Alexander Bryant
First Post
Journal of Etona - Entry III
The little girl was Phreet. A vision then. I opened myself to it but it was not enlightening.
Her skin putrefied, bubbled up, a green worm wriggled free, but she was serene as a cat full of cream on a sunlit stone. Phreet reached for me and I screamed my way out of the reverie.
Her Horny Highness has never assaulted me with dreams of rot and undead before. After all this time, would She send me a vision like this as a first step towards reconciliation? I don’t think so: it doesn’t feel like the goddess. So who am I channeling now? And is Phreet in danger? Or does the little girl represent something, an omen of what will happen to all children here, or to innocence?
“Resh,” I mumbled. Rey arched an eyebrow. Egan probably doesn’t know that one. It means, in Elvish, approximately, "F**k". Visions, portents, riddles: they are mistaken for importance, and so I was important among my tribe. But they are divine wisps. Some of my visions had become truth but they were always obvious after whatever had happened, and thus useless – “I told you so’s” from Her Mocking Majesty.
Interesting that the girl in the vision did not seem to notice the worms. Perhaps it is something that happens slowly, creeps up on a person. Or is Phreet already hopelessly corrupted?
No. She is not. I will not believe that.
We arrived at the Land farm. It was time to bury the bones and free this poor boy, but someone had been here before us and dug up the rest of his family!
The Red Death swept through regions around Greyhawke some time ago, almost twenty years past. We had heard of it from our druids, chiefly Salalu Feonne, our ambassador to Greyhawke (where he still serves in that capacity). Grave sites of those who died from the plague were marked in the manner of these Land’s stones were. Egan was able to confirm all of this and added other details about what it was like during that time. Grim. Fear everywhere. Many bad deeds, though heroes of compassion and courage also arose from the despair. Egan’s family – save for his sister and of course himself – died miserably from it. It hurt me to hear these details: Egan has survived almost continuous woe. He deserves to be reunited with his sister.
Someone here had looted the graves and, after we searched to confirm, stolen their bodies. They had also done it recently, judging by tracks less than three days old. I asked Egan if my memory was correct, that this was a most heinous crime among humans, and he confirmed it. If you were sent to prison convicted of this crime, you would likely never emerge again as the murderers and rapists there would kill you to rid themselves of the stain your presence would represent to even them.
We crept up to the Land’s home and eventually rescued a young owlbear mewling in a circle of dead kin, all slain by presumably whomever took the bones, though at least one of their party left behind a complete arm bearing the brand of Garavin Vest, a nasty mine owner who had treated his people as slaves but was run out of town by the rest of the humans some time ago. That mark leads us to the Feral Dog, an inn frequented by miners and the likely group who took the bones.
Rey crept up to the cub and, as she had done with the wolves, pacified the monster (I cannot ever call this some species of “bear” as it is a magical hybrid – an experiment, really – and not, never will be, a bear: my tribe kills them on sight).
We split up during Rise as She took to her throne of the sky: Rey was bound for the scrub to hunt and teach hunting to the owlbear; Egan made for an inn called the Spinning Giant – he was wary of Phreet’s flirting and fast fingers, but I think she actually likes him.
Oh, you cuille temoer: what a waste of beautiful night! I will never understand . . . well, many things, like sleep. Such short lives and a third of it sacrificed to unconsciousness and chaotic, half-remembered dreams. Then to stay awake throughout the entire day, always bright, always squinting at the sun that reveals everything. I love the sun, of course, but there is so much missed from shunning the moon! The games, the secrets, the silence, the cool air, and Her beautiful face.
I am wasting your time now. I apologize.
I went to the Feral Dog intent on overhearing some sunny words revealing all, but skulking outside was not going to help us, I quickly understood, so I went in. I found a table near a trio of malignant-looking characters, an albino half-orc I had seen before here and there – difficult to miss or forget – as their apparent leader. He was large enough to match the tracks we had seen up the Land farm, but so were others so I bade my time and listened. He growled out, “That last job was not worth the money,” but that complaint could come from any of them, difficult enough was their daily labor.
A different trio of, I don’t know what else to call them, adventurers strode in to hails and greetings: muscular, somewhat preening young man leading a merry elven woman and an older, thin man who didn’t smile. The woman started a game of Hit the Target offering a reward to, it turned out, whomever could defeat the elf.
