Pigs Are Good People

When I first met Nigel, he was this red-haired kid with simple robes and an old dagger and a knack for magic. It was Shadowdale, and we were in a bar on the same night. We’d met there, bumped into each other vying for refills, and before long we were exploring caves under the town and stirring up trouble. It was, I guess, my first “adventure.” His, too, from what I could tell. He was smart and clever – two different things, I’ve learned – and carefree. We were so young, then.

Gods, but we were young.

Fast forward a few years. We’d been through the whole business in Daerlun, with the Talonan priestess who’d been Llannen’s roommate back in her school days. We’d dealt with the threats to Arabel, we’d gotten away from that awful Lich in that shadowed tower off the wagon roads in the Dales. We’d lost Holly after she took off into the sewers with a bad case of lycanthropy and we’d… well, you get the picture. The talking sword, the dopplegangers, everything. By then we were known as The Flatliners because that’s what we kept doing everywhere we went. It wasn’t a good day if we didn’t brush against Death in a dark alley or a dim cave. We’d made the mistake of stepping through a magic mirror somewhere in the wilds and stepped out far, far under the land: The Underdark.

It was there that we lost Nigel, in some backwater cave, on the run from some damn thing or another. He’d cast a simple fireball that had turned back on him, the magic gone all wrong, and in a flash of pain and light he simply wasn’t there anymore. There were a pair of smoking boots where he’d stood. We thought he was dead.

Fast-forward again, this time another five years. Rock and I get summoned to Sess’uadra to meet with Berol and there’s Nigel in his company. Hugs were exchanged, we tried to catch up. Nigel was more tight-lipped than before, more stern, more concerned with payouts and the here-and-now. He still had that shock of red hair, but he was… different. All his magic turned to fire, now, even the spells that should have come out ice or lightning or whatever. He wouldn’t tell us where he’d been, either, except to say that he was held as a slave by the Drow for several years. He’d just escaped a few weeks before, made it to the surface, found his way to civilization and the care of a stranger – Berol, it turned out.

We didn’t pressure him because… well, because you don’t press too hard when you touch the long-dead. You don’t try to force anything because you lost them so easily the last time and you don’t want to lose them again.

All this is important. Just remember it for now.

Right before we left to finish exploring the Embassy, Nigel cast a spell to hide the Font from sight – magical or normal. We can see it, but no one else can, and no one else can scry to find it or otherwise learn its location. It’s a new spell Nigel just learned. His magic is just a little stronger than mine – he can reach heights I can’t – and this was one of the new things he was able to do.

That part is also important.

On to other matters at hand, though. We wrapped up our exploration of the ossuary in the Embassy by discovering a staircase down into utter darkness. A quick conference led us to decide that we should finish exploring the surface level before we moved on into the basement. With that, we started exploring slowly and carefully. At first we didn’t find anything much worth noting – a room where they stored jars of the sickly-sweet nectar the jackal-headed men would sit and drink, a few dusty store rooms. We found an office, with a safe that held a bag of holding in it and, on exploring that, we found a few gold bars, a few gems and a ceremonial head-dress that looked just sufficiently ornate to denote a middle-manager in the Mulhorandi heirarchy. The desk, the ink well and the cash in the safe led us to decide this was probably the Embassy’s accountant. We stashed the stuff amongst our things and kept going, finding the barracks where the embassy’s residents once lived – when they were living. The rooms were barren and decayed, anything not made of stone having been rendered to dust thousands of years ago. One room was locked and trapped, however, and on getting past its door we found an elaborately preserved apartment of almost royal appointments. We started to poke around inside, but then the ceiling turned into a terrible monster – all mouths and squidgy bits – that had to be killed with a quick fight. This, we figured, was where they put those who had to die, or a false prize left for would-be looters.

A little more exploration, and we had worked our way almost to the very back of the complex. We had started to believe we would find nothing else of value in this place, but soon we came across a large set of intact doors with an evil set of runes inscribed across them in vivid, purple ink: runes of pain, death, madness. Whatever was inside they wanted kept inside, it was apparent, and so we of course decided we had to see it for ourselves. Rather than try to deal with the door, however, we walked around to a side wall and with a spell I simply melted part of the wall away.

