Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 350
Darkeye
With some time to look at their surroundings, the three time-travelers see that most of the inward-facing walls are damaged. Chunks of stone have been gouged out of them in many places, and the edges of the yard are littered with debris that has fallen from higher up. One building not far from Kibi, a small rectangular structure made of wood and stone, is riddled with holes, as if it had been a giant’s sparring dummy. Kibi puts his eye to one of the holes and sees an ordinary store-room, with barrels, crates, and small heaps of detritus.
Dranko giggles. I enjoy this place. It makes me tingle!”
Aravis notices that his hand is cramping. “Oh, right.” He carefully places the pebbles a few yards away and casts dispel magic. His friends appear in a sprawling pile of bodies.
“Oops. Guess I should have spaced you out a little.”
Morningstar, Ernie, Grey Wolf and Flicker get to their feet and look about, confused.
“You cannot see us!” Dranko cackles. “But we are here! Invisible! We cannot be seen!”
Now that Kibi can target all of his friends, he casts veil, making the entire party look like termites. Grey Wolf casts enhanced senses and sniffs the air. Castles typically reek of manure, smoke, and sweat, but this one carries only the faintest whiff of such typical odors. Morningstar reestablishes the mind link and then, ever suspicious, casts true seeing. She finds that the spell makes it harder to see. To her divinatory sight, the air above the castle is now quite blurry, and she cannot see any of the trees outside the castle’s perimeter.
Something rises up from behind one of the walls.
It’s a head. With tentacles. At first the party thinks it’s a beholder, but it’s not quite the same. This one is a bit smaller, and they certainly are tentacles and not eyestalks. Dranko panics, but realizes that the tentacles don’t remind him of Cleaners. The creature’s face is surrounded by short tentacles like a wriggling beard, and two long tentacles sprout from its “back” and hang down like obscene pigtails. The tentacled head bobs for a few seconds at the top of the wall, turning slowly to and fro, and then descends back behind the wall and out of sight.
Did it see them? Or were they successfully hidden, veiled as bugs? The floating head didn’t show any signs of having seen them; it was probably investigating the sounds of spell-casting. A moment later two new heads float into view (or maybe it’s the same one, with a friend). The two heads sweep back and forth along the top of the wall, clearly looking for something, but after a minute they again descend and retreat behind the wall.
Confident that he won’t be seen, Dranko flies upward, a tiny flying termite, and peeks over into the space beyond the near wall. It’s the floating chunk of star-field that dominates the scene, a twinkling patch of Astral miasma that confounds his visual perspective. Swooping to and fro in looping arcs are a dozen more tentacled heads; they don’t appear to be guarding anything in particular, unless it’s the Astral field itself.
The buildings here are even more heavily damaged. One tower has fallen completely onto a building below it, caving in its roof, and the ground here is even more strewn with shattered rubble. There’s no sign that anyone has tried effecting repairs, and the rubble itself is not overgrown, suggesting that whatever happened was a recent event. Dranko thinks that the Astral splotch is at the center of the destruction, and opines that something must have emerged from it and assaulted the castle.
Just as Grey Wolf starts using a wand to cast fly on everyone not already so enchanted, a human figure comes flying out of one of the distant towers. Her skin is as ebony as her long robe, and no hair grows on her head, hardly surprising in a Sharshun stronghold. Dranko is far enough away that he cannot make her out more clearly, though his natural ability to detect magic is nearly overwhelmed by the strength of her auras. There are two distinct sources of magic on her person. One, unspeakably strong, casts her whole self (to his magic-sight) in a deep black shadow. The second, somehow even stronger, originates at her right hand, and emits a bright golden glow which gilds the edges of her darker aura.
Dranko blinks furiously as the dark shadow magic starts to draw him in, like it’s attempting to pull out his soul. He starts to move toward her in defiance of his own will, and barely manages to save himself by wrenching his gaze away from her. He frantically informs the others of all of this over the mind link.
The woman speaks, and even from a distance her voice sounds clear to all present, bolstered by a faint telepathic presence.
“I’m very impressed,” she says, “that you were able to get in here. Remarkable! Would you like to talk?”
The floating heads have perked up a bit, and are looking in the same direction as the woman, though they still don’t seem to notice them.
“You have a certain… radiance… about you,” Dranko says.
“That’s true,” she admits.