This elf can defeat the elf, I thought and made my way over.
I have no money, I realized when I got there a few seconds later. “Hi!” I said in Elven to her, and then, in Common, “I am but a penniless soul in search of a contest of skill. Would you be able to front me the entrance fee to your contest?” At least, that is what I said in here, dans tai’ete. But what everyone heard was, “Can I play? Though I have no coin?” She looked at Angivre but also at my torn clothes and bare feet, and she arched an eyebrow. I don’t know what she thought of me, but she smiled and said she would loan me the silver to play.
A throwing contest. Pity: my aim with my bow is better. I slid out my hunting knife, took aim, and –.
Humans poison themselves with regularity, I have observed. It is a wonder their entire people have not developed immunity to it. The denizens of The Feral Dog use cheap alcohol by the gallon to do it. The consequence is all over the floor, underfoot, under my foot.
I slipped on some brown, runny consequence, I heard Her laugh – distinctly heard it for the first time in years – and my dagger plunged itself into the table in front of the albino half-orc where it vibrated to a stand still as did the rest of the bar.
Sehanine had forced my hand. Literally. What was I to say?
Angivre suddenly nocked, ready, and I had not given it a thought. But she was not pointed at them. Without looking, I fired an arrow into the center of the target away over on the other side of the room, over in a different lifetime, perhaps. These three needed to see that.
“I require my knife,” I said. I could not apologize: one doesn’t say ‘Sorry’ in a place like this: it is too wild, the men too close to animal.
The man-thing rose to his feet and grinned. “Looks like this is mine now.”
I tossed its sheath at him. “Then you’ll be needing this as well.” He tilted his head with confusion but took it and strapped it on. On me it looks elegant and perhaps a little menacing. It is larger than a dagger, after all. But on him it was ridiculous.
“That looks darling on you,” I said with a grin. “You should wear it with a little yellow bow.” I began to pat my pockets. “I think I have some ribbon on me somewhere.”
His companions laughed. One in particular had that manic laugh and look in his eye that speaks of a feral, mad existence: he would have to be put down someday.
The semi-orc knocked back his chair and his friends stood likewise. Angivre swung around to point at his face.
“What have you done with the bones?” I said. I needed to see it in his eye. But I did not. If they had dug up the Land family graves and made off with remains, it wasn’t in their faces.
It was time to go.
The chairs, tables, drinks, noise, uncertain lighting and crowd all covered for me as I ducked and dodged my way out of the room. The demi-orc hurled something at a place I had been but a second prior and hit the man I had used to cover my tracks for that tiny slice of time. That man reacted to being attacked and the brawl was on!
I made my way to the stockroom in back but realized I of course still did not have my knife. *Sigh*. Twists, turns, meeting face to face with one of the albino’s henchmen – who swung at me but buried his weapon in wood – a careful dive and grab, more feinting, and I was out again but this time to the roof of the building opposite to “watch the show.” Sheriff’s men swooped down and carted people away to prison, most to be let go only a few hours later.
What had I learned? Much, but nothing to do with the bones, alas. I mulled the matter and, when finally they awoke, described the events of the night to Rey and Egan.
Egan named them for me:
The albino half-orc: Kullen
The giggly psychopath from the swamps south: Rastafan
His flat-topped, serious sidekick who had taken a swipe at me: Todric
They all work for mine owner Balbor Smenk, a fat, shady man who lives in a mansion only a couple hundred paces from my own little home.
Egan seemed aghast at my adventures at the inn and asked if he could have a go at getting the information instead. With luck, he said, the trio of miscreants would emerge at Glimmer – sun rise – from the Emporium. He would meet them armed not with insults and a knife and a bow, but with “cash.” I conceded that his plan was probably better.
The Lady did send them out of the Emporium and just as Egan and Rey – and her owlbear - were walking up to it. I took station across the street on a roof in case someone needed “pincushioning” (I love this newly-learned human term!).
I could not overhear his words, but Egan was successful in discovering everything we needed to know: that these three had pillaged the graves, had taken the bones with them and had delivered them to the curious observatory outside of town that I had been meaning to visit for some time now. There, the “Old Man” had taken possession of the bones.
We immediately went to the observatory.
