The Shattered Coast had no welcome for travelers. Fog rolled in thick off the Umbral Sea as the four companions picked their way along the crumbling cliff path, the smell of brine and rotting kelp sharp enough to taste. Thalor, a broad-shouldered human paladin in tarnished silver plate, led the way with a lantern held high, his golden hair plastered flat by the drizzle. The sun-crest emblem on his breastplate — symbol of Lathander’s grace — caught what little moonlight dared push through the clouds.
Behind him, Mirael moved in near silence, the copper-red braid of her hair tucked inside her dark green hood. The half-elf ranger’s hand rested on the hilt of one of her short swords, her sharp ears catching sounds the others missed: the groan of old timber, the hollow knock of a loose shutter, and beneath it all, something that might have been humming.
“There it is,” said Zephyra softly, her amber eyes cutting through the fog like two lit coals. The tiefling warlock’s small curved horns were beaded with moisture, her dark robes heavy with spray, arcane sigils along the hem glowing faintly with residual energy. She pointed toward the lighthouse — or what remained of it. The tower stood at the cliff’s edge, its upper glass long shattered, the great beacon lamp long cold. A pale yellow light burned in the ground-floor window nonetheless. Grundar pulled his red-braided beard free of his collar and squinted up at it, iron rings clicking softly. “Someone’s home,” the dwarf cleric muttered, shifting his warhammer to his off-hand. “Moradin preserve us if it’s friendly.”
They knocked. The door opened almost immediately. She was old, slight, wrapped in a moth-eaten shawl the color of sea foam. She said her name was Lenna Vane — daughter of the lighthouse’s last keeper, Captain Aldric Vane, lost to a storm twenty years past. She welcomed them in from the rain with cracked hands and a cracked smile, offering salt fish and watered ale. Mirael accepted. Thalor accepted. Zephyra did not.
“Her shadow,” the warlock whispered to Grundar as Lenna busied herself at the hearth. “It doesn’t match.” Grundar looked. The old woman’s shadow stretched behind her — but it had too many limbs. A third arm curled from the darkness beneath the floorboards, fingers too long, reaching toward the loose flagstone in the corner. “THALOR—” Grundar had no time to finish.
The lighthouse shook. A pillar of freezing salt water burst up through the hearth stones, dousing the fire instantly. In the absolute dark that followed, something spoke — a voice like an anchor dragged across a ship’s hull, deep and grinding and full of grief. “WHERE IS MY COMPASS.” A ghostly blue radiance filled the room. Captain Aldric Vane stood at the center of it — eight feet tall, translucent, his naval coat still buttoned despite being rotted to hanging threads. Saltwater cascaded from him in endless streams. His eyes were twin blue flames burning in hollow sockets, locked not on the adventurers — but on the old woman by the hearth.
Lenna Vane was gone. In her place crouched something ancient and hunched, all webbed fingers and needle-teeth and black glass eyes. The sea hag’s illusion shattered in the captain’s cold light. She shrieked, clutching a brass compass to her chest — a compass that pulsed with pale silver light, a light that looked disturbingly like a trapped soul. “Thief,” the revenant captain said, and the word shook salt from the walls. The hag launched herself at Mirael with savage speed. Thalor’s shield caught her talons with a bone-ringing clang. Zephyra hurled eldritch bolts into the creature’s back. Grundar called down a sacred flame that sent her screaming into the corner. Mirael drove a short sword into the hag’s shoulder and pinned her against the wall long enough for Thalor to wrench the brass compass free.
The moment the paladin’s hand closed around the casing, the ghostly blue light shifted. The revenant stood motionless, the endless cascade of water from his form slowing, then stopping. He looked at the compass in Thalor’s hand, and something in the burning eyes softened. “Twenty years,” Captain Vane said quietly. “She kept it from me twenty years.”
The hag escaped in the chaos — slipping through a crack in the foundation that no human body should have fit through. They let her go. Thalor placed the compass in the captain’s translucent palm. For a moment the whole room glowed — warm silver light pouring through every crack and crevice, filling the broken lantern room far above. The Umbral Sea outside fell perfectly still. Then Captain Aldric Vane smiled — a sad, grateful, exhausted smile — and came apart like morning fog. The compass remained on the flagstones, ticking faintly, its needle pointing not north but up.
Mirael picked it up carefully and wrapped it in a strip of her cloak. “We should find someone who knows what this is,” she said. “A soul compass,” Zephyra murmured, tracing the sigils along its edge. “It doesn’t guide ships. It guides the dead to whatever waits for them.” Grundar looked at the cold hearth, at the door hanging open on the fog, at the dark sea beyond. He thought about the hag — about what she’d wanted with twenty years of stolen souls. “Then we’d better make sure she doesn’t get it back,” he said. No one disagreed. Outside, the lighthouse beacon — dark for two decades — flickered once, twice, and lit.
💬 The hag escaped — and she knows exactly who has the compass now. How would your party track her down before she reclaims it? Tell us below! 👇