Part 7 of the Foundations series

Part of the arc: The Houses that UG Built

The second gargoyle hadn’t settled into anything. It prowled the top of the cellar steps in short, aggressive bursts, wings half-spread, throwing itself at whichever spider came closest and backing off just as fast the moment it didn’t land clean. UG watched it lose two rounds and win a third from a safe distance and worked out fairly quickly that there was no grand purpose behind any of it. It had woken up hungry, made it as far as the top of the stairs, found the spiders were the first thing in its way, and simply started fighting them, the way anything hungry and irritable does when the nearest available target happens to be smaller than it.

The crates explained the rest. UG found them wedged behind the old room’s collapsed far wall, three of them, splintered clean open by the same blast that had brought the floor down — proper cargo crates, old enough that the wood had gone soft, with markings stamped into the lids that meant nothing to him but meant something to Lichmyface, who stood over the broken slats for a long moment before saying, in his own way, nothing at all. Stone fiends weren’t native to anywhere near Founder’s Point. Somebody had shipped these two in, packed and crated like cargo, presumably meant for some purpose that had never got as far as unpacking them, and left them exactly where he’d left everything else in this room: unfinished, unexplained, and sealed in the dark for however many years it had taken the goblins to blow the crates open by accident.

UG felt, on balance, that being crated up for years and then freed hungry into a room full of giant spiders was a fairly reasonable excuse for a bad mood.

UG was due back at Zul’Aman before long, and had no particular plan for what to do about either gargoyle before he left, beyond hoping they’d still be there when he got back. He mentioned as much to Lichmyface on his way out, in the tone of a man discussing a mild inconvenience rather than two crated house guests he’d already started thinking of as his.

“Keep an eye on the pets while I’m gone, would you?”

Lichmyface looked at him for a moment, said nothing, and went to go and find out what a gargoyle actually ate.

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More in the Foundations series

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