Alexander Bryant
First Post
Journal of Etona: Entry II
The Swarm
There is one common thread binding all the peoples of the world together: bugs.
It is not the only thread, but it is a stronger one than people suppose.
As a child, I was taught to accept them, watch and learn from them. I saw how their presence was shrugged off by everyone and everything, a background nuisance that merited only a vague hand wave or tail swish. Even the humans reacted this way though they are terrorized by them compared to my people.
I did watch them. I did learn from them. They are terrible. What they do to the land and one another: they have no soul. Their actions create agony and death on a scale a demon could only howl with longing at, but they do not feel malice. They do not feel anything. They are the universe’s machinery of pain and death.
The writhing mass of insects that chased us out of the lantern chamber was a carpet of muertr. “Beetles.” They were led by an armored creature I have heard of, an ankheg. Elves and humans do not have a word for it so we borrow the Dwarven one. The ankheg is a monster, a created thing not of this world. I was pleased to help kill it, though my part in the fight was minor. Most of its death came from Rey, her wolves, and the fire wizard.
Egan
His name is Egan. He strode right up from Lady-knows-where to the entrance of the cairn where Rey and I were talking about what to do about the insects. He is young, about twenty, dressed in leather armor, and spouting fire from his hands which he used to great effect against the plague and their master.
Observance
The wolves both gave their lives attacking the thing. Later, we would carry their bodies to the top of the cairn and place them in a ceremonial ring, laid out to the elements for the world to reclaim.
“Go, children,
Lead the way – we follow
Down the seasons.
Flies the dust where you have stepped:
My skin, my bones, they churn.
Flows the water that I have lapped:
Your blood, your tears return.
Come, children,
Seek our path – we lead you
To rebirth.”
It sounds better in our tongue: Common doesn’t do justice to songs of sienne-kel.
Egan’s Sister, Leyla
Egan is searching for his sister, Sara, who was last seen here a year ago. He knows all about this cairn and its rotating heavy stone grave box. He was here a year ago himself with a team of adventurers but they were busily slain by the traps of this place. He comes again here, now, on the anniversary of his loss. It is her bedroll we discovered in the first alcove to the right.
“I am not insane,” he said in a formal, book-learned Elvish when I ask Rey for her take on a man who would seek a young human girl living for four seasons in a cavern inhabited by wolves and killing mechanisms with no food or guidance. Does he search for her bones? No, not this either. He believes she is alive magically somehow, transported from here to a place where she could survive or here somewhere still, suspended. It seems a faint hope. It seems outlandish.
Sehanine
It is outlandish, all of it.
We three, unconnected paths, joining together at the same time among all the days in the world, at this same forgotten point.
You are both sent from My Moonlit Mistress – She has not forgotten.
You are both here for me.
And I must be there for you.
Our Task
We explored the hole in the ceiling. I have always been able to climb trees, but there was a time when a lone rope would have been a humiliating struggle. I am not what I once was.
Up there is a passage to a stone head, its mouth agape, with two swirling colored gems for eyes. They glowed from within showing us color after color in a pattern that Egan understood: they were in the order of the lanterns below. Lighting a lantern doused a color in the gems. Cause and effect. Experimenting revealed to us that lighting all of the lanterns would extinguish the eyes and then, and then . . . magic would probably happen? Perhaps the mouth would speak or become a door or barbecue our vittles, who knows? But something would happen. We just needed to figure it out.
We are missing two of the lanterns.
We knew where one of them was: the red light greeting visitors to the Emporium. But the violet? Who would know where it went?
Allustan might have a lead on something like that. We would go to him first.
The Indigo Lantern
Of course Allustan was Egan’s old master. When I heard this, I felt warmed by the touch of Her Dancing Majesty. I was about to be joyfully seared by it.
His cottage is homey, cozy, soft-spoken like the man himself, though Egan begs to differ. We caught him outside watering his garden. He brought us inside.
And there she was. How could she be anywhere else?
My soul, resting on a table.
The Lady sent her back to me.