A shuffling and a groan greeted us from the other side, and a voice choked with dust and years rumbled out in ancient Mulhorandi: “Who disturbs this servant of Osiris with foul light? Shutter your lamps, I beg you, as there is something in that light that unbinds my soul at its touch!”

We all looked at Rock, whose sword had been enchanted by Adric – the priest of light whose spells pack a special punch against the undead.

“Are you friendly?” I called out, casting Tongues on myself so that I could be understood.

“I wish to harm no one,” the voice said, “But please, contain that light!”

We signaled to Rock to sheath his sword, and he slapped an alchemical sunrod against the ground to create light that wouldn’t harm the undead. As he did, I cast a spell on each of the others so that they, too, could converse with the being inside the room.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Chul’Tok,” he rasped, “And I am the Ambassador.”

We all looked at one another in the silence, and studied the room beyond for a moment: obviously a chapel, and in its ancient, stone pews lay the bones of many people who had died there as though sitting in a service.

“Are you undead?”

“I am a mummy,” the voice replied, and as we edged into the room we saw him standing in the far corner, having tried to escape the light of Rock’s sword. “I am the representative of Osiris in this place.”

“Okay,” I said, as bluntly as possible, “But we just fought the Ambassador yesterday.”

“You mean the ambassador of Set,” Chul’Tok said, voice solemn. “He is a wicked being, and his people seek only death and destruction and chaos.”

We conferenced again, very quickly, and then resumed our interview. In the time that we spoke, his features became more apparent as he moved with greater trust into the light of Rock’s alchemical torch: a mummy, true to his word, wrapped in ceremonial bandages and wearing an elaborate set of armor, arms, rings, jewelry and head-gear. He looked… well, he looked like something in a Mulhorandi museum.

He looked like living history.

“How long have you been here?” I asked him.

“I do not know,” he answered. “I have been here since the government changed, and we were sealed in by the worshipers of Set.” Chul’Tok’s eyes narrowed, and then he asked, “Are you Netherese?” His eyes fell on Rock and myself and then Badl – still in the form of a Dire Bear – and said, “And… are you related to the elves? What manner of creatures are you?”

“The Netherese Empire fell – literally – several thousand years ago,” I sighed. “The nation you were sent to is long gone. There’s nothing but desert for a thousand miles in any direction. We are here as… ”

“Archaeologists,” Nigel said.

“Yes. And we encountered the Ambassador – the other Ambassador – and killed him yesterday. A different band of soldiers, against whom we are also working, destroyed his minions at the same time.” Rock filled in the rest of this, and we looked to Chul’Tok for a reaction.

“Does Mulhorand still live?”

“Yes,” I said. “We,” and I gestured at Rock, “Were there just a few years ago. Mulhorand is alive and well and the Setites do not, that I know of, rule it. Horus seems to be their chief god now.”

“As would make sense,” the Ambassador intoned. I was very confused, and he was quick to figure that out. “Our system of government is… different,” he explained. “Osiris and his followers rule for a time. Then Set comes to power and overthrows us. Then, in time, Horus avenges Osiris. In time, the cycle begins anew.”

“Well…” I shrugged, finally. “I’m sorry that the Ambassador to Set is dead, but he was very, very dangerous.”

“And you were wise to destroy him.” Chul’Tok wasn’t exactly shaking our hands and buying a round from the bar, but he was opening up to us a little.

“So were you always a mummy?”

“No, I was a man,” Chul’Tok said. “Until the Setites came – the Ambassador was also a man – and murdered many of us and usurped our power. I and many of the Osirians were locked in this room, and so we performed the rite which made me what I am now so that I could be preserved in my mission. I knew that, in time, the wheel would turn.”

“So what do you do now?”

“I will return to Mulhorand to deliver my report. If they decide that this place must still be protected, I will return and resume my duties. If not, I will fulfill whatever tasks might be given me there. I will need to know in what direction to walk.”

“Wait… walk?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I must return and give my report. It is my duty.”

“But…” I tried to be as tactful as possible. “You can’t walk to Mulhorand. You’ll be killed.”

“Undead,” Rock said slowly, “Are not popular in the world.”

“95% of the mummies in the world are evil – Undead in general, for that matter.” Badl spoke to him in his rumbly bear voice. “The armies of many nations would march to stop you in your journey. They would not understand.”