“Should I ask?”
“Certainly,” says the woman. “Would you like to ask in a more comfortable setting, or would you prefer to stay flying around up here while your friends are down below?”
Are we attacking her or not?, Kibi thinks over the mind-link.
Yes! thinks Dranko.
We’re almost ready thinks Aravis. Keep her talking
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” says Dranko, “but aren’t you anathema to everything we love and believe in?”
The woman smiles. “No.”
“No? Really? Who are you, exactly?”
She chuckles. “I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now.”
“Are you Darkeye?”
“Yes, Dranko.”
“Are you also Moirel?”
“Very good!”
“All right! We met your dad, you know.” And killed him, he thinks, though he refrains (barely) from saying this out loud.
Kibi rises up, shielding his eyes from Darkeye as best he can, and drops a greater dispel magic on her. He feels that his abjuration is strong, and so is very disappointed that she doesn’t stop flying.
“Two possibilities,” he thinks to the others. “Either she’s a ridiculously powerful caster, or her magic is being generated by an artifact.”
Morningstar casts blindsight on Aravis, and quickens a second one on herself. Now, at reasonably close range, the two of them will be able to engage Darkeye without looking at her. Aravis changes into a beholder, flies upward until he crests the wall, and shines his anti-magic cone over his target. She’s remains airborne. While the dark magic around her seems somewhat suppressed, the golden glow doesn’t diminish in the slightest. Moirel turns to regard him, and sighs.
Aravis vanishes. His thoughts do likewise from their mind-link. The dark magic around her reasserts itself.
Dranko tries not to let his worry color his voice. “I don’t suppose you want to give us your dagger and let us go?”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” says Darkeye. “I’d rather just talk.”
“And what do you want to tell us?”
Darkeye sighs again. “I don’t know! You came to visit me. When I woke up this morning, I assure you I hadn’t planned on telling you anything.”
“Say,” says Dranko. “Who did all the damage to this place, anyway?”
“I did,” says Darkeye. “It was an accident.”
Grey Wolf joins Kibi and Dranko flying above the wall. Like the others, he shields his eyes as best he can while keeping her in his peripheral vision.
“Ah, Ivellios,” says Darkeye.
“Yes,” says Grey Wolf. “You don’t mind if I don’t look at you, right? What exactly did you do to Aravis?”
“I have him,” says Darkeye flatly.
“Where?”
“Away. Now, are we going to come to blows, or shall we talk?”
“You seem to know a lot about us,” says Dranko.
“I’ve been following your… exploits… for quite some time,” she says with a smile.
Ernie casts divine power on himself. Grey Wolf sniffs the air again with his enhanced senses, and discovers Darkeye carries an unusual but familiar scent. She smells like Sagiro did, when he was the Lord of the Roses. Kibi confirms that powerful Earth Magic is rolling off of her in pulsing waves.
“I thought this place would be a busy hive, swarming with Sharshun,” says Dranko. “What happened? Did you kill them all?”
Darkeye’s countenance darkens. “I sent them away,” she says.
Without warning, Darkeye launches herself high into the air, so that she can easily look down upon the assembled Company. She fixes her gaze upon Flicker, and like Aravis did a few seconds ago, the little halfling vanishes. He finds himself in a translucent, dark-gray room, like a small prison cell made of smoky quartz. It has a window, and out of that window he can see Dranko and the others hovering below him. With a start he realizes that he’s looking out from right about where he just saw Darkeye…
“We’re inside an Eye of Moirel,” says Aravis, who shivers as he paces the small cell. Flicker can feel a deadly cold seeping into him, sapping him of life and strength.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he complains.
“I’m not,” says Aravis. “She has us trapped inside her eye, I’m guessing. I think if we concentrate hard enough, we might be able to escape.”
“So I’m doomed, then,” says Flicker. He looks like he’s about to say more, but the little room shudders and shakes, sending both occupants reeling into the walls. Kibi has closed his eyes, and used his keen sense of Darkeye’s emanating Earth Magic to peg her with a volley of magic missiles. The spell has gotten past her innate resistance, scorching her and causing her to flinch. She clucks her tongue.
