over their breakfasts and grumbled about the maddening codes they’d wrestled with into the wee hours.
Then—the door burst open.
Pfinder strode in, radiant with triumph, and struck a typically over-the-top pose in the center of the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, gays and theys! It brings me unparalleled joy to announce that I have cracked not one, but two—yes, two!—of our friend Captain Nelson’s cryptic communiqués!”
He bowed with a complicated flourish. The rest of the patrons, now realizing there would be no bloodshed, returned to their porridge.
Pfinder swept over to the party’s table, raised a hand to quell the rising storm of questions, and laid two neatly transcribed decrypts upon the table—each accompanied by the original.
“And here, my dear associates, I entreat you – observe the proof!”
Then, with the untroubled conscience of a man who regards all property as at least semi-public, he helped himself to Generic Undefined Character #1’s (hereinafter GUC-1) toast and began chewing with languid, theatrical satisfaction.
The party, now wide awake and energized, passed the letters eagerly between them and began to read.
(The first encrypted letter)
Emile,
The major with the bird tattoos is gone.
You remember I told you about him a couple of years ago—claimed he was just a caravan scout, but knew the old roads too well. We used to joke that he’d been alive during the old wars.
His room’s been cleaned out. Not ransacked—sanitized. Even the dust was gone.
Before he vanished, he left me a message:“Tell the blacksmith in Dolgen’s Hollow the hourglass is leaving.”
I don’t know what it means, but I passed it on. Three nights later, someone left a black feather wedged in my doorframe.
There’s a group forming out here, Émile. Small. Careful. Angry. More organized than peasants ought to be. They call themselves The Ebon Blades. If the name sounds theatrical—it is. But they’re real. And they’re planning something.
I think I saw one of them near the ruins north of Barrow’s Edge. Just watching. Never came closer. I had the sense he wasn’t watching me.
And amidst it all—undead still rising, and the fields are still going dark.
Summer holds: that old big-legged table out on the frontier.
Yours,
A.
And…
(The 3rd encrypted letter)
Emile,
I know the last letter was… strange. This one is stranger. If you’re still reading, thank you.Something ancient is fighting beneath Cambria, and I fear we’ve all been walking over a buried crime so enormous it warped the earth around it. Not metaphorically.
I mean the land—still, in places it shouldn’t. Roads ever subtly away from ruins that don’t appear on any maps.Dead language surfaces in traffic scratched by children who couldn’t have learned them.
Two nights ago, I rode out to inspect a supposed smuggler’s camp near the Iron Spine.
I found no smuggler. What I did find was a stone gate sunk halfway into a hillside, sealed with runes I’ve never seen and a sigil resembling a weeping flame.
The scouts with me said it wasn’t there a week ago.
They’re lying, or forgetting, or both.Worse: there were bones scattered in the moss. Not shattered. Arranged. Reverently. Like a burial rite.
No one teaches that.
Crosses had rites.I asked the local priest. He gave me that same smile bureaucrats give when you’ve already lost the argument.
“Those graves never buried their dead,” he said. “They eat them. Or burned them. Depending on which folk song you believe.”But I don’t believe the songs anymore. Not after what I saw in the gate.
There were carvings inside.
Murals, ritually collapsed.
One showed a cross—not rampaging, but healing the wounded of other races.
One showed a queen, or a priestess, standing beside a human with her hand on his shoulder.I copied what I could, and I’ll send them along in another letter. Maybe someone in Academia can still read them.
None of this is going in the official report.
I’ve already been told—twice now—to stop asking “archaeologist’s questions.”
One of those warnings came from a Colonel I’ve never met, signed with the Central Command wax seal.You remember what we used to say in the watchtower?
“When you hear boots behind you in the dark, ask if they echo.”Well, nothing echoes out here anymore.
Send word back, if you can. If you can’t—send someone.
Cipher holds: Our friend Evergreen.
Yours in haste,
A.
As they reached the final lines, a hush fell over the table. The implications were darker than any had suspected. Captain Nelson, it seemed, had stumbled upon something foul indeed.
After a moment, Vren, ever the one for directness, turned a skeptical eye toward Pfinder.
“Well?” she said. “Are you going to tell us what bardic sorcery you used to crack these, or simply sit there smirking like the cat who’s annexed the creamery?”
“The latter, naturally,” said Pfinder, smoothing his lapel with great care. “Insufferability, you see, is my chief export. However—” and here he caught Vren’s increasingly flinty gaze “—inasmuch as the dissemination of knowledge may forestall the hurling of crockery, permit me to elucidate.”