Someone living outside of town, alone, and interested in paying to dig up bones from human graves is probably someone who also has traps, paid guards and possibly reanimated bodies guarding his secrets, so sweeping through the front door seemed needlessly risky. Instead, we climbed the stone dome of the building and skittered precariously over to the slit through which its looking glass peers skyward. Directly below was a body being surgically opened on a stone table. The surgeon was alone. Excellent: we could simply talk about the problem and reach a mutually-satisfactory goal.
“Hi there!” I said in what I thought was a cheerful voice.
He squawked looking at me with eyes so wide it made me laugh. He started running around, yelling out bits of sound incoherently.
I wanted to reassure him we weren’t assassins or whatever he dreamed we represented. “Calm down! We just need our bones back. Give us the remains that your men took and we’ll leave you to whatever all this is. But we need those bones! Please?”
He pointed a finger up to me and got his mouth under control. The air grew cool, there was a shimmer, a smell. I understand when a spell is being cast.
“None of that,” I told him and fired an arrow through his shoulder to dissuade him. Honestly, this overreaction was going to do him an injury. “I am sorry about the arrow, but you cannot just aim eldritch energy at me and expect –. Hello?” He had ducked out of sight heading down some stairs. I lined up on his shadow and fired again. A wet sound and a thud told me my aim was true.
I hopped down a series of platforms – arch, stone ring, table, floor – from the roof and ended up at the top of the stairs. He was still alive, thank my Mistress, though bleeding and incoherent with fear. When he saw me again, he took a syringe out of . . . somewhere and plunged it into his neck. A second later I heard the smashing of glass.
I see I haven’t described the room yet. Under the old “telescope” (I think is the human word) was the surgery table. Around it were bookshelves and medical instruments surrounded by four large jars of liquid inside of each what I took to be a dead lizard man. There was also a human skeleton perched near the table.
Dead they all might have been but now they were springing to life. And attacking. But I would not face them alone.
Like an avenging angel she fell from the heavens to aid me. What a sight: Rey plunged down from the slit in the dome onto the skeleton, annihilating it under feet and flashing spear. She turned to engage all four of the shambling monsters left, especially the one who was coming towards me, but they were going to be too much even for her. We needed to stop this, and we needed Egan.
I leaped over the surgeon to land in front of him, further down the stairs, but mistimed and ended up on my stomach with the wind knocked out of me.
“Egan? Can you set afire any of these from up there?” Rey yelled up. No reply. “Egan?”
Faintly above the melee we could just hear, “Ah’m joost barely holdin’ me own up here!”
“Use the rope to lower yourself or dangle from it upside down, I care not, but you are required here!” she yelled back.
A gout of flame encircled one of the creatures from above which left it smelly and smokey but otherwise unscathed.
“Take down the master and the flesh golems may fall,” Rey instructed.
“But do not kill him if you can manage it, Egan,” I added in Elvish.
Smoke from the surgeon, a tight curl of it across his head scorching his hair – the angle of Egan’s heat beam had been impressively precise – and the man went down at last.
But his monsters did not.
I leaped up and began traveling in a circle around the room firing again and again, but they were already dead, you see, and so unimpressed with my little slivers of wood. They would have been mightily attendant to Angivre before my fall from grace.
Egan bodily fell in to join us but then jumped right to his feet, somehow not a casualty of his own physical shortcomings for once. I say this with admiration, for he has no knowledge of what to do with his limbs when he is not using them to harness the incredible power he seems to have access to. And the three of us together fought the creatures down.
We were all hurt, bleeding, poisoned, repulsed by what we had just had to fight, but Rey and I patched us back as best we could. I had not been hit hard as Rey was who was considerably lashed by the things’ claws, but she simply, eh, the expression . . . oh yes, “walked it off,” because of course she did.
The surgeon’s room was at the foot of the stairs, a comfortable room dominated by a statue of himself with angelic wings and a face of bravery and beneficence. If he has not had any contact with his mother over the past twenty years, I should think he resembled the statue in her eyes. To me, it seemed a criminal overreach of the term “artistic license.”
We woke him up, calmed him down, asked him about the bones and what he was doing here. His name is Filge, he said, which I think is the dwarven name for the pipe that connects a privy to the plumbing in places that have these installations. Unfortunate appellation.
