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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alexander Bryant" data-source="post: 7244769" data-attributes="member: 6884000">Journal of Etona - Entry ElevenBefore we left for high places, Allustan filled us in on much information. There is an old, secretive cult called Kyuss who idolizes the worms. The Eye of Vecna cult was in the Dourstone mine researching the old Kyuss cult during their gatherings in an ancient Kyuss temple down there. That temple is probably no more, but it might be worth sending someone down to make reliable drawings of the place.Allustan recommended that if we were still interested in the worms, we should contact his man in Greyhawk named Elgios who knows more about them.Smenk was dead, assassinated. The dwarf, Dourstone, was also dead, hanged for crimes against the city. The Vecna cultists largely escaped though some of them caused trouble before leaving. Sheriff Cubbin managed to still be in control despite the garrison doing his job and all his patrons being killed. Order has returned to Diamond Lake in the town thanks mainly to Captain Trask and his men.Rey announced that she was returning to her mistress, the blue dragon. This is a two-day hike up into altitudes where, I have read, humans and my kind alike become weak and pale for some reason. Some sort of mountain miasma? It may have to do with the shortness of breath said to strike for many days until the body either dies or becomes acclimated. Fortunately there is an herb that my merchant friend sold, a preventative remedy partially made up of herbs I’d collected for him. He and I have traded many times before – we have tea and tastings and compare notes twice per cycle – and so I managed to purchase them at an excellent price procuring five doses for each of us.We – Rey the Speaker, Rishkar the Speaker’s lizardman guardian, and I – would take Rey’s mistress some of the treasure we captured as a gesture of goodwill. Our plan was to tell the dragon about Ithane and her necrotic “egg bomb”. There was also some sort of plan to attune Rey’s new spear to blue dragon magic and also to Rey personally? Something like that? I didn’t really follow: it was Rishkar’s idea.Egan remained behind with research tasks. Mel wanted only to go to Greyhawke and in any case would not represent Rey’s interests in front of this particular dragon. Once we returned, we would be on to Greyhawke, with Mel and Egan, to help design a treaty between the lizard folk tribe and the humans. I wanted to return to that human center of eyelash-straightening odors to pursue Phreet. And we all wanted to look up this Elgios person as well.Coldeven 7th Day, three days to full moonI learned quite a bit about dragons from Rey during the ascent. This one likes to be high in the air, above the summer snow line, and favors an area featuring many natural perils as well as traps that she has set. It is a home built to augment the creature’s natural strengths, molded across decades by a considerable intelligence. There are others who live with and around the dragon as well, whole communities roving or permanent depending on what the dragon needs or wants from them.We ascended into the early spring mountains. I strapped on the high-top, fur-lined boots that I broke out for three months out of the year. Warm, but I always feel a little clumsy in them. Chatting at and occasionally with Rey, hunting and finding new herbs, enjoying the scents of the higher altitudes and, of course, experiencing the joy of firing Angivre easily filled the time.I was the natural choice for being on guard during the night, and while I was making the rounds I heard something heavy slip on some scree. I circled around for a look at it but all I could make out was lanterns with prism lenses floating across the tops of the trees heading for the campfire. I had seen this before, otherwise I might have thought it an airborne procession of ghosts. I looked for the legs and found them: a house-sized spider was crashing towards us.While I was introducing the monster to the biting cold of Angivre’s sting, I saw Rey again make a gesture before she engaged. She’d started doing this in just the past few days, and with it her attacks seemed to be landing unerringly. Most of them do anyway, of course, but after making this gesture I noticed her studying her foe intently for a second and then her spear bit more deeply. I asked about this after the fight; she was surprised to hear that I could not see the glamour she was marking her target with.We made short work of the spider, and it fell with Obi ripping into its brain, messily tearing and eating. I managed to pull two doses of a paralysis poison from it that I suppose I will give to Rey.Coldeven 8th day, two days to full moonHer face waxes.Her madness visits Her children whether or not we are physically at the Mirror. For some, it is lust; others burn to hunt and among them, mostly the druids, viscerally kill and kill. My father has visions and paints like mad. My mother would climb the tallest trees and carve glowing runes at the tops of them . . . when she was not straddling father or others among our tribe’s men. Even