Jim’s nose twitched, locking onto the scent trail like a lifeline—a thick rope of musk pulling him forward through the underworld’s gloom. He dropped into the narrow pipe, walls closing in tight and slick, scuffed raw by the frantic passage of bodies. Nose low. Whiskers splayed. The world reduced to essentials: fetid airflow, layered musk, the stubborn tug of this way.

  Deeper in, the smell thickened into a choking braid—ordinary rat trails twisted with the sharper, almost-human bite of wererat and the brutal ammonia punch of dire rats. Too many. Too fresh. It filled his head until there was no room for anything else.

  Then the pipe spat him into a larger tunnel—and the rope snapped.

  The air current here was fierce, a steady shove that peeled scent off stone and scattered it into nothing. Water roared somewhere ahead, swallowing subtle sounds. Trails from gods-knew-how-many passages crisscrossed the ledge in a greasy, overlapping mess. Old commutes, old hunts, old deaths—layered until the present had nowhere to stick.

  Jim pressed on anyway. Nose to the ledge. Slow circles. Then tighter ones. Then back the way he came, just to be sure. He mashed his face into the seam where wall met floor, hunting the honest signs—fresh claw gouges, damp fur smears, grit kicked the wrong direction.

  Nothing.

  Stone didn’t keep footprints. The sewer didn’t care that he needed it to.

  He lifted his head, ears pricked, and stared at the branching paths…

  Jim did the rat version of a shrug—tiny shoulders lifting, tail flicking once in resigned agreement with the universe—and took the deeper branch.

  Downhill. Wetter. Older stink. Less human.

  The main tunnel pinched into a rough chute of brick and stone. Water ran faster here, cold and impatient, and the ceiling wept steady drips that plinked into the channel like someone tapping a spoon against glass. The last faint rumble of Waterdeep overhead thinned out until there was only the sewer’s own breathing: drip, gurgle, echo.

  Forgotten territory. The undercity’s basement. The kind of place where “patrol” just meant something big had wandered through once.

  Then his nose caught it—and his gut tightened.

  Rat musk gone sour. Blood that had dried and been wet again. Rot. Iron. And threaded underneath, faint but unmistakable, that wrong-not-rat tang he’d only tasted in passing.

  Wererat.

  He rounded the bend and the tunnel gave him an answer.

  A body snagged on a cross-grate that spanned the channel—half-submerged, half-tugged by the current. It hung twisted, pinned by the force of the water. Fur plastered dark to skin. Head lolling. One arm jammed through the bars at an angle that would have been excruciating if it had been alive.

  Not a normal rat. Not a normal man either.

  Hybrid. Too much human in the long joints. Too much bulk across the shoulders. Wrong proportions that made his instincts recoil.

  And the way it had died made his human side go cold.

  Not clawed. Not bitten. Not torn apart in a frenzy. Two clean punctures—one up through the ribs, another lower, neat and final. The water had scrubbed most of the blood away, but it couldn’t scrub away the damage.

  Jim crept closer along the ledge, staying upwind, whiskers splayed wide. The smell still had bite—old enough for rot to start softening the edges, fresh enough to say recent. A day. Two, at most.

  He glanced downstream. Up at the grate. Back at the corpse.

  A dead thing turned into a signpost by accident: don’t come this way.

  His instincts ran the numbers before his mind finished forming the thought.

  If the nest he was tracking—the migrating knot of ordinary rats, dire rats, and their wererat shepherds—had come through here, the tunnel would reek of it. Thick. Braided. Fresh musk and panic-sweat and dominance markers laid like road signs.

  It didn’t.

  One violent event. One body.

  They hadn’t come this way.

  This was someone else’s story.

  Jim sat for a moment in the damp half-light, watching the wererat hang where the current pinned it—fur matted dark, limbs twisted at unnatural angles, mouth half-open like it had tried one last clever curse before the knife went in.

  The sewer kept moving. Water hissed around the bars in steady, relentless rhythm. The dead stayed dead.

  He turned to leave.

  That’s when the sound changed.

