Issue #7: The Red Witch - Episode 4 of 5
The rest of us toil towards the freehold with the cart. It is slow going, even switching off horses from time to time, and making the entire party walk. With little to no rest the previous two nights, all of us are exhausted by afternoon. Miriel is reduced to plodding, focusing all of her effort on putting one foot in front of the other, and only Stone and Goldpetal have enough energy to scout ahead for ratmen. They do not see any.
The six of us draw near the freehold just before dark. We can hear the alarm bell tolling well before we come into view of the walls. As we approach, we see the last few farmers heading for the gates. The ratmen have not yet arrived; the gate is half closed, but the hold stays open. A number of men stand guard along the walls, armed with bows and arrows. A large man atop the watch tower shouts to us to hurry, and we make a run for the gates.
Just as we get through the gates, they are closed and locked behind us. We are in the courtyard of a walled complex. Paks steps out of one of the buildings, and shouts a warm greeting, clearly glad to see us. Stone, the half-orc, tries to look inconspicuous, but there is little need – everyone is extremely busy, and they hardly take time to notice us. There are people scurrying everywhere. Women carry buckets of water, men are sharpening swords, and children are collecting stones to use in slings. A middle-aged woman, standing atop the tallest hall, yells directions.
A cry goes up from some of the archers, and we turn around to look. The tall members of the party stare over the top of the low wall, while Milo and Goldpetal scurry up a nearby ladder to see what is happening outside from the rooftop.
In the distance, to the south, we can see a man, being chased by a group of rat men. The rat men have bows, and they are shooting at him. They stop pursuing him when they approach the edge of the orchards that surrounds the freehold, staying a safe distance from the walls, but they continue to shoot him. Even as we watch, we see three arrows hit him, but he runs up the hill towards the freehold.
A few of the archers offer return fire, but the arrows fall short of the ratmen, and they can only cheer on the runner. “C’mon, Taryn, you can make it!”
He reaches the edge of the wall, and his men drop a rope to him. He fastens it around his chest, and they pull him up. Stone and Chuck climb up to help haul on the rope, and shortly they have dragged him to the top of the hall. Paks and Miriel climb up to the roof as well.
As soon as he is atop the building, the woman who has been leading the townsfolk grabs him. He looks terrible, and when she opens his cloak, we can see that he is covered with numerous gashes and wounds.
Miriel asks one of the archers, “When did you last see him?”
“In the fields today, I reckon.” He has the soft-spoken drawl of a farmer, though he clearly wields the bow competently enough.
“Ratmen,” Taryn tries to warn us. He is barely able to gasp words out, and it is hard to hear him. “Ambushed us. John and Eldred ... dead. Only I … escaped.” He closes his eyes, as though to rest, and then remembers something else. “They’re … the disease tribe,” he tells Myrs, who is trying to bandage his wounds as best she can.
Miriel asks, “Is there a healer in the hold?”
The archer looks at the symbol of Madriel, which Miriel wears visibly at her neck, and says, “I’d guess that’s you, milady.”
Miriel steps over beside Myrs. “I’m a healer,” she says. “May I ask Madriel to heal your wounds?”
Taryn, on the verge of unconsciousness, does not appear to hear her, but his wife answers fervently. “Oh, thank the gods. Please do!”
Miriel is worried about disease, and she specifically requests in her invocation that Madriel heal any disease as she heals Taryn’s wounds. She asks Madriel to heal him, but his wounds are massive, and it takes many repeated invocations, until Miriel is completely exhausted, before he is sitting up and looks close to well.
As Taryn is healed, he becomes more aware of the surroundings, and Myrs introduces him to Paks. She, in turn, introduces Miriel and the rest of the fellowship. Myrs blanches a little when she recognizes that Stone is half orcish, but she graciously thanks us all for the warning.
Paks tells them both, “We’re here to help fight off the ratmen.”
Taryn, his voice much stronger, says, “I’m glad you’re here to help out.”
