Rosella stands quietly, observing and listening, but not participating in the conversation. I should've gone with Broccan or Erdukk, or somewhere on my own for a bit. I feel like a Pig in the Prince's Garden in here.
"Of course he's a miner, Auric," Khellek mutters. "Everyone's a miner in this dung-heap town."
"Yes yr'lor'dship," Broccan replies to the man. His mind wanders to the men's injuries, wondering if he recognized them from any local menace.
Those welts look like stirge bites--the Stirgenest Cairn is a somewhat infamous cairn around the northern outskirts of the hills, known for its many stirge nests. You don't know quite what a stirge is, but you know what it looks like when someone's met one. You know the Stirgenest Cairn for a fact to have been completely and thoroughly cleared long ago, unlike the Whispering Cairn.
"Sorry t'be'n y'rway, Lords," Broccan mutters, still not making direct eye contact with them. "'ll be goin' now."
Assuming his business with Taggin is concluded, and if neither of them stop him, he makes his way to the door and back to his mother's place.
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Kata sucks in a gulp of air and mumbles, "I- Did you know my mother?"
"I'll try, Ma," Broccan replies, 'bu'chu know'if I'm undergroun' I can'eh leave unt'e'lem told to. If I can'eh make't, 's not for no'want'n to be 'ere w'ye."
Broccanese: I'll try, Ma. But you know if I'm underground, I cannot leave until I'm told to. If I cannot make it, it's not for not wanting to be here with you."
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While she quickly gathers her thoughts, the flicker of partial recognition between Allustan and Kata gives her a moment’s pause. A strange weight, a gloom, seems to hang over almost the whole town and its inhabitants, and she hopes she can be tactful when it comes time to mention Caith’s ghost.
“I’m sure she would be very proud of you,” the elf tells her bardly colleague quietly, before her eyes flicker to the sage. “I don’t want to think of what might have happened to us without Kata’s quick wits, and her song and spear.”
After a beat, she tries to sum up what she can of the adventurers’ historical gleanings. “The Cairn, though … it’s more than a tomb, at least as far as I was able to gather. There’s a section we haven’t been able to reach yet, and, er, candidly, my grasp of the elemental tongues isn’t what it ought to be. Not Terran, at any rate.”
“Artophanx seems to have been bound by someone he calls ‘the Architect,’ who seems to have lived and worked in the complex while it was being built, along with the workers? Long enough ago that Artophanx wasn’t sure we Avistani even knew true wizardry. There was a definite Garundi connection: statues of the Old-Mage’s Magic Warriors, and of a goddess – Shimye-Magalla? Our priestly friend Edrukk knows a bit more about her, though he’s a Gorumite himself. There was also something that looked vaguely an aiudara – in the form of a mirror, but it was shattered to pieces, and there’s a fiendishly trapped door that we’re fairly sure leads to an area that might be unspoiled, and so let us learn more, but we’ve yet to breach the last obstacle.”
She glances around the table at the others, gaze lingering on Kata in particular. Caith was her friend, so Alaïs thinks she probably ought to let her handle that bit, in case anyone gets any ideas about going in with holy water and exorcisms. She’s not sure that would even work, but then necromancy isn’t her style.
"Cross'd fing'rs'n spit," Broccan says, invoking a common saying meant to wish for good fortune. "Keep yerself warm'n fed, an'I'll be back when'I can." He gives his mother one last long hug, then makes his way back in the general direction of Allustan's house.
She starts out practically enough, but as she gets into the details, her whimsical, aesthetic side takes over as she starts to imagine what it must have been like to design and build the thing. “It’s fascinating, if deadly work, and it’s a shame so much of it has been damaged. The statues were in dreadful shape, overall. I would have loved to see the cairn in its prime, or at least the plans for it. The moving parts would be mostly beyond me, but how they put them together to keep the works out of sight…”
She breaks off as she realizes she’s at risk of rambling off on a meditation on canons of architecture and design that are probably of considerably less interest to anyone else in the room.
"You're good at your craft, Edrukk," Osgood says with a laugh. "Call by if'n you ever want a better job than minin' for Balabar."
Three things he doesn't ask about, because they haven't directly come up yet, are Alais's sudden unexplained knack for Auran, the strange creature known as Seeker, and Caith's ghost.
Broccan stands outside of Allustan's residence, trying his best to look like a porter or the like, rather than a filthy miner in a respectable part of town. He does not knock, but waits for the others to complete their business with the wizard.
