Focusing on the quest didn’t result in a quest marker or anything, but Kaldalis had a vague sense of a direction to go. He led Haldir back down under the water, diving down and swimming southwest, farther away from the shore. As they swam down, the sandy bed of the ocean kept pulling down and away, leading them farther and farther from the surface.

That same peculiar globe of visibility he remembered from his fight against the Elder Nautilobster became more and more defined as they got farther and farther from the light filtering down from the surface.

After a while, Kaldalis felt (rather than saw) the bulk of the ship’s prow near at hand. He wasn’t close enough to see it, but the dark shape of it was unmistakable. Or, at least, he hoped it was the shipwreck, and an enormous eye wasn’t about to open right next to him.

He had a suddenly vivid memory of a beak the size of a small car snapping at the water hungrily.

Kaldalis focused. His sense of direction on the quest faded, and he brought his attention to the murky ocean floor. At first he didn’t know what he was looking for, but the longer he stayed there looking, details began to emerge. Bits of dark shadows in the murky sand resolved themselves as more than just rocks or buds of coral. After a moment, he picked out a shape that was obviously a boot.

And then a helmet.

There was a vague sparkle that turned out to be a brooch.

And then a frame of a painting Kaldalis recognized from the captain’s quarters, the image on the canvas reduced to a blur due to the saturation of seawater.

The next thing he noticed was that these things seemed to define a path. One end trailed towards the vague dark shape of the shipwreck. The other one vanished to the north. Kaldalis decided to swim along that direction.

He passed a number of other trinkets. A smoking pipe carved from stone. Here was a book that was too waterlogged to save, but hadn’t completely disintegrated yet. A head-sized stone that had been broken in half to reveal a fossil of some strange bug. Next up was a wire circlet set with a smooth copper disc. Then there was a ceramic pot still half-filled with dark dirt, but there was no sign remaining of what had been growing inside.

Kaldalis debated about gathering as much as he could carry to try and return these various mementos to whoever they each had belonged to, but there was so much. These were probably here as part of a hundred different quests. Handling those items not related to his own quest could ruin something for someone else down the line, either removing the quest opportunity forever, or luring them down here with a marker to something that was no longer here.

And ever since his run in with the syncoresi, Kaldalis was trying to be more careful about going out of his way for things he didn’t have a quest about.

Eventually, he reached down and plucked the wooden palette out of the sand. It seemed unnaturally white to his eye for wood, but he didn’t know what it had looked like before. Perhaps there was a story, either it had been made from some unusually pale variety of tree for some symbolic property, or there was some story of it having been left out in the summer and bleached by the sun. Regardless, once it was in hand, his quest updated, instructing him to return it to Sivima.

Even though his quest was done, Kaldalis suspected there was more to discover here. He had plenty of breath bar remaining, and so he looked to Haldir. They didn’t really have a way to communicate, so Kaldalis gave a questioning gesture in the direction of the trail of trinkets. Haldir shrugged and gave a nod, so Kaldalis took that to mean he was free to investigate further. He turned and swam out to the north, following the trail.

Kaldalis was almost surprised when he met a rock wall a few minutes later. Shouldn’t there have been beach here?

It took him a moment to realize that these must have been the distant-seeming rocky cliffs visible just by looking up the beach. He followed the rock upwards, eventually breaking the surface and refilling his breath bar.

Haldir surfaced a moment later.

“I didn’t think we traveled this far north,” Kaldalis said, looking to the southwest and seeing the familiar beach surprisingly far away.

“You set a pretty decent pace,” Haldir said. “It’s not like swimming is any slower than walking.”

Kaldalis had to admit, he was probably biased by real-world experiences on that. And experiences in other games. Apparently traversing aquatic environments was something this game wanted to encourage rather than punish. Perhaps that would come up again at some future date.

Then again, he supposed it already had, with so many resources and supplies likely still tucked away in the shipwreck.

Kaldalis returned his attention to figuring out where the trail of items was leading. There was a chance that he had passed it on the way up. Perhaps a burrow beneath the sand, or even a hidden entrance in the stone.

But as he looked around, he soon discarded those theories.

About six feet up the cliffside was an opening in the stone. It looked like a fissure with smooth-worn edges, and the darkness beyond led him to believe that there was more space behind there than he could see from here. He suspected that, at high tide, the mouth of the cave would be completely submerged. It was possible that at Arma Tide the water was just right to row a boat up to the edge, or maybe a little into the opening.

Being that it was still low tide, he had to go up the old-fashioned way.

The stone was worn nearly smooth by the sea, but there were rounded outcroppings and imperfections in the surface that were enough for Kaldalis to get a grip and climb. He was actually surprised at how easily he was able to pull himself up.

Within a few moments he was clambering into the fissure, picking his way along until the cave he had suspected to find opened up around him.

The interior of the cave was dark, but Kaldalis didn’t have too much trouble seeing his surroundings. From the surroundings, he suspected he was correct about the water level, as the cave walls were smooth for a while until there was a definite line in the tunnel where it curved upwards. In that space, there was something that looked like a dry den. Things were a little dank, and there were a few other cracks and fissures in the stone walls - no longer worn smooth, now that he’d reached the part of the cave that wasn’t ever submerged in seawater.

There were three things he noticed in the cavern.

First and foremost, the floor of the denlike cavern was coated in a layer of seaweed that looked like it had been shredded, almost like bedding.

Second, there was a small pile of the shiniest mementos. There was jewelry and other trinkets here. Kaldalis could pick out a pair of glasses, a number of chipped gems that looked like they’d either been pried out of or fallen loose from decorative fixtures, and even a few lengths of steel chain and particularly polished laminated wood.

The third thing was a creature that was about two feet tall - barely knee high to Kaldalis. The fur on its face was a very light beige, and running down its body the fur grew darker, a chocolate brown across its torso to an almost black hue for its brief tail. It had a brief muzzle and its dark eyes and nose stood out starkly against the lighter fur on its face. It looked bipedal, which immediately made Kaldalis worry that it might be one of the Infernal Horde.

But instead of big and fearsome, this one was small and cute.

For a long moment, he stared at it and it stared back at him in turn. Its nose twitched rhythmically, wiggling its whiskers. For a moment, he realized he wasn’t sure how intelligent it might be. Was it a monster? Wildlife? Or maybe even a previously-unmentioned sentient race?

Kaldalis had a few options, and a few risks. The biggest risk was that furry little thing would attack him. If he didn’t approach it as an enemy, it might hit him with a sudden strike to catch him off-guard. As a tank, though, he wasn’t afraid of getting one-shot, even if the little creature was an Infernal Horde beast. Even the four-fingered syncoresi had only gouged out three-quarters of his hit points, instead of entirely obliterating him.

On the other hand, if it was sentient - in particular, if it was a member of an undiscovered race native to these islands - it would be not just rude to attack it unprovoked, but it might spark some kind of war between its people and the Adventurers League. While the creature itself didn’t look that fearsome, and wasn’t even wearing any rudimentary clothing or ornamentation, he’d watched Return of the Jedi more than enough times to know that the advantages of size and technology didn’t guarantee victory.

At the end of the long pause, he’d decided he would rather risk getting a face full of fangs now over starting some kind of nightmare boobytrap war later. He slowly raised one of his hands.

“Hello,” he said.

The fuzzy creature gave a brief chittering noise and darted to one of the cracks in the uneven walls. It was impossibly fast, almost faster than his eye could follow.

Before he could even jump, it was gone.