Bolstered by Calendula's aura of justice, Rudrik smites the spirit three times, and with the final blow, it discorporates! The ghostly man sighs with relief as he fades away, his soul finally able to move on to the Boneyard for judgment.
Something begins to glow through the rubble at the edge of the crater. It only takes a few moments to brush aside the dirt and debris to recover the item--the Fluttered Wing.
Shenuska takes the Fluttered Wing gently and examines it closely, turning it this way and that to deduce its properties.
"This is probably most useful for you Nime." She says eventually, handing it to the undine. "It helps you be convincing in conversation and will prevent anyone using magic to detect falsehood unless it is a powerful spell indeed."
She looks around, "We need to find some acolytes as well?" With that she starts making a thorough sweep of the ruined temple, looking for clues.
Unfortunately, even the most thorough search does not reveal any clues to the location of the missing acolytes, nor anything else of interest.
Nime says a quiet prayer for the freed soul and then takes the artifact in reverent hands. "I'll treat it with respect," she says, slipping it into her bag.
"While we're here, we should ask around to see if anyone has seen Rialte or Celvinx," she says. "They were last seen near here. Someone must know where they've gone."
Rudrik pulls his helmet up and off and tosses it onto the floor, knowing that the magical adamantine is basically immune to denting. Another gobbet of vomit falls out and dribbles off his breastplate. He rummages around in his pack for a cleaning rag and wipes off his mouth and neck, then digs for his waterskin to clean up a bit more thoroughly.
"That was just gross," he says. "Lemme at least get this cleaned off before we go looking for people and saying 'Hey! We're here to help you! Especially the smelly half-orc in the filth-covered armor!'"
You begin to canvas the neighborhood of the Emerald Enlightenment, asking around about the missing Desnan acolytes. Most of the citizens are ensconced in their homes, keeping their heads down, and it is difficult to find any who are willing to talk.
The cult of Doloras controls this district, and it isn't long before your activities attract its attention. Two women dressed in spiked chain shirts and wearing iron masks approach you. "You are newcomers to the city--a rather unique occurrence," one says. "High Master Sarn wishes to speak with you. You will accompany us to the Arcanium Abjurant at once." It doesn't look like they are in the mood to brook dissent.
"That was just gross," he says. "Lemme at least get this cleaned off before we go looking for people and saying 'Hey! We're here to help you! Especially the smelly half-orc in the filth-covered armor!'"
"Oh, gods, Rudrik!" Nime exclaims. "Here let me help." With judicious use of magically summoned water, the undine very quickly has Rudrik cleaned up.
"There," she pronounces. "All better."
~~~~
"High Master Sarn?" Nime questions with a raised eyebrow. "If he is as important as his name sounds then we will be most privileged to meet him." she replies.
Shenuska wraps herself in the armor of arrogance and allows the women to escort her to where she is actually quite happy to go.
The centerpiece of this magnificent city, the fabled Arcanium Abjurant is a white marble building boasting a dozen scalloped columns along its front entrance. Once, vellum banners draped the building’s rotunda, but now thick, crisscrossing chains mire the aesthetic. The sculpture of Runelord Belimarius in the courtyard has been transformed into a statue of an angel with wings made of knives.
The acolytes escort you a reception room, where a gaunt man grins eagerly. He wears gray robes twined with blood-red sashes and hunches menacingly as he walks. Lifetimes of sadism emanate from his cruel gaze. "Ah, and here they are," he says. "The people who strode through shadows to reach this trapped realm. I am Solethex Sarn. Congratulations on your success in finding a way into Xin-Edasseril. Now, tell me how you did it!"
"No." Shenuska responds, smiling beatifically. "Anything else?"
She lets the shocked silence linger for a few moments before continuing. "Nothing for nothing and precious little for a copper Sarn. If you want information from us you will have to give information in return. I want unrestricted access to the libraries here, for one month. Once I have what I want then I will explain to you how we got here. If I cannot accomplish that within a month then you will have your information regardless since it is my failing." She cocks one perfect eyebrow. "This is how you bargain, Sarn. So - do we have a deal?"