I owe Allustan a favor now – I have been in this position before with another man, quite a devil he was. But that is merely . . . let’s say that I recognize Her sense of humor.
Next to Angivre was the indigo lantern. Obviously. In exchange for it, our party was to record every sigil and glyph that we discovered in the Whispering Cairn. This slight chore was gladly accepted.
To the Emporium.
The Red Lantern
I thought this would be difficult. But Hannah, pleased to offer us a dinner inside for investigating the oddities about her farm, offered us an easy way to get the lantern, not even to borrow it but to own: simply discover why long-time members of the Emporium’s opium takers (the Common word for it is khalamantis) have become violently ill.
Opium is a flower that provides, in my tribe at least, a window to the Fey. It is, it, this vision, it sits on top of what you are actually seeing. Difficult for me to describe. It lets some of the Fey’s scents and sounds come through as well. I don’t know what humans experience – not the Fey, I know, from the deadness it produces in them – but it must pleasurable because so many who try it cannot stop, trading many of their short march of years to lie fallow in its grip. When they cannot get the flower, Rey told me, they become very sick exactly as these Emporium customers are.
The squash soup served for dinner was delicious. And it was the cause of the illness.
It immediately counteracts the opium. I saw this first-hand. And so all those humans throwing their insides out were suffering from the withdrawal. The cook who made the soup, a gangly, nervous young man with little idea of how to prepare a meal but had been gifted by My Lady with spectacular, un-ruinable gourds, was very surprised that it was his blundering causing the problem. His is a piteous soul, so I took pity and helped him improve the recipe in a few ways as to offer a range of dishes. We asked the owner for the boy to stay employed there and have “the whole affair smoothed over.”1
Problem solved, red lantern ours.
Back to the Cairn
Armed with Angivre, the lanterns, and a lot of oil, we set to our experiment. Hanging each lantern up and pouring lamp oil into them doused the gems on the level above us and – floating mating unicorns! – the mouth opened.
Beyond was a corridor that ended in a pit of balls made of ceramic, Egan said. A plank ran across the pit to a closed door on the other side, holes in the walls about the size of the balls, something moving underneath, perhaps another ankheg. A trap, then. There was nothing for it but to “put a coin in the slot and turn the handle”.
I crawled out onto the plank. Some part of me must have expected what was going to happen when the balls came flying out of holes. Only one clipped me, but it had heft like it was filled with water. The one who would walk across the plank upright would swiftly find out how the world works, and ends, at least for him.
I reached the door but it may as well have been a picture of a door for all the access it offered.
An oddly cheerful ghost of a young man began flitting about enjoying very much our efforts. His name was, or is – I am not sure of the right way to refer to a spirit’s name – Alastor. His shade’s form was of his last second alive when a ceramic ball broke his neck. It must have killed him instantly, because had the creature shuffling about the bottom of the pit below eaten him, his ghostly shape would have looked, eh, worse?
If we would care to take his bones to the cemetery in town, he said, he would open the door for us.
I would have gladly come all this way to help this poor boy do just that. Our mission of mercy became two-fold. My Mistress Moon is feeling merciful.
We decided to simply attack and slay the monster below. I felt that there was a clever solution to blundering down and killing it, but it was probably miserable anyway, existing in this small space, eating once a decade. It turned out to not be an ankheg but some other horror that Rey made short work of. Or perhaps Egan fried it to ashes. I was not able to see as I was retrieving the bones.
And so we left the Whispering Cairn once more to deliver Alastor’s shell to a reunion with the rest of his dead family in a human cemetery near Diamond Lake. So odd that they want to be buried since they do not come from underground and have no history of dwelling there. Stranger still, that humans want their bodies to decay together, that there is some meaning in it. But there surely is! A dead human is telling me so.
I will meditate after we lay him comfortably to rest, resigned perhaps to his eternal silence. If only he would speak to us again! I have so many questions. But the dry rustling of the bones is all we have been offered since we left the cairn.
The motion of steps, the wrapped charge in my arms, the sun, it has led me into reverie as we move along, no one wanting to break the silence. I dream of night. But it is not night, it is darkness, the black of blindness. And a familiar little girl steps forward . . . .