Morningstar also shuts her eyes, not needing to be precise in her targeting as she lets loose with a firestorm. All of the floating heads are incinerated with cold flames, and Darkeye herself has clearly been burned as well. As she hovers above them, smoke rising from her robes, golden light from the object in her right hand flashes around her, bathing her momentarily in its light. But her wounds don’t heal, and there’s no other obvious effect. Nodding with satisfaction, Morningstar quickens divine power.
Aravis sets his mind to escape, and in an eyeblink finds himself returned to the spot at which he was hovering before Darkeye captured him. While the prison’s interior had returned him to human form, he reappears as a beholder, and his central eye’s anti-magic ray is pointed right at Kibi. The dwarf plummets about fifteen feet before Aravis closes his eye.
“Sorry!”
Ernie (shielding his eyes like the rest) casts energy drain on Darkeye. “You are a bad, bad woman!” he scolds as he casts. “You have done many horrible things!” His spell is drawn entirely into the golden light surrounding his target, where it harmlessly dissipates. Ernie grunts, flies toward Darkeye, and releases Beryn Sur.
“Ernest,” says Darkeye. “That was rude.”
Ernie is incredulous. “You’re trying to bring back the horrible, evil Emperor, and my hitting you is rude?”
“Yes,” says Darkeye. “This is my home. You are an intruder. I would have expected a cleric of Yondalla to understand that.”
“This is more like exterminating a nest of fire ants,” Ernie retorts.
Darkeye calls out to Grey Wolf. “Ivellios! I’m sure you will understand, that everything I have done, has been to restore our good family name.”
Grey Wolf lifts an eyebrow. “Family name? It’s in pretty good order right now, thanks. You’re not really improving it.”
Shaking her head, Darkeye frowns at his descendant. “I am disappointed, though. It appears that our Earth Magic did not travel down the family line. You’re not even a true wizard, are you? Of course, neither am I, any more.”
“What are you now then?” asks Dranko.
“I am Darkeye. I am a Sharshun.”
“Great!” Dranko exclaims. “Let’s both jam our tongues into the top of our mouths and see which one of us survives!”
Grey Wolf quickens a true strike, channels a maximized acid orb into Bostock, charges, and swings. He’s keeping his eyes mostly shut, but uses his keen senses to sniff her out. Grey Wolf does catch a quick glimpse of his foe and ancestor; one of her eye sockets is filled with dark crystal, and in fact many parts of her body are covered with patches of smoky gemstone. She wields a golden sword – certainly the Watcher’s Kiss – and the weapon, as Sagiro’s was in Het Branoi, is grafted to her arm by the crystal that grows upon her skin.
Grey Wolf swings, and Darkeye is deluged in a flood of hot acid. Her skin, both true and crystalline, smokes and runs. She winces in obvious pain, before whispering, “I suppose we do have to do this the hard way, then. It’s a shame. I was looking forward to talking to you.”
“And what would we talk about?” asks Grey Wolf, mockingly.
“How about this,” says Darkeye. “The Emperor is my enemy also.”
Grey Wolf cannot hide his surprise.
“Now are you listening?” Darkeye asks. “But, if you wish to continue with fisticuffs…”
She glances downward as Dranko streaks towards her, ready to strike while she’s distracted by Grey Wolf. She narrows her eyes… and Dranko vanishes. He reappears in the little crystal prison, where Flicker is looking decidedly pale and weak. He himself feels a shiver as the room sucks the life out of him.
“We have to get out of here,” Flicker stammers, teeth chattering. “It’s… it’s cold…”
Dranko attempts to heal Flicker with a wand, but the magic fails. He curses under his breath, as he looks out the window at Grey Wolf, Ernie and the rest.
Even as the Darkeye’s crystal coating starts to fill in the worst of her wounds, she swings the Watcher’s Kiss for the first time. She lands three blows with upon Grey Wolf – damaging, but by no means what he had been expecting from a weapon of that power. But he hears Ernie also cry out in pain. All of the same wounds the sword made upon Grey Wolf, are opened in the same places upon the nearby halfling. She then tries to draw Ernie into her crystal prison, but he resists.
“If the Emperor is your enemy,” asks Kibi, “why do you keep trying to bring him back?”
“It’s not that complicated,” says Darkeye. “We can talk about if your comrades stop hitting me with swords and splashing me with acid.”
Kibi has no such intention. He flies directly at Darkeye, casting Otto’s Irresistible Dance, and touches his quarry. The spell is absorbed into the golden light and has no effect on the Sharshun. Kibi curses, but is secretly relieved that she didn’t have spell turning active.