Filge was unexpectedly friendly and chatty when we got him to talking. He said, “My mate Balabar (Smenk) called me up from the Free City for a bit of study about some weirdness in town. He made a deal with a dwarf named Dourstone to get a hold of some special provisions he could not obtain. Dourstone was a bit cagey as to what he needed it for, but he told Smenk that it was for a group of explorers that were excavating an abandoned section of his mine. Sounds like a bunch of crazed cultists if you ask me...but money is money. Anyways, Balabar suspected things were afoot when these strange green worms started showing up.”
Here he gestured over to a stoppered glass tube containing a green worm suspended in a clear fluid.
“The thing is dead now of course, but Smenk said that a lot of these worms wriggled out of one of his men, the only one who wasn’t slaughtered by the cult after the final delivery. Smenk said that he burned the body, but he managed to keep one worm intact. I am not exactly sure of its secrets yet, but my guess is that these things can transfer necrotic energy to the host organism.”
The green worm from my vision, right here in front of us in a vial and starring in story about undead infection of the mine that was here in the center of town. Cultists leaving the one living victim alive presumably to use him as a living farm for the worms.
Cultists in a production mine in our town?
So many questions. So many answers I do not want to hear if they mean entering a mine. Goddess! I hate mines. Truly I do.
But first, this Filge seemed to be at ease with us. It rankled.
“This body” I said, Angivre extending to the end of my arm, “is a vessel of Sehanine. Do you know who that is? My people know her as a goddess who delights in meddling in the affairs of mortals. She is among us all the time. She has powerful passions. She loves lovers. She loves the moonlit night and its shadows that conceal the weak trying to rise against the mighty. She despises true darkness, however, for that way is despair. And so she hates those who create the undead to roam and spread despair.” In a heartbeat I loosed an arrow to flit past his ear. Another one past his other. “I am therefore not interested in your word. I want to know your heart. Tell me all that you doing here in this place. I am not one of your paladins, so I am not interested in good and evil. But I must know what you are doing here. All of it.”
For a moment he looked less afraid than confused. “I told you. Smenk had me come here to find out more about these green worms. The reports we have had over the past few months show a few sightings in the marshlands of the south, but the fact that they are here in Diamond Lake, that is new. This cult that Dourstone protects in his mines probably wants to know what they are too. Whoever solves this riddle will possess a very powerful weapon against their enemies. That all said, I wouldn't be here if Smenk wasn't paying me,’ he said. He looked like he was going to shrug but evidently thought the better of it. “In my off-time, I was working on some animation theorems but the worm is turning everything I know upside down. A very exciting time."
Egan took the worm, and all three of us took Filge through the observatory to the front door. We passed a site that I cannot decide was more grisly or pathetic: a large round table piled high with dinner plates and food waited without hope of ever being eaten by a collection of corpses propped up in the seats all around. As we went by, one raised a turkey leg and exclaimed, “It is a fine meal from a generous host, m’lord!” and another: “They were wrong to expel you from the wizard’s guild – you are the equal of anyone there!”
His heart is not full of malice, this Filge. He is lonely. But I don’t really want to meet the companion he eventually finds to be me, and it certainly will not be any of us.
Filge dismantled the trap set facing the door, un-animated the rest of the Land family also lying in wait, and made to leave. I stopped him, turned him to face me.
“The smallest, poorest, would-never-missed, lowliest street urchin; the most miserable, cast aside, beaten woman; the blind, limbless, bleeding beggar: none of these, no one in the town or any other, have nothing to fear from you, am I correct?”
Filge gulped. “N, no, ma’am.”
“I do not want to see you again.”
“You won’t!” And with that, he strode out of our lives.
Rey’s owlbear, but also a row of ravens, both awaited us outside. The birds fly off noisily.
We returned the bones to their land, inter them, speak words of dignity and comfort. I recited words from a past life of the visiting priest to humans, tasked with befriending them, learning their culture, respecting their ways. As we left, we heard the quiet sigh of a “Thank you,” and I have not been this happy in weeks.
It was Quickening, early evening, and we parted ways to attack the Whispering Cairn in the morning. I went to the Emporium spending two gold and a wonderful evening with Shag learning Dragon Chess and some details about his interesting life and friends. I also tried the opium again.
Glimmer again, we assembled: Rey and her creature and Egan. The latter had thoughtfully purchased another skein of oil for lighting lamps and activating magic, for we travel back to the Cairn today to see if Alestor was able to keep his word and open the door barring our way.
