Also, Sagiro did you leave out italics so the scrolls and spells could be italicized? That would make sense.
Bingo.
I've tried something else in this update; we'll see how it looks.
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 391
Coming Home
So, the Company now has a dread linnorm in their proverbial pocket. They start musing about whom they should release it upon. One of the Three, surely? Dranko suggests Tarsos, since they don’t hate him as much as the others; the Company won’t want to be denied the satisfaction of killing Meledien and Seven Dark Words themselves.
As they discuss this the next day, cheered by the vision of Azhant’s downfall, a small earthquake rocks the tunnel as they walk.
Dranko looks all around, wondering if another purple worm is coming for them. “Kibi, what’s happening?”
“Feels like a minor temblor,” says the dwarf. The quake continues for another fifteen seconds and subsides, leaving small flakes of rubble and puffs of dust as its only immediate consequence. Not trusting this as a natural occurrence, Kibi queries the nearby wall with
stone tell.
“Hello, Kibilhathur,” says the wall.
“I just felt a tremor,” says Kibi. “Why were you shaking?”
“Because all the rock around me was shaking.”
“But what was making all of you shake?”
The immediate wall doesn’t have specific knowledge of that, but it guesses that the epicenter was several miles beneath them. Kibi consults the calculations of Corriv, and finds that Leaping Circle Two should send them 3.9 miles coreward.
On the final night before arriving back at Leaping Circle Two, Aravis has another vision of the surface.
The paladin Glade parts a thick knot of web with her scythe. Old bones crunch beneath her feet. “Wellington, I’ve followed you into some foul places in the past couple of years. This? Nothing quite compares with it.”
The boy wizard nudges his glasses higher onto his nose. “We’re past the worst of it,” he says. “And if I’m right… and Belinda is right… and the Banishing Lens
is up here, we could end this war in a single stroke.”
Royce Tillman laughs. “Remind me why is it that no one thought of this before now?” he asks.
Wellington looks serious. “The Masking,” he says. “Its last remnants are fading away, but it’s not all the way gone. No one knew about the upper vaults of God’s Thorn until about week ago. It’s a long shot, but worth it.”
“And are there any more monsters or traps between us and the prize? Assuming it’s there?”
“I don’t know,” says Wellington, as he consults a faded, crinkled map. “Probably. But we’re almost there. That door up ahead should lead to the innermost chamber. If the Banishing Lens is here, it should be in that room. Standard procedure?”
Royce creeps forward, magically stealthy, and listens at the door for a good minute. He shakes his head. Wellington casts a number of buffing spells, before casting knock
on the door. Royce grins and kicks it inward. Splinters fly, and Glade and Royce move swiftly into the room beyond. When they give the all-clear, Wellington follows.
The room appears empty. Wellington looks about with true seeing.
“There are small niches in the stone walls,” he says. “They’re masked by illusion, but you should be able to find them by feel. They’re about knee height. Look for a way to open them, but be wary of mechanical traps. According to Belinda, there should be ninety-nine false Lenses, and one true one. Our job is to grab them all and bring them back to her; she’ll figure out which one is the real one.”
Royce spikes the door open, and the three fan out, finding that the hundred small shoe-box sized niches open if pushed in hard enough. The first fifty are vacant .
“This doesn’t seem right,” says Glade. “There were no signs on the way up of anyone having been here in centuries. Why are these empty?”
The door to the room slams shut, shattering Royce’s spike. A green glow fills the entire small chamber, just as a person materializes in the center of the room. Wellington’s eyes go wide.
“They’re empty,” says Parthol Runecarver, “because I’ve already taken everything.”
“You?” Wellington exclaims. “What are you doing here?”
“Evening things out,” says Parthol coolly.
“What the hell does that mean?” demands Royce.
Parthol makes a quick gesture with one hand. Wellington and Royce find themselves paralyzed. Then he quickens a second enchantment upon Wellington. “No metamagic for you, kiddo.”
Glade, wearing a ring with freedom of movement
, rushes forward and sweeps her scythe across Parthol’s chest, but her swing barely makes a scratch on the old wizard’s unarmored skin. Parthol takes a step back, casts again, and traps Glade in a glowing forcecage.
“It means the balance has shifted too far in your direction,” says Parthol. “The scrolls you people had in the Vault were a little too
powerful. Azhant should have done much more damage before you bested him. At the rate you’re going, you might actually end up defeating
Naradawk, especially with the Banishing Lens
in your hands. I can’t have that. Or, rather I can
have it, and you cannot. After Naradawk finishes off the Spire, I’ll need the Lens
to get rid of him.”