“I attempted to restore time, to rehabilitate my father’s name,” says Darkeye. “No doubt he was killed for his failure. For my failure. My divinations tell me that he died long ago. When I failed to return, I’m sure his experiment was deemed a waste of time, and that the Emperor had him killed. Had my attempt been successful, to rewrite time, my father’s work would have been vindicated.”
So, whatever else she might know, she doesn’t know that she’s currently facing down her father’s killers.
“What’s your opinion of the Adversary?” asks Kibi.
“A fool’s errand.”
“The Adversary is coming,” says Morningstar, flying towards her and drawing Ell’s Will. “We need the Watcher’s Kiss to stop him.”
Darkeye shakes her head. “You may think that is true, but it is not.”
“No, we’re pretty sure it is,” says Kibi.
“Fine. But I’m not giving it up.”
Morningstar arrives at her target and smashes Ell’s Will into Darkeye’s stomach. A spray of crystal shards flies from the point of impact, and Darkeye grimaces in obvious agony.
“This…” she wheezes. “This is why I sent everyone else away.”
Aravis flies close enough that he can target Darkeye with his blindsight. He closes his eyes and pegs her with a disintegrate, which she largely shrugs off. Ernie and his dancing blade each make a flurry of slashes, nearly all of which are deflected by the patches of black crystal. Up close, Ernie can also see that even where her skin isn’t covered in crystal, it’s still somewhat gnarled and rocky-looking – something he and the others have seen on both Cranchus and Condor.
Grey Wolf locks another acid orb into his sword, and lands another strike. Again a gout of acid splashes outward, but this time Darkeye is utterly unaffected by it. Hm.
Inside the dusky prison, Dranko has chalked “we killed your father” on the walls. He tries to will himself free, but has no more luck than Flicker. He too feels the deathly chill starting to seep into his bones, but as there’s little he can do about it, he does the only sensible thing he can think of. He licks the wall. It’s cold and glassy.
Darkeye’s wounds continue to heal at a rapid pace. She turns to Kibi, who has moved into melee range, and lands four painful strikes. As each blow lands, an identical wound is opened up on Grey Wolf and Ernie. (For whatever reason, Morningstar is not affected.)
Kibi responds with power word: stun, to no effect. Morningstar takes a full round of attacks with Ell’s Will, and while she inflicts some real damage on Darkeye, the Sharshun woman flicks the Watcher’s Kiss deftly, and Morningstar’s holy weapon falls from her hand, to go spiraling some eighty feet down to the yard below.
As they often do in these grand encounters, things look grim indeed. Darkeye is healing her wounds at an astounding rate. The Watcher’s Kiss seems to absorb most magic, and its attacks damage not only its target but its target’s allies. Dranko and Flicker are both entrapped in Darkeye’s prison and rapidly losing life energy. It’s not at all clear that they will survive this crucial encounter.
Aravis decides to take several appalling risks, all at once, by casting Mordenkainen's Disjunction. He knows there’s a chance he could destroy the Watcher’s Kiss. He knows there’s a chance he’ll permanently lose his spell-casting abilities. And he knows there’s a chance he’ll inadvertently catch one of his friends in the spell’s radius, given that they’re flying around Darkeye in attack formation. But he casts it anyway, and luck must be with him, because none of the awful possibilities come to pass.
A terrible cracking sound comes from Darkeye, and huge chunks of crystal start to fall from her body. Kibi feels a surge of Earth Magic bend reality around him, feels the very stones of the castle warp and flex. Flicker and Dranko appear where they had last been flying.
Aravis stares defiantly at Darkeye. ”Now are you ready to give us the Watcher’s Kiss? Or would you like to die?
It looks like she might die anyway. Blood is pouring from her eye-socket that is no longer caked with crystal. Her arms are limp at her sides, though the golden glow of her weapon still keeps her aloft.
“Yes…” she croaks. “You may have it. Just… please, don’t let me die.”
Dranko casts a healing spell at range, and Darkeye regains a little bit of strength. “It’s gone,” she whispers. “It’s gone. It’s no longer controlling me!”
Hovering above her castle, still bathed in the light of the Watcher’s Kiss, Moirel begins to cry.