“Undead are evil now? Even mummies?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Very evil. That’s part of why we were so ready to destroy the Ambassador of Set.”

Then Chul’Tok said something which has lodged in my mind ever since: “It is a tragedy that the magic of immortality is used for evil in these days, and not used to preserve wisdom instead.”

We were, I think, a little stunned by the conversation so far. Finally I blurted out something I realized we might not have long to ask, given he was already asking directions to Mulhorand: “Your Grace, are you familiar with something called The Font?”

Chul’Tok narrowed his eyes at us again and nodded his head. “I am.”

“What… does it do?”

“I do not know,” he sighed, heavily. “We found it when we were building this place. The Netherese were so deep in their magic that we decided to hide it from them. We built it into this embassy to hide it from them. It is one of the things I must report on my return to Mulhorand.”

“You just… found it?” Rock was incredulous, but respectful. “Did anyone in particular try to influence your decision to build here, or to dig there? Was this where you originally planned to put your Embassy?”

Chul’Tok’s mind clicked back through untold aeons and then he made a sound of deep thought. “There was a dwarf. He was our builder. We wished to be closer to the Netherese capital’s central district, but he insisted that this was the perfect place. He was also the one who found the Font, and recommended we not tell the Netherese. We found it whole, exactly as it is – encased in a room of mithril alloy as though it were simply waiting to be discovered.”

“Did you ever see the dwarf again?” asked Badl.

“No, we did not.”

But we all knew, right then, didn’t we? We all knew that dwarf must have been Alec, whose great age even then would have seemed to one as ancient as the Ambassador to be as huge a chasm of experience and alien thought as the Ambassador of Osiris’ own years seemed to us.

After a few moments’ thought, the Ambassador asked, “Have you encountered the Guards of Osiris? Are they destroyed as well?”

We shook our heads and looked blank. “I must wake them,” Chul’Tok said. “They must guard the embassy while I journey to Mulhorand. And I must think of how to get there without attracting the attention of these nations of the world.” He paused and looked at us. “Are there many nations between here and Mulhorand?”

“Pretty much all the dry land,” we replied. “The Dales, Cormyr, Sembia…”

“Ah,” Chul’Tok said. “In my time, there were naught but barbaric tribes.”

“Were there elves?”

“Of course, the High Court is a force of great power. But the human lands are – were – uncivilized, disorganized. Nomadic.” With that, he disappeared down those stairs in the ossuary where we had yet to tread. We followed him in, and by our torch we could see him approach each of six sarcophagi, each one covered with the same evil, purple runes as the doors into the chapel. Chul’Tok simply grasped the lid of each tomb, however, and rent it from its moorings, tossing it aside. In each he found a mummy like himself, these clearly armored as soldiers of Mulhorand. They did not speak, but they obeyed his every order. In a matter of minutes he had distributed them around the complex such that every entrance and exit could be watched.

“We are,” I said, “Still on our archaeological mission. Would it be possible for them to know that we should be permitted to pass?”

Chul’Tok agreed, and gave those orders to his men. From that moment on, they did not even look at us.

As he woke and arranged them, however, we conducted a quick conference. The bottom line, I felt, was that we could get him to Mulhorand – and keep the secret of the Font safe for as long as necessary – and keep from creating another batch of trouble in the process. If we told him everything and made him understand the importance of it all, then teleported him to Selgaunt so that he could skip the civilized nations between us and the Sea of Falling Stars, he could then cross under the ocean to Mulhorand under his own power. It would take him months – possibly years – to make that crossing on foot. “Look at him shuffling around,” I said. “He’ll be down there until this time next year. And by then, it’s probably not going to matter whether Alec finds out we have the Font.” Nigel was worried that we couldn’t trust him, that it might be an elaborate ruse by an evil foe of the Ambassador of Set’s, worried that if we had bested the one who had bested him that he ought to play nice until we were out of sight. A quick casting of Legend Lore quickly provided our assurances that Chul’Tok could be trusted, however, as this came into Nigel’s mind:

Chul’Tok, Servant of Osiris

Loyal beyond sanity

Faithful beyond measure

He lives only for Duty

And so, I sat down with Chul’Tok and I told him all of it, that we were seeking the tools of an ancient and wicked elf who had once betrayed many nations, including his own, and escaped his punishment to wreak havoc on the world. The Font, whatever it is, was “the foundation of cities,” and given its bizarre effect on plants we wondered at the awful possibility of placing it near that giant, skeletal dragon in The Tomb. Did Alec want it to bring back his faithful mount, Stormcloud? Or did it have some even worse purpose? I explained to him that I could teleport him to a modern city, but that he would have to cross the ocean – something he assured us would be no trouble – in order to buy us some time. “You will be able to make your report,” I said, “And we will be glad to help you live up to that duty, but we must ensure that it take time, something you have in plentiful supply.”

“I agree,” Chul’Tok said. “We leave tomorrow.”

He also told us that the Ambassador of Set probably kept his personal belongings in the old Ambassador’s quarters, behind the throne room. As the Guards stood in mute sentry here and there, we ventured back to the very end of the complex and found a trapped door behind an over-sized throne. Once through it, we were greeted by an ancient dwelling, all furniture gone save one stone bench and one stone chest – and two stone golems. A very brief scuffle ensued, and before long we were holding some of the Ambassador of Set’s most prized possessions in our hands – including an ancient artifact even by Mulhorandi standards, something none of us had seen before. It was a piece of worked, green glass with writing on it in ancient Elven, and when we moved our fingers up and down the side the text would move so that one such piece of glass could hold many times its own capacity in words. A small stylus was attached to it, and with it we could enscribe other words on the glass as well.

It was a miracle of magic and craftsmanship, but even that failed to interest us when we read the words themselves:

Herein Are Contained The Reflections of One Aphtul, Elf, Follower of Muad Ter’Thalas

Aphtul was a scientist and farmer. The Font had been entrusted to his use and care. He did not detail in it what exactly the Font might do, but instead noted its effect on the odd plants of “this new world.” We could tell from his descriptions that he described common enough life: oak trees and ferns and such. The Font, he had realized, made them grow at a greatly accelerated rate. He wished, he said, that he had access to the cities and libraries of their former world so that he could learn if this was true of all Fonts.

All Fonts – so there were once many? And this one had been brought by Muad, likely stolen, for some great purpose in his escape or his banishment from – or his rebellion against – some other home.

Aphtul’s diary was not terribly interesting, but here and there it would speak of The Dragon War, and of how Muad Ter’Thalas, who had led the elves to this world, was growing increasingly unpopular. Eventually, the diary told us, he betrayed the elves to work towards the dragons’ ends, not the elves’. Aphtul remained loyal to Muad, even after his betrayal, but not so all the elves, and a civil war had started. His last entry was brief, but poignant:

Today, the Faerath comes for Muad and for all of us.

And so here we were, yet again close enough to the truth to reach out and touch some angle of it, one face of its many facets, the truth at the center of history – some ancient gem so dense and so perfectly hidden by the years of grime and ignorance and confusion that we could scarce make out what we beheld. The Font was important, yes, obviously, but its effect on plants is not its supposed purpose? We cursed this ancient elf for not having even mentioned what exactly the Font is supposed to do, but at least we knew now that this was an effect it has always had.

With that, we went back to the cave and slept the sleep of the truly tired.

The next morning Nigel and I teleported the Ambassador of Osiris to the docks ward of Selgaunt. There were screams, yes, and people were very frightened to see two guys and a mummy chatting on the docks. We pointed the Ambassador in the right direction and then he stepped from the pier and into the water and began his months-long journey. Moments later, we were back in the cave, and our secret was still safe, and we could talk about what to do.

First, however, we wanted to check on the Font. Badl softened the stone we’d shaped so that we could hide inside it the lead-lined storage crate which, in turn, held the Font. When we opened it, however, we did not see the crate. We saw only the lead lining that had been inside the crate, wrapped in a sphere around the otherwise slightly oval shape of the Font itself.

Nigel scraped away some of the lead. The Font was still inside, but it had obliterated the crate, and sucked the lead down around itself and formed it into a sphere.

The stone around it had started to warp as well.

The Font is forming a new sphere in which to house itself.

The Font, whatever its purpose, is after fifty thousand years – a hundred? a million? – trying once again to form its customary home.