Parthol walks forward and stands before the stricken Wellington. “You had promise,” he says. “A pity it had to end this way.” He yanks an amulet from the young wizard’s neck, and pulls off the boy’s magical headband. Then he places a glowing black hand on Wellington’s head. The boy, paralyzed, cannot even cry out in anguish as he turns to dust. Glade screams in fury, tears running down her cheeks.
“You unholy bastard!”
Parthol chuckles. “Nothing unholy about a good old-fashioned disintegrate
. Or Parthol’s Peerless Paralytic
, for that matter. Now, you and the warrior may be tougher, but I’ve got over a dozen of these. Royce, Glade, it’s been nice knowing you.”
It takes eleven more disintegrates
, but a minute later there are two more piles of dust on the floor. Parthol dismisses his forcecage
, thoughtfully sweeps the dust piles into a large bag, stows what of his victims’ magic items he can carry, dismisses his dimensional lock,
and vanishes.
All are quiet for a moment as they consider this vision, then break into a chorus of profanity.
“I really, really want the opportunity to kick in his face,” says Dranko. The only shred of a silver lining is that things were going so well on the surface, to prompt Parthol into such drastic action. But they mourn for their lost comrades.
They quietly pick at their morning’s
heroes’ feast, occasionally speculating on what dangers they have yet to face.
“We’re going to end up fighting Wlaqua, right?” asks Morningstar.
“’One more before she comes herself,’" says Ernie, nodding.
“You know what would be great?” says Dranko. “If we end up fighting the Adversary, and Seven Dark Words, Meledien and Tarsos, and Wlaqua, all at the same time.”
Galdifain looks up from her plate. “One more before she comes herself? Are you sure that wasn’t referring to me?”
That at least is a cheering thought; maybe Wlaqua isn’t coming for them after all.
/*/
They emerge from the
mansion, and find signs that there was another small earthquake overnight.
“This suggests they’re doing horrible, horrible things,” says Dranko, kicking at a dislodged bit of rubble.
“We’d better get going,” says Aravis.
They make great haste to Leaping Circle Two, reviewing once more the Prophecy of the Croaking Oracle. They’ve figured out (or think they have) a great deal of it, but some remains opaque. Ernie opines that “one loves all and one hates one,” might mean the Sister Gods, Yavin and Wlaqua. As for “One to channel what makes dead,” that could be Grey Wolf, a spellsword who channels his deadly magics through
Bostock. And the line “One to drive the spike clean through” could refer to the thorn in the side of Abernia; perhaps it needs to be struck in a way that pushes it out the other side, but the other side of what? The world? No one knows the proper levels of abstraction and metaphor to apply to the Croaking Oracle’s words.
Two more small tremors shake the tunnels before they arrive at Leaping Circle Two some six hours later.
“They’re torturing the planet,” says Grey Wolf dourly.
Checkle is there waiting for them. “You did it! Amazing! Thank you! Who wants the instructions?”
Kibi volunteers. Checkle walks up to stand before the dwarf. “I’m not sure exactly how this works,” says the little Keffet. “But if I just think about transferring… whoa!”
A huge rush of knowledge comes into Kibi’s head, as though he’s crammed a week’s worth of study into a single second. As he examines the details in his mind, he frowns. It’s a four day ritual, and a tricky one at that. Any number of small errors could require the wizards to start over, delaying things unacceptably. As if underscoring the need for haste, the earth shakes and groans.
Kibi consults with the others, and they all concur: it’s worth using up another one of Kibi’s reality-tweaks to speed up the process. Everyone gathers in a circle around the dwarf, and he beseeches Abernia to shift its reality to favor his wishes.
The Leaping Circle room shudders and vibrates, the Leaping Circle itself rings like a bell, and the sum of information in Kibi’s head about the ritual shrinks to small fraction of its original size. He thinks now that he and one other wizard can easily complete the ritual in 12 hours, down from the original 100 hours.
It would be nice to know what awaits them beyond. Will Leaping Circle Two take them directly to where the Evil Trio are working their mischief? If only there was some way they could know.
Morningstar blinks, and fishes in her pack. She produces one of the oldest items the Company still possesses: a
potion of clairvoyance brewed by Abernathy himself, and left for her on the very day he summoned the original group to his tower. It’s a minor item, and there’s no way it could possibly allow her to see across miles of rock. That’s not how the spell works. She drinks it anyway.