…to be continued…
Darkeye
With some time to look at their surroundings, the three time-travelers see that most of the inward-facing walls are damaged. Chunks of stone have been gouged out of them in many places, and the edges of the yard are littered with debris that has fallen from higher up. One building not far from Kibi, a small rectangular structure made of wood and stone, is riddled with holes, as if it had been a giant’s sparring dummy. Kibi puts his eye to one of the holes and sees an ordinary store-room, with barrels, crates, and small heaps of detritus.
Dranko giggles. I enjoy this place. It makes me tingle!”
Aravis notices that his hand is cramping. “Oh, right.” He carefully places the pebbles a few yards away and casts dispel magic. His friends appear in a sprawling pile of bodies.
“Oops. Guess I should have spaced you out a little.”
Morningstar, Ernie, Grey Wolf and Flicker get to their feet and look about, confused.
“You cannot see us!” Dranko cackles. “But we are here! Invisible! We cannot be seen!”
Now that Kibi can target all of his friends, he casts veil, making the entire party look like termites. Grey Wolf casts enhanced senses and sniffs the air. Castles typically reek of manure, smoke, and sweat, but this one carries only the faintest whiff of such typical odors. Morningstar reestablishes the mind link and then, ever suspicious, casts true seeing. She finds that the spell makes it harder to see. To her divinatory sight, the air above the castle is now quite blurry, and she cannot see any of the trees outside the castle’s perimeter.
Something rises up from behind one of the walls.
It’s a head. With tentacles. At first the party thinks it’s a beholder, but it’s not quite the same. This one is a bit smaller, and they certainly are tentacles and not eyestalks. Dranko panics, but realizes that the tentacles don’t remind him of Cleaners. The creature’s face is surrounded by short tentacles like a wriggling beard, and two long tentacles sprout from its “back” and hang down like obscene pigtails. The tentacled head bobs for a few seconds at the top of the wall, turning slowly to and fro, and then descends back behind the wall and out of sight.
Did it see them? Or were they successfully hidden, veiled as bugs? The floating head didn’t show any signs of having seen them; it was probably investigating the sounds of spell-casting. A moment later two new heads float into view (or maybe it’s the same one, with a friend). The two heads sweep back and forth along the top of the wall, clearly looking for something, but after a minute they again descend and retreat behind the wall.
Confident that he won’t be seen, Dranko flies upward, a tiny flying termite, and peeks over into the space beyond the near wall. It’s the floating chunk of star-field that dominates the scene, a twinkling patch of Astral miasma that confounds his visual perspective. Swooping to and fro in looping arcs are a dozen more tentacled heads; they don’t appear to be guarding anything in particular, unless it’s the Astral field itself.
The buildings here are even more heavily damaged. One tower has fallen completely onto a building below it, caving in its roof, and the ground here is even more strewn with shattered rubble. There’s no sign that anyone has tried effecting repairs, and the rubble itself is not overgrown, suggesting that whatever happened was a recent event. Dranko thinks that the Astral splotch is at the center of the destruction, and opines that something must have emerged from it and assaulted the castle.
Just as Grey Wolf starts using a wand to cast fly on everyone not already so enchanted, a human figure comes flying out of one of the distant towers. Her skin is as ebony as her long robe, and no hair grows on her head, hardly surprising in a Sharshun stronghold. Dranko is far enough away that he cannot make her out more clearly, though his natural ability to detect magic is nearly overwhelmed by the strength of her auras. There are two distinct sources of magic on her person. One, unspeakably strong, casts her whole self (to his magic-sight) in a deep black shadow. The second, somehow even stronger, originates at her right hand, and emits a bright golden glow which gilds the edges of her darker aura.
Dranko blinks furiously as the dark shadow magic starts to draw him in, like it’s attempting to pull out his soul. He starts to move toward her in defiance of his own will, and barely manages to save himself by wrenching his gaze away from her. He frantically informs the others of all of this over the mind link.
The woman speaks, and even from a distance her voice sounds clear to all present, bolstered by a faint telepathic presence.
“I’m very impressed,” she says, “that you were able to get in here. Remarkable! Would you like to talk?”
The floating heads have perked up a bit, and are looking in the same direction as the woman, though they still don’t seem to notice them.
“You have a certain… radiance… about you,” Dranko says.
“That’s true,” she admits.
