A long-buried statue of a mysterious woman, carved from gray granite, standing in an old side-chapel with a vaulted ceiling and flagstone floor. The statue itself is larger than life, eight feet tall perhaps and carved of gray granite; chipped in places, worn smooth in others, with any paint it once bore long since worn away. Her face is visibly youthful, with a proud, perhaps defiant, look, and a bearing at odds with her commoner’s dress, facing a collapsed passageway.
The statue was old when any human that any human currently alive has ever met was young, and its history has faded into obscurity. Because of that, none can quite agree on what she’s a symbol of, or even what her true history is. Various groups have at times claimed to know what she truly represents, and so people leave offerings at her feet; a pile of dead and half-dead flowers lie scattered around (time passes differently here, or perhaps even a cut flower can linger as a ghost under the circumstances), but among that pile are useful objects: bottles, some still full of wine; coins, mostly copper and silver; twine that could perhaps be braided into a rope; candles; and even some things that are more strange to find as offerings: iron spikes, a waterskin, a grappling hook.
A coterie of ghosts lingers in the chapel, for the most part simply observing silently and invisibly. They may manifest if the offerings are disturbed, if they are greeted, or if anyone claims to know the Maid’s history and gets it wrong.
Any telling of the Maid’s history is “wrong” to at least one of the ghosts. To hear the first, Winthel, who had been butler to the house of Casrei, tell it, she was a maid in a since-forgotten noble house who, when the household’s enemies fell on them, she took up a spear herself and shamed their routing guards into standing fast. The second ghost, Rissa, tells a different story; in her account, the Maid was part of the leadership of a peasant revolt, a canny and skillful messenger who held the group together no matter the weather or patrols, until she was caught and kept her fellow rebels’ secrets to the end, revered as a hero only decades after her death. Leor, the youngest of the ghosts at death yet the longest at the statue, a merchant child dead of pox before the war, gives yet a different version; to them, the Maid is clearly a statue of Dame Elandra, one of the adventuring knights of King Paroc of old. None alive can say for certain that any of these versions of the tale are false. The ghosts will argue back and forth about this for as long as their visitors appear to be paying attention, if started.
Thieves who steal from the offerings may be stalked and robbed, with whatever can be filched from their bags put in the offering’s place. None of the ghosts, however, can fight to defend the statue or its offerings from thieves. A shrewd character might bargain with them, bartering some item for an item from the offerings. The value the ghosts put on things being offered in such trades comes much more from the apparent value of the item to the barterer (as a useful item or by how much they personally care about it) and its suitability, in their eyes, as an offering to the Maid, than it does from any monetary value.
Near the old collapsed entrance, a gap exists between the inner walls holding up the ceiling vault and where the stone was carved, filled with packed earth. High up on this gap there is a buried cache containing a dagger, a floorplan only a few years old of a baronial manor a day’s ride away, and some vials of a poisonous oil that has degraded from deadly to merely irritating.
Ten Leagues Beneath the Earth 