"No," Sarn replies in the same tone Shenuska used. "That's not how this is going to work. I am not going to sit on my hands for a month after waiting to so long to find the answers I seek! If you want to access the libraries, you will have to pay up front."
"Better!" The Runelord clone applauds mockingly. "An equal trade then. I will give you the tool we used now, and explain its use afterwards. If you can figure it out yourself, then all credit to you, and if not then you just have to be patient."
"Hmph. Let me see this tool of yours first," Sarn demands.
Shenuska, who actually has no intention of misleading the 'High Master', produces the Shadow Stylus and holds it casually between two fingers. Any attempt to take it however is met by its swift disappearance.
"Do we have a deal?" She repeats, a little steel in her tone this time.
Sarn's eyes glow faintly as he murmurs a spell and studies the shadow stylus. "No, this is worthless. It can open a door to the Shadow Plane, but without a stabilizing ritual or a key to focus it, the gate will last but a moment, just like all the other ones I have tried to open. Whatever is keeping the city locked in time is interrupting the gates as well. There has to be more! Stop holding things back! What aren't you telling me?"
As Sarn casts Shenuska slips a minor minor spell of her own out at the same moment.
"And if I tell you then what guarantees do I have that you honor your end of the bargain?" Shenuska replies languidly. The High Master is highly emotional, which makes dealing with him much easier.
"I've made a gesture of good faith. If you don't do the same then we have no accord."
She doesn't need to do anything as crude as glance left and right to establish whether her companions are ready for the combat that she gives a sixty five percent chance of occuring.
"You mistake me for a man who is not willing to kill to get what he wants," Sarn says warily. "My patience is beginning to wear thin. We can work things out peacefully, or we can walk the path of pain."
His two bodyguards tighten their grips on their weapons.
"No, I mistook you for a man with brains." Shenuska responds flatly. "Try not to trip on the path as you die."
When they reach the Arcanium Abjurant, Nime stops to appraise the ... artistic additions ... that have been placed upon the front of the building.
"Shelyn says that beauty can be found almost everywhere," she says finally after looking over the chains and the wings of blades for a good five minutes. "I think we've found the 'almost'." She shakes her head. "That is simply grotesque. I'll say that they tried and leave it at that."
~~~~
Nime watches the interchange between Shenuska and Sarn with an eye to understand what the man really wants.
"Sarn," she says finally. "Now you know that if you attempt to kill us then it will be just that much harder to divine the usage of the stylus. Let Shenuska use the library and you have my word that she'll then explain to you how to escape this place. Please. The alternative would be for us to defend ourselves and you don't know our capabilities."
Sarn holds up a hand to forestall his bodyguards from attacking. "Very well. I will admit is much easier to question a living person than to try to extract secrets from the dead. I will allow you 3 days of access to the libraries in exchange for your promise of information. And I want an apology from her for that last insult."
Nime turns to Shenuska and gives her an expectant look.
"I apologise for my last comment." Shenuska says calmly.
”Thank you. You may check the records now,” Sarn says. You are free to search through the Arcanium’s records at your leisure, at least for now. The college and its archives are massive, but they are extremely well organized, and as you can read Thassilonian, you can learn much on the topics you choose to study.
Belimarius’s History (Knowledge [history or nobility] DC 30
Ending Xin-Edasseril’s Time Trap (Knowledge [arcana or planes] DC 35
Runewell of Envy (Knowledge [arcana or local] DC 30
Tampered History (Knowledge [history or local] DC 25
For once Rudrik relaxes and hits the books, reading folk tales and local legends while looking for examples of distorted time.
With Nime’s magic allowing him to understand Thassilonian, Rudrik hits the books. It takes him all of the first day, but eventually, while examining historical records, he comes across an anomaly where his own knowledge of the ancient past does not match what has been recorded here.