Miriel and Taryn are both thoroughly exhausted, and need time to sleep and recover. Myrs says she can also cast some spells, and that she will go memorize some spells better suited to a battle. She leaves Paks, as she is the one with the most campaign experience, in charge, with her daughter, Llewyn, as Paks’ lieutenant. Myrs leads Taryn and Miriel to the sleeping quarters in the main hall, and puts them to bed, and then turns in herself, to sleep and study. Delonia and Goldpetal also study spells and try to catch up on their sleep.
Milo slips out into the orchard, telling Paks that he will try to sneak up on and kill the archers.
Paks begins planning for a siege. The gates are the weakest point in our walls, vulnerable to a battering ram, so she decides to shore them up. She directs some of the freeholders to push wagons outside, and tip them over on their sides. This provides cover from ratman archers, so that others may dig ditches in the approaches to the gates. Stone goes with them, to help. Although he is met with disdain initially, the freeholders are very appreciative when they find out first-hand how much strength is packed into his compact frame.
When they are set and at work, Paks directs some other freeholders to begin blocking the second-story windows of the hall, as best they can, and sets the remainder to creating archery blinds on top of the buildings. Even the children work: she has them filling every bucket of water, in case we need to fight fire. One of the guards, Garth, is standing lookout atop the tower, with a telescope.
When they have a moment, she speaks with Llewyn and Brand. “I’m a ranger,” Llewyn tells her. “And I have a warhorse, though I’m better with a bow.”
“Following in your father’s footsteps?” Paks asks with a smile. “He is said to be quite a warrior.”
“I’m able to get a touch on him, occasionally,” Llewyn says, but then laughs and adds, “If I’m willing to be knocked down in the dust a dozen times or so. Listen, I was thinking, we have some slight military stores, from ages ago. I think there are five suits of chain mail, which we might use.”
Brand shakes his head. “They’re all in very poor repair,” he says.
“You’ve a forge,” Paks says levelly. “Can you repair them?”
“Certainly,” he says, “but it will take me many hours. Perhaps eight hours or so.”
“You’d best start, then,” she tells him.
Chuck sets grimly to work fletching arrows, and sharpening all of our weapons. His grief, for both Jim and Steve, has turned to a fey rage, and he is looking forward to avenging their deaths.
An hour after Milo left, he comes back. He ducks past Stone’s crew, working at the back gate, and re-enters the complex. His clothes are grungy, and he looks exhausted. “Wench!” he cries, “Bring me a drink!”
One of the children looks at him, and says scathingly, “Fetch your own drink.”
When he returns from the well, Milo finds Paks to give her his report. “I went south,” he says, “To where the archers were. They must have seen me; right when I got into the orchard, I immediately came under fire.” He pulls several arrows from under his cloak, and gives them to Paks. “These were shot into some trees near me, and I thought you could use them.
“Anyways, I shook them off, and was then able to sneak around a little bit. I found a group of five archers. They’d clearly been there for a while; they’d built some sort of blind to fire out of the orchard with. It took a long time for me to get close, and when I did, I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
“Well, I killed three of them, and the other two ran. I followed them for a while through the trees, but they were running south, and I didn’t want to follow them out of the trees. I started circling around the freehold, and about a third of the way around, I heard another set of five archers. I figure they have a blind, too.”
“Did you see them?” asks Chuck, who has been listening intently.
“No.”
Paks asks him, “Could we go sneak up on them?”
“I might take more guards and harry them,” Milo says, “But I should warn you, even though I’m exceptionally quiet, the rat men still noticed my approach, so I doubt anyone else will be able to sneak up on them.” He pauses, as though expecting a response, but when Paks remains silent, he says, “There are no archers left to the south of the hold right now, and after I rest, I’ll go out again to try to kill some others. Can the blacksmith spare the time to make me some darts?”
“I think so,” Paks says. “I’ll tell him.”