Abernathy was always a bit scatterbrained. Maybe he was distracted while brewing it, and infused it unintentionally with great power. Whatever the case, Morningstar feels
Laramon’s Jade Clover grow warm in her pocket for a second, and then she has a quick vision, of an uninhabited place over a steep rocky slope. Assuming that’s their landing spot, she now knows it’s free of immediate danger, though the floor is pitched such that they will immediately tumble downward if unprepared.
Kibi and Aravis spend the day enacting the ritual, managing (barely, in Aravis’s case) to maintain their concentration through two more earthquakes. As they near the end, Morningstar casts a new spell of her own devising:
Morningstar’s Mind Status, which will let her know if anyone is trying to read or influence any of the minds of her allies. Everyone is made to
fly, burning off charges of an old wand.
The ritual ends, and the Company Leaps downward.
Dranko, as is typical now of these jumps, experiences a side-trek to the Far Realms. The whispers are familiar. “Do not Become,” they warn, many voices in near-but-not-quite synchronicity, beseeching him, warning him. But then a new voice sounds, louder, sibilant, as though the speaker has its lips almost pressed to his ear.
“Dranko, you
should Become! Become, Dranko.”
“I cordially invite you to bite me,” answers Dranko.
“It can happen,” says the new voice. "You can Become. You can become famous again. It is almost upon you, Dranko. Don’t let it slip away. Become!”
They arrive. The
fly spell barely functions now, so far beneath the surface. It acts more like
feather fall, allowing them to run down the steep stone slope in a more-or-less controlled fashion. Seventy feet they descend, until they stand at the bottom of a subterranean ravine, shaped like a V. It’s hard to stand at its bottom, the ground sloping up steeply on both sides. In both directions, east and west, the ravine extends into the darkness.
Kibi senses that they are nearly four miles deeper than they were a moment earlier. The Earth Magic around him is wonderfully strong. He can hear the whispers of the stones all around him, and though he cannot make out words, he feels as though they are telling him, “welcome home.”
“Kibi, what’s happened to you?” Ernie is pointing his face. The others see that patches of his skin have taken on a rough, earthy texture and hardness. Kibi finds it comfortable, natural, but when he holds still, the others perceive something akin to a stone statue.
“He looks like Cranchus,” says Flicker.
But all is not well. While only Kibi can sense the ambient Earth Magic, all of them can feel the tainted stink of Essence all around them, a foul odor everywhere.
In Morningstar’s pocket,
Laramon’s Jade Clover is warm, and holding a steady temperature. She pulls it out and looks at it thoughtfully. “Maybe Laramon, the God of Luck, is in this clover somehow?” But if that’s so, one wouldn’t know to look at it. Beyond its warmth, it’s just a trinket.
Kibi casts
stone tell on the sloping wall of the ravine.
“What’s happening down here?” he asks it.
“Please make it stop, Kibilhathur. It’s not natural!”
Kibi can tell that the stone of the world is sad, worried, pained. “What was making the earth shake?” he asks.
“We don’t know, but you’re not far from it. Please, put an end to it!”
“I’ll try to make the badness go away,” Kibi promises.
“Of course you will,” says the wall.
Kibi knows, can feel, that the source of the evil is to the east, not the west. They begin to stumble that direction, keeping inside a
magic circle of protection vs. evil as they travel. The ceiling slowly descends toward them, until the ravine has become a corridor shaped like an inverted triangle.
After half an hour of this, something strange happens ahead of them. A wave of stone is coming toward them, as though the ground were a cloth sheet that someone snapped at the far end. It rushes toward them, and most of the Company take a step back, assuming an attack. Only Kibi is not troubled. Ten feet away, the wave stops, and the ground buckles and bubbles into a oval dome, largely blocking the passage.
A doorway opens in the stone side of the dome nearest them. Inside they see that it’s hollow, the ground flattened.
“A trap?” says Morningstar.
Ernie fires off a quick
divination, but gets nothing from it.
“I think it’ll be okay,” says Kibi.
“Kibi, says a familiar voice from inside. “You coming in?”
He moves to step inside, but none of the others follow.
“If Dranko’s afraid,” says the voice, “ask him who else would know about the stone he swallowed, or what his cigars can do.”
Dranko lights a cigar and puffs out smoke. It forms the words “It’s perfectly safe, you dolt!”