“Should I ask?”
“Certainly,” says the woman. “Would you like to ask in a more comfortable setting, or would you prefer to stay flying around up here while your friends are down below?”
Are we attacking her or not?, Kibi thinks over the mind-link.
Yes! thinks Dranko.
We’re almost ready thinks Aravis. Keep her talking
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” says Dranko, “but aren’t you anathema to everything we love and believe in?”
The woman smiles. “No.”
“No? Really? Who are you, exactly?”
She chuckles. “I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now.”
“Are you Darkeye?”
“Yes, Dranko.”
“Are you also Moirel?”
“Very good!”
“All right! We met your dad, you know.” And killed him, he thinks, though he refrains (barely) from saying this out loud.
Kibi rises up, shielding his eyes from Darkeye as best he can, and drops a greater dispel magic on her. He feels that his abjuration is strong, and so is very disappointed that she doesn’t stop flying.
“Two possibilities,” he thinks to the others. “Either she’s a ridiculously powerful caster, or her magic is being generated by an artifact.”
Morningstar casts blindsight on Aravis, and quickens a second one on herself. Now, at reasonably close range, the two of them will be able to engage Darkeye without looking at her. Aravis changes into a beholder, flies upward until he crests the wall, and shines his anti-magic cone over his target. She’s remains airborne. While the dark magic around her seems somewhat suppressed, the golden glow doesn’t diminish in the slightest. Moirel turns to regard him, and sighs.
Aravis vanishes. His thoughts do likewise from their mind-link. The dark magic around her reasserts itself.
Dranko tries not to let his worry color his voice. “I don’t suppose you want to give us your dagger and let us go?”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” says Darkeye. “I’d rather just talk.”
“And what do you want to tell us?”
Darkeye sighs again. “I don’t know! You came to visit me. When I woke up this morning, I assure you I hadn’t planned on telling you anything.”
“Say,” says Dranko. “Who did all the damage to this place, anyway?”
“I did,” says Darkeye. “It was an accident.”
Grey Wolf joins Kibi and Dranko flying above the wall. Like the others, he shields his eyes as best he can while keeping her in his peripheral vision.
“Ah, Ivellios,” says Darkeye.
“Yes,” says Grey Wolf. “You don’t mind if I don’t look at you, right? What exactly did you do to Aravis?”
“I have him,” says Darkeye flatly.
“Where?”
“Away. Now, are we going to come to blows, or shall we talk?”
“You seem to know a lot about us,” says Dranko.
“I’ve been following your… exploits… for quite some time,” she says with a smile.
Ernie casts divine power on himself. Grey Wolf sniffs the air again with his enhanced senses, and discovers Darkeye carries an unusual but familiar scent. She smells like Sagiro did, when he was the Lord of the Roses. Kibi confirms that powerful Earth Magic is rolling off of her in pulsing waves.
“I thought this place would be a busy hive, swarming with Sharshun,” says Dranko. “What happened? Did you kill them all?”
Darkeye’s countenance darkens. “I sent them away,” she says.
Without warning, Darkeye launches herself high into the air, so that she can easily look down upon the assembled Company. She fixes her gaze upon Flicker, and like Aravis did a few seconds ago, the little halfling vanishes. He finds himself in a translucent, dark-gray room, like a small prison cell made of smoky quartz. It has a window, and out of that window he can see Dranko and the others hovering below him. With a start he realizes that he’s looking out from right about where he just saw Darkeye…
“We’re inside an Eye of Moirel,” says Aravis, who shivers as he paces the small cell. Flicker can feel a deadly cold seeping into him, sapping him of life and strength.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he complains.
“I’m not,” says Aravis. “She has us trapped inside her eye, I’m guessing. I think if we concentrate hard enough, we might be able to escape.”
“So I’m doomed, then,” says Flicker. He looks like he’s about to say more, but the little room shudders and shakes, sending both occupants reeling into the walls. Kibi has closed his eyes, and used his keen sense of Darkeye’s emanating Earth Magic to peg her with a volley of magic missiles. The spell has gotten past her innate resistance, scorching her and causing her to flinch. She clucks her tongue.