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"As for the Cairn, Alaïs' memories are full of clarity and detail. There was a also a bird, or a once-bird named Seeker. She was a magpie, but her eyes hang from their sockets, and she speaks at least two languages, Taldane and Necril. She has a voice like honey taken by the fire on a cold night; it lulls you into comfort. And she stayed at the cairn, begging off accompanying us in light of the sunlight, though that could have been a fib to cover her true intentions - or limitations. Do you know of such a creature? A magpie with eyes that hang from their sockets, and the voice of a lullaby's end?"
Edrukk can be seen striding down the street wearing a suit of banded mail, betraying a bit of excitement as he seeks out his friends.
Broccan is soon joined outside by Edrukk, who, if only out of respect for Broccan's shyness, keeps his fellow miner company as they wait for the party to resolve matters with Allustan.
He goes to his shelves again, this time selecting a tome bound in rough-stitched red leather, its pages printed on thick and uneven sheets of paper. He flips through the book gingerly before settling on a page, and reads it to himself, mumbling under his breath.
At last, he looks up, his expression grave. "I believe... what you describe may be a creature called a lurking strangler, a type of lesser beholder. It... well, without going too far into the gruesome specifics, it is a sort of symbiote, or parasite in some cases, that takes partial control of a living host by replacing its..." He coughs. "Well, you can infer. Lurking stranglers are, true to their name, also quite deadly if agitated on their own, and might use their gaze spells or simple suffocation to knock a target unconscious before undertaking the... procedure.
"They are highly amoral beings, and their sense of right and wrong, if indeed they have any, appears to be quite limited. I suppose some mages born blind who desire to change that state might use them as familiars. I cannot imagine why a lurking strangler would speak Necril, mind you."
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Not, mind, that plants are necessarily much friendlier (mistletoe, anyone?), as anyone who’s had to weed a garden row or two would be able to tell you. That includes Alaïs, though she would easily admit that after learning how to do it, for the most part her idea of a morning of weeding is to ask the gardeners to look after it, apart from a few very special beds requiring a personal touch.
She gently redirects her attention to the matter at hand. She wonders if aberrations ever stop being aberrant, but she’s no druid. Maybe Rosella would know?
“We gathered that some sort of magic must be involved,” she acknowledges. “I suppose it could be a former familiar? It sounds like the sort of creature that might appeal to a necromancer, or anyone with a taste for the morbid. Do you have an idea about how often or if they change hosts willingly? Do we need to worry about tracking her down?”
As Alaïs’ questions narrow down, a more focused facet of her personality becomes apparent, one that offers a discreet reminder that all elves have a basic acquaintance with bow and blade, and a rather vigorous attitude to defending their communities from unwanted outside influence.
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Another thought occurs to Kata; she twists her hands together in worry. "Or, her master, the blind mage, still resides in unlife, somewhere in the Cairn? That would be very bad..."
"But then, why would Seeker be stuck on the other side of the door?"
Turning to Alaïs, Kata nods, her face pinched with worry. "Yes, I think we should worry. We may have set free a scourge upon Diamond Lake!"
After a few moments, she sighs. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions or deprive anyone of the benefit of the doubt, but she’s definitely been evasive. Unfortunately, even a half-way to decent binding geas is far beyond me, so when we confront her… Unless anyone feels like adopting beholderkin, we might be able to trap her in the lower levels again.”
It looks like she’s not likely to see her travelling harp again for a while, but evidently freeing Artophanx is going to take some time, and she is a woman of her word, when she swears to it. As for Seeker, as Alaïs rises from her seat, the soft clash of scabbards against armour speak wordlessly to worst-case measures.
“She did seem to shy away from daylight, so we might have a bit of time yet,” the poet says darkly. She turns to Allustan, her features a mask of politeness, “Thank you for offering to look after Artophanx’s bowl. I was worried about what might happen if we had to keep carrying him around, given that he’s otherwise bound to the Whispering Cairn. I don’t think we need to impose further on you this afternoon.”
“Only – if, as Kata says, we might need to worry about undead, and we still haven’t seen the airier portions of the cairn, might you have any suggestions for how we could prepare for ‘ghosts and shadows’ as well as ghouls and bending and squirmy wormy things? Our miner does have a magic blade, and two of us, I think, have our own magic.”
She thinks that’s about all for now, and prepares to take her leave. Hopefully she can satisfy more of Allustan’s curiosity once they find a way to get past that door.
