#there's something to how the rot needs no mending rune of such and such

[eldintower]

i truly think there is something quite compelling about miquella abandoning all of his fears at the culmination of all he's worked for and in that moment imagining malenia- fearless malenia- and all his doubts & vacillations- steadfast malenia- like malenia being what miquella is trying to reach in becoming a god. and of course the other way around- "he is the most fearsome empyrean of all". i think when faced with a loveless miquella and miquella's shed love, malenia would not even think twice. she would choose miquella. Ugh god. and as miquella shed parts of himself, so to does malenia (although i think millicent is different from trina. a new form of life. the swamp of aeonia as a giant receptacle/rot crucible- she's like the rot equivalent of a jar gestalt baby. plants growing in pots lol). forever mirrored. and when miquella is god for a moment, malenia is god in an age that will come in time as the rot spreads further and further past the burning wall into limgrave. Gah!!

[miirshroom]

Renowned Tarnished and the Shardbearers they Champion

Why does the guidance of grace point towards the greatrunes, but also Millicent, Castle Sol, and Castle Morne? A process of elimination with the shardbearers philosophies and the renowned Tarnished of Elden Ring:

Firstly - ignore the Empyreans (and Rennala) for now. If Ranni is any example - the endings that align with their philosophies would have been something truly something unique. 

Secondly - assume that the endings are exactly as shown. The fractured and broken version of Marika is never repaired. The Elden Ring may be fixed, but she herself never is - in the four standard endings we become Lord to a dead god.

Mohg - Dung Eater - Mending Rune of the Fell Curse

Mohg revels in being an Omen. The Fell Curse aims to create a world where everyone lives a cursed existence. No notes. By which I mean, yes there is nuance to Mohg and I have many notes, but no I don't think it is needed context for this connection.

Morgott - Goldmask - Mending Rune of Perfect Order

Morgott is also called the veiled monarch, to hide that he is an Omen. Goldmask is hiding a frankly emaciated and undead looking face behind a brilliant mask of gold. Also notably, Goldmask is not aligned with the hunters of those who live in death. His goals and Fia's are not in opposition. Both Morgott and Goldmask see that there is an inherent problem with the Golden Order - but continue trying to prop it up by any means necessary rather than allowing for change to a new kind of Order. Marika is Radagon and we just killed them - god is dead, but let's put on a good face and pretend that all is well.

Godrick - Fia - Mending Rune of Death

This one is most easily understood through methods - they are both about reanimating corpses to restore a gruesome version of the Golden Lineage. Godrick grafts body parts onto himself with corpsewax. The yellow in the wings of Fortissax the lichdragon demonstrate that there is little difference between corpsewax, amber, and "gold". In all endings the rune of Destined Death is returned to the Elden Ring - but it's Fia's end that introduces the new centipede looking rune of Death. Those who live in death are exalted in the upcoming age.

Rykard - Sir Gideon Ofnir - Age of Fracture

They also actually have a lot in common, but it's subtle: Neither wants to restore the Elden Ring. Both are associated with orders of knights, both are only interested in prolonging combat. They've positioned themselves as arbiters of god's will - Gideon through claiming to know Marika's intent and Rykard through declaring himself a god wanting to devour and replace Marika. 

Radahn - Hoarah Loux - Relics of the Age of the Erdtree

It can't really be said that we meet "Radahn" in the game - his mind has long since been rotted away by Malenia. Similarly, when we first encounter Godfrey, his eyes have lost grace. He only regains the light of grace after the defeat of Morgott - who had been striving to prop up the failing Golden Order. Morgott is the face of the Golden Order as it is, and Godfrey the face of what it was at the height of its power. Also Radahn was said to idolize Godfrey, and they both have that lion theme. 

So, given that understanding of how we can unwittingly choose to side with various demi-gods through the renowned Tarnished, I think that the guidance of Grace has something to do with ideals. To fight any given shardbearer requires stepping into their domain - to consider the world from their point of view. Ideals are infectious - the act of engaging with them may be subtly influencing the perspective of the player Tarnished and impacting the ending that they choose to lock in.

This purpose would explain the presence of the 3 outlier guidance of grace: Millicent and Castle Sol are both important to understanding Malenia and Miquella's perspectives. Completing Irena's quest at Castle Morne is the mandatory first step in understanding the perspective that culminates in the Frenzied Flame. Which is also important to Miquella's - it is afterall his needle that can stop the frenzy flame ending. And for Melina, going through with the Frenzy Flame reveals a side of her that otherwise would not have been seen.

[smouldring]

“--so, it’s just up there.” She straightened, though her legs trembled, and pushed the hair from her face. The flickering grace at her feet shone brightly, but she did not bend to touch it; she had barely been able to stomach the sight of such embers since-- since the mountaintop. There would be no one to greet her when she sat to rest, so what was the point? Besides, she was so close now, and she had the strong feeling that, whatever lay ahead, she had no more need to convert her runes into strength. In fact--

       “I hope I know how to do this. It should be easy, right? I’m sure I have what I need.” Rennala’s Great Rune resided inside of her, as did all the others. The Rune of the Unborn, with the ability to draw the experience from one’s body and convert it back into its base form. If she was correct in her theory ( how strange, that she should have a theory, like some sort of scholar! ), then she could bring all of this to an end just as it had began. But first, she had to succeed. 

       The Rune Arc burned her hands as she held it aloft, crushing it between her fingers. Its golden glow formed the path to guide Rennala’s slumbering rune to the surface, and Merri grasped weakly at her chest as it drew itself forth. “Great Rune of the Unborn,” she said, in a voice she hoped befitted a lord, “answer my call. Let the Elden Ring be reborn, here. Take the shards from my body, and revert them to their state of origin. Make of them a Rune of Mending, that I might see the world made whole. Heed my words, come forth and let this thing be done.”

       She had been prepared for pain. Had pain not been her constant companion, from waking all the way to the door of the most holy? She had won these runes with pain; she would give them up with pain. Each speck of light and power peeled itself from her skin, burning as they went, and she could feel herself wavering, and her vision began to swim as her face turned pale and her lips went white. But she did not stop, did not even dare to move, until every bit of gold, every mark of a hard-fought battle was gone from her and hovered before her in a hazy circle, meant to mend. 

       Breathing shakily, she steeled herself, then gave up the last of it: the Great Runes of all the other lords, the anchor and the rot and the smoldering resistance, the base and the mark of blasphemy and the blood and its phantom. She took them in her hands, and pulled the Mending Rune to her, and pressed them close and pushed. She pushed, and she pushed, and she felt them harden against her skin. She felt the circle take shape, and coalesce, and the fire became metal, became solid, and finally, became still.

       Her knees hit the ground, and she just managed to catch herself on one elbow before her face followed. Sweat poured from her brow; her hair clung to her skull and cheeks, and spit and vomit and blood flecked her lips grotesquely. Slowly, slowly, she raised her head, and beheld the Elden Ring, clutched in her charred fingers. For a moment, there was silence. And then she laughed, and then she cried, and the tears came fast and hot. “Oh, Elden Ring,” she warbled, smiling, shaking. “All this, all of this, for something so small? Oh, oh--” Her forehead touched down to the stones, and her shoulders heaved and her lungs worked like bellows. All the while, the ring glittered in her grasp, perfect and unassuming in its perfection.

       In increments, her weeping ceased. She wiped her cheeks, the snot from her nose, the little strands of hair from where they had tangled into her eyes. And then she rose again, a bit at a time, and looked upon the Elden Ring once more. “Alright, little ring. You won’t believe what I’ve done to get here. And I’m afraid we won’t be together for long. I need you to grant me a wish, understand? I’ve given you something new. If it worked -- if I did this right -- you’ll know what to do.” The stairs to the Erdtree crackled quietly, and Merrimac nodded to herself, and carefully, deliberately slipped the ring onto her finger. “Let’s go, then. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find Melina inside, and I’ll show her what I’ve done.”

[cursewoodrecap]

Session 23: Medical Ethics

Y’all ever been to college?

Our new friend Vigdor has just pulled a pale, twitching human leg out of a poster tube, sheepishly admitting to Valeria that it’s his own.

Valeria blinks at it. “Well, it doesn’t appear to be bleeding demons, so that’s good?”

Shoshana sticks her head in the door, and has to pause to take in the sight. “Uh, bruh? Bruh? I have questions. Is that yours? I mean, like, yes, you HAVE it, but was it attached to-“

“That’s a bit tricky? It was amputated twice.”

“Twice?!”

“Once from me, and then, well, um. Once from an amalgam of sewn together body parts?”

(Gral and Shoshana pile into the room, because Oh, Lore?)