We sealed it back up, and Nigel reflected that at least we would have another week and a half before anyone could possibly scry it to find it.

And here, I will note that Nigel had spent the whole morning asking us if it was warm in the cave? Were we uncomfortably hot? Was it just him? He had sweat, and drunk water, and waved his arms to flap the sleeves of his robe and cool himself, and with a heavy sigh he leaned a hand against the wall only to watch the stone glow red around his fingers and wash away like water.

A gate of flame opened in the side of the cave, and a being of fire spoke to him: “Nigel, you have done well. We have observed your skill, and know that your magic is now strong enough for the final stage. Come, the time is now.  This was, after all, the arrangement.”

We stared in shock, and then Nigel turned to us and set his backpack on the floor and took out the rod of quickening he carries. “Take this,” he said. “I won’t need it where I’m going.”

“Will you be back?”

Nigel looked at the being of fire, and then back at us. “I think so.” Then he stepped through, and he was gone, and so was the portal.

I don’t know where Nigel was for those years we thought him dead. But I’m not so sure I believe it was the Drow, and I think we know now a part of why all his magic turns to fire.
And next time I see the dead walk, I will press, and squeeze a little harder, and I will not be so scared that I will push them away again.

Upon completing our questioning of Philip, we bound him to let him consider the option of atonement we had given him and to discuss the situation ourselves.  We also did some quick calculations and realized that if the Ambassador was moving as fast as he could to get to us – and to the Font we’d recovered from the Embassy – that he would in a few hours run right through the middle of the nomad camp where we’d first made human contact in the desert.

“We have to go warn them to pack up and move,” I said, and though the others were sympathetic they generally felt it could wait given how low we were on spells.  I pretty much always have tons of magic at my disposal, though, and I knew I could teleport directly to the camp, warn them and then teleport directly back.  “Please,” I said, “Just let me go right now and warn them.  I’ll be gone five minutes.”

Adric and Badl and Nigel and Rock asked to go with me, just in case, and so the five of us teleported to the nomad camp and I asked to speak to their leader, a merchant named Fast Abdul.  Abdul appeared with a smile and outstretched hands, but I didn’t waste any time:  “You and your people have to move your camp immediately.  Go as far as you can directly to the west or the east and don’t come back for at least a week.  An enormous, millenia-old undead monster is marching this way through the desert and will very likely harm you if you cross paths with him.”

Abdul looked me up and down and, without shifting his smile, turned to an associate and spoke in his native tongue.  I don’t think he realizes my helm allows me to understand languages, because what he said was:  “Either this man is doing a tremendous favor or has gone irreparably insane.  Go and fetch a priest so that we can determine what to do with him.”  Shortly a priest had arrived, cast Zone of Truth on me – is now a bad time to admit I’m no stranger to the occasional Zone of Truth spell? – and I repeated my statement word for word.  Abdul smiled broadly again and turned to the same subordinate as before:  “Pack up the camp, we are leaving immediately!”  Then he thanked me and went off to see to his employees and partners.

Not content to let this one good deed rest on its own, we stayed to make sure the camp really left.  I was not ready to let the lives of several dozen people weigh on my conscience in the name of making sure I was personally safe from the Ambassador.  The serious nomads – the ones who didn’t try to grease every deal with an expansive smile and inconveniently extravagent robes – were gone within an hour, no clues whatsoever having been left behind to suggest they were ever even there.  Abdul and his men, however, were slower to move.  By the time they were lined up to leave, dusk had started to fall.  We heard his foremen give the word down the line, and as camels and other beasts started to file out of the camp we heard an abrupt and startling cry from one of the animals closest to us.

Four shadows rose out of the ground around it as it fell dead on the sand, and screams erupted from the people nearby.  The Ambassador had arrived.

Adric turned his holy symbol towards the shadows and denounced them in the name of Lothander, before anyone could even react, and no sooner were the words gone from his lips than there were four tufts of smoke coming from where the shadows had been.  I hadn’t even lifted my hands to Magic Missile them yet, and as I started to point and say those incantations I simultaneously realized that the shadows had been destroyed and heard the booming voice of the Ambassador from behind us:  TAKE THEM ALL, MY BROTHERS, WE WILL NEED AN ARMY OF THE DEAD TO RECLAIM THAT WHAT HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM ME.  Even as he spoke a shadow rose out of the camel where it lay and more burst from the sand around us.  Rock, who had been spying from afar, came running down the nearby dunes in the direction of the voice and Badl took to the air in the form of an eagle.  Nigel clicked his heals and lifted into the sky as well, and Adric and I were left standing there on the sand looking for the source of that voice.