our family of half-elven farmers are affected, becoming hunters and lovers and, for young Moiriel, a sort of soil druid burrowing in the dirt. Even Verdre has trouble with that one. It is two long nights of burning passion that leaves us exhausted, so much so that we look to our allies in the forest, and the Fey, to protect us while we fall to extended meditation for the two days after.Four years I wandered, and in that time the dorse feu did not descend upon me. It had always taken me more lightly than others, but its absence is akin to never enjoying a hot meal through endless days of rain or never seeing the sun (yes, we love and revere the sun: it is a common misconception that we do not. That fiery being is simply not who we are, but He is still important and we love Him).Will Mistress Heat-in-the-Night offer me a drink of Her madness at last? I hope it is more likely this cycle than previous fifty. When I gaze up to the storm-shrouded mountain tops ahead, I cannot help but think that if She takes me up there, what will happen? Will Rey understand? And what of the dragon? Does she know of i? Will my Mistress tolerate Rey’s savage one and vice-versa?We moved up into cold and wind and ice. Rey found us a stone shelter but took no pleasure or pride in doing so even out here in this featureless, bleak place, for her mistress’ claw marks were everywhere. The dragon hunts from the air, Rey said, and this evidence of her roaming on foot had her worried.I was introduced to my first Xorn today. This is a creature from the Elemental Plane of Earth. There are stories among my tribe of a far-wandering druid encountering them – I will have to ask Verdre if she ever saw one – but their sightings are extremely rare. This one’s name is Whisper. It is three-armed, three-legged and has its mouth on the top of its body which makes it quite different from the Xorn of our stories. This is to be expected for creatures that come from other planes, I suppose: they would have to assemble themselves of whatever material was present, and I would imagine that temperament and race would play into what came out as well.Whisper followed the dragon who uses it to find metals and gems, particularly sapphires which she particularly craves.A roaring sweeping thing passed us by while I was meditating about the coming moon, disrupting me enough to get me to my feet. It was a snow tornado that Rey told me was actually alive in some way, a, thing from the Elemental Plane of Air.What a land up here! I would like to stay long enough – perhaps a few years – to one day navigate it as skillfully as Rey does and see all of its splendid sights.That night a dozen reddish dragon-like creatures the size of large dogs swooped around the mouth of our cave long enough to shoot down breakfast.Coldeven 9th day, one day to full moonRey and Rishka woke to fresh-cooked meat laced with spices and an altitude sickness prevention poultice. It should be effective on Rey and me – I adjusted the doses accordingly – but I had to guess with the lizardman’s, if it even worked at all.We climbed ever further into thunder pealing across the tops of the mountains, lightning flashing across gleaming ice, sleet pelting the rock all above us. For the final mile, we did descend into a dry zone valley now somewhat protected from the din, though now we were subject to one of the terrain traps: sinkholes.And Rey located one for us. With her whole body. Never half-measures for her.Once she extracted herself, she also found her mistress who probably came to see what had fallen in.This is my second dragon. The first, a young male named Kravostrix, wanted to rule Far Dale and the surrounding area. But for some reason he wanted to look good, actually asking us for, eh, fashion tips I think is the human expression, and to rule well. And so he asked us – in his imperious, dragony way – how he would best gain the respect of the town. Each of my friends at the time offered different advice. Mine was Friendship and Sacrifice: that a proper monarch would die for any of his subjects, and in turn his subjects would willingly sacrifice themselves for him without being asked. I told him of the hollowness of fear with its accompanying resentments, festering disloyalty and short-term fame. If you are hated, you are forgotten. If you are loved, your name and what you stand for will endure in one way or another forever, because people want and need hope. He seemed to listen to us. I very much want to go back and see how he is doing all these seasons later.That all goes to say that I believed myself prepared for Rey’s mistress.I was not.She emerged out of the ground, a creature of impossible size, simply immense compared to Kravostrix. The air crackled around her, the ground glowed under her footsteps. Her scales were the blue of sapphires, of the center of mighty icebergs that Uncle Skaen used to tell us of. Gleaming sabers, her claws, and arm-length teeth. She radiated catastrophe, discord, hunger, strife.But her eyes . . . .Her eyes were milky and sick. The wind all around roared and yet she scented us, turned her massive head to us, unseeing. Rey walked to her alone, and when her mistress finally saw