“When I was in the swamp, we were fighting a bunch of zombies led by this particularly nasty undead guy. We called it the Wailing Wight. At first it was just the usual undead hordes, but then a local leatherworker was found, torn apart and harpooned every which way, half his limbs torn off and stolen. After that, we started getting attacked by stitched together abominations cobbled together from human and animal pieces. I was there just trying to help the villagers, being a doctor and all. But that’s when I lost my actual limbs.”

“They got stolen, like the leatherworker’s?”

“I had to chop them off. Which, for the record, is not a fun time? The Wight’s harpoon has a kind of poison that rots everything it touches. So I had to amputate or, like, die. So I cut them off and his zombies, uh, stole them. And I managed to get one back? Kind of a long story. I don’t know how I recognized it, but – I guess I know my own leg like the back of my hand? Now I’m taking it back to Sturmhearst. There’s a weird fluid inside it; I want to study what’s going on with that so we can take care of the nastyboy in the swamp.”

“Well, I am generally against nastyboys,” says Shoshana, poking his foot in the ticklish bit. It squirms at her.

We’re headed to Sturmhearst anyway, so traveling together seems reasonable. We think about taking Fun Key Shortcuts, but that could backfire spectacularly, so we’ll play it safe and go the normal, boring way.

In the morning, we head downstairs. The inn is trashed. The stalwart barkeep Rene is not there; instead there’s a young elf sweeping out what debris he can. As we grab breakfast and the young fellow thanks us over and over for saving his friend’s life, Vigdor awkwardly wanders around casting Mending on chairs and tables that got a little too close to the tentacles and chainsaws. Shoshana doesn’t really do non-destructive magic, but she slips the barkeep some gold for repairs.

Vigdor’s too lopsided for a horse, so he’s gonna hop on in our cart. He’s very taken with the Eyegis, poking at it with fascination. “You can see the blood vessels in the eyes, despite no source for a blood supply! Do they have tear ducts? Have you ever seen the shield produce tears? Can you make it cry?”

Valeria gets very uncomfortable with this line of questioning and turns the eyes back into painted ones, put off by a Weird Stranger gettin’ all up in her business. Gral distracts him by asking about his fancy metal limbs.

Vigdor goes full technobabble on how the runes and machinery work. “Well, there’s three different kind of magical actuators on each joint, and they act as conduits for the dilithium crystals-” He knows the details secondhand from Bjork and none of us speak robotics, so if he ever needs serious repairs he’ll have to bring them back to Sturmhearst for the engineers to take a look at.

Valeria knows a bit about Jotunn runesmithing, but she’s never heard of it working to this degree of precision; before, she’d only heard of stuff like boats that row themselves, or a peg leg that has a little extra articulation. These are fully actuated limbs!

Val checks if the limbs are the same metal as our space wrench, but nope, they look like completely normal everyday metals. She’s not gonna inspect further, because she has RESPECT, unlike SOME people.

(“Hey, I didn’t try to pry the eyes open or anything!” Vigdor protests.)

She does notice one thing, though: Valeria recognizes runes from most magic systems even though she doesn’t know them well enough to use; her sister studied magic for a long time, so she knows what they look like. There’s one elaborate rune that appears on both Vigdor’s forearm and leg that is of no origin she’s ever seen.  

“How long’d it take Bjork to build this thing?” Shoshana asks, squinting at Vigdor’s kneecap.

“Well, I was unconscious for a good bit of it so…between a week and 2 months? He was already working on it when I, uh, had to amputate.”

“…did you KNOW you were gonna wake up with those things on?”

“Oh! Yeah, yeah. It took a while ‘cause the original blueprints they found were for somebody, like…really short for a human or really tall for a halfling? Something in between. Bjork had to resize the whole model to fit a human.”

“He, uh, FOUND blueprints?

“I can’t imagine he’d have made blueprints for a person who didn’t exist? It was all proportioned very strangely. I don’t know too much about it, you’d have to ask Professor Bjork.”

(One of the players asks if the strange rune, perhaps, says ISTC in a language the characters don’t know. It DOES, and we’re all very pleased with ourselves for previous-campaign references.)

The long road stretches on before us, and we have plenty of time to talk as we spend a week or two heading north toward the coast. We fill Vigdor in on the four flavors of Curse and the concept of the Prisoners, and that we suspect there’s major Key nonsense going on up at the university. (Heh heh, “major key.”)

Vigdor and Shoshana bond over being locals. Why are foreigners so weird about trolls?

Vigdor really, really wants to look at Twombly’s glasses. We explain to him that the Key could take his desire for knowledge and turn him into a cackling, dimension-hopping madman with a few extra eyeballs. He still wants to play with the glasses. Valeria protectively hides the Key map, just in case, flashing her Hunt fangs at anyone who asks about it.

After like a week of pestering everybody, Vigdor gets to look at the glasses. Disappointingly, when not looking at the Key map, the colorful lenses just make everything look slightly more those colors. Maybe Gral’s lutestrings look weird, but that could be the placebo effect. He tries flipping around the many lenses in different combinations, and finds that all of them make him look absolutely ridiculous.

Eventually after many days of travel, we can smell the ocean and the distinctive stench of a large number of humans living in one place. Vigdor takes in the familiar sight of his college hometown. Shoshana is dumbfounded that this many people can live on top of each other, while Valeria thinks it’s a quaint little town.

Up to the west, Sturm Castle squats on a cliff above the city, like a big hippo of knowledge. It looks like it was once a reasonable castle shape, but it’s had new wings and towers built onto it haphazardly until it’s a weird sprawling network of jammed-together architecture. By the edge of the cliff, in one of the more sensibly-built sections, a majestic lighthouse beams out over the bay. In the city below, the largest building appears to be a grand temple, with its roof carved in the shape of an open book. The perimeter of the city is outlined by strange wooden and metal towers, two or three stories tall with conical brass roofs.

Eh. It’s only got one castle, so it can’t be that good of a city compared to Aurentium.

Our cart is briefly stopped for a quick examination at the gate by a friendly city guardsman. He’s flanked by two of the same enormous owl-masked guards we saw accompanying Quercus and Ulmus. “Hi, welcome to Sturmhearst, folks! What brings you here?”

We all awkwardly try not to look at Vigdor’s leg bag.

“I’m, uh, here to visit Dr. Emily Thorpe?” he tries.

“Oh, visiting the university. Don’t need yer life story. Where you stayin’? I can recommend some inns. Oh, and check out the Scholar’s Temple while yer here!” He hands us a brochure from the Sturmhearst Tourism Board and steps back. “ALL RIGHT BIG GUYS, LET EM THROUGH!”

The owl guards don’t move.

“Oh, uh, I mean –“ He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a whistle. “Lemme see if I can remember how the doc told me to do this.” He blows a few sharp notes on the whistle, and the owl guards promptly step off the road to let us through.

Huh.

Vigdor makes an investigation check on those guards, who definitely weren’t around back when he was in school. They’re pretty bulky for humans – no, honestly, they’d be bulky even for goliaths. He’d heard a story from Professor Bjork that the school was hiring goliath mercs and dressing them in owl masks, but the professor had sounded like he hadn’t believed it much. Supposedly they’re silent because they don’t speak the language, but Vigdor’s pretty sure Bjork speaks Jotunn, so that excuse doesn’t quite hold up.

Once we’re out of the guards’ earshot, Gral pulls a huddle. “Vigdor, the Key’s a more recent influence, so let us know about anything new or significantly more abundant – that’s where we’ll need to search.”

Vigdor hmms. “The big brass towers weren’t here before. And the owl guys didn’t used to be a thing.”

Gral cuts another glance back to the owl guards, considering. “…How much of a faux pas is it to remove a Sturmhearst person’s mask?”

“I mean, if you’re dealing with the plague, it’s kind of a dick move? And dangerous? But most people – it’s like, the same rudeness of grabbing someone’s hat or jacket. For some people it’s badge of honor or superiority, y’know, how amazing they were to get through the gauntlet of Sturmhearst. But mostly it’s a practical tool of the job. We’re not, like, afraid to show our faces.”

Gral nods. “So you wouldn’t have to duel them, then.”

“W-what?”

“Oh, with bards it’s like ‘you are not deserving of your title’ and you have to duel about it. You know, like, how dare you slander my name, I’ll have to fight you for my honor?”

“Oh, uh, no, nothing like that. The mask is proof of office, that’s all.”

Before we get investigating, though, it’s late and we should rest. Vigdor wasn’t a palling-around-town type, but he rolls a nat 20 and knows the best inn in the city – not one of those touristy places on the square; the best-kept-secret on a side street that only the locals and regulars know about.

We have a lovely night around the docks of Sturmhearst. Shoshana spends like fifteen minutes just staring out to sea, because they MAKE boats that big???? This much water even EXISTS????? There’s a dragonborn ship from Aurentium, a goliath ship from Jotunhein, a couple of Galwan freighters, and even a ship crewed by colorful macaw aarakocra. (History check: while the Aquilians mostly died out, some of the ground-based aarakocra cultures survived. Valeria’s met macaw traders before in Aurentium; they tell lots of stories and do GREAT impressions.)