“Over there,” Nigel cried, seeing through the Ambassador’s invisibility with a spell of his own.  “He’s invisible and headed this way.”  Rock turned in his tracks to take on a new heading approximating Nigel’s directions, and I began chanting as Rock approached:  stone giant, stone giant, Stone Giant, STONE GIANT, I said, clapping him on the shoulder as he went by so that one moment he was Rock and the next he was a towering Stone Giant with a sword as large as a man.   Just as fast I started to cast a See Invisibility of my own when the Ambassador made himself visible to us by turning his foul gaze on several of us at once.  Necromantic anti-energies washed out around us, searing our flesh, but Badl had beaten the Ambassador to the punch:  with a few squawks and twitched wings, he had cast a spell on Rock to protect him from any such magic.  As the rest of us scrambled to get away from the melee, Rock raised his sword and tore into the Ambassador’s ambiguous form.

More shadows came out of the ground around Adric, who’d again called on the powers of his god to rain shards of holy light on the area, disrupting his ability to cast anything on the Ambassador himself.  I fired a spell at the Ambassador and watched it wash away again, but Nigel, where he hovered, was able to fling orbs of force and fire that harmed the Ambassador just as much as if he were merely mortal.  Though the smaller shadows were giving Adric a terrible time of it, draining his strength just as Katarina’s “pet” has done so many times on our behalf, he held his own and I dropped a sonic fireball on top of them to try to distract the shadows away for a bit.  Meanwhile Badl, Nigel and Rock were whittling away at the Ambassador and in short order managed to rend his “flesh” such that his towering, matte shadow form was starting to show tatters at the edges and his bellowing voice carried less conviction than it had before.  Though he turned his evil gaze on us again and again, within moments we all still stood but his form, with one final injury, faded slowly from sight until at last even his star-lit eyes winked from existence and only a single, black wand lay on the ground with a twisting, geometric groove in its handle.

The nomads, busy running for their lives, eventually brought their line back under control and Fast Abdul approached us as Badl and Adric worked to heal us as much as they could.  “My friends,” Abdul said, “You have done us a great favor this day!”

“It’s the right thing to do,” I replied, and I handed him one of the TTC’s business cards.  “Here,” I added, handing him two more, “Give these to some friends.”

“How can I repay you?”

“Well,” I said, “I would feel terrible taking your money…”  Nigel was quick to kick the back of my boot and leaned in to whisper:  Expensive incense!

“But…” I went on, “We do have a terrible need for your very finest incense.  In large quantities.”

Abdul stared smilingly at me for a moment and then turned to his underling.  “Go, get incense!  A ton of it!”

When the underling returned with a chest filled with the stuff, Nigel did some quick calculations:  “This is only worth 400 gold,” he said in a tongue the nomads didn’t understand.  “I need something much more valuable for Legend Lore.”

I turned to Abdul and shook my head.  “I’m sorry, but we need finer incense than this.”

“This?” Abdul demanded of his servant, kicking the chest towards him over the sand.  “You call this incense?  This is trash!  Bring them the very finest we have!  For gods’ sakes, it’s cheaper than gold!”

When the servant returned, he had with him a small, wooden box so richly perfumed it stang our noses from feet away.  Nigel gave me a thumbs-up, and I gratefully accepted the incense from Abdul.  “I’m sorry that this has disrupted your business for the day,” I said, “But I am very glad you believed us when we arrived.”

“You’ve saved many of our lives,” Abdul replied with a dismissive wave.  “We cannot possibly repay you.”

No sooner were these pleasantries exchanged, however, before Adric was pulling me away and the rest of us into a huddle.  “I just got a message from Katarina,” he said – he’d created a telepathic bond before we’d left – urging us to gather together in a huddle.  “She says that Muad Ter’thalas just teleported into the cave.  She and Shadow and Bonzo are hiding.”

