Post
by Sharkforce » Sat Feb 13, 2021 7:02 am
From the Journal of Zivilyn, Windling Magician: Shadows of the Past
It seems Azurea has found a lead on something of importance to her; information on her past. She does not know who her birth parents were, and was adopted as an infant by the inhabitants of a small kaer hastily built from the wreckage of an overturned airship to provide shelter to a an adoptive family of (former?) nomads in the Throalic Mountains. Her Aunt Boogaloo had suggested that she might ask a hermit who lives in the mountains known for his oracular abilities. A hermit seer in the mountains that nobody seems willing to Name, you say? Well, it has been some time since I visited my master, I'll be happy to come along.
Joining us as well are Norg, Lashana, and Thorkell, who have met the old grouch, and Vlolkir (who, like Azurea, had not). 4 Trolls, 2 Windlings, a Shrieker Bat and a Dire Wolf... there's probably a joke in there somewhere.
We arrived at the tower and, unsurprisingly, came across a number of signs telling us we were not welcome. He did something to hide the door... looked like some kind of illusion, but whether it was Illusionist magic or just some Nethermancy trick I'm not familiar with (or something else entirely, I very much doubt I've seen the *entirety* of his private library) I am unsure. LaShana went up to the windows to say hello and stopped short of getting hit with some sort of ward, but also managed to get him to admit that he was in, and begrudgingly he let us in.
Azurea told him her tale of woe, and it seems he actually did have something that would help. Not anything as simple as just giving an answer, of course (when is *anything* that simple?), but then again if she expected it to be that easy she wouldn't bring a crew of Warden and almost-Warden Adepts to do it. No, he set up a very interesting sort of ritual using an old unusual device, powered by thread magic and consisting of shallow dishes on which he placed candles in a ring, surrounded by little figures made from some sort of putty. It seems the magic levels the device was designed for were simply not present any more, so we had to use a little bit of blood magic to get it started, and then things got pretty weird.
First it got dark around the outside of the circles he had drawn (which honestly isn't *that* weird around Nethermancers), leaving just enough light that the candles cast shadows from the figures he had made from our blood and the putty. The shadows started moving as he did something with the candles, and as he told us to stay focused on the shadows, they came alive, took on a form of substance, enveloped each of us in our own little circle around the outside of the device (and also enveloped Mister Wuggums, his cat, who had been pawing at the shadows) until they had covered us entirely and then dragged us down into the shadows beneath ourselves. I'm just going to go out on a limb and speculate that the device might have been made by a Nethermancer.
Anyways, we wound up in a place that was basically nothing, where each of us had a sort of vision of the past. They were a little garbled though, so we had to put them in order, and here's what we figured; first, shortly before the beginning of the scourge, a group of Namegivers came to a kaer door seeking shelter. The kaer could not take them in, but they did receive the aid of a group of volunteers in an airship. What their plan ultimately was I cannot say, but they didn't make it very far, and crashed in a valley, but managed to get out safely and crash the airship in such a way that they managed to build an emergency kaer out of it.
Next, much more recently we saw the interior of the kaer that had been unable to take in the travelers, home to a Moot that had made their shelter from True Water and True Earth, a peculiar combination. This next bit is a few visions combined, and we can only guess at the order to some extent; the Chief and his Wife had children (it was unclear how many in the vision, but in the end it seems like the number was three, based on information we gained later). One of those children was Azurea.
The chief had an advisor, A woman with a painted face who was known for her ability to foretell the future, and by her guidance he led well. That advisor had a lover, a young Troll warrior, honored among his people, but who was married to another and had to keep his relationship secret. One night, while the lovers slept together in her home, shadows crept into the warrior's home, and for the lack of a warrior there his family were slain, and the portion of the storehouses of the kaer which that couple had been expected to guard within their home was lost in some fashion.
The Chief passed judgment on the young warrior, and his horns were sawn off and he was cast out from them. The next vision we saw was of the advisor casting bones and foretelling some dire fate should the Chief's daughter not be cast out of the kaer. A bit of speculation here; based on the reasons we were having these visions, there may have been no true prophecy there. After all, why would we need to know that the seer had a lover or that the lover was cast out otherwise? Admittedly, I have no evidence... yet.
These visions were devoid of sound, and of shadowy detail, and each of us saw only our own portion. (Mister Wuggums also had visions of his own, of the cats of the kaer bravely fighting the rodent menace that threatened the grain stores, which poses an interesting question; had we not had Azurea's interests in mind, I wonder what we might have seen instead.
Lastly, the Chief brought to his home 11 warriors in secret, whose Names I record here to honour their courage: Enrich, Thali, Sumervet, Nitoni, Arda, Molin, Angaset, Speili, Vartin, Bael, and Ragni. Strangely, we each felt ourselves being drawn into one of them, and we were able to hear and to act within the vision. These 11 owed him a life debt, and he called on them to secretly bring his daughter to the kaer made from the airship wreckage, Azurea's childhood home. He gave them a token that would gain them access if they arrived, no doubt gained from a pair of Trolls that had went with the airship initially and then made haste back to their kaer when they crashed; a token conveying a debt owed by the inhabitants of the crashed airship to the kaer of ice and earth.
A false infant was publicly cast out of the kaer, the true infant was secretly escorted by the 12 warriors; many dangers they did face. Stone that became as liquid and then hardened with a victim inside; strange wasps that stung with an icy venom that transformed the body to ice; great quakes that cracked the earth asunder, the hunting grounds of deadly horrors, each claimed a victim. Lastly, a great horde of gnashers sensed us and gave chase; the last of our companions who were not from their future gave her life to buy us time to escape, but could only delay a few, and a veritable wave of teeth and claws descended upon us.
Knocked to the ground, grappled and pinned, bitten and clawed, we barely managed to fend them off while LaShana guided her shadow of the past with the infant to escape through a flock of winged gnashers, and the rest of us bought her precious time and took down a scant few of the many huge twisted forms with our dying breaths.
Obviously, we didn't actually die; they were shadows, and we were but puppeting them the way that Azurea puts on plays with her hands. I find it somewhat improbable that there was any sort of four-discipline Magician amongst the Trolls of that moot, or that they had two Trolls that could somehow fly, and yet I could move and act as though I were myself even though I looked the part of a Troll. Instead, we woke up in the hermit's home, which was much more appealing than being a snack for a bunch of gnashers, no matter how noble the cause (even if there was some grim satisfaction in watching them struggle to get past my defensive magic and knowing that when they did wound us, the Boar Spirit only made us stronger). I shall simply say that had we been there in reality, the gnashers would have had more gnasher to eat than Troll.
My recent acquisition of The Damarish Rose, a crystal buckler that guards the user from horror magic and sheds light in tainted regions that causes them and their creations to shrink away from it, would have proved most fortuitous for those Trolls had they been there. Backing up a little, when I returned home from Kampung Gajah the long way around (through Travar, around the plains a time or two, back to Throal, and then home... you know, the loooooooong way), there was a package waiting for me. I do not know who sent it; perhaps a gift from the Lahala in thanks for tending to her peoples' wounds and fighting their enemies? Or perhaps from someone else. Whoever it was, it was devastatingly effective in that fight, you'd almost swear they were a seer themselves. I hope I shall never need it, but I do not believe that to be true for even a second. There is work to be done,