Valeria, meanwhile, holies some ocean water. They say Galwan clerics swear by holy seawater; salt repels demons, right? It’s gross harbor water but, whatever, it’s holy now. She also beats a sea captain at Man-go, presumably dock style. The inn’s equipped for foreign travelers, so it’s got a whole bar of draconic and goblin spices!

Gral, meanwhile, discovers the inn is near a bath house and enjoys finding out what a sauna is.

Morning comes, and Sturmhearst U awaits. Vigdor knows the main campus has the colleges of Engineering, Science, and Medicine, while the satellite campus across the bay houses the college of Ethics, which includes humanities like economics and history.

Valeria rolls for Order of the Rose knowledge. The Order actually has an arrangement with Sturmhearst when they’re working in Valdia – whenever the Order is sent on disaster relief, some Sturmhearst ethicists are sent to help coordinate. Valeria’s never worked with them personally, but the impression she’s gotten from her fellow knights is Not Great. From what she’s heard, they’re supposed to do triage and help direct the knights, but it seems like they spend the whole time sitting around debating absolutely horrible things. “Hey, if we brewed up some necromancy, could we use the skeletons of plague victims to transport supplies without spreading the infection?” Apparently they just sit around in corners debating whether that kind of shit is kosher or not, without ever actually DOING anything.

Also ethicists wear white instead of black like most Sturmhearst scholars, which is just pretentious. We then poke fun at an Order of the Rose knight calling anyone else pretentious.

Vigdor studied at the College of Medicine; he’s a doctor. But that’s not where he’s taking the leg.

“Why not Medicine? I mean, it’s a human body part, innit?” Shoshana asks.

“It’s…I have some concerns…regarding the, um. So, along with this leg, my arm was stolen, right? Not long after the arm was stolen, the sewn-together amalgams got a lot, uh, cleaner.”

We stare at him.

“…as if whatever stitched them together had my medical training.”

…oh.

“I’m a little hesitant taking that info to the College of Medicine,” he admits.

“Why?”

“There’s a lot of ‘for the greater good’ stuff with the College of Medicine sometimes. The College of Ethics keeps them in check. Anyway, there’s actually this thaumochemist I want to take a look at it.”

(We’d know the discipline as alchemy, but she hates that. She’ll go on a whole tirade about it. Somebody yells “Full Metal Thaumochemist” and we accidentally take a commercial break. We’ll never get tired of that joke.)

More of those owl guards are at the door, supervised by a businesslike white-coated member of the College of Ethics. His mask is a bit more abstract than the ones we’re used to; not modeled after a bird face like the regular scholars’. He lets Vigdor in with no problem, though he’s a bit suspicious of the rest of us. We’re with a doctor, though, so he’ll let it slide. “Welcome to Sturmhearst, may your visit be enlightening.” He does the same whistle we heard before and the guards step aside. Gral’s a string guy, he can figure out the notes easily enough but he doesn’t whistle.

“Nothing goes on here without Ethics knowing about it, huh,” Gral observes.

More owl guards are stomping around, some carrying heavy objects. Vigdor knows where he’s going, but asks an owl guard for directions, as an experiment. The owl guard doesn’t even notice him. He steps in front of the guard, who just steps around him very politely.

The castle is a nightmare to navigate, like Hoeska, but we have an expert tour guide. “The old keep, the part that used to be a castle – that’s where all the 101 classes are and the whole working hospital. All the additions are laid out super weird, and then there’s the tunnels underneath. The Chem students had WILD parties down there, they brewed up all SORTS of stuff. The lighthouse is a real lighthouse, but it’s also where admin is, and the dean’s and headmaster’s offices. Oh! DO NOT cross the librarians. Each college has its own library? Like, theoretically they share the whole collection, but which college keeps which books is kind of a blood sport…”

Shoshana and Gral hang back, feeling out of place. “Bards don’t really have a college, exactly?” Gral explains. “It’s more of a pilgrimage. I met the elders of each village and they imparted wisdom upon me?”

Shosh feels like an uneducated hick even by that standard.

We take a hairpin turn in one of the Science buildings and run into Professor Quercus! Or at least someone with a bird mask and a similar voice, chatting with some other masked scholar. “Ah! Yes! We made a lot of excellent discoveries before we started to run into problems – you see, there hadn’t been an event in some time, but if we could get in there to the source, we could really – well, my goodness! These are the people I was telling you about, who gave me such wonderful notes!” Quercus turns to us, sounding rather delighted. “I certainly didn’t expect to see you here. Welcome to the world of knowledge! What brings you here? I thought you were having adventures and derring-do!”

“Well, it turns out our adventures led here!” Gral tells him.

Quercus nods enthusiastically. “I’d show you around, but I rather need to speak to the bursar! If you need anything, I’m sure you can find my offices without too much problem. And please, if you’ve encountered any interesting monsters, I’d love to hear details! Especially if you have samples!” Despite his keen excitement, Professor Quercus rolls a four and fails to notice our Shusva accessories.

“If you ever need a cup of tea and a biscuit, you’re welcome to stop by my office! I’d be more than happy to speak with you! And if you could do me a favor – well, I wouldn’t mind having you with me when I speak to the bursar! See, our expedition to Holzog has hit a bit of a snag. The events with that mist stopped happening, you see. Luckily, we managed to identify which house you were going to, and we were all set to investigate, but then the Baroness put a squadron of those damnable Condotierri to prevent us getting in – “

Gral shrugs, deliberately casual. “I don’t know why you’d go back; there’s not much to see besides what’s already in the notes.”

(Vigdor immediately rolls insight to see if Gral is lying. Unfortunately for him, bards are excellent liars.)

“Anyway. The bursar’s giving me an earful about continuing to fund the expedition. I’m considering withdrawing from Holzog and asking him to redirect the funds into a different project! For example, lots of interesting monsters have been seen around Barroch lately!”

Yes, definitely, we want him to go somewhere that’s not a Tempting Key Portal. Valeria and Gral tag-team Persuasion checks to sell him on interesting cases of monsters we’ve heard of around Barroch. If we’re fuzzy on the details – well, all the more reason to have someone get out there and take a closer look!

Quercus is rather taken by the idea. “If you would, Mr. Duu –“

“Um, actually, Duu is the tribe, my family’s name is-“

“-yes, if you could write me some letters, I might find it useful making the acquaintance of the locals while setting up camp. Sturmhearst hasn’t established an official relationship to your people yet’”

Gral agrees to write up a formal letter explaining the mission of Sturmhearst and the expedition to make introductions a bit smoother; the word of a bard will go a long way in gaining the cooperation of the orcs of Barroch. He’ll do a personal letter of introduction for Quercus, and a general letter to Shieldeater’s administration to explain who the heck these weird bird people are.

“Wonderful! Bring it by my office!” He gives us directions that make NO sense to anyone but Vigdor. We’re pretty sure several of those compass directions aren’t real words?

“Oh, and if you see an angry tall woman stomping around, tell her I’m not here! She’s mad at me for some reason I can’t discern. Good day!”

He scuttles off, presumably to hide.

We definitely want the gossip on that – Ulmus was mad at him about funding, and she definitely dissed his field of study. Is this what academia is like?

Vigdor confirms that the professors have all kind of weird beefs, interdepartmental politics, and personal feuds. “One of my professors gave me a B- in amputation – shows what he knows – purely because I was taking some classes outside the College of Medicine and he got all offended. It’s a lot of politics and bullshit, they’re all more concerned about their careers and publishing than actually important stuff.”

We find a door with a brass plaque: Dr Emily Thorpe, Thaumochemist. There’s a paper list tacked to her door with a list of courses: “Intro to Potion Brewing,” “Principles of Alchemy Thaumochemistry”

Vigdor knocks. “Yes, who’s there? Come in!” a voice calls.

“It’s Vigdor! Vigdor Gavril!”

“Ah, Vigdor!” A halfling woman in the requisite bird mask waves from behind a counter where she’s handling a set of proper Movie Science bubbling beakers and flasks. “Yes, you sent me that letter! You had something ‘interesting’ for me!”

“Yes, and you will see why I couldn’t be more detailed!”

She notices his metal arm as he starts pulling open his heavy waterproofed case. “Oh! I heard that Professor Bjork was giving you his prototype! How’s it working?”

“They’re loud and heavy and uncomfortable sometimes, but I have limbs! Can’t complain! But then I, uh, found one of my limbs again.”

He goes over to an open table and pulls out his entire-ass leg with a flourish, plus vials of hair and blood and strange unidentified liquids. Her eyes widen.