This occurs when he is reading about how First King forged the legendary Sihedron over ten thousand years ago. The exact nature of how Alaznist changed the past is unclear—these records don’t record it (since they record the past as it should have happened). All Rudrik can be sure of is that, somehow, Alaznist changed the event in question.
The half-orc has a nagging sensation of déjà-vu suggesting more of these anomalies must exist.
Shenuska focuses on the most important thing first - the tampered history. Everything else can wait until later.
Shen finds three more anomalies:
–6420 AR: First King Xin is assassinated.
–6301 AR: Azlant invades Thassilon, but is defeated by the Oliphaunt of Jandelay.
–6150 AR: A schism among the runelords results in several of their deaths and begins an era of bickering and conflict among Thassilon’s seven nations.
The sense of deja vu remains. There are still more anomalies to find.
Theo's mind was still disrupted somewhat from the temporal ghost and he'd done little more than profusely apologise for clawing Nime during the encounter.
He was, however, relieved when Nime managed to defuse the situation in the archives and his mind had cleared up enough by the time they could get down to the research. Realising that Shen would focus more on history, Theo set to trying to find how to break the temporal lock.
Rolling for Day 2 ahead of time, will retcon if need be.
Theo's mind was still disrupted somewhat from the temporal ghost and he'd done little more than profusely apologise for clawing Nime during the encounter.
Nime accepts Theo's words with a smile. "You weren't in your own mind," she says with understanding. "You've nothing to apologize for, but I accept your apology." A quick kiss on the cheek demonstrates no hard feelings.
The undine is happy to wander through the library, perusing a book here and some scrolls there. Nothing that really helps the group, but she doesn't feel that she'll be able to outdo Shenuska in the research department.
Theo doesn't make a lot of progress on his research during the first day. Once you get too tired to continue on, you return to the Sanctum to rest, then head back to the Arcanarium to continue your research on the second day.
This time, Theo finally has a breakthrough. There are a few scattered notes about the time trap in which the city is caught, all penned in the days since the time loop was disrupted. This research speculates that the linchpin of the city’s time trap is hidden within Belimarius’s Eye of Jealousy, the demiplane located within her runewell. The anonymous scholars note that access to the runewell lies via a secret door in the back of Belimarius’s throne room. This entryway is said to be a small chamber with a single, floating emerald inside. To enter the Eye of Jealousy, one must touch this emerald while chanting, in Thassilonian, “When I envy all, all envy me; what’s not mine shall perish beneath my feet.” If someone could enter the Eye of Jealousy and bring the demiplane down from within, the time trap might be ended as well.
Shenuska is able to discover three more temporal anomalies on the second day as well:
-5786 AR: Alaznist learns the secrets of fleshwarping from the qlippoth lord Yamasoth.
-5620 AR: Karzoug constructs the Cyphergate, known at the time as the Annulus Juncture.
-5293 AR: Earthfall is predicted to devastate Thassilon.
The feeling of deja vu fades away. It seems you have discovered all of the anomalies.
You still have another day's free access to the archives if you want to do more research about Belimarius and the Eye of Jealousy.
Having grasped the libraries cataloging system Shenuska is able to use the third day very productively.
Throughout Belimarius’s time as a tax collector, her jealousy burned with slow determination, as her envy of the power and prestige of others festered. Her skill in magic also grew, and she used her spells and cunning to clandestinely cut down higher-ranking bureaucrats one by one. Belimarius coveted her superiors’ authority and their influence, but mostly she envied the time she believed they stole from her when she, a daughter of wealth, should have been engaged in more prestigious endeavors. At just 20 years old, Belimarius became one of the most influential finance officials in Edasseril—but the ultimate expression of her nefarious desires, as it turned out, was yet to come.