In the middle of the evening, some of the archers begin shooting at our workers outside the gates. They have set up blinds at the edge of the woods, in several locations. The trenches are pretty much finished, so Paks calls everyone back inside, and we shut the gates for the final time. There is now a no-man’s land, the open expanse of hill slope, about a hundred feet wide, between our walls and the edge of the woods. Neither side can make a good shot, since each side has good cover, but that hill is a clear field of fire, devoid of even the slightest protection.
Work continues inside the complex, with occasional arrows harassing anyone who forgets to stay under cover, even for a moment. Likewise, our archers occasionally loose arrows into the woods, but Paks admonishes them that arrows are in scarce supply, and they should make sure they have a good shot.
After about an hour of this, we can hear louder noises in the woods. Stone, who sees well in the dark, says that he can see, through the woods, a large rat man force coming up from the south. He can’t see what they're doing, but he can see a large camp. He tells Paks that he gets the impression of as many as a hundred rat men.
A short while later, a herald from the rat men appears at the gates. He carries two banners: one is a white flag of truce, while the other is the banner of a disease clan, worshippers of Chern. The herald looks different from any rat man we have seen before. He appears gray and twisted, as warped as the trees of the swamp. He is wearing a dirty, torn cloak.
He stops on the road, halfway between the woods and our main gate. “Heathen persons!” he calls, in the common tongue. “You owe us your lives, for the death of the brother of the rat man! Because Chern is merciful, because Chern is good, we will be merciful, and you can serve us if you lay down your weapons and come out! Otherwise, we will gnaw your bones!”
Paks stands up from behind cover, on the roof of the main hall. “We won’t be laying down our weapons,” she calls out to him.
“You may have an hour to consider it,” yells the herald.
“Okay,” Paks shouts. “We’ll let you know in an hour.”
The herald goes away, disappearing into the cover of the orchard.
Milo prepares to go out into the woods to scout and hunt rat men. He asks for a healing potion, which Paks gives him, as well as the 20 darts the blacksmith made for him while he rested. He then heads out, after offering a prayer to Madriel.
When Myrs awakens, Paks asks her if she has any ideas about fashioning some sort of siege weapon. It turns out that Myrs is an engineer, and has built siege weapons before. She thinks that she can rig a catapult, given ten to twelve hours, and perhaps twenty men.
Most of our first works have completed, so Paks tells Myrs to draft whoever she needs, and work begins on a catapult, in the center of the compound. The remainder of the workforce and Paks sets to reinforcing the walls of the buildings as best as they can. The herald never does return to ask our answer.
“Midnight!” grumbles Telryn under his breath. “I can’t believe he’s making me meet him at midnight.”
He hurries nervously through the empty streets of Lave, the capital of Vesh. It is a much larger city than he is used to, and despite his caution, he notices leering dirty faces peering out of the shadows at him, and his sense of unease heightens. At home, he avoids the darker parts of town, but here is not even sure where they are. He becomes uncomfortably aware that he hasn’t seen a watchman for several minutes.
Half-certain he is being followed, he is not sure whether to be relieved or terrified when he reaches the dark tower. Three stories high, in the dark it appears to be made of black stone, though he knows from his earlier visit that they are in fact the darkest of grays. He hastens his steps to reach the base of it, where he is confounded by the same thing which stopped his first visit.
There is no door.
He glances over his shoulder, but the footsteps echoing behind him have stopped. If a watcher lurks, it appears they are as frightened of Delmeron’s reputation as he is. He sends his familiar, a white snowy owl, to make a quick circuit around the base of the circular tower, but there is no entry anywhere, not even a window up on the third floor.
He looks up at the bell, set at the end of an iron bar almost twelve feet above the cobblestones of the street. There is no cord, and the raven familiar which, on his last visit, told him to return at midnight, is nowhere in sight. He smiles grimly. “That’s okay,” he mutters to himself. “That’s what I memorized mage hand for.”
With another quick look over his shoulder, he begins casting the cantrip. Invisible arcane energy extends from his fingers, and gives a quick tug on the bell.
It tolls ominously, echoing off the stone in the tower.
