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Message: <blockquote data-quote="skotothalamos" data-source="post: 6604047" data-attributes="member: 83398">History LessonThe constables returned home to Risur after a long journey that had seen them help the Children of Hewanharimau overthrow a Crisillyiri colony, secure an artifact that held the key to Summer’s past, sow dissent in a Danoran colony, complete a transcontinental railroad, become witnesses to a coup in Ber, and meet the first dragon anyone had seen in two hundred years. It was an eventful trip.On the way back, Cazara, who had tucked Pemberton’s robot head into her Gloves of Storing, contacted Harkover Lee to have him take possession of the strange artifact. He teleported to their ship. When Cazara produced the head from the extradimensional space inside her gloves, it still held the likeness of Benedict Pemberton. The constables demanded to know why they hadn’t been told that their primary financial benefactor was a dragon. Lee responded that such secrets were on a “need to know” basis, and they did not need to know until they were actually attacking his Volcano Lair. Had anyone suspected what Pemberton was up to in Ber, they certainly would have been warned. Upon trying to hand over the head, Pemberton’s eyes opened and he said, “y’all better run, I’m a bomb!” When no one responded, he simply disconnected his consciousness from the head and it reverted to a neutral form.Cazara handed it over to Harkover, hoping there would be some way to use it to track Pemberton to his actual lair. Then the conversation turned to Pemberton’s daughter and whether Risur should take custody of her. Cazar asked Lee, “Do you suppose a dragon could ever be raised to serve the people instead of dominating them?” Lee responded that many things were possible, but it would be unwise to anger such a potentially powerful creature by taking her in against her wishes. Hopefully James would be a more positive influence on her life than her father. Lee thanked them for everything, and then teleported back to Slate.The return to Flint was less eventful at first. Alienor put a plan into motion to remove her daughter from Danor and shelter her with the Cloudwood Skyseers. IronPeak went to visit her friend TitanFist, whose mysterious connection to IronPeak remains a mystery. Cazara wanted to go and visit with Duchess Ethelyn in Shale, with was convenient because Summer had some memories in Risur that she wanted to track down, and one of them seemed to be in Shale. They collected IronPeak and Alienor and headed out.In Shale, the Arc of Reida drew Summer to a house, where a caretaker told them to come back the following day. When they did, the caretaker allowed them entrance under the condition that she could observe the phenomenon. The world shifted and suddenly it was eleven years earlier. in 490, Kasvarina was coming to visit the owner of the house, and Eladrin woman named Chatwood. As they sat for tea, Kasvarina demanded that Chatwood undertake a secret mission to accompany the Duchess Ethelyn and serve as her Skyseer. Chatwood was to serve Ethelyn faithfully except where Axis Island was concerned. Any visions about Axis Island were to be kept secret, and in fact Chatwood was to encourage Ethelyn and Risur to give up Axis Island to the Danorans without a fight.Chatwood said she would go along, but only if she knew why, hinting that she wanted more information about Kasvarina’s secret society. Kasvarina told her that she would only be told what she needed to know. Chatwood was adamant; she would not do any more secret missions unless she knew the truth behind them. After too many refusals, Kasvarina made up her mind: this agent was no longer useful. Unable to bring herself to kill an Eladrin woman, she instead permanently blinded her and drove her insane, causing her to be locked away in the Shale Sanatorium for the past decade. When the memory faded, the caretaker pointedly asked the party to leave.After a brief visit with Chatwood in the Sanatorium during which nothing useful was gained, the constables visited the former Duchess Ethelyn in the Bridge Tower. She welcomed them to her prison as old friends, with tea and cakes. Cazara asked if Ethelyn knew Kasvarina, but she said she did not. They asked about Skyseers who had been perhaps skittish about Axis Island, and the Duchess mentioned that her “handmaiden” Sokana had joined her about a dozen years prior and done exactly that. The constables were learning that Kasvarina always won, one way or another.Upon their return to Flint, Summer felt a pull toward both the Navras Opera House and the old Obscurati facility in Cauldron Hill. She opted for the opera. At the Opera House, they were preparing for a play called Cauldron of Blood, about the struggle between King Lorcan Finn and the Red Contessa of Cauldron Hill a century prior. On Mondays, the opera was closed, and the constables were able to start the memory sequence without disrupting the opera’s business too much.The rooftop tore away and they were pulled three hundred years into the past. Kasvarina walked with her friend Navras and asked him why he would build this wonder