  Not the water. Something else: a soft scraping, nails on stone, rising from the far side of the grate—down in the channel where the water turned black and the ledge narrowed to nothing.

  Jim froze, every instinct screaming.

  A shape rose from the water.

  Humanoid. Too thin. Too many angles. Skin pale and slick, stretched tight over bone. Its eyes caught the faint light and reflected dully—not animal-bright, not human-warm, just hungry.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  A ghoul.

  It moved with the casual confidence of a thing that knew most living creatures down here were either food or future food. It didn’t look at Jim. Not even a flicker.

  It looked at the wererat corpse like a person looking at a loaf of bread.

  The ghoul gripped the body with both hands—long fingers, nails like little hooks—and gave a testing tug. The corpse shifted against the bars with a wet, reluctant sound. It tilted its head, judging leverage.

  Then it did something Jim would never forget.

  It sank its teeth into the wererat’s shoulder and yanked.

  Bone clicked. The ghoul braced, pulled harder, and this time the sound wasn’t water or stone.

  It was meat giving up.

  The wererat’s body lurched, caught, and the ghoul worried the shoulder like a dog on a rope, twisting for leverage, dragging dead weight against iron until the snag became a seam.

  Something tore.

  The corpse came apart in sudden, ugly surrender—one half sliding free with a splash, the other still hung for a heartbeat before it too slumped loose, bumping the grate and dropping into the channel. Filth sprayed up the walls. The ghoul didn’t care. It gathered what it wanted with quick, practiced tugs, hauling the heavier portion through the cross-bars and into the black.

  In seconds, both ghoul and its prize were gone, swallowed by a side passage that reeked of old death and stagnant water.

  The tunnel fell quiet again.

  Jim remained motionless on the ledge, paws pressed into slime, whiskers rigid.

  He processed it the only way he knew how.

  Okay, he thought. So the deep tunnels have ghouls. And they eat wererats.

  His stomach tightened—fear first, then the cold practicality underneath.

  That ghoul hadn’t looked at him because it had better food.

  Which meant one day, if he was unlucky—or if the deep tunnels got hungry enough—he’d be the best food available.

  He backed away without a sound, tail tucked close. When he finally turned to leave, he did it with a new kind of urgency.

  Jim backtracked the way he came, paws quick and quiet, nose still thick with the sour death-scent he was more than happy to leave behind.

  The deeper tunnel widened again into the larger artery. He slipped back into it expecting the familiar empty echo, the same wet noise chewing at the edges of every sound.

  Instead, the crossroads was occupied.

  Four of them, spread out in a loose, practiced search pattern like people who had done this before and expected to do it again.

  Jim’s eyes narrowed, piecing them together from a hundred remembered character sheets.

  The big one up front: warrior in mail, shield raised, stance planted like he’d fight the dark itself if it looked at him wrong. Fighter, Jim decided. Or maybe paladin, but no holy aura leaking yet—just pure, stubborn wall-of-metal energy. The kind who never trusted a corner that didn’t have light on it.

  Behind him, the one with the half-hidden holy symbol glinting under the cloak: a pair of white hands crossed and bound at the wrists with a blood-red cord. Jim knew that mark—Ilmater, the Crying God, the one who took pain so others didn’t have to. Cleric, definitely.

  Then the lean shadow drifting at the edges: hooded, quiet, moving like the darkness had corners and every corner held a knife. Rogue, no question.

  Last, the one in the rear: staff in hand, lantern-light catching the signet ring and a faint, twitchy shimmer around their fingers like they were one bad surprise from turning the whole tunnel into fire or lightning. Sorcerer. Restless power, not the studied calm of a wizard.

  They were studying the walls, the grates, the waterline. Not chasing anyone in particular, but hunting information—marks, tracks, anything the stone or the stink might still hold.

  Jim froze instantly. Belly flat to the ledge, fur blending with the wet grime, trying to become just another smear of sewer.

  The rogue’s head turned.

  Not fast. Not dramatic. Just that subtle, professional shift of attention that said: I saw movement where movement shouldn’t be.

  The rogue’s eyes settled on him.