There is no response. He can do nothing but wait, impatiently, watching away from the faceless stone of the tower. The owl lands on his shoulder.
Without warning, Telryn flickers briefly to nowhere. For a brief moment, he is lost in a dark void. Before he can panic, the world flickers again, and he finds himself in a dark chamber. His familiar is still perched on his shoulder. There are mystical symbols painted on the floor, and the countertops, covered with potions and spellbooks, remind him his master’s laboratory at home.
That might have been a comforting thought, but then his eye lands upon Delmeron. Penetrating eyes catch his gaze, and he shudders. The man seems to be sitting on shadows. Beside his chair is a large crystal ball, mounted on a bone pedestal which reminds the young mage of a hand.
“You rang?” he asks, and his voice tolls as ominously as the bell.
“My… master, Loowys Strangeblood, has sent me to you,” he starts, fighting down the fear which threatens to return his voice to the childhood stammer, so painstakingly eradicated through hours of practice, for the arcane arts are unforgiving of even the slightest mistake. “He said you might sell us some glitter ink?”
The mage rises with a hint of a smile on his face. “I might have,” he says, pulling his black robe tighter about himself. He is thin and angular, with curly white hair, and Telryn cannot help but think that a smile does not belong on that face. “But unfortunately, my supplier has recently experienced… difficulties.”
Telryn starts to say, “Thank-you-then-I’ll-just-be-going.”
Before he can rattle off a complete sentence, however, the mage stops him with an uplifted hand. “However, I am quite sure I know where you can get some.”
“Okay…” Telryn starts hesitantly, mentally reviewing to find the catch.
“In fact, I can teleport you there, if you are willing to wait an hour or two...”
The young mage weighs caution against getting to see magic more powerful than any his master has performed in front of him. Curiosity wins out. “Very well, I accept,” he says, his voice firmer than it had been anywhere else in the conversation.
“Good,” says Delmeron, his face breaking into a predatory smile. “Here, you might as well start making yourself useful. Draw a chalk pentagram over there…”
The rest of us toil towards the freehold with the cart. It is slow going, even switching off horses from time to time, and making the entire party walk. With little to no rest the previous two nights, all of us are exhausted by afternoon. Miriel is reduced to plodding, focusing all of her effort on putting one foot in front of the other, and only Stone and Goldpetal have enough energy to scout ahead for ratmen. They do not see any.
The six of us draw near the freehold just before dark. We can hear the alarm bell tolling well before we come into view of the walls. As we approach, we see the last few farmers heading for the gates. The ratmen have not yet arrived; the gate is half closed, but the hold stays open. A number of men stand guard along the walls, armed with bows and arrows. A large man atop the watch tower shouts to us to hurry, and we make a run for the gates.
Just as we get through the gates, they are closed and locked behind us. We are in the courtyard of a walled complex. Paks steps out of one of the buildings, and shouts a warm greeting, clearly glad to see us. Stone, the half-orc, tries to look inconspicuous, but there is little need – everyone is extremely busy, and they hardly take time to notice us. There are people scurrying everywhere. Women carry buckets of water, men are sharpening swords, and children are collecting stones to use in slings. A middle-aged woman, standing atop the tallest hall, yells directions.
A cry goes up from some of the archers, and we turn around to look. The tall members of the party stare over the top of the low wall, while Milo and Goldpetal scurry up a nearby ladder to see what is happening outside from the rooftop.
In the distance, to the south, we can see a man, being chased by a group of rat men. The rat men have bows, and they are shooting at him. They stop pursuing him when they approach the edge of the orchards that surrounds the freehold, staying a safe distance from the walls, but they continue to shoot him. Even as we watch, we see three arrows hit him, but he runs up the hill towards the freehold.
A few of the archers offer return fire, but the arrows fall short of the ratmen, and they can only cheer on the runner. “C’mon, Taryn, you can make it!”