The Swarm
There is one common thread binding all the peoples of the world together: bugs.
It is not the only thread, but it is a stronger one than people suppose.
As a child, I was taught to accept them, watch and learn from them. I saw how their presence was shrugged off by everyone and everything, a background nuisance that merited only a vague hand wave or tail swish. Even the humans reacted this way though they are terrorized by them compared to my people.
I did watch them. I did learn from them. They are terrible. What they do to the land and one another: they have no soul. Their actions create agony and death on a scale a demon could only howl with longing at, but they do not feel malice. They do not feel anything. They are the universe’s machinery of pain and death.
The writhing mass of insects that chased us out of the lantern chamber was a carpet of muertr. “Beetles.” They were led by an armored creature I have heard of, an ankheg. Elves and humans do not have a word for it so we borrow the Dwarven one. The ankheg is a monster, a created thing not of this world. I was pleased to help kill it, though my part in the fight was minor. Most of its death came from Rey, her wolves, and the fire wizard.
Egan
His name is Egan. He strode right up from Lady-knows-where to the entrance of the cairn where Rey and I were talking about what to do about the insects. He is young, about twenty, dressed in leather armor, and spouting fire from his hands which he used to great effect against the plague and their master.
Observance
The wolves both gave their lives attacking the thing. Later, we would carry their bodies to the top of the cairn and place them in a ceremonial ring, laid out to the elements for the world to reclaim.
“Go, children,
Lead the way – we follow
Down the seasons.
Flies the dust where you have stepped:
My skin, my bones, they churn.
Flows the water that I have lapped:
Your blood, your tears return.
Come, children,
Seek our path – we lead you
To rebirth.”
It sounds better in our tongue: Common doesn’t do justice to songs of sienne-kel.
Egan’s Sister, Leyla
Egan is searching for his sister, Sara, who was last seen here a year ago. He knows all about this cairn and its rotating heavy stone grave box. He was here a year ago himself with a team of adventurers but they were busily slain by the traps of this place. He comes again here, now, on the anniversary of his loss. It is her bedroll we discovered in the first alcove to the right.
“I am not insane,” he said in a formal, book-learned Elvish when I ask Rey for her take on a man who would seek a young human girl living for four seasons in a cavern inhabited by wolves and killing mechanisms with no food or guidance. Does he search for her bones? No, not this either. He believes she is alive magically somehow, transported from here to a place where she could survive or here somewhere still, suspended. It seems a faint hope. It seems outlandish.
Sehanine
It is outlandish, all of it.
We three, unconnected paths, joining together at the same time among all the days in the world, at this same forgotten point.
You are both sent from My Moonlit Mistress – She has not forgotten.
You are both here for me.
And I must be there for you.
Our Task
We explored the hole in the ceiling. I have always been able to climb trees, but there was a time when a lone rope would have been a humiliating struggle. I am not what I once was.
Up there is a passage to a stone head, its mouth agape, with two swirling colored gems for eyes. They glowed from within showing us color after color in a pattern that Egan understood: they were in the order of the lanterns below. Lighting a lantern doused a color in the gems. Cause and effect. Experimenting revealed to us that lighting all of the lanterns would extinguish the eyes and then, and then . . . magic would probably happen? Perhaps the mouth would speak or become a door or barbecue our vittles, who knows? But something would happen. We just needed to figure it out.
We are missing two of the lanterns.
We knew where one of them was: the red light greeting visitors to the Emporium. But the violet? Who would know where it went?
Allustan might have a lead on something like that. We would go to him first.
The Indigo Lantern
Of course Allustan was Egan’s old master. When I heard this, I felt warmed by the touch of Her Dancing Majesty. I was about to be joyfully seared by it.
His cottage is homey, cozy, soft-spoken like the man himself, though Egan begs to differ. We caught him outside watering his garden. He brought us inside.
And there she was. How could she be anywhere else?
My soul, resting on a table.
The Lady sent her back to me.
I owe Allustan a favor now – I have been in this position before with another man, quite a devil he was. But that is merely . . . let’s say that I recognize Her sense of humor.