“You see, the first cipher is a classic monoalphabetic substitution. Each letter in the original message is systematically replaced with another. A few centuries ago, the good scholars of Cirellia—being a particularly meddlesome and alphabetically obsessed people—devoted their energies to defeating such encryptions. They developed the technique of frequency analysis, noting, as one must, that certain letters—E, T, O—are positively common, found frolicking in every second syllable, while others—Z, X, V—are more elusive, preferring to haunt crossword puzzles and secret societies.”
“The foundational insight of our dear Cirellian cipher-smiths—spirited eccentrics, all of them, with ink-stained fingers and an unhealthy interest in consonants—was this: when one merely substitutes one letter for another, one alters the attire of the alphabet, yes, but not its essential rhythms. The music, as it were, remains unchanged. That is to say, if I were to replace every splendid little ‘E’ in a message with a brooding, suspicious ‘R’—as our beleaguered Captain Nelson so unwittingly did—then, lo and behold, the letter R would begin showing up absolutely everywhere, like a particularly determined suitor at a garden party. And one might reasonably conclude: ‘Aha! R is, in fact, E in disguise.’”
“From there, the process is devilishly straightforward—though not, I must stress, easy. One looks for other frequent flyers—T, O, A, and the like—and swaps them out accordingly. Soon patterns begin to wriggle free from the cryptographic chrysalis. A word like T?E, for instance, presents itself, and one’s mind begins to hum. Is it ‘THE’? Is it ‘TIE’? Could it, in some horrific scenario, be ‘TOE’? We test, we tinker, and gradually the whole thing peels apart like a poorly sealed envelope.”
“Now, this requires what we in the bardic profession refer to as ‘effort,’ which, I admit, is a quality we typically outsource. But occasionally, when the stakes are grave and the breakfast lukewarm, even we aesthetes and warblers must roll up our sleeves and do a spot of actual work.” He punctuated the remark with an ironic shrug and a look of mild personal betrayal, as though manual labor had once borrowed his books and returned them smelling of vinegar.
“The second cipher, I regret to say, is somewhat more juvenile. One might describe it as a lexicographical shuffle—the letters of each word scrambled like eggs at a boarding school breakfast. Consider the very first word: ‘Eeilm.’ Not, as one might suppose, an exotic fruit, but rather the scrambled remains of ‘Emile,’ our correspondent’s confidant.”
Pfinder lifted a reproving finger.
“This, my friends, is what happens when a man attempts espionage without the benefit of a classical education. The Cirellian school insists—quite rightly—that one should omit punctuation, casing, and any other comforts of civilization when encoding secret texts. Captain Nelson, in his rustic zeal, has neglected this and thus made himself vulnerable to those of us with both a sharp eye and a well-thumbed lexicon.”
He leaned back, satisfied.
“In summary,” he concluded, brushing toast crumbs from his sleeve, “the art of decryption is not unlike the art of seduction: equal parts observation, patience, and a certain unshakeable confidence in one’s own cleverness.”
Then, with a broad smile and an arched brow, Pfinder added, “Now then—who else would like to be impressed?”
GUC-2 and GUC-3 rolled their eyes at one another and GUC-2 said dryly, “Well, before we shower you with the adulation you clearly believe is your birthright, perhaps we might verify your work? Have you a key for the code of this second letter that we might use to follow in your brilliant footsteps?”
Pfinder, ever magnanimous, produced a folded slip of paper from some improbable corner of his attire with a flourish so baroque it verged on interpretive dance. “But, of course, Comrade! Here it is! Take note, if you would, that the encrypted letters appear on the left and the decrypted letters appear on the right.” The piece of paper he produced read,
C = Y
F = W
H = U
I = T
J = S
K = A
M =R
P = O
R = E
U = M
V = L
Y = I
Z = H
L = G
Q = N
E = B or F in context (possibly phonetic)
T = D
X = J
GUC-2 and GUC-3 bent to their work while GUC-4 took the fourth letter, comparing coded and uncoded versions and murmuring quietly in approval with each confirmed word. After a couple of minutes, however, GUC-3 straightened up and said, “This is rather tedious. We should alphabetize this key to make the decryption easier.” Nodding silently, GUC-2 bent to the task and suddenly froze mid-scribble. “Wait a second,” she muttered, scribbling faster. A moment later, she slammed her pen down, circled part of the key, and pushed the paper into the center of the table.