The little girl was Phreet. A vision then. I opened myself to it but it was not enlightening.
Her skin putrefied, bubbled up, a green worm wriggled free, but she was serene as a cat full of cream on a sunlit stone. Phreet reached for me and I screamed my way out of the reverie.
Her Horny Highness has never assaulted me with dreams of rot and undead before. After all this time, would She send me a vision like this as a first step towards reconciliation? I don’t think so: it doesn’t feel like the goddess. So who am I channeling now? And is Phreet in danger? Or does the little girl represent something, an omen of what will happen to all children here, or to innocence?
“Resh,” I mumbled. Rey arched an eyebrow. Egan probably doesn’t know that one. It means, in Elvish, approximately, "F**k". Visions, portents, riddles: they are mistaken for importance, and so I was important among my tribe. But they are divine wisps. Some of my visions had become truth but they were always obvious after whatever had happened, and thus useless – “I told you so’s” from Her Mocking Majesty.
Interesting that the girl in the vision did not seem to notice the worms. Perhaps it is something that happens slowly, creeps up on a person. Or is Phreet already hopelessly corrupted?
No. She is not. I will not believe that.
We arrived at the Land farm. It was time to bury the bones and free this poor boy, but someone had been here before us and dug up the rest of his family!
The Red Death swept through regions around Greyhawke some time ago, almost twenty years past. We had heard of it from our druids, chiefly Salalu Feonne, our ambassador to Greyhawke (where he still serves in that capacity). Grave sites of those who died from the plague were marked in the manner of these Land’s stones were. Egan was able to confirm all of this and added other details about what it was like during that time. Grim. Fear everywhere. Many bad deeds, though heroes of compassion and courage also arose from the despair. Egan’s family – save for his sister and of course himself – died miserably from it. It hurt me to hear these details: Egan has survived almost continuous woe. He deserves to be reunited with his sister.
Someone here had looted the graves and, after we searched to confirm, stolen their bodies. They had also done it recently, judging by tracks less than three days old. I asked Egan if my memory was correct, that this was a most heinous crime among humans, and he confirmed it. If you were sent to prison convicted of this crime, you would likely never emerge again as the murderers and rapists there would kill you to rid themselves of the stain your presence would represent to even them.
We crept up to the Land’s home and eventually rescued a young owlbear mewling in a circle of dead kin, all slain by presumably whomever took the bones, though at least one of their party left behind a complete arm bearing the brand of Garavin Vest, a nasty mine owner who had treated his people as slaves but was run out of town by the rest of the humans some time ago. That mark leads us to the Feral Dog, an inn frequented by miners and the likely group who took the bones.
Rey crept up to the cub and, as she had done with the wolves, pacified the monster (I cannot ever call this some species of “bear” as it is a magical hybrid – an experiment, really – and not, never will be, a bear: my tribe kills them on sight).
We split up during Rise as She took to her throne of the sky: Rey was bound for the scrub to hunt and teach hunting to the owlbear; Egan made for an inn called the Spinning Giant – he was wary of Phreet’s flirting and fast fingers, but I think she actually likes him.
Oh, you cuille temoer: what a waste of beautiful night! I will never understand . . . well, many things, like sleep. Such short lives and a third of it sacrificed to unconsciousness and chaotic, half-remembered dreams. Then to stay awake throughout the entire day, always bright, always squinting at the sun that reveals everything. I love the sun, of course, but there is so much missed from shunning the moon! The games, the secrets, the silence, the cool air, and Her beautiful face.
I am wasting your time now. I apologize.
I went to the Feral Dog intent on overhearing some sunny words revealing all, but skulking outside was not going to help us, I quickly understood, so I went in. I found a table near a trio of malignant-looking characters, an albino half-orc I had seen before here and there – difficult to miss or forget – as their apparent leader. He was large enough to match the tracks we had seen up the Land farm, but so were others so I bade my time and listened. He growled out, “That last job was not worth the money,” but that complaint could come from any of them, difficult enough was their daily labor.
A different trio of, I don’t know what else to call them, adventurers strode in to hails and greetings: muscular, somewhat preening young man leading a merry elven woman and an older, thin man who didn’t smile. The woman started a game of Hit the Target offering a reward to, it turned out, whomever could defeat the elf.
