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It was rumored by some that an ancient evil had returned,
in those brief years before the War of the Lance. Finn was
one of those who harbored them, the populace whispered.
For in the depths of his seaside cavern lay an intricate web
of still larger caverns, tunnel devolving on tunnel, the
darkness slick and echoing. This was the legendary Finn's
Ear, where it was supposed that all sounds muttered in
shelter of stone eventually and eternally circled and spoke.
At the heart of Finn's labyrinth was said to lay a monster,
his black scales glittering with cold malice and devouring
acid.
They said that the beast and the bandit had struck an
uneasy truce: Finn soothed the monster with the music of
well paid but exhausted bards, and, lulled by continual
song, the great creature received in turn the company of the
bandit king's uncooperative prisoners. And as to the fate of
those poor wretches, even the rumormongers were silent.
In the rough border country between Lemish and
Southlund, cooling myself in the high foothills of the
Garnet Mountains, I pondered the looming necessity of
actually going to Finn's Ear, where the bards were singing
and the caverns echoing. It was the only place I had not
searched for the song.
Hooded as always to hide my livid scars, I crossed that
border and stalked through the burning peninsula, keeping
the towers of Caergoth to the north as I traveled toward the
little villages in the west. My route took me within Finn's
own sight, had he cared to leave his rocky throne and look
west from the beetling cliffs
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