He reaches the edge of the wall, and his men drop a rope to him. He fastens it around his chest, and they pull him up. Stone and Chuck climb up to help haul on the rope, and shortly they have dragged him to the top of the hall. Paks and Miriel climb up to the roof as well.
As soon as he is atop the building, the woman who has been leading the townsfolk grabs him. He looks terrible, and when she opens his cloak, we can see that he is covered with numerous gashes and wounds.
Miriel asks one of the archers, “When did you last see him?”
“In the fields today, I reckon.” He has the soft-spoken drawl of a farmer, though he clearly wields the bow competently enough.
“Ratmen,” Taryn tries to warn us. He is barely able to gasp words out, and it is hard to hear him. “Ambushed us. John and Eldred ... dead. Only I … escaped.” He closes his eyes, as though to rest, and then remembers something else. “They’re … the disease tribe,” he tells Myrs, who is trying to bandage his wounds as best she can.
Miriel asks, “Is there a healer in the hold?”
The archer looks at the symbol of Madriel, which Miriel wears visibly at her neck, and says, “I’d guess that’s you, milady.”
Miriel steps over beside Myrs. “I’m a healer,” she says. “May I ask Madriel to heal your wounds?”
Taryn, on the verge of unconsciousness, does not appear to hear her, but his wife answers fervently. “Oh, thank the gods. Please do!”
Miriel is worried about disease, and she specifically requests in her invocation that Madriel heal any disease as she heals Taryn’s wounds. She asks Madriel to heal him, but his wounds are massive, and it takes many repeated invocations, until Miriel is completely exhausted, before he is sitting up and looks close to well.
As Taryn is healed, he becomes more aware of the surroundings, and Myrs introduces him to Paks. She, in turn, introduces Miriel and the rest of the fellowship. Myrs blanches a little when she recognizes that Stone is half orcish, but she graciously thanks us all for the warning.
Paks tells them both, “We’re here to help fight off the ratmen.”
Taryn, his voice much stronger, says, “I’m glad you’re here to help out.”
Miriel and Taryn are both thoroughly exhausted, and need time to sleep and recover. Myrs says she can also cast some spells, and that she will go memorize some spells better suited to a battle. She leaves Paks, as she is the one with the most campaign experience, in charge, with her daughter, Llewyn, as Paks’ lieutenant. Myrs leads Taryn and Miriel to the sleeping quarters in the main hall, and puts them to bed, and then turns in herself, to sleep and study. Delonia and Goldpetal also study spells and try to catch up on their sleep.
Milo slips out into the orchard, telling Paks that he will try to sneak up on and kill the archers.
Paks begins planning for a siege. The gates are the weakest point in our walls, vulnerable to a battering ram, so she decides to shore them up. She directs some of the freeholders to push wagons outside, and tip them over on their sides. This provides cover from ratman archers, so that others may dig ditches in the approaches to the gates. Stone goes with them, to help. Although he is met with disdain initially, the freeholders are very appreciative when they find out first-hand how much strength is packed into his compact frame.
When they are set and at work, Paks directs some other freeholders to begin blocking the second-story windows of the hall, as best they can, and sets the remainder to creating archery blinds on top of the buildings. Even the children work: she has them filling every bucket of water, in case we need to fight fire. One of the guards, Garth, is standing lookout atop the tower, with a telescope.
When they have a moment, she speaks with Llewyn and Brand. “I’m a ranger,” Llewyn tells her. “And I have a warhorse, though I’m better with a bow.”
“Following in your father’s footsteps?” Paks asks with a smile. “He is said to be quite a warrior.”
“I’m able to get a touch on him, occasionally,” Llewyn says, but then laughs and adds, “If I’m willing to be knocked down in the dust a dozen times or so. Listen, I was thinking, we have some slight military stores, from ages ago. I think there are five suits of chain mail, which we might use.”
Brand shakes his head. “They’re all in very poor repair,” he says.
“You’ve a forge,” Paks says levelly. “Can you repair them?”
“Certainly,” he says, “but it will take me many hours. Perhaps eight hours or so.”