her, she said only, “It is you. Follow.” And back underground she went.We followed into a slightly warmer place of phosphorescent blue light and glass walls. The entryway, I noted, was of Dwarven make.Whisper popped up out of the ground as we moved into some kind of huge audience room. “Back you are, back you are! The mistress cannot see!” he said in Draconic which Rey translated for me. “The eyes are clear but the mind is unwell.” The mistress crouched in a sitting position like a cat and turned her attention to us. Whisper vanished once more.Her presence filled the room. Every part of our last several hours climbing up towards her lair was redolent of her: touches on stone shocked; the air swirled blue; there was a constant feeling of being close to an electrical storm. I had experienced something like this once or twice in the Fey, but here this lingering presence of naked power came with menace and doom.Words in Draconic flew back and forth between Rey and the dragon. None of it seemed hostile but it is an aggressive-sounding tongue so it is difficult to tell. The creature pointed to Rishka, said something, and he immediately opened the chest of treasure. She beckoned it and him to her side, and I saw the fear and awe of a follower there.She beckoned to me as well, switching to Common.“Who are you?” she says.“I am Etona, a child of the Mirror.”“You worship the moon goddess,” she said.“I am–. I was my tribe’s priestess of Sehanine.”“Whom do you serve now?”“Today I serve Rey’s mistress.”She snorted. This seemed to satisfy her and I was forgotten for a time.Rey explained all of the events from our going to the swamp, what we found, and our return. She wisely left out our adventures in the cairn. The dragon took this all in but looked intently at us when Rey described where the treasure came from.“These shinies are from Ithane’s cache?” she asked suspiciously, and then she waved a claw over it, spoke some words. The air shimmered. “You have brought me a trap! This metal is dripping with her scrying magic. She knows where I am now,” she said in voice laced with contempt, sparks arcing between her horns. “Do not move, any of you.”We waited. Possibly for death.She cast a spell. Tendrils of blue lightning wove themselves into a tea cozy that encircled the treasure. There was a buzzing, a crackling. A *whuumph* that made the coins tinkle.“It is done,” she muttered. “Bring me no more cursed treasure.”Since we were to live, we continued, as we made our apologies, to covertly examine her to try and figure out what was ailing her. Rishka heroically engaged her along many conversation points, accidentally(?) lapsing into Draconic now and then, stalling her, so that we could look for clues to make a diagnosis. We saw much, but not enough. She finally left the way she came.Whisper reappeared and, after a gold piece morsel from Rey, told us that Tody is in the next chamber over, a very retiring green-skinned gnome. How curious! I had never met one such as he.“My name is Etona. I have always wanted to meet a gnome, but you always run too deep for my . . . kind –.” I faltered as the gnome looked like he was under assault.“Too much words, the elf says too many! Stop! Stop!”I saw Rey suppress a smile.“Why are you here?” asked Rey.“Mistress summoned me,” said Tody. “There was a mix-up and I was supposed to accompany someone, but...” he shrugged.“What are you doing here?” she pursued and motioned to the glass tubes and burners set up all around the room.“The mistress has changed.” He begins rushing around the . . . laboratory, yes, that’s the word for what he has created here. “Scales getting thinner. Poisoned! But I checked,” he points to a set of tubes containing colored fluids, “the water and lake, the dirt, the soil. She eats only local, caribou, all good. She goes out during the day, hunts, comes back at night. She is frightened of rocks falling. She pees everywhere.” He makes a sound like an annoyed badger. We would hear this a lot in the coming days.We sat down to understand the sequence of events here. At some point in the recent past, the blue and black dragons fought, probably at the fruit orchard. The blue was already ill and not able to kill her younger, smaller rival. Rey left her mistress after this to try and find answers as to what was wrong when she met me and subsequently Hannah selling her land with the ever-regrowing lilacs. Then the gnome came, and then Gubble, and then we returned from the swamp and journeyed here.Oh yes, Gubble: a Vecna Gnothic brought here by an increasingly paranoid dragon to search for spies.Gnothics, Tody told us, are beings punished by Vecna for something, possibly coming too close to a particular secret. They are cursed individuals: shunned by all but retaining enough humanity, maybe, to understand what they have lost. They see into people somehow with their single malformed, oversized eye. They are lost creatures, existing as mere tools for the wicked or desperate. This one, Gubble, has the single burning red eye, warped features, remnants of hair, patchwork clothing, and it delights only in interrogation. I have never met a creature crying out more obviously for death, though perhaps something