Next to Angivre was the indigo lantern. Obviously. In exchange for it, our party was to record every sigil and glyph that we discovered in the Whispering Cairn. This slight chore was gladly accepted.
To the Emporium.
The Red Lantern
I thought this would be difficult. But Hannah, pleased to offer us a dinner inside for investigating the oddities about her farm, offered us an easy way to get the lantern, not even to borrow it but to own: simply discover why long-time members of the Emporium’s opium takers (the Common word for it is khalamantis) have become violently ill.
Opium is a flower that provides, in my tribe at least, a window to the Fey. It is, it, this vision, it sits on top of what you are actually seeing. Difficult for me to describe. It lets some of the Fey’s scents and sounds come through as well. I don’t know what humans experience – not the Fey, I know, from the deadness it produces in them – but it must pleasurable because so many who try it cannot stop, trading many of their short march of years to lie fallow in its grip. When they cannot get the flower, Rey told me, they become very sick exactly as these Emporium customers are.
The squash soup served for dinner was delicious. And it was the cause of the illness.
It immediately counteracts the opium. I saw this first-hand. And so all those humans throwing their insides out were suffering from the withdrawal. The cook who made the soup, a gangly, nervous young man with little idea of how to prepare a meal but had been gifted by My Lady with spectacular, un-ruinable gourds, was very surprised that it was his blundering causing the problem. His is a piteous soul, so I took pity and helped him improve the recipe in a few ways as to offer a range of dishes. We asked the owner for the boy to stay employed there and have “the whole affair smoothed over.”1
Problem solved, red lantern ours.
Back to the Cairn
Armed with Angivre, the lanterns, and a lot of oil, we set to our experiment. Hanging each lantern up and pouring lamp oil into them doused the gems on the level above us and – floating mating unicorns! – the mouth opened.
Beyond was a corridor that ended in a pit of balls made of ceramic, Egan said. A plank ran across the pit to a closed door on the other side, holes in the walls about the size of the balls, something moving underneath, perhaps another ankheg. A trap, then. There was nothing for it but to “put a coin in the slot and turn the handle”.
I crawled out onto the plank. Some part of me must have expected what was going to happen when the balls came flying out of holes. Only one clipped me, but it had heft like it was filled with water. The one who would walk across the plank upright would swiftly find out how the world works, and ends, at least for him.
I reached the door but it may as well have been a picture of a door for all the access it offered.
An oddly cheerful ghost of a young man began flitting about enjoying very much our efforts. His name was, or is – I am not sure of the right way to refer to a spirit’s name – Alastor. His shade’s form was of his last second alive when a ceramic ball broke his neck. It must have killed him instantly, because had the creature shuffling about the bottom of the pit below eaten him, his ghostly shape would have looked, eh, worse?
If we would care to take his bones to the cemetery in town, he said, he would open the door for us.
I would have gladly come all this way to help this poor boy do just that. Our mission of mercy became two-fold. My Mistress Moon is feeling merciful.
We decided to simply attack and slay the monster below. I felt that there was a clever solution to blundering down and killing it, but it was probably miserable anyway, existing in this small space, eating once a decade. It turned out to not be an ankheg but some other horror that Rey made short work of. Or perhaps Egan fried it to ashes. I was not able to see as I was retrieving the bones.
And so we left the Whispering Cairn once more to deliver Alastor’s shell to a reunion with the rest of his dead family in a human cemetery near Diamond Lake. So odd that they want to be buried since they do not come from underground and have no history of dwelling there. Stranger still, that humans want their bodies to decay together, that there is some meaning in it. But there surely is! A dead human is telling me so.
I will meditate after we lay him comfortably to rest, resigned perhaps to his eternal silence. If only he would speak to us again! I have so many questions. But the dry rustling of the bones is all we have been offered since we left the cairn.
The motion of steps, the wrapped charge in my arms, the sun, it has led me into reverie as we move along, no one wanting to break the silence. I dream of night. But it is not night, it is darkness, the black of blindness. And a familiar little girl steps forward . . . .
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