This elf can defeat the elf, I thought and made my way over.
I have no money, I realized when I got there a few seconds later. “Hi!” I said in Elven to her, and then, in Common, “I am but a penniless soul in search of a contest of skill. Would you be able to front me the entrance fee to your contest?” At least, that is what I said in here, dans tai’ete. But what everyone heard was, “Can I play? Though I have no coin?” She looked at Angivre but also at my torn clothes and bare feet, and she arched an eyebrow. I don’t know what she thought of me, but she smiled and said she would loan me the silver to play.
A throwing contest. Pity: my aim with my bow is better. I slid out my hunting knife, took aim, and –.
Humans poison themselves with regularity, I have observed. It is a wonder their entire people have not developed immunity to it. The denizens of The Feral Dog use cheap alcohol by the gallon to do it. The consequence is all over the floor, underfoot, under my foot.
I slipped on some brown, runny consequence, I heard Her laugh – distinctly heard it for the first time in years – and my dagger plunged itself into the table in front of the albino half-orc where it vibrated to a stand still as did the rest of the bar.
Sehanine had forced my hand. Literally. What was I to say?
Angivre suddenly nocked, ready, and I had not given it a thought. But she was not pointed at them. Without looking, I fired an arrow into the center of the target away over on the other side of the room, over in a different lifetime, perhaps. These three needed to see that.
“I require my knife,” I said. I could not apologize: one doesn’t say ‘Sorry’ in a place like this: it is too wild, the men too close to animal.
The man-thing rose to his feet and grinned. “Looks like this is mine now.”
I tossed its sheath at him. “Then you’ll be needing this as well.” He tilted his head with confusion but took it and strapped it on. On me it looks elegant and perhaps a little menacing. It is larger than a dagger, after all. But on him it was ridiculous.
“That looks darling on you,” I said with a grin. “You should wear it with a little yellow bow.” I began to pat my pockets. “I think I have some ribbon on me somewhere.”
His companions laughed. One in particular had that manic laugh and look in his eye that speaks of a feral, mad existence: he would have to be put down someday.
The semi-orc knocked back his chair and his friends stood likewise. Angivre swung around to point at his face.
“What have you done with the bones?” I said. I needed to see it in his eye. But I did not. If they had dug up the Land family graves and made off with remains, it wasn’t in their faces.
It was time to go.
The chairs, tables, drinks, noise, uncertain lighting and crowd all covered for me as I ducked and dodged my way out of the room. The demi-orc hurled something at a place I had been but a second prior and hit the man I had used to cover my tracks for that tiny slice of time. That man reacted to being attacked and the brawl was on!
I made my way to the stockroom in back but realized I of course still did not have my knife. *Sigh*. Twists, turns, meeting face to face with one of the albino’s henchmen – who swung at me but buried his weapon in wood – a careful dive and grab, more feinting, and I was out again but this time to the roof of the building opposite to “watch the show.” Sheriff’s men swooped down and carted people away to prison, most to be let go only a few hours later.
What had I learned? Much, but nothing to do with the bones, alas. I mulled the matter and, when finally they awoke, described the events of the night to Rey and Egan.
Egan named them for me:
The albino half-orc: Kullen
The giggly psychopath from the swamps south: Rastafan
His flat-topped, serious sidekick who had taken a swipe at me: Todric
They all work for mine owner Balbor Smenk, a fat, shady man who lives in a mansion only a couple hundred paces from my own little home.
Egan seemed aghast at my adventures at the inn and asked if he could have a go at getting the information instead. With luck, he said, the trio of miscreants would emerge at Glimmer – sun rise – from the Emporium. He would meet them armed not with insults and a knife and a bow, but with “cash.” I conceded that his plan was probably better.
The Lady did send them out of the Emporium and just as Egan and Rey – and her owlbear - were walking up to it. I took station across the street on a roof in case someone needed “pincushioning” (I love this newly-learned human term!).
I could not overhear his words, but Egan was successful in discovering everything we needed to know: that these three had pillaged the graves, had taken the bones with them and had delivered them to the curious observatory outside of town that I had been meaning to visit for some time now. There, the “Old Man” had taken possession of the bones.
We immediately went to the observatory.
