The village sits where the jungle opens onto sword-grass fields at Borthanza’s foot, its palm-thatch domed huts raised on a low hill inside the same mile-wide, doughnut-shaped scorch ring the Agents had already crossed once on the trail in. Bor-ThooDell – “lifted dead” in a tongue that doesn’t translate cleanly to Common – takes its name from a burial custom: bodies desiccated and left suspended in hammocks up in the canopy, out of reach of whatever the halflings call the underground demons.
The village’s real life happens underground. Every hut hides a tunnel down into hard-packed clay passages the halflings’ ancestors dug generations ago – a legacy that turned out to matter more than anyone expected the night the sky opened up.
FILE NOTES
The Agents arrived to find the fields empty, the huts silent, and a chewed hand in the grass days old. What they eventually pieced together, through Beloq’s translation, matched what Section 18 already had on file as the Hangar Door breach from the other side: burning eggs fell from the sky, and the grimlocks that came pouring out afterward – “night demons,” clicking and swinging their heads, pale eyes shining red – didn’t understand food until they tasted it, and then didn’t stop. The survivors retreated into the tunnels and held out until the creatures gave up and carried their own dead and wounded back up the mountain. See Grimlocks and The Hangar Door, Borthanza for the same raid from the Agents’ own side of it.
Two more grimlocks tried the tunnels again the night the Agents stayed over, and died for it – dropped one at a time through a hut’s hidden hatch into a corridor Raven and Ash had already turned into a kill box. It was enough to earn the village’s trust. The chief handed over two recovered blades – a longsword named Kusanagi, “forged by Tubal Kaine,” that mends itself when its name is spoken mid-fight, and an orcbane shortsword called Kort-Sanum – for a hundred gold in diamond, and had two guides walk the Agents through the sword-grass and its traps to the foot of Borthanza itself the next morning.
Not everything about the welcome was comfortable. A gift of flowers from a village girl turned out, by Beloq’s account, to be either a genuine kindness or a polite notice that the recipient had been marked as the next meal; the evening’s “honour” of preparing dinner meant killing a bound, evidently intelligent lizardman prisoner by hand, an offer nobody who understood it was eager to accept twice. One hut kept a row of shrunken, carefully detailed heads hanging by their own braided hair. Whatever else Bor-ThooDell is, hospitable doesn’t quite cover it.
“They’re usually reasonable, mind. Do pursue carnivorous habits, though. Erm – often other people. Should be fine, though.”
Beloq, on the approach to Bor-ThooDell
STATUS: Filed under Locations. Devastated once already by the same grimlock incursion Section 18 has catalogued from the Borthanza side, and still standing – barely, and on its own considerably stranger terms.