worse awaits after. This last thought stayed my hand when I came upon the creature unawares, looking in confusion at itself in a reflecting pool.Gubble told us that it is still working on “the last monk.” I immediately had this person moved to our room and the apparition sent away.The monk was unconscious. I tended to his unusual wounds as best I could: he seemed to have been hollowed out, skin sloughing away. I suspect he is from the Twilight Lodge outside of Diamond Lake. There are wonderful tattoos and constellations and patterns – I recognize every one of them – on most of his exposed skin. All of them track or represent the majesty of Luna.I undress him as part of treating him, though much was curiosity I had to admit. And . . . . well, he looks strong despite his torture, and handsome. And I hear Her laughing. Her full face is mere hours away.When I had done all I could, and all I permitted myself to do with a desirable but unconscious man, we again gathered to assemble our clues. We began to understand something: the cattle at the beginning of my story with Rey had been poisoned by an unknown agent so their owner moved them to Hannah’s farm where they were, to their owner’s disgust, dying from another problem, the magic lilacs.Poisoned cattle well within the dragon’s hunting territory.The dragon was eating the poisoned cattle.She was sick before Hannah’s farm, stricken by whatever made the cattle sick before they moved to Hannah’s. I remembered the conversation with their owner only now: the cattle suffering from blindness, distemper, urination.Rey’s black spear earlier that day had sucked her mistress’ blood into itself and left behind a single drop of quicksilver.Metal poisoning. Quicksilver poisoning. This is what has happened to the dragon.Tody believed he could create a potion to cleanse the arcae’mithrear from her body. With the Xorn providing sulfur, it might be possible, over two weeks of daily administration involving vomiting and pain, to cure her. Possibly fully, possibly not.He got to work, both Rishka and I helping.While I did so, and later while I was wandering through the deeper caves, I pondered what this meant: mercury in the cattle. Arcae’mithrear in the land. The mine. The mine is poisoning the land! It must be closed. Verdre and I will contact the Briarwood Lodge, the garrison, perhaps even Greyhawk: that mine must not be allowed to reopen and in fact will need to be cleansed and then filled in.I also pondered everything we had learned to this point: What did we know about Ithane? These green worms destroyed the Clutch and Ithane appeared after the Clutch was wiped out. What did we know about the worms? The green worms seem to have been created this way: they are not a change to an existing worm, Egan thinks. It is the larval stage of something else.The Vecna cult in the Dourstone mine discovered the green worms in the surrounding area but they were likely from the Clutch. It all originated in the south with the black dragon. But black dragons aren’t necromancers, I thought. Nor evil worm makers or contagion spreaders.The white worm that we found in a tube among Filch’s belongings has similar properties, but we don’t know what it is or how it is related to the much more plentiful green ones. Perhaps we should try to find Filch again?Through the night I watched the monk. I also gathered and prepared what ingredients I could to aid Tody’s effort on the morrow. When Rishka woke as he did during the night from the cold, I asked him:  “What if we allow Rey’s mistress to die? Would it not serve a greater good? The chromatic dragons are ravagers. They use their intelligence and power to –.”“All dragons are sacred,” Rishka interrupted me. I now know what outrage looks like on a lizardman. “They are the first ones. Their ways are not our ways.”I did not come up here to slay a dragon nor watch one die, and there is some sense in Rishka’s words. Also, it would hurt Rey, perhaps more than I understand. As well, My Mysterious Mistress has not offered any indicators one way or the other how She feels about my helping this creature.I needed to think, so I needed to wander.The caves go back a considerable way. Their immense size allows me to ignore for the most part that I am under the earth, surrounded by rock eager – in its ancient crumbling way – to bury and forget me.Its beauty is not lost on me. It is not hard to understand the dwarves’ fascination with being down here: crystals, shimmering pools, stalag–, stalactim–?, glowing mushrooms, trickles of water as calm as any burbling brook. The peace of being wrapped in the blanket of the earth. Yes, I see it. I simply cannot feel it. All I feel is smothering, the weight, the ocean of rock. Any ocean has this effect on my kind: we are prone to melancholy whenever we encounter one, and I am no exception.I came upon the Gnothic staring into its pool. A single arrow, blessed I was certain by My Merciful Mistress, would fell it and bring peace from its tiny world of torment that it was forced to exist in. But, as I wrote before, I could not. Its misery is not mine to end, unasked for.So I will ask.</blockquote>

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