C3 E5 in brief

The “trap” in the Corsair den becomes a parley. Yash Mangal — gregarious voice of the leaderless Hubatt Corsairs — demands collateral (Imogen surrenders her estranged father, Ashton offers FCG) before trading intel: Dugger left the crew six months ago, vanished for weeks, returned wrong and wasting, and they knew nothing of his shade-creepers or brumestone. Yash hands over Dugger’s address, sanctions the kill, and seeds an uneasy alliance. The crew provisions through the slick merchant Advik — buying real healing potions and Sending Stones — as Ashton voices the group’s first shared doubt about their patron Eshteross.

Dugger’s house, in Imogen and Laudna’s own neighborhood, is a horror: oil-sheened, spore-dripping, reeking of rot — a nest, not a home. The crew breaks in, and Dugger squeezes from the burrow wall a broken-backed, black-eyed husk, more shade-creeper than dwarf. The level-three fight nearly wipes them — Imogen to two death saves, Fearne and FCG felled, the slime-choked rooms swarming with creepers that burst from Dugger’s own back. Dorian, who’d blamed himself for letting Bertrand wander off alone, finally Thunderwaves the killer to ash for him. They barricade the spawn-holes and search the shell of a house: carpentry tools, rotted food, every valuable already stripped by someone who got there first.

They bring a vial of Dugger’s slime to Eshteross, who takes the corruption seriously — promising his Smolder-Spire and alchemist contacts, warning “this may go deeper than you expect” — pays a thousand-gold bounty on Bertrand’s killer, and brokers Orym’s coming meeting with Oshad. Avenged but unenlightened, the crew levels to four. Unresolved: what rots an ordinary carpenter into a husk, the brumestone trade, and the source still pulsing in the rock below.