“Ah, this is yours!” She watches his toes wiggle. “Well, you don’t see that every day.”

“Yeah, I found it stitched to some kind of unholy undead abomination.”

“And that explains the Knight of the Rose. Hello, Kyr.”

“Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service!”

“Dr. Emily Thorpe, at your service as well, I guess? Pardon the mess in my lab, it’s not much but it’s home. Hand me that vial?” She pulls out a syringe and takes a sample of not blood, but oily black liquid, from the leg. “It will take some time, but I can write up a thaumaturgical profile without much difficulty. Do you mind if I keep it?”

“You can hang on to it. But I would appreciate discretion.”

“Yes, this will stay between me, your friends, and – oh, this is Hugo, he’s my teaching assistant. He’s been helping since the school was mobilized.” She turns to Vigdor’s clearly uneducated hick friends (not you, Valeria, you’re very fancy) and explains:

“In times of crisis, the University turns from education to innovation. Were this a disease, we’d be researching cures! If demonic, we’d be researching weapons or dimensional banishment. We haven’t really received direct orders this time, so everybody is doing their own thing, which I can’t say I mind. Mostly I’ve been helping other researchers with the practical application of their theorems.”

She scribbles out a hasty list. “Hugo, if you can go to the library and put these books on order? The Vigmar and the Auspelius especially would be useful, but don’t let the librarians kill anyone over them. And the Principles of Advanced Anatomy – tell them I won’t ask. But I do need it.” The grad student nods and hustles out of the room.

(Shoshana insights, out of paranoia. Hugo’s a good egg, though he might refer to thaumochemistry as alchemy.)

“Now, Dr. Gavril, do you want this leg back? How intact-“

“Want it back? Like, in the abstract, or on my body?”

She pulls out a vial of bubbling acid. “I’d like to put some of this on it and I’d like to see what happens.”

He blanches slightly. “Uh. Um. I have some proprietary-“

“Aw, no acid then,” she grumbles, stowing the acid with an audible sigh.

“Only do something you would do to living person’s leg. That they would survive!”

“How would I know? I’m a chemist, this is only, like, my second dead person!” She pauses. “…well, fifth.”

Shoshana starts looking around at all the alchemy equipment curiously. Everything here is clearly labeled with numbers, and letters that feel like numbers, and complex formulae, which hedgewitch potionery doesn’t really account for.

There’s a knock at the door. “Ah, that must be Hugo. Come in!”

Valeria instinctively body-blocks the leg from view.

It is not Hugo. In walk 3 white-clad ethicists. The gentleman at the front is in fancier robes – we suspect he’s the kind of fellow who has tenure – and he wears a powdered judge’s wig atop his mask. We immediately don’t like it. His two companions peer around the lab – one has a jeweler’s loupe built into the lens of his mask, and the other is carrying a big chime with runes carved into it, clearly a magic item of some sort.

“Dr Thorpe,” the leader intones.

“Sorbus,” she replies disdainfully.

“I see you have guests, is now a bad time?”

“Is it ever a good time?” Emily makes a point of tending to her samples and beakers busily.

“I suppose not. We have come to ask a few follow-up questions. Have you been visited at all by Professor Matthias Macker? Has he followed up on the project you were working on together?”

“I told you, no! I had no potions strong or precise enough for what he needed, and he’s never spoken to me since. That was months ago!”

“And no one has seen him since then. You understand why we need to know what you discussed.”

“Yeah, not since you quarantined the whole surgical wing!”

“That is not what I’m asking about. Has Macker’s assistant Greta Ruble visited you?”

“No. She’s a good kid, though, don’t hassle her.”

“We are simply making sure she is not a danger.”

Emily sputters angrily. “A danger to who?!”

“I cannot tell you that.” He turns to Valeria. “Kyr, it is always a pleasure to see a member of the Order here. I suppose if you’re here we can be assured nothing… unethical is happening,” he says, unpleasantly oily. “I am Professor Rigmor Sorbus of the College of Ethics; I lecture on legal and judicial ethics. These are my assistants, Charles and Pippin.”

Valeria bows with the precise degree of politeness required. “Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance. In these times of mobilization, it falls to us as ethicists to supervise our colleagues’ noble efforts. Please, I implore you: if you see anything untoward or suspiciously unusual, I request you report it to the nearest representative of the College of Ethics.”

Emily butts in. “What happened to Eric Pelbort, his other assistant?”

“Mr. Pelbort has transferred to the College of Ethics and is assisting us with some research. We will let you know if that changes.” He tells her dismissively. “Kyr Argent, the College of Ethics has always been proud of our long association with the Order, and I would like to extend our deepest condolences for the tragedy of the Crusade. Should you have need of any assistance whatsoever, do not hesitate to ask. Our offices are on the satellite campus across the bay. If you were to visit, I’m sure many would love to speak to a paladin of the Order of the Rose.”

“We have business here, but I might be able to make time to stop by,” she equivocates.

“Very well. I will let you all get back to whatever it is you’re doing with that leg,” Sorbus says, turning neatly on his heel and taking his leave, his toadies hurrying in his wake.

(Yes, you guessed it: That was Professor Rowan, with his Tort Wig and his assistants Pip Loupe and Chime Charles.)

“Those guys give me the creeps,” Emily grumbles. “They used to be fine, but lately they’ve been doing this whole inquisitor act.”

Vigdor’s always known these guys as douchey blowhards. But now they’re douchey blowhards with AUTHORITY.

There’s always been a divide between Ethics and the other three colleges roughly the size of the harbor! The sciences don’t believe in debate, they believe in experimentation! Anyone who can spend an entire week talking without action is wasting time and breath. The College of Medicine thinks even less of them – they just get in the way of progress!

(IRL we all respect medical ethics, but Sturmhearst WAS founded on a fine tradition of graverobbing and leeches.)

Vigdor is primarily a surgeon, or he was, when he had two fully functional hands. (Two players at once: “HE GOT DR STRANGED!”) He had quite a few classes with Macker, the chair of the surgery department. Most people didn’t like the guy, except his surgical grad students who would defend him to the death. A bit of a hardass about proper procedure, but that’s probably not a bad quality for a surgeon. He was a local institution, so it’s pretty alarming he’s somehow gone rogue.

“His whole lab was quarantined?”

“The whole teaching wing, actually,” Emily tells us.

“Are there people in there? Some kind of sickness?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Ethics just put guards outside the labs and blocked everyone from going in. They’ve done it to a couple places around the school recently. The excuse is that someone was doing ‘unsafe experimentation’ that’s ‘poisoned the area’ or something?”

Wack. “How long have these quarantines lasted?”

“They don’t really end? A couple stopped after a few months, but some have been there for a year! Nobody goes in or out. Sometimes the white coats go in, but it’s pretty rare and they don’t stay long.”

“Is that what all the guards are for? Where’d they all come from?” Vigdor asks.

“Medicine used to be the ones, uh, hiring them.” (A quick insight roll notes that she hesitates on the phrase “hiring.”) “Lots of them still answer to whoever they were originally assigned to. But recently Dean Chidor from the College of Ethics took over that whole program, so a lot of the newer ones answer primarily to the ethicists. I mean, they all dress the same, so it’s kinda hard to tell? I haven’t asked a lot of questions, I’ve been trying to keep my head down since the whole thing with Macker.”

“What actually happened with him?”

“He’d been acting weird for a while,” she confides as she starts sticking pins in the leg and wiring them to a voltage generator. “He’d been working on something, some kind of extreme surgery – I think he was looking into a method of surgically removing Curse corruption. He was hitting roadblocks, though; he called in me and Alma Ulmus, who’s a College of Medicine bigwig.”

“Yeah, we met her in Bad Herzfeld!”

“I heard she’s here again, stalking around the halls complaining about funding. She knows more about his project than I do. Anyway, Macker sent me requirements for a healing potion he was gonna administer as part of some surgical procedure. I couldn’t get anything as powerful or precise as he needed. I’m a thaumochemist; I don’t know medicine that well. So it was beyond me to do that amount of gross tissue damage repair as controllably as they wanted it. I mean, I made some pretty nice innovations as far as the theory of potioncrafting, I’m hoping to get published as soon as it goes to peer review.

“But I couldn’t do what he needed, and eventually I got shut out of the project. Then one day he vanished. Alma set off for Bad Herzfeld and Macker stopped coming out of his lab. His assistants were still going in and out, but not long after that, the ethicists quarantined the place.”

“Has anyone else been quarantined?” Valeria asks.