Someone living outside of town, alone, and interested in paying to dig up bones from human graves is probably someone who also has traps, paid guards and possibly reanimated bodies guarding his secrets, so sweeping through the front door seemed needlessly risky. Instead, we climbed the stone dome of the building and skittered precariously over to the slit through which its looking glass peers skyward. Directly below was a body being surgically opened on a stone table. The surgeon was alone. Excellent: we could simply talk about the problem and reach a mutually-satisfactory goal.
“Hi there!” I said in what I thought was a cheerful voice.
He squawked looking at me with eyes so wide it made me laugh. He started running around, yelling out bits of sound incoherently.
I wanted to reassure him we weren’t assassins or whatever he dreamed we represented. “Calm down! We just need our bones back. Give us the remains that your men took and we’ll leave you to whatever all this is. But we need those bones! Please?”
He pointed a finger up to me and got his mouth under control. The air grew cool, there was a shimmer, a smell. I understand when a spell is being cast.
“None of that,” I told him and fired an arrow through his shoulder to dissuade him. Honestly, this overreaction was going to do him an injury. “I am sorry about the arrow, but you cannot just aim eldritch energy at me and expect –. Hello?” He had ducked out of sight heading down some stairs. I lined up on his shadow and fired again. A wet sound and a thud told me my aim was true.
I hopped down a series of platforms – arch, stone ring, table, floor – from the roof and ended up at the top of the stairs. He was still alive, thank my Mistress, though bleeding and incoherent with fear. When he saw me again, he took a syringe out of . . . somewhere and plunged it into his neck. A second later I heard the smashing of glass.
I see I haven’t described the room yet. Under the old “telescope” (I think is the human word) was the surgery table. Around it were bookshelves and medical instruments surrounded by four large jars of liquid inside of each what I took to be a dead lizard man. There was also a human skeleton perched near the table.
Dead they all might have been but now they were springing to life. And attacking. But I would not face them alone.
Like an avenging angel she fell from the heavens to aid me. What a sight: Rey plunged down from the slit in the dome onto the skeleton, annihilating it under feet and flashing spear. She turned to engage all four of the shambling monsters left, especially the one who was coming towards me, but they were going to be too much even for her. We needed to stop this, and we needed Egan.
I leaped over the surgeon to land in front of him, further down the stairs, but mistimed and ended up on my stomach with the wind knocked out of me.
“Egan? Can you set afire any of these from up there?” Rey yelled up. No reply. “Egan?”
Faintly above the melee we could just hear, “Ah’m joost barely holdin’ me own up here!”
“Use the rope to lower yourself or dangle from it upside down, I care not, but you are required here!” she yelled back.
A gout of flame encircled one of the creatures from above which left it smelly and smokey but otherwise unscathed.
“Take down the master and the flesh golems may fall,” Rey instructed.
“But do not kill him if you can manage it, Egan,” I added in Elvish.
Smoke from the surgeon, a tight curl of it across his head scorching his hair – the angle of Egan’s heat beam had been impressively precise – and the man went down at last.
But his monsters did not.
I leaped up and began traveling in a circle around the room firing again and again, but they were already dead, you see, and so unimpressed with my little slivers of wood. They would have been mightily attendant to Angivre before my fall from grace.
Egan bodily fell in to join us but then jumped right to his feet, somehow not a casualty of his own physical shortcomings for once. I say this with admiration, for he has no knowledge of what to do with his limbs when he is not using them to harness the incredible power he seems to have access to. And the three of us together fought the creatures down.
We were all hurt, bleeding, poisoned, repulsed by what we had just had to fight, but Rey and I patched us back as best we could. I had not been hit hard as Rey was who was considerably lashed by the things’ claws, but she simply, eh, the expression . . . oh yes, “walked it off,” because of course she did.
The surgeon’s room was at the foot of the stairs, a comfortable room dominated by a statue of himself with angelic wings and a face of bravery and beneficence. If he has not had any contact with his mother over the past twenty years, I should think he resembled the statue in her eyes. To me, it seemed a criminal overreach of the term “artistic license.”
We woke him up, calmed him down, asked him about the bones and what he was doing here. His name is Filge, he said, which I think is the dwarven name for the pipe that connects a privy to the plumbing in places that have these installations. Unfortunate appellation.