so far away from home, so far away from Elfaivar. Navras told her that he needed to go some place that had a clean energy and was uncorrupted by Kasvarina’s world view. He told her that she had corrupted his vision and created too many problems for the project he was trying to complete now. Only in a fresh environment like Risur could the Dirge of Vekesh be properly delivered any more; the “Vekeshi” Mystics had twisted the message beyond notice. Kasvarina asked if she could come to see Navras’s first performance and he threatened to have security ban her from the building.The memory faded and the constables found themselves floating in a memory that was not Summer’s. The memory-capturing abilities of the Opera House seemed to have combined strangely with the memory-reliving abilities of the Arc of Reida, and they found themselves as floating invisible spectators on Navras’s first and only performance of the Dirge of Vekesh in his opera house. Cazara noted as an aside to Summer that clearly Kasvarina respected this man; when had she ever asked permission to do anything?The Dirge was delivered in Elvish, but the magical properties of the Navras Opera House allowed each listener to fully understand not only the words, but their deeper context. Navras played a simple Eladrin guitar and sang alone. The Dirge followed the typical style of an Eladrin elegy: three verses; one each for the Maiden, Mother, and Crone aspects of Srasama. In the first verse, he sang of the Maiden’s joy and wonder. In the second verse, he sang of the Mother’s comfort and strife. For the third verse, when he should have sung of the crone’s burden of loss and death, he instead stayed silent and simply played the notes on his guitar. Navras then repeated the first two verses, with a slightly adjusted tone to indicate that he is mourning not the death of his nation, but of Srasama. in the final verse, the song comes to its point: it is only a mourning song if it ends in death. The Eladrin people are not defeated as long as they refuse to go with the crone into the afterlife. There is a plea for the listeners to seek retribution, but to not throw themselves to their deaths. No Eladrin man should sacrifice himself for revenge when there are still Eladrin women who need to be returned home safely. They should grieve, grow strong, and rebuild from weakness to prosper with strength. When he finished, the room was filled with a memorable and life-affirming sorrow. The crowd cried, the singer cried, even the memory-ghosts cried. Before they could really take in what they had witnessed, the constables were whisked off to another memory captured in the walls of the opera house.It was the year 401, a hundred years prior to their actual time frame, and they felt themselves inhabiting the various historical figures represented in the Cauldron of Blood play. IronPeak was drawn into the role of King Lorcan Finn, who was to face the Witches of Cauldron Hill this very night; his presumed successor, the knight Melissa Gahlot was to be played this night by Cazara; Harkover Lee, just as healthy as ever, was inhabited by Summer; and Alienor felt herself drawn into the personality of another noble Tiefling gunslinger, Amielle Latimer. Harkover Lee, King Lorcan, and Dame Melissa were meeting with the mayor of Flint, Roland Stanfield. Amielle had not yet arrived.The four Risuri discussed their plans for the night. The witches of Cauldron Hill needed to be overthrown, and tonight there was an eclipse of the moon. There was some debate over whether this was a good omen or ill, but the Skyseer who was supposed to give them answers was running late. As they discussed how to deal with this, a Danoran ship sailed into the harbor under a flag of peace. Perhaps the hated enemy had some advice? They went outside and were met by a steam-powered runabout carrying Amielle Latimer. She said her “astrologers” had specific information about the eclipse of the moon and that according to them, tonight was the best time to strike, before the eclipse if possible.Just then, the chief of police rushed up and told the gathering that Rebecca Lang, the Skyseer, had been spotted in the small nearby town of Parity Lake, being chased out onto the lake by a mob of commoners who were accusing her of being a witch.The mayor argued that Lang could take care of herself and that they should just get up the mountain ASAP, but the king overruled him and the group mounted horses bound for Parity Lake. On the way, they were met by a hooded figure who stopped the procession to stab himself in the throat. As his blood gushed to the ground, it coalesced into the figure of the Red Contessa, leader of the Witches of Cauldron Hill. She told the gathered crowd (for many had gathered to watch the king pass) that she was their queen and they were her subjects. She told them that she was a far better monarch than King Lorcan, even though she’d been boiling their children alive for thirty years. She wanted an end to the hostilities; all they had to do was accept her as their queen and there would be no more hostage-takings. She claimed she already had more than she could use and waved her hand toward the mountain