  For one long heartbeat, Jim was absolutely certain his entire life was about to end as random encounter: rat.

  Then the rogue snorted—barely audible, more breath than sound—and called back to the group in an easy, unbothered voice:

  “Nothing to worry about. Just a rat.”

  The warrior didn’t even turn fully, just flicked a half-glance and dismissed him with the indifference of someone who’d seen worse than vermin. The cleric kept their focus on the grates and the lingering rot in the air. The sorcerer muttered something about “checking the left branch again” and adjusted the lantern pole with a faint metallic scrape.

  And Jim, pressed against the wall with his heart hammering like it wanted out of his ribs, felt the strangest, most bitterly funny thought rise up through the adrenaline:

  I’ve never been so grateful to be underestimated.

  Jim stayed glued to the wall as the party conferred, lantern-light sliding over wet stone—and over him—like he was part of the masonry.

  The rogue’s dismissal—just a rat—had done its job. Nobody was looking at him anymore. They were looking at the tunnels.

  Which meant Jim got to listen.

  He stayed flat against the stone, whiskers quivering.

  The warrior pointed with the tip of his sword toward the tunnel Jim had come from—the deeper branch with the cold air and the old stink.

  “That way,” the warrior said, voice low. “Fresh scuffs on the ledge. Something’s been moving through there recently.”

  The sorcerer made a small sound of disapproval. “Something is always moving through here. That’s not… helpful.”

  The rogue shrugged. “It’s a direction.”

  The cleric exhaled, steadying themselves, and Jim caught the edge of why they were here.

  “My temple didn’t hire you to sightsee,” the cleric said. Not rude—clipped with purpose. “We need the entrance. We need it found before the next tide surge buries it again.”

  The warrior gave a quick nod. “We’ll find it.”

  The rogue glanced sideways at the cleric. “And keep you breathing. That’s the contract, right? You live, we get paid, your temple gets its… what was it… honored bones?”

  The cleric’s jaw tightened. “Relics. The sacred remains of St. Laupsenn. The crypt was sealed during a long-ago plague. The old entrance collapsed; eventually the sewer was carved through the temple ruins. The honored dead shouldn’t be left in a place like this—where thieves and ghouls can reach them.”

  Jim’s whiskers twitched at ghouls. He did not like how well that lined up with what he’d just seen.

  The sorcerer rolled their shoulders like they were trying to get comfortable with the idea of casting in a sewer. "I hope it's worth it, for some old bones."

  “It is worth it,” the cleric said, and there was a note underneath—fear, and something stubbornly devotional. “My temple gathered you. My temple pays you. And my temple expects me to return with proof we didn’t abandon our dead.”

  The rogue’s grin was all teeth in lantern light. “Then stick close and don’t fall in.”

  The warrior lifted the lantern pole, sweeping light down the tunnel Jim had fled from. “Move.”

  They set off.

  Boots on stone. Chainmail whispering. The cleric’s softer steps tucked into the center of the formation. The rogue drifting at the edge like a shadow with hands. The sorcerer bringing up the rear, lantern light bobbing and throwing long, warped reflections in the water.

  Straight into the branch where the wererat corpse had been—and the ghoul definitely was.

  Jim watched them go, pressed flat to the wall, tail rigid.

  He couldn’t speak up. He couldn’t warn them in Common. He couldn’t even squeak meaningfully. To them, he was background noise they’d already dismissed.

  Jim stayed pressed to the wall, still as mortar, and watched the lantern glow crawl away down the tunnel.

  He’d seen this party formation from the other side of a screen a hundred times. It was almost comforting.

  He followed.

  Not close. Just near enough to hear but far enough to slip away if the tunnel turned into a blender.

  He glanced once at the dark pipe mouths branching from the junction and thought, half amused and half grim:

  Welcome to the campaign, Rat #1. Your party doesn’t know you exist, your quest log is a mess, and the dungeon’s already rolling wandering monsters.

  Then he dropped off the wall and slipped after the lantern glow, paws silent, keeping to the shadows like he was born for it—because, inconveniently, he was.