K = A
E = B
S = C
T = D
R = E
E = F
L = G
Z = H
Y = I
X = J
W = K
V = L
U = M
Q = N
P = O
O = P
N = Q
M = R
J = S
I = T
H = U
G = V
F = W
D = X
C = Y
B = Z
A = ?
“Kestrel’s Flame. Wasn’t that the bottle of rotgut Nelson and Monpierre used to pass back and forth on the watchtower?” she asked. “And look! There’s two E’s in Kestrel so that’s why Pfinder had to assign E to two different letters in the original message! And I’ll bet there’s no A’s in the encoded message…” she ran her finger through it and looked up in satisfaction. “Nope, there aren’t!”
Pfinder, watching the revelation unfold with theatrical patience, sipped delicately from GUC-1’s mug. “One is always gratified,” he said, “when one’s intellectual labors are finally appreciated by the proletariat.”
GUC-4, meanwhile, squinted at the other letter, frowning, “The bulk of the words are unscrambled properly but there are the occasional, shall we say, eccentricities? Come, Pfinder, give us the honor of a second glance?” And they bent to work, silent, except for a muffled exclamation – “Not crosses! Orcs!”
That got everyone’s attention. The group poured over the letters with renewed purpose. Within a few minutes, they had untangled the remaining knots and laid the decrypted letters neatly on the table, fully deciphered at last.
(The first encrypted letter)
Émile,
The major with the bird tattoos is gone.
You remember I told you about him a couple of years ago—claimed he was just a caravan scout, but knew the old roads too well. We used to joke that he’d been alive during the old wars.
His room’s been cleaned out. Not ransacked—sanitized. Even the dust was gone.
Before he vanished, he left me a message: “Tell the blacksmith in Dolven’s Hollow the hourglass is leaking.” I don’t know what it means, but I passed it on. Three nights later, someone left a black feather wedged in my doorframe.
There’s a group forming out here, Émile. Small. Careful. Angry. More organized than peasants ought to be. They call themselves The Ebon Blades. If the name sounds theatrical—it is. But they’re real. And they’re planning something.
I think I saw one of them near the ruins north of Barrow’s Edge. Just watching. Never came closer. I had the sense he wasn’t watching me.
And amidst it all—undead still rising, and the fields are still going dark.
Cipher holds: that old five legged table out on the frontier.
Yours,
A.
(The third encrypted letter)
Émile,
I know the last letter was… strange. This one is stranger. If you’re still reading, thank you.
Something ancient is shifting beneath Cambria, and I fear we’ve all been walking over a buried crime so enormous it warped the earth around it. Not metaphorically. I mean the land tilts in places it shouldn’t. Roads veer subtly away from ruins that don’t appear on any maps. Dead languages surface in graffiti scratched by children who couldn’t have learned them.
Two nights ago, I rode out to inspect a supposed smuggler’s camp near the Iron Pines. I found no smugglers. What I did find was a stone gate sunk halfway into a hillside, sealed with runes I’ve never seen and a sigil resembling a weeping flame. The scouts with me said it wasn’t there a week ago. They’re lying, or forgetting, or both.
Worse: there were orc bones scattered in the moss. Not shattered. Arranged. Reverently. Like a burial rite.
No one teaches that orcs had rites.
I asked the local priest. He gave me that same smile bureaucrats give when you’ve already lost the argument. “Those savages never buried their dead,” he said. “They ate them. Or burned them. Depending on which folk song you believe.”
But I don’t believe the songs anymore. Not after what I saw in the gate. There were carvings inside. Murals, partially collapsed. One showed orcs—not rampaging, but healing the wounded of other races. One showed a queen, or a priestess, standing beside a human with her hand on his shoulder.
I copied what I could and I’ll send them along in another letter. Maybe someone in Edicaria can still read them.
None of this is going in the official report. I’ve already been told—twice now—to stop asking “historical questions.” One of those warnings came from a Colonel I’ve never met, signed with the Central Command wax seal.
You remember what we used to say in the watchtower? “When you hear boots behind you in the dark, ask if they echo.” Well, nothing echoes out here anymore.
Send word back, if you can. If you can’t—send someone.
Cipher holds: Our friend Vigenere.
Yours in haste,
A.
Vren shook her head slowly, a crooked smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Orcs instead of crosses, and Vigenère instead of Evergreen. You know, for a man who cracked the code, you certainly left in a few puzzles.”
She reached for the letter again. “Still… orcs with rites. That’s going to bother me.”