“You’d best start, then,” she tells him.
Chuck sets grimly to work fletching arrows, and sharpening all of our weapons. His grief, for both Jim and Steve, has turned to a fey rage, and he is looking forward to avenging their deaths.
An hour after Milo left, he comes back. He ducks past Stone’s crew, working at the back gate, and re-enters the complex. His clothes are grungy, and he looks exhausted. “Wench!” he cries, “Bring me a drink!”
One of the children looks at him, and says scathingly, “Fetch your own drink.”
When he returns from the well, Milo finds Paks to give her his report. “I went south,” he says, “To where the archers were. They must have seen me; right when I got into the orchard, I immediately came under fire.” He pulls several arrows from under his cloak, and gives them to Paks. “These were shot into some trees near me, and I thought you could use them.
“Anyways, I shook them off, and was then able to sneak around a little bit. I found a group of five archers. They’d clearly been there for a while; they’d built some sort of blind to fire out of the orchard with. It took a long time for me to get close, and when I did, I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
“Well, I killed three of them, and the other two ran. I followed them for a while through the trees, but they were running south, and I didn’t want to follow them out of the trees. I started circling around the freehold, and about a third of the way around, I heard another set of five archers. I figure they have a blind, too.”
“Did you see them?” asks Chuck, who has been listening intently.
“No.”
Paks asks him, “Could we go sneak up on them?”
“I might take more guards and harry them,” Milo says, “But I should warn you, even though I’m exceptionally quiet, the rat men still noticed my approach, so I doubt anyone else will be able to sneak up on them.” He pauses, as though expecting a response, but when Paks remains silent, he says, “There are no archers left to the south of the hold right now, and after I rest, I’ll go out again to try to kill some others. Can the blacksmith spare the time to make me some darts?”
“I think so,” Paks says. “I’ll tell him.”
In the middle of the evening, some of the archers begin shooting at our workers outside the gates. They have set up blinds at the edge of the woods, in several locations. The trenches are pretty much finished, so Paks calls everyone back inside, and we shut the gates for the final time. There is now a no-man’s land, the open expanse of hill slope, about a hundred feet wide, between our walls and the edge of the woods. Neither side can make a good shot, since each side has good cover, but that hill is a clear field of fire, devoid of even the slightest protection.
Work continues inside the complex, with occasional arrows harassing anyone who forgets to stay under cover, even for a moment. Likewise, our archers occasionally loose arrows into the woods, but Paks admonishes them that arrows are in scarce supply, and they should make sure they have a good shot.
After about an hour of this, we can hear louder noises in the woods. Stone, who sees well in the dark, says that he can see, through the woods, a large rat man force coming up from the south. He can’t see what they're doing, but he can see a large camp. He tells Paks that he gets the impression of as many as a hundred rat men.
A short while later, a herald from the rat men appears at the gates. He carries two banners: one is a white flag of truce, while the other is the banner of a disease clan, worshippers of Chern. The herald looks different from any rat man we have seen before. He appears gray and twisted, as warped as the trees of the swamp. He is wearing a dirty, torn cloak.
He stops on the road, halfway between the woods and our main gate. “Heathen persons!” he calls, in the common tongue. “You owe us your lives, for the death of the brother of the rat man! Because Chern is merciful, because Chern is good, we will be merciful, and you can serve us if you lay down your weapons and come out! Otherwise, we will gnaw your bones!”
Paks stands up from behind cover, on the roof of the main hall. “We won’t be laying down our weapons,” she calls out to him.
“You may have an hour to consider it,” yells the herald.
“Okay,” Paks shouts. “We’ll let you know in an hour.”
The herald goes away, disappearing into the cover of the orchard.
Milo prepares to go out into the woods to scout and hunt rat men. He asks for a healing potion, which Paks gives him, as well as the 20 darts the blacksmith made for him while he rested. He then heads out, after offering a prayer to Madriel.