Morningstar also shuts her eyes, not needing to be precise in her targeting as she lets loose with a firestorm. All of the floating heads are incinerated with cold flames, and Darkeye herself has clearly been burned as well. As she hovers above them, smoke rising from her robes, golden light from the object in her right hand flashes around her, bathing her momentarily in its light. But her wounds don’t heal, and there’s no other obvious effect. Nodding with satisfaction, Morningstar quickens divine power.
Aravis sets his mind to escape, and in an eyeblink finds himself returned to the spot at which he was hovering before Darkeye captured him. While the prison’s interior had returned him to human form, he reappears as a beholder, and his central eye’s anti-magic ray is pointed right at Kibi. The dwarf plummets about fifteen feet before Aravis closes his eye.
“Sorry!”
Ernie (shielding his eyes like the rest) casts energy drain on Darkeye. “You are a bad, bad woman!” he scolds as he casts. “You have done many horrible things!” His spell is drawn entirely into the golden light surrounding his target, where it harmlessly dissipates. Ernie grunts, flies toward Darkeye, and releases Beryn Sur.
“Ernest,” says Darkeye. “That was rude.”
Ernie is incredulous. “You’re trying to bring back the horrible, evil Emperor, and my hitting you is rude?”
“Yes,” says Darkeye. “This is my home. You are an intruder. I would have expected a cleric of Yondalla to understand that.”
“This is more like exterminating a nest of fire ants,” Ernie retorts.
Darkeye calls out to Grey Wolf. “Ivellios! I’m sure you will understand, that everything I have done, has been to restore our good family name.”
Grey Wolf lifts an eyebrow. “Family name? It’s in pretty good order right now, thanks. You’re not really improving it.”
Shaking her head, Darkeye frowns at his descendant. “I am disappointed, though. It appears that our Earth Magic did not travel down the family line. You’re not even a true wizard, are you? Of course, neither am I, any more.”
“What are you now then?” asks Dranko.
“I am Darkeye. I am a Sharshun.”
“Great!” Dranko exclaims. “Let’s both jam our tongues into the top of our mouths and see which one of us survives!”
Grey Wolf quickens a true strike, channels a maximized acid orb into Bostock, charges, and swings. He’s keeping his eyes mostly shut, but uses his keen senses to sniff her out. Grey Wolf does catch a quick glimpse of his foe and ancestor; one of her eye sockets is filled with dark crystal, and in fact many parts of her body are covered with patches of smoky gemstone. She wields a golden sword – certainly the Watcher’s Kiss – and the weapon, as Sagiro’s was in Het Branoi, is grafted to her arm by the crystal that grows upon her skin.
Grey Wolf swings, and Darkeye is deluged in a flood of hot acid. Her skin, both true and crystalline, smokes and runs. She winces in obvious pain, before whispering, “I suppose we do have to do this the hard way, then. It’s a shame. I was looking forward to talking to you.”
“And what would we talk about?” asks Grey Wolf, mockingly.
“How about this,” says Darkeye. “The Emperor is my enemy also.”
Grey Wolf cannot hide his surprise.
“Now are you listening?” Darkeye asks. “But, if you wish to continue with fisticuffs…”
She glances downward as Dranko streaks towards her, ready to strike while she’s distracted by Grey Wolf. She narrows her eyes… and Dranko vanishes. He reappears in the little crystal prison, where Flicker is looking decidedly pale and weak. He himself feels a shiver as the room sucks the life out of him.
“We have to get out of here,” Flicker stammers, teeth chattering. “It’s… it’s cold…”
Dranko attempts to heal Flicker with a wand, but the magic fails. He curses under his breath, as he looks out the window at Grey Wolf, Ernie and the rest.
Even as the Darkeye’s crystal coating starts to fill in the worst of her wounds, she swings the Watcher’s Kiss for the first time. She lands three blows with upon Grey Wolf – damaging, but by no means what he had been expecting from a weapon of that power. But he hears Ernie also cry out in pain. All of the same wounds the sword made upon Grey Wolf, are opened in the same places upon the nearby halfling. She then tries to draw Ernie into her crystal prison, but he resists.
“If the Emperor is your enemy,” asks Kibi, “why do you keep trying to bring him back?”
“It’s not that complicated,” says Darkeye. “We can talk about if your comrades stop hitting me with swords and splashing me with acid.”
Kibi has no such intention. He flies directly at Darkeye, casting Otto’s Irresistible Dance, and touches his quarry. The spell is absorbed into the golden light and has no effect on the Sharshun. Kibi curses, but is secretly relieved that she didn’t have spell turning active.