They all go in. The dome is empty, but Kibi can feel Cranchus’s presence as keenly as though his grandfather had an arm draped around his shoulders.
One by one the voice of Cranchus speaks the names of the Company, greeting them hastily, as though he’s trying to get through them before he forgets. “It’s hard for me to be this… coherent,” says Cranchus. “To be this ‘in one place.’ You’re in deep enough now that I think I can keep this up for a few more minutes.”
Kibi feels overwhelmed with peace and happiness. “It’s great to… uh… to sense you,” he says. "Are you… part of the earth now?”
“Yes. Yes I am. And I’ve been trying to communicate with you for a while, but you weren’t in deep enough, and my efforts were clumsy. I only managed it a couple of times. I did manage to goose that toad for you. Did it tell you anything good?”
Kibi grins. That was his grandfather, blasting the Croaking Oracle with Earth Magic, prompting it to speak its prophecy!
“And I tried to give you a burst of as much power as I could, sometime after that. Wasn’t sure how well it worked.”
“It worked great!” says Kibi. “Thanks! We didn’t know that was you.”
“It’s been a few centuries now,” says Cranchus. Kibi thinks his voice is already beginning to waver. “I couldn’t stay myself, being that close to the Source for so long. So, I became one with the Source. And now Abernia and I are hard to tell apart.”
“You must feel awful,” says Kibi, “with all the Essence around.”
“Yes. The thorn in my side… the splinter has encased itself. I tried to send you that message once. The splinter is the Hand of the Adversary. It’s lodged here, encased in a shell of its own blood.”
Kibi understands. “And we have to get through it…”
“It has to be you, Kibi. It must be you who breaks its shell.”
“But you’re so powerful…” Kibi begins.
“I can’t get that close,” says Cranchus. “My consciousness doesn’t’ stay coherent if I try to get near that place. Kibi… it has to be eradicated. Only you can go inside.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you?”
“No,” says Kibi. “But I’ll figure it out.”
“I can’t sense what’s there, not on the inside. But there is something powerful guarding it on the outside, so be careful.” Cranchus’s voice is clearly strained now, as though he’s having trouble keeping his focus.
“Do you know about the three Black Circle people who came down?” asks Kibi. “Are they the ones guarding it?”
“No. They set something else to guard it. I don’t know what. But the Three are inside. You have to stop what they’re doing.”
“Are they making the earth shake?”
“Something inside is causing it. I don’t know if it’s them. They went inside, and that’s where I lost sight of them. That’s where the splinter is. The thorn in my side, the Hand of the Adversary. It’s in there.”
Kibi recalls that the other archmagi received getting messages from Cranchus, though they never spoke with him directly. Kibi asks him how that was possible.
“My consciousness extends through the Barrier, since I surround it,” says Cranchus. “And it was Abernathy, always Abernathy, who heard my whispers. He’ll hear yours, too.”
“He will?”
“Or maybe he did in the past,” says Cranchus. “It’s hard for me to know. I exist in all the pasts, all the futures. That’s why it’s hard for me to have this conversation. I am forcing myself into one time.”
“I’m so glad that you could gather yourself enough together to have this talk,” says Kibi, tears coming to his eyes.
“You’re going to join me, you know.”
In his heart, Kibi knows it. “But what about mom?” he asks.
“She doesn’t expect you to come back,” says Cranchus softly. “And we’ll have a long time to figure out how to get a message through that big slab of iron.”
There is a pause, and Kibi fears Cranchus has gone, but his voice comes back, faint, wavering. “It will… be nice to have some company. I know that it happens. Remember, I’m in all times, and when it happens to you, you’ll be the same. But not yet. But don’t fear death, Kibi. You’ll just change your state.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m smiling in Leantha’s Book,” says Kibi. “Because even if I’m dying, I’m becoming one with the earth.”
“You’ll become,” whispers Dranko. “You’ll become the world.”
“This place will be safe for you tonight,” says Cranchus. “No Essence will trouble you. I’ve also smoothed things out for you, so it won’t take you so long to get to the Shell. It’s a straight path for you, Kibi. Tomorrow this will all be over.”
“And there are no enemies between here and there?” asks Morningstar.
“I don’t think so, no. And I’ll talk to you again soon, grandson. It’s been nice. Now go and do to those bastards what you did to Condor. Goodbye, Kibi.”
The sense of Cranchus fades away, and the dome is silent, save for the sound of their breathing.
…to be continued…