On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, Belimarius learned that the daughter of Runelord Phirandi’s treasurer, a girl named Vexnill, had earned a fully funded position as a student at the Arcanium Abjurant. Enraged that the child of a man and family she hated—yet who was ultimately her employer—had been handed a spot she believed the girl couldn’t possibly have earned, Belimarius planned Vexnill’s demise. This time, she did little to hide her identity as Vexnill’s killer, hoping she could impress the mistresses of the Arcanium and take the girl’s spot.
Her plan worked better than she ever imagined, for her cruelty and power had gotten the attention of the land’s runelord himself.
Instead of punishing Belimarius, the wicked Runelord Phirandi praised her. Seeing her significant magical potential, he took her on as his personal apprentice in his Palace Miasmoria in Xin-Edasseril, the capital of the Realm of Envy. Belimarius spent more than 4 decades as Runelord Phirandi’s personal student and advisor. However, as the years passed, resentment and entitlement again began to foment in Belimarius’s heart. She suspected that the runelord was holding her back from her true potential: replacing him as ruler and the greatest wizard of the land. Once she had this epiphany, it was nothing for the talented and wily spellcaster to entrap Runelord Phirandi in a coffin of pure force and claim his throne as her trophy. In –5402 AR, Runelord Belimarius fulfilled her ultimate destiny and became the Runelord of Envy.
For 109 years, rule in Edasseril under Belimarius was brutal, efficient, and absolute. Her first act as runelord was to transfer the traditional seat of power from central Edasseril to her hometown on the nation’s eastern border, so that she could be closer to her roots and keep an eye on Cyrusian to the east and the elven nation of Mierani to the south. (Today, many scholars of Thassilon erroneously assume that the ruins of Old Xin-Edasseril, crumbling on Chakikoth Isle, remained the capital city to the end.) Belimarius filled her days with assassinating potential rivals, seizing wealth from those who ran afoul of her temper, and otherwise building a ruthless empire. Her magical studies fell by the wayside—after all, as a practically immortal runelord, she believed she had all the time in the world to build her arcane might. But then Belimarius caught wind of the impending cataclysm of Earthfall, and she realized her mistake. She knew that the surest way to survive such an apocalypse lay in the creation of a personal demiplane, where she could ride out the devastation in safety and slumber. But fashioning such a demiplane involved the creation of a runewell, a task that required immense arcane skill beyond Belimarius’s ken. The only wizards powerful enough to create a runewell, Belimarius was forced to bitterly concede, were Thassilon’s four mightiest runelords.
Belimarius considered many options, including her tried-and-true method of deviously cutting down one of her rival runelords and stealing that which she coveted. Such methods, though, were far too risky when applied to those powerful wizards. In the end, Belimarius approached Karzoug and paid him an obscene sum of gold and a vault of priceless treasures for his help creating her runewell. Karzoug eagerly accepted the payment, but he had little interest in actually aiding a potential rival. He gave her the support she needed to complete construction of her runewell, but laced his advice with cunning traps and faulty logic. Had Belimarius not been so rushed to complete her creation, and had she taken just a bit more time investigating Karzoug’s advice, she may very well have escaped this trap and already safely awakened from Earthfall.
But Belimarius had no time to perform such studies. When she activated her runewell, she was able to fashion a demiplane known as the Eye of Jealousy, but as she did so, the sabotaged runewell revealed its flaws. Even as it formed, the Eye of Jealousy imploded, engulfing the heart of Xin-Edasseril and casting it out of time and space itself. The city’s center became encased in a sphere of what appeared to be indestructible crystal, a demiplane that would in time become known as Crystilan.
As the third day of your research come to an end, High Master Sarn and his bodyguards enter the library. "We've reached the end of the agreed upon research period. Now it's time to hand over the method of traveling to the Shadow Plane!"
"We used a ritual to travel to Crystalian." Shenuska replies, having foreseen this encounter and ensured that Rudrik and Calendula are suitably prepared in case things get nasty. "It allowed us to find a 'back-door' through the time trap and into Crystalian but it had to be performed at the exact location of Crystalian within the shadow plane."