When the subject returns to the matter of exploring the dungeon, Allustan nods. "I fear that the restless dead are even further outside my ken than aberrations. However, it sounds as though the undead you have faced have risen from would-be conquerors of the Cairn. Assuming none have penetrated the central tomb... tell me, what do you speak of when you mention 'ghosts and shadows'? Ghouls are flesh and blood, are they not?"
"I wouldn't mind trying to befriend the magpie, once that creepy
Seeker-eyeball-thing has been removed," Rosella replies to Allustan. "But talking to it right now gives me the heebie-jeebies."
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That's it, Kata thinks, hoping she recounted everything correctly. Those minutes were a blur, as if she were only partially present.
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She can’t imagine a reason why Caith’s ghost would lie, but then she’s not sure how much of Caith is left. It’s the sort of metaphysical question that Alaïs has never really worried over yet – she’s no priestess – but Broccan seemed to find his bout of possession rather uncomfortable.
“Thank you for your candour, Kata,” she offers, bending a leg to the elegist in pre-emptive apology, in case she needs it.
“Things aren’t always what they seem, and we’ve already seen some things that are less … solid? than they ought to be, in the cairn,” the elf lady replies to Allustan. “Apart from our staring-eyed not-quite-a-bird, gricks and ghouls, there’s at least one elemental unaccounted for and another possibly freed. Of air, if I understood Artophanx correctly, but that’s doubtful, honestly. And there was an unnaturally flexible thing that crept out at us only to dissolve into vermin and scraps of hide when Rosella put a last arrow in it.”
To take the sting out of any suggestion that some part of her is remotely concerned about what might have to be done if they’re being led on a wild chase by a malevolent shade, she concludes lightly, “It’s also an old song.”
“By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney:
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end,
Methinks it is no journey…”
She smiles self-deprecatingly, her trivial air gently announcing that she’s aware of her outsider status and that she’s wary of pushing into places and interactions that she’s very much a stranger to.
[Allustan] furrows his brow. "How do you intend to do this? Take her to the Boneyard, to be buried with her family?"
“Or to her family home, if they had a burying-ground there,” Alaïs adds sympathetically, returning to the matter at hand. “Thank you for your time, Allustan.”
With that, she thinks it’s time to track down the gentlemen so they can all try to lay Caith to rest at last.
Leaving Allustan's home, the ladies find Broccan and Edrukk waiting outside.
Nonchalantly ‘polishing’ his armor, Edrukk says, ”Fine weather, aye?”
"Looks goo'don'yeh," Broccan replies, with an approving nod. "Looks like'ye'got't fitt'd up well."
His grin shows through the thick beard, ”Thankee, lad. Th’ smith Osgood does good work. E’en lemme help!”
"'Appy'r th'ands'old'n 'amm'r'n tongs!" Broccan replies with an oft repeated dwarven aphorism.
"Did'j'eh fine'en'eh thin'out from Allustan?" he asks the others as they emerge from the wizard's home.
"Happy are the hands holding hammer and tongs!"
"Did you find anything out from Allustan?"
He nods enthusiastically, then waits expectantly for the report from the mage.
After exchanging parting salutations with her friend, Alaïs makes her way back outside to find Broccan and Edrukk, that old song now stuck in her head until she gives it voice. She keeps it quick and soft, out of respect for Kata’s feelings.
“With a host of furious fancies
(Whereof I am commander),
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander,”
she sings whimsically.
She stops short as she realizes the gentlemen are waiting just outside the door, and she can only guess they’ve been there a while and didn’t knock.
“He’ll look after Artophanx for us, for now,” Alaïs starts. “He thinks it’s too strong a binding for him to try to undo with what magic he has on hand, but he might be able to track down a suitable scroll at some point.”
“Other than that, he’s dreadfully curious about all our findings, and I’ll have to drop by once we get past that door,” she continues. Hypothesizing that Broccan is the leader in untimely deference, as she considers the pair, the elf lady’s eyes narrow playfully in a way that not a few people back home in Kyonin would be able to tell is a sign of trouble brewing, to say nothing of ‘Prince’ Moonmeadow here in Diamond Lake, though he would probably be much less polite about it. We shall all have to update our wardrobes too, when we can. Travelling light is all well and good, but after that mishap and misunderstanding in Magnimar…
Her plans to ease Broccan and Edrukk into polite society – at least as far as convenience for adventuring goes, if nothing else – will have to wait, though. “Oh, and Seeker’s some sort of beholderkin. Those eyes are some sort of symbiote, and have a magical gaze. We might want to do something about that, after we get Caith home.”