When Myrs awakens, Paks asks her if she has any ideas about fashioning some sort of siege weapon. It turns out that Myrs is an engineer, and has built siege weapons before. She thinks that she can rig a catapult, given ten to twelve hours, and perhaps twenty men.
Most of our first works have completed, so Paks tells Myrs to draft whoever she needs, and work begins on a catapult, in the center of the compound. The remainder of the workforce and Paks sets to reinforcing the walls of the buildings as best as they can. The herald never does return to ask our answer.
“Midnight!” grumbles Telryn under his breath. “I can’t believe he’s making me meet him at midnight.”
He hurries nervously through the empty streets of Lave, the capital of Vesh. It is a much larger city than he is used to, and despite his caution, he notices leering dirty faces peering out of the shadows at him, and his sense of unease heightens. At home, he avoids the darker parts of town, but here is not even sure where they are. He becomes uncomfortably aware that he hasn’t seen a watchman for several minutes.
Half-certain he is being followed, he is not sure whether to be relieved or terrified when he reaches the dark tower. Three stories high, in the dark it appears to be made of black stone, though he knows from his earlier visit that they are in fact the darkest of grays. He hastens his steps to reach the base of it, where he is confounded by the same thing which stopped his first visit.
There is no door.
He glances over his shoulder, but the footsteps echoing behind him have stopped. If a watcher lurks, it appears they are as frightened of Delmeron’s reputation as he is. He sends his familiar, a white snowy owl, to make a quick circuit around the base of the circular tower, but there is no entry anywhere, not even a window up on the third floor.
He looks up at the bell, set at the end of an iron bar almost twelve feet above the cobblestones of the street. There is no cord, and the raven familiar which, on his last visit, told him to return at midnight, is nowhere in sight. He smiles grimly. “That’s okay,” he mutters to himself. “That’s what I memorized mage hand for.”
With another quick look over his shoulder, he begins casting the cantrip. Invisible arcane energy extends from his fingers, and gives a quick tug on the bell.
It tolls ominously, echoing off the stone in the tower.
There is no response. He can do nothing but wait, impatiently, watching away from the faceless stone of the tower. The owl lands on his shoulder.
Without warning, Telryn flickers briefly to nowhere. For a brief moment, he is lost in a dark void. Before he can panic, the world flickers again, and he finds himself in a dark chamber. His familiar is still perched on his shoulder. There are mystical symbols painted on the floor, and the countertops, covered with potions and spellbooks, remind him his master’s laboratory at home.
That might have been a comforting thought, but then his eye lands upon Delmeron. Penetrating eyes catch his gaze, and he shudders. The man seems to be sitting on shadows. Beside his chair is a large crystal ball, mounted on a bone pedestal which reminds the young mage of a hand.
“You rang?” he asks, and his voice tolls as ominously as the bell.
“My… master, Loowys Strangeblood, has sent me to you,” he starts, fighting down the fear which threatens to return his voice to the childhood stammer, so painstakingly eradicated through hours of practice, for the arcane arts are unforgiving of even the slightest mistake. “He said you might sell us some glitter ink?”
The mage rises with a hint of a smile on his face. “I might have,” he says, pulling his black robe tighter about himself. He is thin and angular, with curly white hair, and Telryn cannot help but think that a smile does not belong on that face. “But unfortunately, my supplier has recently experienced… difficulties.”
Telryn starts to say, “Thank-you-then-I’ll-just-be-going.”
Before he can rattle off a complete sentence, however, the mage stops him with an uplifted hand. “However, I am quite sure I know where you can get some.”
“Okay…” Telryn starts hesitantly, mentally reviewing to find the catch.
“In fact, I can teleport you there, if you are willing to wait an hour or two...”
The young mage weighs caution against getting to see magic more powerful than any his master has performed in front of him. Curiosity wins out. “Very well, I accept,” he says, his voice firmer than it had been anywhere else in the conversation.
“Good,” says Delmeron, his face breaking into a predatory smile. “Here, you might as well start making yourself useful. Draw a chalk pentagram over there…”
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