“We have to go back,” everyone said at once, and even though we’d fought two major enemies that day and were essentially empty of magic and wholly empty of healing, it took no time at all for us all to join hands and for me to say two words:  “The Cave.”  With a flash of light, we were gone.

An instant later, we were in the cave, and there sat Philip, still bound, still free of the bonds of mind-control Alec/Muad Ter’thalas had imposed on him.  Unfortunately, there was a dagger sticking out of his forehead.
And there stood Alec/Muad Ter’thalas, smiling at his own handiwork in the form of Philip’s corpse.  When we appeared, he turned to look at us, smiled, winked… and disappeared.

I have never hated someone so much in my life.

And so it is, dear diary, that Philip, the one I’d so hoped to see reformed, the one whose salvation had given me pause to consider my own slow retreat from the shores of total optimism, the one who could have spent time in the service to one god or another in hopes of atoning for his many sins, is dead.  We freed him, yes, and by the time the sun had set the same day Muad Ter’thalas had come to take revenge.  We learned today that Muad keeps tabs on his servants, and that Muad will not allow an asset to escape or a betrayal to go unpunished.  We have pondered resurrecting him, but the dagger driven deep into his brain was enchanted with some sort of necromancy we suspect will prevent such a second chance from ever happening.

With his death died much of my sense of victory for today.  I briefly reacted with bitterness, wondering whether by leaving Philip bound and out of our company that we had effectively sentenced him to death.  Why didn’t we stop to think that this would happen?  Were we that short-sighted?  But ultimately I suppose I cannot be held responsible for Muad Ter’thalas’ evils in the world.  Still, I regret that Philip had so little time to enjoy his freedom, even as I realize that at least his last hours on Toril were his and his alone.

As our thoughts turned to what to do moving forward, Nigel explained that we were lucky Muad Ter’thalas hadn’t simply cast Locate Object to find the Font, and wondered if perhaps he had no idea we even had the font in our possession.  To ensure against this, however, I spent the rest of the evening in Waterdeep having a crate of special construction built to contain the font and renting a condominium in one of the nicer parts of town.  Now I have a reliable, personal, private teleport point in Elventree, in Dhambryth, in Phlan and in Waterdeep.  I paid rent for the next six months in advance.

I guess I didn’t retreat wholly from my usual optimism in the wake of Philip’s death.

With the crate itself – but not the several dozen yards of stuffed, crushed velvet I’ve ordered to go around the Font inside said crate – we’ve been able to protect the Font from any sort of attempt to find it by magical means.  The plan as it stands right now is unclear – perhaps to secret it away in the basement of one of my properties in Phlan, perhaps to deposit it in Sess’uadra with Berol and the Temple to Kelimvor, perhaps to make it a gift to his operation in the long run in hopes that it would revitalize Sess’uadra and make it a liveable place once again.  In the meantime, we need to get the Font in front of someone who can tell us more about it, be that the Sentinel of Mystra in Elventree or Elminster in Shadowdale or someone else entirely.  At the same time, though, I hope to take Philip’s body to Berol for examination and, if he cannot be brought back to have a second chance at life in this world, to have him buried with dignity, to respect that part of him that wanted a second chance, to try and lay to rest at least a little of that fear and prejudice I’d spoken of last time.

First and foremost, however, we came here on a mission and our mission still stands.  Specifically, the Embassy still stands.  The five of us slept that night in the Cave and then went immediately the next morning back to the Embassy to begin our explorations.  I awoke with a fresh mind and a new understanding of some of the magic I’ve seen, and we all seemed more hale and hearty than the day before.  My mother used to say that hard work made hard sleep, and it was quite true for us that such a hard sleep lent us strength we hadn’t known before.

As soon as we were back at the Embassy, we went in the hole in the exterior wall we’d seen – but not explored – before.  The room inside was an enormous ossuary filled with bones and skeletons and high, thick columns that stretched thirty feet to the ceiling, spaced every few feet from one another.  On the way in, Nigel decided to take a few moments and make use of one of the new spells he had awoken understanding this morning to permanently enchant himself to see invisible creatures.  It was a good thing, too, as no sooner did we walk into the room with me watching our backs from the doorway than Nigel cried out:  “Invisible lions!”

Invisible lions?