“People from all three colleges got hit. I dunno about other ethicists, I haven’t heard about them quarantining anything of their own. But everyone else has. A group of engineering students were building a defense system to be deployed out to the Scar, and all of them got quarantined. Here in my department, Dr. Vilman – remember him? Stupid goatee, did a lot of stuff with crystals? – got shut down. Sometimes they quarantine the whole lab; sometimes they just shut down a project and everyone working on it gets a ‘guest lecture position’ over in Ethics. Sorbus said they got one of Macker’s assistants, Eric Pelbort. He had another one, Greta Ruble, but I guess she’s given them the slip.”

Emily’s got experiments to do on that leg, so we’ll let her get to it. As we head out, Gral asks one last question. “What’s up with those guards, by the way? Why do they only respond to those whistles?

“Uhhhh,” she says, as we fail our persuasion check. “They, er, don’t speak very good Valdian. Mostly foreigners, goliaths, the like. The whistles get their attention.”

Gral sighs and doesn’t push it. Vigdor’s already making plans to pickpocket a whistle. Valeria, since she has a direct invite to talk to the ethicists, considers the unheard-of paladin approach of Just Asking Them Directly.

First, though, Vigdor wants to check out the quarantine of Macker’s lab; he knew that professor well, and we’re all curious what’s been going down.

We walk on over to the surgical wing to case the joint. There’s a single owl guard blocking the hallway, presiding over a small barricade. A pleasant sandwich board sign states “Area quarantined by College of Ethics, apologies for the inconvenience.”

We try to walk in and the enormous guard holds out a hand to stop us. Shoshana tries to wiggle around him, like a cat trying to get at your dinner, but he impassively blocks her every move.

Gral tries a smoother approach. He begins with small talk; the guard doesn’t even twitch. He starts asking prying questions about the surgical ward. No response. Fine, then: he switches to Orcish, a sinister undertone weaving through his voice as he uses Words of Terror.

An insight roll reveals completely unchanged body language.

“Either they’re immune to fear or not a humanoid,” Gral reports back. “Not a single emotion. Definitely not goliath mercenaries.”

“Tryin’ to talk your way into the surgical wing?” says another chatty passerby. “Good luck. They got all the medical cadavers locked up in there and they won’t let us in.”

(Cadavers? Oh shit, we bet that’s the guard factory, theorize the players.)

“Oh, are you a med student?”

“Yeah. I work with Professor Herberts, or I used to, anyway. We needed a couple cadavers to do this comparison study about spleens; we got some weird ones from out in the wood, we compare spleens to see if place with thing don’t worry about it; need control spleen. And then these BIG DUMB IDIOTS wouldn’t let us in, and Herbert got transferred to the College of Ethics all of a sudden. He’s been gone a couple months.”

“How long do professors usually transfer for?” asks Gral.

“I mean, they usually pop over to give a lecture or two and come back by the end of the day.”

(Vigdor happens to remember that the College of Ethics also runs an asylum. They live in a big spooky castle and do dissections with guts and stuff, it can do a number on your head! Some of the ethicists have branched into the field of psychology. No reason to mention this when people are having extended stays on the ethics campus, of course…)

The student shrugs. “I gotta get to lecture. If you manage to get in there, any chance you can bring me back a couple spleens?”

We wave goodbye noncommittally, though Vigdor insists he can pop a spleen out of a corpse like a yolk from an egg. He’s a good surgeon!

Anyway, Vigdor went to school here, and the dice are on his side; he knows a side path through an old abandoned classroom into the surgical suite. He pops the lock on the door easily; all the undergrads used to go this way when slipping into lecture late, to get past the TA keeping track of tardies.

The guard is in earshot but facing the other direction, and he’s not even blinking, much less scanning around. Gral casts Silence on us and our very clanky party slips by easily.

Shosh sticks her head into the TA’s office. Nothing really stands out, but she swipes some interesting-looking notes from the desk drawers to look at later.

Meanwhile, Gral and Vigdor go into Macker’s office. The desk is an absolute mess, which is very unlike the guy Vigdor used to know. There are wheeled chalkboards crammed into the office, covered in scribbles and anatomical diagrams. Paging through the notes and glancing over the chalkboard, Vigdor makes a decent medicine check and can at least figure out what problem Macker was working on.

Based on what Dr. Emily told us, Macker’s trying to develop a surgical procedure. The issue is that whatever he’s doing would cause so much physical trauma that it’d kill the patient, and he’s looking for some way to prevent that. There are lists of healing options: formulas, spells, potions, nonmagical stabilization methods to keep the patient alive while various tissues are extracted from the body.

Gral’s unimpressed. Healing methods? That’s pretty tame for forbidden knowledge.

To Vigdor’s experienced eyes, this stuff looks mega-advanced and highly experimental, but Gral’s right – it’s not anything you’d scramble to censor.

Weirdly enough, the place doesn’t look ransacked, only disheveled and a little dusty. Macker’s notes haven’t been moved since he was here. Maybe this isn’t what the ethicists were after?

We head to cadaver storage while Valeria keeps watch. Cadaver storage is creepy as hell, but only because it’s, y’know, a room full of cadavers. A lot of the bodies, kept stable with Gentle Repose, appear to be Cursed, but that’s hardly weird. What’s so crazy they’d keep it hidden from everyone?

Vigdor opens the door to the dissection labs, Gral’s Silence deadening any ominous warning he might have had from the room beyond. Yes, the table here’s been recently used, and the bizarre symbols scrawled on the chalkboards have spilled onto the surrounding floor and walls, but Vigdor’s eyes are drawn to where the chalkboard peels away like skin to reveal a strange, multicolored, impossible space. The floor begins to take the shape of a stone hand that projects out into the shimmering void, joining a daisy-chain of enormous hands that form a walkway out to a marble platform floating in space.

Gral takes his Silence spell with him and runs to get Valeria.

Eyes starry, watching entire worlds and impossible shapes spinning through iridescent mists, Vigdor takes his first heady hit of Key taint.

As we cut session, Valeria considers that the ethicists may actually have a point.

[thebadchoicemachine]

Oh oh for the character song ask thingy maybe ranboo or bbh :]

BBH: Blood Moon

Ranboo: Freaking Out (Also, Too All Girl )

Blood Moon

I gave my lover fruit to eat, But she left it at her feet. She is always doing that, doing that. She is always doing that.

"My God, " I said, "I cannot share. And you can't leave it lying there. You are always doing that, doing that. You are always doing that."

And so I Wander willows. Scattered pits Take room behind your cracking lips. They are always doing that, doing that. They are always doing that.

Will cocky runes say mend and dwell, To grow within our shackled cells. They are always doing that, doing that. I see flowers doing that.

And so I... So, our rotting floor. I am sure you craved me once before; When I think of all the fruit I've found, And how easily you left it on the ground.

The Hunter's Moon was bleeding red, The night you left our thorny bed. You were always, always... You were always...

Last night I dreamt I kissed your feet, And held you on our dusty sheets. I am always doing that, doing that. I am always doing that.

And so I... And so I... And so I...

And so I... So, our rotting floor. I am sure you craved me once before; When I think of all the fruit I've picked, And fed to you just so you could spit it out.

I gave my lover fruit to eat, But she left it at her feet. She is always doing that, doing that. She is always doing that.

•••

Freaking Out

I got this feeling, I'm losing you. And it's got me reeling, I need a clue. Got my heart burning, I lost my spell. Can't see you turning up. This looks like hell.

I can't fight this feeling. It's not in my head. I know it was something I did, baby. I can't fight this feeling. I'm out of control. Got to get back to the life that I know!

I'm not freaking out. But it feels like time is running out. How did this shit come about? I'm not freaking out. But I'm afraid, Afraid of losing you.

If that's what it comes to, baby. If that's what it comes to, baby. It's all you gotta say to me. If that's what it comes to, baby. If that's what it comes to, baby. It's all you gotta say to me.

I just keep onto my tongue, Until all you want is done. Alright. And you just wanna leave me. Oh- yeah. Oh- c'mon!

I can't fight this feeling. It's not in my head. I know it was something I did, baby. I can't fight this feeling. I'm out of control. Got to get back to the life that I know!

I'm not freaking out. But it feels like time is running out. How did this shit come about? I'm not freaking out. But I'm afraid, Afraid of losing you.

If that's what it comes to, baby. If that's what it comes to, baby. It's all you gotta say to me. If that's what it comes to, baby. If that's what it comes to, baby. It's all you gotta say to me.

[mogadichu]

SOAST DRAFT TWO CHAPTER ONE

Sahn Darru created a story the day his life ended.