where dozens of fires began, apparently each one with a hostage inside. She claimed that she could solve the country’s problems, unlike King Lorcan, who let enemies into his harbor, and rode beside them like friends. She would take care of their enemies, she said, and with a wave of her hand the Danoran ship in the harbor exploded and she collapsed back into a puddle of blood.The group redoubled their efforts to save Skyseer Lang. They found an unruly mob being goaded on by the beadle of North Shore, Husky Pete. Pete was up on a soapbox by the shore of the quaint fishing lake, inciting the others to violence. People were lighting pitch-soaked arrows and launching them toward a raft in the middle of the lake that assumedly held Rachel Lang and her fellow skyseers. Dame Melissa rode straight toward Pete as he was shouting “The witches are everywhere. They are among you. There are witches on the  mountain. There are witches in the lake!” Melissa told Pete he could tell no lies, and through sheer force of will she made him turn his story in mid-pitch. “The witches are everywhere. I’m a witch, in fact, and you are all being controlled by me. There are witches on the mountain. There are witches in the lake!”With spell of “Husky Pete” somewhat broken by the half-elf paladin, he transformed into a witchier countenance. Sister Deliria forced Melissa to attack Amielle. When Amielle shot the witch, the now-scattering crowd winced in pain all at once. Harkover Lee detected that she had some kind of magical connection to the crowd, and he broke her spell, allowing the witch to be taken down quickly. As she died, a black spirit flew out of her, cackling its way back up the mountain, and cursing them all.The Skyseers thanked the king and mayor for saving them, and then Rachel offered up her vision to the king: “When the moon is near setting, and the glow of dawn waits to appear, the cauldron is unguarded, the coven exhausted and sleeping after their night of revelry. And a figure steps willingly into the boil and the bubble. The fire turns to ice, the cascade stops, the blood fades away. And then the sun rises, the witches turn to stone, and the mountain is purified.”Now there was a decision to be made. The Danorans said to attack before the eclipse; the Risuri skyseers said to wait until dawn. Which should they do? King Lorcan made his decision. He would sacrifice himself heroically at dawn to crush the witches and cleanse the mountain, but first he would make sure that Dame Melissa fought against them heroically and survived, so that he could name her his successor before he went to his death.Melissa and Amielle led a force of a hundred troops up the mountain. After losing nearly three-quarters of their number to some dark spirits, they were reinforced by another group of a hundred. They fought some witches and zombies and evil spirits at the pyres where the hostages were being burned. They freed thirty hostages and sent them back down the mountain with an escort of six of their most wounded soldiers. They arrived at the peak of the mountain after the lunar eclipse had begun, and from their perspective the moon was pouring blood over the whole mountain. They fought valiantly against the wtiches and their hundreds of minions, but in the end were forced to retreat from the battle. No more than half a dozen soldiers made it back down the mountain with Amielle and Melissa barely surviving.Confident that Melissa had established her bond with the people, King Lorcan led the way back up the mountain before dawn. As the sun was just about to rise, he and Mayor Stanfield and Harkover Lee arrived at the summit. It was sticky with blood, but there were no witches to be seen. The witches’ black cauldron stood alone, slowly bubbling the blood inside. A few scattered revelers lay sleeping on the peak. Lorcan transferred his Rites of Rulership to Melissa and stepped willingly into the blood cauldron, sacrificing his soul to the Red Contessa and ensuring her rule over the city of Flint for a generation.The witches of Cauldron Hill held sway over the city of Flint for many decades, until King Aodhan returned from the Third Yerasol War with a steamship capable of shelling the mount. Together with the powerful sorcery of Harkover Lee, they were able to break the witches’ hold over Flint and begin a new age of industrial revolution in the city. As the memory ended, the constables realized that it had always been this way, and any memories of a different history were quickly swept away.As the memory faded, Alienor could feel that she had some kind of connection to Amielle Latimer. A blood connection perhaps? She was convinced that Amielle was her ancestor. As an orphan, this was amazing news for Alienor to find out. Unfortunately, she was too busy being drawn in to yet another strange event.Somehow connected to Amielle Latimer’s consciousness, Alienor felt herself being pulled across the sea to an island off the coast of Crisillyir. It was modern day, and she was inhabiting the ghost of her ancestor as she watched a new crop of recruits coming in for their Obscurati orientation…</blockquote>

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