Filge was unexpectedly friendly and chatty when we got him to talking. He said, “My mate Balabar (Smenk) called me up from the Free City for a bit of study about some weirdness in town. He made a deal with a dwarf named Dourstone to get a hold of some special provisions he could not obtain. Dourstone was a bit cagey as to what he needed it for, but he told Smenk that it was for a group of explorers that were excavating an abandoned section of his mine. Sounds like a bunch of crazed cultists if you ask me...but money is money. Anyways, Balabar suspected things were afoot when these strange green worms started showing up.”
Here he gestured over to a stoppered glass tube containing a green worm suspended in a clear fluid.
“The thing is dead now of course, but Smenk said that a lot of these worms wriggled out of one of his men, the only one who wasn’t slaughtered by the cult after the final delivery. Smenk said that he burned the body, but he managed to keep one worm intact. I am not exactly sure of its secrets yet, but my guess is that these things can transfer necrotic energy to the host organism.”
The green worm from my vision, right here in front of us in a vial and starring in story about undead infection of the mine that was here in the center of town. Cultists leaving the one living victim alive presumably to use him as a living farm for the worms.
Cultists in a production mine in our town?
So many questions. So many answers I do not want to hear if they mean entering a mine. Goddess! I hate mines. Truly I do.
But first, this Filge seemed to be at ease with us. It rankled.
“This body” I said, Angivre extending to the end of my arm, “is a vessel of Sehanine. Do you know who that is? My people know her as a goddess who delights in meddling in the affairs of mortals. She is among us all the time. She has powerful passions. She loves lovers. She loves the moonlit night and its shadows that conceal the weak trying to rise against the mighty. She despises true darkness, however, for that way is despair. And so she hates those who create the undead to roam and spread despair.” In a heartbeat I loosed an arrow to flit past his ear. Another one past his other. “I am therefore not interested in your word. I want to know your heart. Tell me all that you doing here in this place. I am not one of your paladins, so I am not interested in good and evil. But I must know what you are doing here. All of it.”
For a moment he looked less afraid than confused. “I told you. Smenk had me come here to find out more about these green worms. The reports we have had over the past few months show a few sightings in the marshlands of the south, but the fact that they are here in Diamond Lake, that is new. This cult that Dourstone protects in his mines probably wants to know what they are too. Whoever solves this riddle will possess a very powerful weapon against their enemies. That all said, I wouldn't be here if Smenk wasn't paying me,’ he said. He looked like he was going to shrug but evidently thought the better of it. “In my off-time, I was working on some animation theorems but the worm is turning everything I know upside down. A very exciting time."
Egan took the worm, and all three of us took Filge through the observatory to the front door. We passed a site that I cannot decide was more grisly or pathetic: a large round table piled high with dinner plates and food waited without hope of ever being eaten by a collection of corpses propped up in the seats all around. As we went by, one raised a turkey leg and exclaimed, “It is a fine meal from a generous host, m’lord!” and another: “They were wrong to expel you from the wizard’s guild – you are the equal of anyone there!”
His heart is not full of malice, this Filge. He is lonely. But I don’t really want to meet the companion he eventually finds to be me, and it certainly will not be any of us.
Filge dismantled the trap set facing the door, un-animated the rest of the Land family also lying in wait, and made to leave. I stopped him, turned him to face me.
“The smallest, poorest, would-never-missed, lowliest street urchin; the most miserable, cast aside, beaten woman; the blind, limbless, bleeding beggar: none of these, no one in the town or any other, have nothing to fear from you, am I correct?”
Filge gulped. “N, no, ma’am.”
“I do not want to see you again.”
“You won’t!” And with that, he strode out of our lives.
Rey’s owlbear, but also a row of ravens, both awaited us outside. The birds fly off noisily.
We returned the bones to their land, inter them, speak words of dignity and comfort. I recited words from a past life of the visiting priest to humans, tasked with befriending them, learning their culture, respecting their ways. As we left, we heard the quiet sigh of a “Thank you,” and I have not been this happy in weeks.
It was Quickening, early evening, and we parted ways to attack the Whispering Cairn in the morning. I went to the Emporium spending two gold and a wonderful evening with Shag learning Dragon Chess and some details about his interesting life and friends. I also tried the opium again.
Glimmer again, we assembled: Rey and her creature and Egan. The latter had thoughtfully purchased another skein of oil for lighting lamps and activating magic, for we travel back to the Cairn today to see if Alestor was able to keep his word and open the door barring our way.
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