He didn’t physically write it. The words were scribbled haphazardly in his mind. Not his best work, but it passed the time as he pushed his little raft to his destination. Tuma and Moyane were furious when they saw the horrors their children had inflicted upon the perfect world, and they came down to confront the people of silver and gold. Sahn repeated it again and again before finally succumbing to write it down in his scroll, already a compound of records and tragedies and fairy tales. After nearly ten years, it was finally bursting at the seams. He hoped he would get another for his birthday, if the monks felt particularly generous. If I pluck and twist this a bit more, he thought, scribbling along the scroll’s edges, maybe I’ll recite this to Ari tonight. He snapped back to attention as the raft buckled against the reeds clogging the sides of Rin River, stabbing the long pole into the rocky bottom to steady himself. The land on either side of him was sprawling rice terraces and grain fields, milk-white umi trees and curved tile roofs. No mountain, not even a hill large enough to block the view to the blurred line of the horizon.

Devoid of mountains and magic.

Sahn shoved the thought away the moment it appeared, keeping to the task at hand. The temple curved into view, tattered and lopsided and bleached with sun. A gargantuan hole plagued the center of the roof, the tiles stripped, the deep green faded to a dull grey. A chunk of it fell away as Sahn made port, throwing a pile of rope on the ground to anchor. “Sister Maudra,” he called. No answer. He ascended the cracked, moss-ridden steps two at a time. His heart was a drum hammering faster and faster as he neared the open threshold. He called again. Still no answer.

He recalled all the times he had come to this temple with his cousin. Then, it had been a dim edifice of wood and murals, lit only by a single wall of glowing candles. Now, sunlight smothered the place in obscene brightness. The putrid smell of mold and moisture and sewage assaulted Sahn’s nostrils. Like the roof, another hole swallowed the middle of the room, the staircase nothing more than a pile of driftwood. The delicate furniture was overturned, covered in a thick layer of dust. The wall of candles was now a wall of wax dried mid-fall. Curtains of cobwebs fell from the rotting timbers, and everywhere, mold was eating its troubles away.

What in Moyane’s name happened to this place?

The wood sagged with each step Sahn took deeper inside. He called out once more. “Sister Maudra.”

Finally, there was an answer. “Go away,” the voice squawked from the lower level.

Sahn fell to his hands and knees, peering out over the hole’s edge to the pile of rubble below. “May I please speak with you, Sister?”

“What?” Sister Maudra appeared behind the ruined staircase, also covered in grime. She looked smaller than Sahn remembered, hunched over, her back curving in a perfect arch. All but a few strands of her gray hair held in her bun; the rest hung over her wrinkled face like the leaves of a willow tree. Everything about her was gray, her hair, her eyes, her robes. Even her skin looked alarmingly colorless. And, like the rest of the temple, she too was covered in a layer of dust, which she fruitlessly brushed off as she glowered at the open ceiling. “This blasted place. I tell you, it’s trying to kill me.”

Sahn gasped. “That bit of roof didn’t fall on you, did it?”

“Would I be up here, allowing you to waste my time, if it did?” The old woman shot back, rolling her eyes.

Sahn flushed, wringing the strap of his satchel in his fists. The creak of the leather whispered a rhythm. Just leave, just leave, just leave. “I don’t suppose you remember me,” he said.

“Yes, yes, little Darru boy, I remember you.” Dust flew off her fingers as Sister Maudra waved him off, turning back to the staircase. “I’m old, not simple. I’m sorry about your brother’s death,” she added haphazardly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Sahn reached for her bony shoulder. “Sister-”

Maudra spun around, dust swirling around her like a gown. “Three moons, boy. What do you want?”

In answer, Sahn carefully pulled three scrolls from his satchel, catching flecks of parchment as they fell through the carved wood covers. “These scrolls are falling apart. Please, would you mend them?”

Maudra’s face immediately softened, as it always did at the sight of a scroll in distress. Gently, she slid the cover off one and slowly unrolled it, examining the tears and holes and faded letters. Sahn rubbed his nose to hide his smile. A mother did not examine a child’s wound the way Sister Maudra examined a damaged scroll. She tisked, sighed, and said, “Well, then, we’ll just have to do something about this, shall we?”

 Behind the ruined staircase, another stood firm, leading down to the lower level. Maudra sped past the heap of wood and furniture fluff to an adjacent corridor, her silhouette scuttling along the stripes of orange light that sliced through the pitch black. Despite her size and age, she moved like a trotting dragoat, and Sahn had to jog to catch up to her. “Where is Sister Mysha?” Sahn asked, expecting to catch her making candles in one of the dark rooms, waiting for stray lemurs to hop over his ankles toward food that the Daughters of the Moons laid about. “And Sister Tilla? Is she in the-?”

“They’re dead,” Maudra barked without a pause.

The breath was punched out of Sahn’s lungs. “Oh,” he said, his stomach sinking. He should have expected that. Sister Mysha and Sister Tilla had been over ninety years old, the last he’d seen them. But indeed, the temple was eerily silent, the halls devoid of lemurs and droppings. It shouldn’t have hurt so much, like his chest was twisting into a knot. How much had changed since the last time he’d stepped through these halls?

“Is Opal here?” Sahn asked tentatively, an unwanted glimmer of hope warming his belly.

Maudra did not answer. “I did not mean to be so abrasive when you arrived,” she instead tossed over her shoulder, “but you caught me at a most inopportune time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I haven’t got long in this world, you know. I can’t be wasting my precious seconds entertaining a junior archivist.”

“I understand.” But Sahn wasn’t entirely listening. He had slowed to a sluggish pace, peering through the spaces in the wooden planks from where the light came. It was a wide vestibule, blinding with the light of hundreds of candles. Dripping black markings cluttered every inch of the walls, written large and small, forward, backward, upside down and, he assumed, right side up. He stepped closer, squinting to read them, when a silhouette stepped in front of him, blocking his view.

Maudra glowered up at him through her matted hair. “Do you now?” Sahn smiled, but she continued to glower. “People don’t go in there. Do you understand?”

“Oh… then… who painted those runes?” Sahn asked, huffing an awkward laugh. Sister Hada stared at him as though he had just inquired about the taste of her toenails. “You said that people don’t go in there, and you are people…” The seconds stretched on. “You are people, aren’t you?” Maudra scowled. “I’m making a joke,” Sahn finally whispered.

“I know,” Maudra grumbled. “It wasn’t funny.” She grabbed hold of his cloak and dragged him along down the corridor.

What once was the temple’s scriptorium was now a home for cobwebs, dark and damp but for a single candle that burned dangerously low. “Help me move these,” said Maudra, gesturing to the row of desks. Sahn joined them all together as she watched with hands on her hips, forming a long, narrow table. Then, he unrolled the scrolls down the table, stepping back as Maudra placed the scraps in their appropriate places. “Now,” she said, “name them.”

She remembered their old ritual. Sahn pointed to each one with pride. “The tale of Great Batti, the demigod who stole the seeds from the three moons to grow Luna buds in the human world. Lanai’s Song, the story of the singing grass. And a document of Bo-Min, the greatest orator in Kelshin history.”

Maudra squinted at each cover, narrowing her eyes at him when he was correct. “You need friends.”

“I already have one.”

She snorted but didn’t contradict him. Then, she set to work. Sahn pulled up a chair, his chin on his fist, watching her with a small smile. She moved slowly, deliberately, her nose almost touching the parchment, each swipe of the pungent wheat paste made with the greatest care. She was the only one in Kelsh who loved stories with the same fierceness that he did. No one could mend scrolls like she could. He wanted to learn, to fix the broken stories himself, but he enjoyed watching her work far too much.

The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable, but it allowed unwanted thoughts to whisper in Sahn’s ear. He leaned back past the table, staring off into the corridor. “What are those-?”

“Nothing for you to concern yourself with,” Maudra hissed. “Pass over the ink.”

The bottle on the table was empty, so Sahn retrieved a “fresh” one from one of the abandoned desks. “That looked like Old Kelshin,” Sahn pushed gently. “I know a few words in Old Kelshin. I could-”

“Ink.”

“Well, what about the hole through the temple? How in Moyane’s name did that-?”

“Ink,” Maudra screeched, her voice ricocheting off the walls.

Sahn dropped the bottle on the table, snapping his hand back as though she might bite him. The silence returned, Maudra rewriting the faded letters with an iron hand. Sahn wrote more notes in his cramped scroll, fighting to ignore the questions crowding the edge of his tongue. He scanned the scriptorium, grey with cobwebs and rot. His lungs burned with dust. Maudra thought she could avoid his curiosity with silence. But silence was Sahn’s power. It gave him time to hatch an idea, grow it, and let it nestle in his mind with a content sigh. “Tell me a story,” he said.

“Which one?” Maudra asked, softer now that stories were involved.

“Tell me about the Daughters of Moyane.” It was Sahn’s favorite story, the tale of the women rebellion. The Daughters of Moyane built the temple with their own hands, devoid of help or funds from the men of the High Council. Sahn and Jehra would weave spirit beads well into the night, listening to Sister Mysha recount their chants and songs.

“We wanted to create a line of spirit healers and failed,” said Maudra. “The end.” She fell silent. Sahn’s face fell.