"'ow'do we fine where Caith's fam'ly lives?" Broccan asks. "I can'eh recal'lev'r goin' to'er home."
"How do we find where Caith's family lives? I cannot recall ever going to her home."
"Yes," Kata says, her eyes hardening, as she nods along with Alaïs. "We need to do something about Seeker. If I understand correctly, the magpie that Seeker is in is still alive? Poor bird!"
Thrushes, songbirds, and other similar birds were important to the Jadisians. Kata's mouth twisted into a deep frown the more she thought about it. Seeker had to be dealt with. "We should lull her along, continuing to treat her as a valued companion." Worry pinches at Kata, the elegist twists her hands together, an increasingly common nervous gesture. If she hasn't fled into Diamond Lake.
"As for Caith, I... I know generally where Caith lived," Kata murmurs, voice soft. "But Caith hated being in there an always met me in the middle around town. Caith had a half sister, Venelle. Maybe we should visit her?"
17. Venelle's
Venelle is a curious but shy woman who sells weapons and armor—particularly bows and arrows, which she fletches herself. She has many friends in the Bronzewood Lodge, and has some distant elven blood. She was Caith's half-sister, but wasn't adopted by the couple that adopted Caith. Technically, Balabar Smenk owns Venelle's shop, but she's able to keep up with rent fairly reliably.
“Do let’s,” Alaïs nods, about to set off briskly until her brow knits in brief consternation as she realizes she’s not sure where they’re going.
Thinking about it for a bit longer, the visitor finally places the name. “The bowyer, right? Well then.”
Alaïs dabbles, of course, but she’s not so enthralled by that manner of sport to have done much more than notice the shop. She happily lets the locals lead the way. Hopefully Venelle will be able to direct them to the family plot.
"Yes! The bowyer! I forgot..." Kata mumbles, looking intently in the direction of Venelle's shop, a bit of blush coloring the elegist's cheeks. "I should add, for when we talk with her: Venelle liked Caith and actually wanted to adopt her, but she was... not financially stable at the time. She did not get along with Caith's family."
"A'lwee got'iz'm ol' bones," Broccan warns. "She migh' no'b'lieve's tha'their Caith's. She migh'teven thin'kwe're try'n t' pul'leh fas'one'on'r, maybe scam'r out'eh some coin. We nee' t'make sure we let'r know'p front't we don' wan'tennythin' 'cept 'ow t'ge't'eh Caith's home."
"All we've got are some old bones. She might not believe us that they're Caith's. She might even think we're trying to pull a fast one on her, maybe scam her out of some coin. We need to make sure we let her know up front that we don't want anything except how to get to Caith's home."
Venelle's archery shop is quite narrow, crammed between two buildings as if squeezed in a vise. The interior is cramped and cluttered, though the weaponry on display (or piled haphazardly on tables) is of clearly beautiful craft. As Broccan files in last and closes the door behind him, the metal loop affixing the doorbell in place seems to come loose, and the bell clatters to the floor at his feet.
Venelle pokes her head up from behind a shelf. She is quite imposing, with a slightly rounded form softening obvious musculature formed from years of hard labor and bowstring-pulling. Her ears are ever-so-slightly pointed, and her pupils being just a little too close in shade to her irises gives her a slightly distant look. She blinks at the party. "Oh! Hello! Sorry, uhh, the bell does that sometimes. I've been meaning to fix it. Well, fix the thing that holds the bell on the door, I mean--the, uhh, bell is fine, I guess. What can I do for you?"
“Hello!” Alaïs says cheerily enough, before quickly schooling her expression to something more suitable for the occasion, and bearing in mind Kata and Broccan’s warnings.
“Just a quick question this afternoon, and I must admit it’s a bit of a strange one,” the elf spares a glance at the nearest table, dragging her fingers along its edge as she lets her armour and the whole motley crew of adventurers to speak for themselves.
“Allustan has us investigating the – well, the Whispering Cairn, especially. We know that (if you’ll forgive my mentioning it) your half-sister was lost there, but we were hoping we could pay our respects at her grave before we explore the depths of the Cairn. Just … to remember who we’re doing this for. Should we go to the Boneyard, or does your family have a plot on their land?”
She steps aside to make room for her new elegist friend, “You must remember Kata? She’s a brave soul, but under the circumstances, I can understand why it would … hit rather close to home.”