“I attempted to restore time, to rehabilitate my father’s name,” says Darkeye. “No doubt he was killed for his failure. For my failure. My divinations tell me that he died long ago. When I failed to return, I’m sure his experiment was deemed a waste of time, and that the Emperor had him killed. Had my attempt been successful, to rewrite time, my father’s work would have been vindicated.”
So, whatever else she might know, she doesn’t know that she’s currently facing down her father’s killers.
“What’s your opinion of the Adversary?” asks Kibi.
“A fool’s errand.”
“The Adversary is coming,” says Morningstar, flying towards her and drawing Ell’s Will. “We need the Watcher’s Kiss to stop him.”
Darkeye shakes her head. “You may think that is true, but it is not.”
“No, we’re pretty sure it is,” says Kibi.
“Fine. But I’m not giving it up.”
Morningstar arrives at her target and smashes Ell’s Will into Darkeye’s stomach. A spray of crystal shards flies from the point of impact, and Darkeye grimaces in obvious agony.
“This…” she wheezes. “This is why I sent everyone else away.”
Aravis flies close enough that he can target Darkeye with his blindsight. He closes his eyes and pegs her with a disintegrate, which she largely shrugs off. Ernie and his dancing blade each make a flurry of slashes, nearly all of which are deflected by the patches of black crystal. Up close, Ernie can also see that even where her skin isn’t covered in crystal, it’s still somewhat gnarled and rocky-looking – something he and the others have seen on both Cranchus and Condor.
Grey Wolf locks another acid orb into his sword, and lands another strike. Again a gout of acid splashes outward, but this time Darkeye is utterly unaffected by it. Hm.
Inside the dusky prison, Dranko has chalked “we killed your father” on the walls. He tries to will himself free, but has no more luck than Flicker. He too feels the deathly chill starting to seep into his bones, but as there’s little he can do about it, he does the only sensible thing he can think of. He licks the wall. It’s cold and glassy.
Darkeye’s wounds continue to heal at a rapid pace. She turns to Kibi, who has moved into melee range, and lands four painful strikes. As each blow lands, an identical wound is opened up on Grey Wolf and Ernie. (For whatever reason, Morningstar is not affected.)
Kibi responds with power word: stun, to no effect. Morningstar takes a full round of attacks with Ell’s Will, and while she inflicts some real damage on Darkeye, the Sharshun woman flicks the Watcher’s Kiss deftly, and Morningstar’s holy weapon falls from her hand, to go spiraling some eighty feet down to the yard below.
As they often do in these grand encounters, things look grim indeed. Darkeye is healing her wounds at an astounding rate. The Watcher’s Kiss seems to absorb most magic, and its attacks damage not only its target but its target’s allies. Dranko and Flicker are both entrapped in Darkeye’s prison and rapidly losing life energy. It’s not at all clear that they will survive this crucial encounter.
Aravis decides to take several appalling risks, all at once, by casting Mordenkainen's Disjunction. He knows there’s a chance he could destroy the Watcher’s Kiss. He knows there’s a chance he’ll permanently lose his spell-casting abilities. And he knows there’s a chance he’ll inadvertently catch one of his friends in the spell’s radius, given that they’re flying around Darkeye in attack formation. But he casts it anyway, and luck must be with him, because none of the awful possibilities come to pass.
A terrible cracking sound comes from Darkeye, and huge chunks of crystal start to fall from her body. Kibi feels a surge of Earth Magic bend reality around him, feels the very stones of the castle warp and flex. Flicker and Dranko appear where they had last been flying.
Aravis stares defiantly at Darkeye. ”Now are you ready to give us the Watcher’s Kiss? Or would you like to die?
It looks like she might die anyway. Blood is pouring from her eye-socket that is no longer caked with crystal. Her arms are limp at her sides, though the golden glow of her weapon still keeps her aloft.
“Yes…” she croaks. “You may have it. Just… please, don’t let me die.”
Dranko casts a healing spell at range, and Darkeye regains a little bit of strength. “It’s gone,” she whispers. “It’s gone. It’s no longer controlling me!”
Hovering above her castle, still bathed in the light of the Watcher’s Kiss, Moirel begins to cry.
…to be continued…
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