“Well, what about the great wall of water that nearly flooded the island? You must have been alive when that happened. What was it like?”

“It was wet,” Maudra said bluntly, “and windy. A bit cold. I got some seaweed in my hair. The end.”

“I used to think you loved telling stories.”

“I used to think you were a mute. Right now, I wish that were the case.”

“Did the wall of water cause the hole in the roof?”

Maudra huffed incredulously. “Of course not.”

“Then what did?”

“It was the-” She caught herself just in time, her eyes narrowing into slits.

Sahn flushed. “I’m sorry. I really am. I just...” He trailed off, words dying before they could reach his tongue. Her grey eyes seemed to be staring through him, into him. He could not look away. He bit his lip, swallowing once, twice, three times. Don’t say it, he begged himself. Please don’t say it.

But, he did.

“Are you using magic?”

And there it was between them; the word. The word that would slice a sword through your throat. The word that brought the taste of iron and rot. It lay there like a dead thing among the ink and paste and parchment. Maudra’s face blanched. Suddenly, the silence in the room was deafening. “Did Bo-Sahn bring you here to spy on me?”

Sahn blinked. “What?”

“Three moons, that man just can’t wait for me to die, can he? He had to send his grandson to do his dirty work for him. Is that it?”

In an instant, Sahn’s surprised rotted into something so sudden and so violent that he held the corner of the table in a white-knuckle grip. Oh, moons, if Bo-Sahn found out…

If his parents found out…

If Kelsh found out what he had just said…

The weight of tears pressed behind his eyes. His heart hammered like a dancing drum, rapping painfully against his ribs. Once upon a time, the world was divided by silver and gold, for the sun and the moon lived in the sky as one. Those in Tuma’s light were bathed in gold, and in Moyane’s, silver. Sahn recited his story in his head, squeezing his eyes shut, wishing away the images that clawed at the edges of his mind, like a child wishing away a monster. Tuma’s golden children began to see Moyane’s silver as lesser beings. After all, what did they have but stars and darkness? Tuma was filled with light and joy, where everything was awake and alive. What they did not know, however, is that the silver children saw the golden ones as lesser, for they did not have the luxury of walking a moonlit field in the soft shades of starlight. Soon, a war was upon the children of Tuma and Moyane before either even realized.

Maudra watched him silently, evenly, waiting for his attack to subside. When it did, she asked again. “Are you here to spy on me or not?”

Sahn, with shaking hands and a dry mouth, met her eyes and said, “No.”

“Good.” She shoved the scrolls, now mended and dried, into his arms.

“Thank you,” he said, allowing her to lead him by the wrist back to the front door. When he was finally back outside, he doubled over, gasping in the fresh air, snorting the dust out of his lungs. Finally, his trembling melted away. “I’m so sorry. I-”

“Come back tomorrow,” Maudra grumbled. “Bring a broom.” Sahn nearly went limp with relief. He nodded, bowing. “Thank you, Sister. Thank you so…”

The door slammed.

“…much.”

[themaleficperformers-blog]

Chapter X: Leopold / Ronan

The infirmary was a tucked away in what seemed like the darkest part of the Institute. Rot walked along the hallway with defined purpose. The only light came from half-melted candles scattered on the windowsills, ledges and along the floor. It was a dark and eerie place, resonating more with a warlock's keep or a demon's cave than where the sick and injured came to lick their wounds.

After High Inquisitor Oswald had given his rhetorical masterpiece, Rot had lingered in the darkness of the ballroom. The little space he had chosen was nestled behind the grand staircase, partially hiding him for the annoying merriment. He had dusted off his suit, finally ridding his sleeves of whatever the werewolf had past to him, trying to think of a way out. He opened the top button of his shirt as the Inquisitor spoke, the silvery words barely reaching his ears.

Rot did not care for the speech. He knew why he had been summoned to the Institute, there was absolutely no need to spell it for him.

The only people that saw him, sulking in the corner, were those that past by. Small groups came now and again to go further down the hall, chuckling to themselves and glancing in his direction. At one point, a few Shadowhunters even stopped halfway up the staircase, craning their necks over the banister to catch a glimpse of the High Warlock of Toronto. They would not get to see him otherwise.

He was hiding. There was no use denying it. The Institute was the last place he wanted to be. He had no time for all of this, but it had to be done. So, as the crowds began to slowly dwindle away, Rot had left the security of the shadows and took to the main hall again.

He sighed heavily. The crowds had only gotten more and more energetic with time, spurred on by whatever the Nephilim were serving. One young Shadowhunter, with dark hair and enough power in his stature to knock even the biggest of men off their feet, could barely keep his balance. He came tumbling past Rot, his lips curved into a drunken smile. Idiot. Rot hadn't paid much heed to the High Inquisitor, but he felt that the reason for this gathering was not to have a festival. There were three Shadowhunters dead. Three of their own - if it was looked upon as an attack on the Shadow community in Toronto. This was not a time for fun and games.

As he moved towards the centre of the room, more careful now to avoid any interactions, he heard the large doors of the Institute burst open. He turned on his heels, tilting his head to the side as a flash of scarlet darted into the night. A red-headed women had thrown the doors wide open, running frantically down the steps of the Institute. She's no Cinderella, he thought. Besides, it wasn't even midnight yet and Cinderella didn't leave with a look of determination etched onto her face.

He glanced around the hall. No one had noticed, or if they had, they didn't want to show it. They were too enthralled by their festivities. Simple minded fools. Then, as he caught sight of the High Inquisitor, Ronan Hightower began to run too, tearing past Rot's line of sight, following the red-headed Shadowhunter with equal determination.

Hightower's movement meant trouble. It was why he had informed the High Inquisitor. It was why he was on his way to the infirmary. It was why suddenly, he got worried. A young mundane on her way home had been attacked by a vampire, who now had an arrow sticking out of his black heart for his bloodlust. But, the violent act had not gone unnoticed. This wasn't the first time Rot had heard talk of a vampire making such a blatant attempt at a bloodmeal. There were rumours that a vampire was among the suspects - a possible three-time murderer in their midst. No Child of the Night had responded to the Clave's call, which only added unwanted strength to the whispers behind closed doors. Whether this was attempted murder number four, soon to be marked XII, or simple a vampire desperate for fresh blood needed to be deciphered.

He pushed on the door of the infirmary, closing it behind him as he stepped inside. The mundane was lying on a bed, her skin already beginning to show the blue-red rosettes of deep-seated bruising. Beyond her was Hightower, dressed in traditional clothing. A hoodie and a tracksuit bottom. Rot shook his head, smirking mischievously. He had known the sophisticated style would never last. In front of him, his daughter, Clara, stood staring into his eyes.

Ronan’s eyes flickered up when the doors opened once more. Again? However, this time, instead of an unwelcomed burst of energy from frightened Shadowhunters, it was the High Warlock, Leopold Rot. Ronan knew him, not well, but enough to know that he never enjoyed meddling in Shadowhunter affairs.

Clara’s eyes lit up at the sight of the man, though. She had only seen photos of him - not the real deal.

“Rot,” Ronan said, nodding towards Stella’s body. “I assume you’re here to attend to the Mundane?”

“Hightower,” Rot nodded, smiling brightly, more at Clara than at Hightower himself. “You assume correctly. It wouldn’t be the most difficult of detections, now would it? But, I also want to speak to you. We have much to discuss.”

Rot made his way to the bed, looking down at the young girl. The bruises were deep, set into the tissues and far beneath the skin. It wouldn’t be difficult. A few small spells. A few angelic runes would have been sufficient had she been Nephilim, and he would never he been called.

“How are you, Littletower?” Rot asked, glancing at Clara, her lighting up at the attention.

“She’s fine.”

“I can talk, dad,” Clara butted in. “I’m good, thank you.” She gave Rot a slight bow, something Tilly must have taught her during their lessons. Most Shadowhunters bowed to people like Rot. Ronan understood why, exactly.

Ronan’s eyes flickered up to the clock resting on the wall. “Clara. It’s nearly midnight. You need to get to bed.”

“But I’m not tired.”

“And I don’t care. Go find Tilly, she’ll tuck you in. I’ll be up shortly.”

Clara protested a little longer, but eventually was sent on her way. Ronan sighed, closing the door behind her and locking he and Leopold in. He turned, folding his arms over his chest, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his arm when he did so. The deep scrape on his cheek was slowly beginning to fade due to the iratze.

“What would you like to discuss?” Ronan muttered.

Rot smiled and nodded his head at the young girl, as she was sent away, disheartened, by her father. Hightower didn’t realise how lucky he was with her - she was always a good child. As Clara left, Rot bent over the young mundane, examining her carefully with expert eye. She looked like she was sleeping peacefully, but Rot could she the pain that had been inflicted on her.