Alaïs’ sympathetic look flickers from Caith’s friend to her sister, trying to smooth the way for Kata while dancing around the question of why now, exactly, and where. She does mean it, about how difficult she can imagine it would be to visit a friend’s grave, maybe especially if it’s a cenotaph, though she’s also grateful that her own immediate family isn’t as messy as Caith’s seems to have been.
Venelle's face falls when the Whispering Cairn is mentioned. "Oh. Well, uhh... you know her grave isn't, uhh... I mean, they never found the body. So you might actually, uhh, find it in there. Find her in there." She seems to notice Kata, and a little of her smile returns, but sad and nostalgic now.
At the mention of her family, her features darken. "They aren't my family. They were barely hers, either."
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"I won'ner why she wans'teh be buried'ere?" Broccan asks himself under his breath, only realizing he said something out loud after the words escape his lips. He lowers his head and clears his throat, hoping Venelle didn't hear him.
"I wonder why she wants to be buried there?"
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"Hi, Venelle," Kata murmurs, her voice barely a whisper, the elegist seeming to shrink into herself, as if she were no more than a girl a mere ten years of age. "It's been a long time..."
She draws into the background as the others talk, the past, well, never being entirely the past, just raw scabs to be picked at in discomforting moments, like this one, and she's lost for a bit in memories, until Venelle's face darkens and Broccan stumbles his question, and Kata realizes that they are both living with their own wounds, barely scabbed over, from that trauma so many years ago. And of course, of course Venelle would have the most wounds of all, probably everyone in Diamond Lake. Caith was almost a daughter to her after all.
"Truth is..." Kata stumbles, looking at the ground and then casting a furtive, unwilling glance to Edrukk's pack, "We found her. Caith. Both her body and her spirit. And her spirit was restless. And we hope to put her to rest."
There. It was out there now, no more beating around the lilac bush. Kata exhaled, deep, and looked to Venelle to read her. But the elegist, for all the practiced empathy her job with the church required, was deeply uncomfortable, and could not hold her eyes onto Caith's half-sister for more than a moment. Kata looked away, silently cursing herself, and wiped her hand under her nose.
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Alaïs’ eyebrows raise as she finds out just how tense things were between Venelle and the rest of Caith’s evidently … complicated family, to put it mildly. She doesn’t mean to be misleading, really, but she can imagine how she would react if she lost one of her brothers and someone walked into her home announcing that they had his bones in their bags, and where would she want them?
Now, though, the cat, at least, is out, and the best she can do is try not to hurt any feelings as she tries to navigate the question of where – or who – Caith’s home really was. Her lips purse for a moment before she explains, “I am sorry. It’s as Kata says, and I had just hoped to spare you the worst of it until we could bring … Caith back home. That’s as much as we know about what she wanted, but we would be honoured to see it done, wherever she should be laid to rest, and you are more than welcome to join us, of course.”
It sounds a bit strange to her own ears, and she is very aware that she's a toff from who knows where meddling, but this is what she was born for. Well, the meddling too, but mainly empathy, tact and diplomatic words, and despite her foreignness, Alaïs feels pretty confident that she's found the right tone and posture to convey her earnestness.
Edrukk has a stern expression, nodding slowly to encourage his friends to face their pain. Finally, he adds, "The spir't o' yer sister was where she fell. She 's a strong 'un 'n she 'elped 's 'cause she wanted 'er body t' finally 'ave a genuine rest. We 'r jus' wantin' t' give 'er 'er due."
"Hi, Venelle," Kata murmurs, her voice barely a whisper, the elegist seeming to shrink into herself, as if she were no more than a girl a mere ten years of age. "It's been a long time..."
Venelle give a smile stretched thin with sadness ill-concealed. "Hi, Kata. Haven't, uhh, seen you around here in some while, huh?"
"Truth is..." Kata stumbles, looking at the ground and then casting a furtive, unwilling glance to Edrukk's pack, "We found her. Caith. Both her body and her spirit. And her spirit was restless. And we hope to put her to rest."
Venelle's eyes widen, and her voice drops to match Kata's softness. "Oh. Oh, Shalm, no. Her spirit?"
She listens closely to Alais's deeper explanation. Briefly her pupils seem to dilate, her eyes turning dark and solid, unmistakeably elfin eyes. "Of... of course, I..." Something seems to click. She turns to Broccan with a frown. "Buried there? Did I hear you right? She wants to be buried with... with them?"