She pauses briefly to glance at all her companions and make sure they are ready in case he takes the news badly. "We traveled to the Shadow Plane using the stylus I showed you. Once there we conducted the ritual. It opened into a warped space between planes, the same place your portals seem to have opened, but it was possible to return your portals to this plane."
She spreads her hands wide in a negatory gesture, "We have no way of leaving this place either. Our ritual was, as far as I can tell, one directional."
Sarn considers the information for a moment before nodding. "Very well. Provide the details of the ritual to me, then our business will be concluded and you can be on your way."
"I will need pen and paper." Shenuska replies before settling down to create the instructions. She makes no attempt to make them any more comprehensible than Xanderghul's where and deliberately obscured, very carefully, her solutions to more than one of his logical leaps.
Sarn cackles with triumph, unaware of Shenuska’s manipulations. You are able to leave without further incident.
Though he's able to help study a little bit, Rudrik ultimately winds up at loose ends and spends more time polishing and maintaining his weapons and armor. Not that items of such legendary enchantment need it, but at least it keeps him busy.
"So what's next?" he asks as the team finally cracks the case. "Now do we go after the Runelord, or the um... guardian-things... or what?"
"I had really hoped to find Rialte and Celvinx," Nime says with a frown. "But I understand if there are more important things we need to do first."
"Oh yeah! We can do that," says Rudrik agreeably. "I just don't know what order to do things in, this is all pretty... weird."
Nime smiles at the half-orc and places a hand on his strong arm.
"Sometimes the right choice isn't as clear as we'd like it to be," she says.
"That's why I have smart friends!"
"Me too," Nime replies, her grin widening.
"That and finding the other people in the districts is our most urgent task." Shenuska offers. "They are far more in danger than either Belimarius or the Rune Giants are, so I agree with Nime, we look for them first."
She doesn't appear to have any particular ideas on how though.
You resume questioning the locals about the whereabouts of the missing Desnan acolytes. After dealing with an attack by a pair of chronogeists (fortunately weaker than the one you fought earlier), you at last find a lead. Somebody last spotted them in the company of a halfling in Envy Row East.
This district of ramshackle housing is home to citizens who have hunkered down to weather out the city’s chaos. Further questioning leads you to a small and tenuously protected collection of houses that is haven to refugees who have so far escaped the warring factions. There are about a dozen refugees here— commoners, mostly, surviving on force of will and street smarts. A local jack-of-all trades, a halfling named Amilxna En, leads the refugees’ efforts to scavenge food and stay out of sight. So far, her wiles have kept the group safe, though she recently ushered them from an old safe house that the rune giants had discovered to this new locale. However, the refugees’ safety constantly erodes, and it’s only a matter of time before the rune giants, cultists, or Belimarius’s guards discover their presence, exterminate them, or force them to choose sides.
Among the refugees are the missing Desnans, Rialte and Celvinx.
To the couple's surprise, Nime embraces them both with tears in her eyes. "Renner will be so happy to know that you're well," she says. "He's been worried sick and has even been having dreams about you both. Although I'm sure they're not sex related dreams."
She considers the possibility.
"He wasn't clear, though. And there wouldn't be anything wrong with it if they were."
Nime is ready to bring the discovered refugees back to the others.
The acolytes blush at Nime’s affections and insinuations, but they and the other refugees are happy to accompany you to the much safer Sanctum. They are welcomed with open arms, and Renner happily embraces his comrades, showering you all with profuse thanks.
Shenuska remains rather aloof from the whole thing, translating as required but not really taking part for her own sake. She seems to regard the whole thing more as checking off an item on a list, although she works as hard as anyone to ensure that the refugees make it safely to the sanctum.
"So, shall we attempt to locate the old lady?" She suggests once everyone is safe. "Or confront the Rune Giants? They should not be left unchecked in that quarter of the city."
"Perhaps the Rune Giants?" Nime suggests. "If by the 'old lady' you're referring to the Runelord of Envy. We should remove as much of her support as possible before confronting her."