His fingers began to glow in response to a few sweet, lilting syllables in an ancient tongue, light rolling onto the girl. A sky-blue mist washed over her, the bruises beginning to fade. “What’s her name,” he asked, not glancing away from her. Hightower was a cold and as callous as always. Like Rot himself. “Does she have any internal injuries? I can’t sense any.”

Rot eventually looked up. He couldn’t avoid speaking to the Head of the Institute. He wanted to make a bristling comment, see how Ronan Hightower reacted to being an underling in his house. But, he held his tongue. They would have to work together.

“I need to talk to the person in charge about these murders; how I can help you,” Rot said, noting the grimace Hightower made. He was hurt, he just did not want to show it. “But, most importantly, about an uninvited guest who slipped by your shitty wards.”

Ronan tightened his jaw, pacing over to where Rot was hovering over the Mundane. He looked down at her, at the mist that had cleansed her wounds. Out of every Downworlder species, Warlocks were by far the most impressive, and the most useful.

“Her name is Stella Burke. As for internal damage, none that we are aware of.” He examined her face, still unsure of what the course of action would be when she finally opened her eyes. If she ever did… He supposed that was the one good thing about not being Head for the time being: he didn’t have to make the decision.

“Oswald has retired for the night,” he finally muttered, stepping back so that he sat in his chair once more. “So, if you have anything to say, you can say it to me, and I will inform him.”

Rot nodded his head slowly, his magic pouring over the mundane. He could feel it falter, somewhere across her chest. As the bruises cleared, he gently ran his fingertips across her ribcage. The bones seemed to be okay, but he could sense that something was amiss. His magic seemed to dip somewhere along a rib, dropping like a stone into a crevice. One broken bone, he thought, the Shadowhunters must have missed that. Another quick utterance, full of dark sounds, forced the bones to mend themselves.

Flexing his fingers, the joints popping, Rot turned away to face Hightower, “Ms. Burke will be fine. She will recover in due time. She should be awake by the morrow, if not, the afternoon. Her side may be tender, that vampire had broken a rib. Your healers need to go back to the Shadow Academy.”

He moved across the room, sitting down gracefully in the chair beside Hightower. He took one last look at Stella Burke, pleased with his handiwork. It wasn’t common for him to cast magic on mundanes. For some spells, it was harder. Humans generally did not let the magic take. He put his left leg over his right knee and leaned back. “Yes, Oswald has taken over hasn’t he. How is that going down? Lots of chatter, you know.” Rot smirked - he knew this got under Hightower’s skin. He could see the jaw tensed tight.

“But, if you were to ask me opinion, he’s not in charge here. He never will be. I know him of old, he’ll end with a jade’s trick. You are the Head of the Toronto Institute. Fuck Oswald,” Rot explained, “He’s not from around here. He has no idea what he’s doing. It’s why I’m still with you, in this ghastly place.”

Ronan chuckled, tilting his head back. “Well, that makes one person on my side.” Although, if that one person is the High Warlock of Toronto, it couldn’t be all bad.

“We don’t really know enough about the murders to put many people to work,” he said, feeling the wound in his cheek fade completely now. “We’ve mostly been questioning those who could be suspicious, and sending out spare Shadowhunters on watch. We know the Night Children are involved now, at the very least.”

Rot smiled. He wasn’t expecting Hightower to chuckle. It sounded almost foreign. He remembered their first meeting, on the steps of the Institute. He had barely gotten the man to speak at all. Nevertheless, he nodded in agreement, “Unfortunately, it most certainly looks that way. Not a single one of them decided to show up this evening, and then, Ms. Burke gets attacked.”

Rot threw his head back, moving his fingers through his hair, “The Night Children will come looking for you. One of them has been killed. The leader of the clan will be demanding reasons, even if they are responsible for the murders. Vampires love to keep their appearances so sunny.”

Rot laughed, “Can we throw Oswald to them? Please? I would not mind throwing him on the martyr’s sword. It would help us both.”

Ronan didn’t look back to Rot. He simply kept his eyes trained in front of him, in Stella’s general direction. Something about the entire thing felt off. Vampires killed before, sure, but they were never alone… and the numbers. None of this felt normal. Ronan had dealt with murders before, but it was always quickly figured out and rectified.

“I…” Ronan caught his words in his mouth, unsure if he should finish his thought. It was a horrible thought to have, he knew, but what else could be done? “I think we may have to wait until more has been done on the murderer’s part. We can’t move forward without any more information. The Fey aren’t talking, the Werewolves say they haven’t heard of anything like this. We can see about confronting the Vampires, but… it’d be risky. We’d also need Oswald’s green light.”

Oswald’s green light? Has Hightower been clipped? Rot glanced in his direction. Hightower was right, in one regard. Rot understood the dark thought that broke the surface of both their minds. It had struck Rot way sooner, when the second murder had happened. Whoever the murderer was, they were killing and marking their prey. The markings would not come to an end unless the perpetrator was apprehended, or they simply ran out of numbers.  

“I am not suggesting you confront anyone,” Rot advised, keeping his cool. He steeled his voice, like he always did when things needed to get done. “We have no idea what the fuck is going on. Not a clue, Hightower. That vampire might have just been attracted to Ms. Burke in her little outfit, and went too far. We don’t know. But what I can tell you, is that the Fey possibly know more than they are willing to admit. One of the fairfolk attended this evening’s soiree, didn’t she? Lunaria, outcast of the Court?”

Ronan nodded. He didn’t know much about where Lunaria stood with the Court, but he had a feeling she wasn’t welcomed warmly, seeing as Sol was an ex lover of hers.

“She was here, yes. I spoke with her briefly.” He looked back over to Rot now. He had somewhat of a distant look in his eye. Something he noticed with Warlocks that had aged over a few hundred years. “I had a feeling she wasn’t telling me everything, but I don’t think she was lying. Still, we can’t cut the Fey out completely.”

“You do not need to worry about faeries and lies,” Rot said plainly, his eyes fixed on a distant spot. “Faeries cannot lie, that is a universal truth. But, there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. They must always tell the truth, however, they have their tricksy ways to get around that physiological weakness.” Rot sighed, his mind rolling back to the mercurial presence he had felt, just after Hightower and his red-haired friend had taken to Toronto’s streets.

“The truth is subject to what each person believes. I believe you have a cold stone for a heart, which is not true. But, I believe it. So, as a Fey, I could tell that truth and not be bound by natural laws. I believe Lunaria knows something - or knows something, she does not yet know she knows. That is partly why Duke Sol came to see her this evening, that silvery-eyed bastard. Slipped right under your defences and disappeared before I could get to him.”

Ronan furrowed his eyebrows about Rot’s ‘cold’ comment. That was the second time in less than an hour. He grunted, shaking his head, but perked it back up at the sound of Duke Sol’s name… and presence at the Institute.

“How…? No, that is impossible,” Ronan said, shaking his head. “Duke Sol was not invited, and the only way into the Institute is through the front doors. The Wards would keep anyone else away.”

“He was here,” Rot spat, bile rising in the back of his throat. Duke Sol cut no ice with him. None. He tricked too many of his kind in the last few years, since the day Leopold Rot was named High Warlock of Toronto. “He arrived just after you and the lady in the inappropriately big hat went out to play hero for our damsel in distress.” He thrust his head in the direction of the sleeping mundane.

“He was on the first floor balcony. He’d been leaning against the railing. I could smell it. Oh, if I had caught him,” Rot mumbled, a sharpness to the steel of his voice, “I would have ripped him from his stupid Seelie Court in Allan Gardens.”

Rot’s fists clenched, his nails digging into his palms. The dull pain triggered his relaxation, leaning back further in the chair. “I told you, Hightower. Your wards are shit! If he wanted in, he’s powerful enough to get his wish. Even, if only for a second.”

Ronan nodded to himself, his teeth grinding on each other. He’d been told countless times that they would ware out if he continued to do so, but the habit was unbreakable. He turned his head from Rot, exhaling slowly.

“I need to attend to my daughter. So, if you are done here, I ask that you make your leave.” He stood up, moving over to the large double doors, unlocking them. “If you learn of anything regarding the murders, do not hesitate to inform us.”

Rot bit hard on his tongue. He had let his emotions take control, his deep untrust of those around him seeping into his words and his actions. He sighed softly, shaking his head. “Of course, absolutely, of course. You have my full support, Hightower. I shall not detain you any longer.”

He stood slowly, offering Ronan Hightower a gentle smile. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little loonie coin. He flick it from his thumb into the air, “Catch.”

As the coin arched, it began to glow. It shone brightly in the room, giving off a brilliant, white phosphorescence. It always reminded Rot of fireflies - it was why he loved the trick.

“Give that to young Clara,” he whispered, “Tell her it’s a gift from me.”