The Rune-Break Company

Scholarly Salvage Band — Nord-Vast#

"They know exactly how much to excavate before stopping. They just never stop there." — Pine Oath warden, northern giant-road territory

The Rune-Break Company is a loose association of scholars, salvagers, and specialist delvers who excavate the ruins of the pre-human giant-roads and the waystation complexes built alongside them across Nord-Vast's northern reaches. Their targets are the wards, astronomical instruments, navigation maps, and structural curios embedded in giant-construction that pre-date every human civilization in the region by several thousand years. The Company sells what it finds — primarily to Azure Isles collectors, Meridian Custodian survey offices, and the occasional Umbra Magni institution that does not inquire too closely about extraction provenance — and uses the proceeds to fund the next expedition.

The Company's reputation is built on genuine expertise. Its members have produced the most accurate existing survey of active giant-road segments, identified three major ward-node complexes that the Custodians subsequently incorporated into the eastern infrastructure system, and written the definitive field guide to distinguishing inert giant-construction from construction that is inert only because nothing has disturbed it recently. This last document was written partly as a cautionary text and partly, members admit, to explain what went wrong on several specific expeditions.

The Company is usually one bad decision from waking something that has been dormant under ice or rubble for millennia, and the membership knows this well enough to describe specific thresholds, specific sites, and specific excavation limits that have been established by hard experience. The problem is that the most valuable finds are reliably located precisely beyond those thresholds. Adventurers hired on by Company expeditions as protection should clarify what, exactly, they are being paid to protect against — and whether the contract covers threats that originate inside the excavation.