In truth, they were not invisible.  When they walked through the patches of sunlight streaming into the otherwise pitch-dark room from the holes in the wall and ceiling, they were invisible.  Once they stepped into shadow, however, they were like lions made of… light, perhaps of sparks.  The general shape of a lion was there, but none of the substance, as though embers had been captured in the air and forced into a lion-shape mold.  The others quickly took up arms against them as I basically ran in a big circle around the room trying to dodge the one chasing me.  We suffered a comedy of errors as one of my new spells after another would wash off the ghost-lion and its jaws would in turn snap shut on empty air as I bobbed and weaved out of its way.  The rest had greater success and eventually the lion chasing me between the columns got tired of our games and turned on Adric.  Together, we were all able to finish them off and now I sit in one of those patches of sunlight, writing in my journal because I simply couldn’t put it all together in my brain until now.

I still mourn the loss of Philip’s life, but I must also be honest with myself:  do I mourn Philip’s death or my own lost opportunity to demonstrate that I was good enough to help convert someone whose life had been so thoroughly evil?  Did I reach out a hand of genuine friendship, or did I reach down with condescension in my heart when I painted idyllic pictures of Philip happy and honest and valued amongst the Kelimvorians?  Was there, in my hope for him, a hint of belief that it was all the kinder because a half-dragon would never deserve such good faith?

Ah well.  Enough self-doubt for one day.  It’s time to move on to another room in this Embassy, and gods only know what we’ll find in the next evil enclave.

I am a half-elf.

Half Sun Elf, to be precise. I’m told it’s a rare combination, but I’ve never been to Aglorand to check and that’s the only half-elf “community” of which I know. The long and short of it is that I have that bronzed skin if I stay out in the sun and my hair, which is on the blond side of sandy, bleaches to a perfect white gold if I put lemon juice in it on those same sunny days.

When I wear a hat that covers my ears, though, I can pass for human. I can pull on a toboggan around Hogswatch Night and go out in the streets of, say, Phlan, and if I’m not wearing my mayoral badge then I can pass as just another human in the huddled and bustling mass.

The Sun Elves, if you’re not familiar with them, are the “high” elves. A few thousand years ago they were the ruling class. I think they still fancy themselves as such, the polar opposite to the cold-blooded Drow: beautiful and benevolent and noble in a way few others can match. I don’t aspire to hold myself out as better than everyone around me, but I will in my most contemplative moments – and only in writing, for saying a thing aloud makes it more real and no one of any intelligence would disagree with me – admit that I do like simply being me a tremendous amount. What I think the Sun Elves don’t realize – or don’t mind, if they do – is that others see them as being just as cruel in their own way as the sky-shunned and deceitful Dark Elves. The Sun Elves will kill you slowly with little smiles, smothering you in gold; at least a Drow’s dirk is quick and its poison may numb you while you bleed.

I wish I could say that it’s for that reason I would go out on those cold nights and simply walk around and giggle to myself at the thought that the market vendors saw me as nothing special, that I did it to understand what it’s like to be common in some quest for greater perspective, some kernel of self-knowledge and a taste of some greater truth, something like, “we all have lives to live, and hopes and dreams, regardless of the shape of our ears,” but in truth I did it to savor the other 364, as they say. To feel unspecial for a short while made feeling special all the time feel, well, special again. I guess I wanted to know how the other half lived , so to speak, and on finding it unremarkable I was glad to get back into my usual role, that of the unusual life of adventuring, of being Mayor, of being a half-elf bard with a unique repertoire of raunchy songs about the Purple Dragon Knights, or Zentil Keep, or whatever else I’d seen on the road.

My mother was the elf in my lineage, and I have always wondered why she gave me such a human name. It’s unusual, to be sure, but she translated our surname from the Elven and gave me a human surname as my common name, and I like to think that she did it to emphasize the two sides of my ancestry. Even though my life has been lived almost entirely among humans, or at least among non-elves, I prefer to imagine that she was striving for a recognized balance, a reminder that even as an unusual name made me a little more unique in the world it also would remind me whence I came, that two cultures were fused within me and that I have more options to draw on than just one racial past, one set of prejudices, one selection of strengths or burden of weaknesses.

In truth, I think she did it because she thought it would make me more normal.

There’s a point to this, but it’s coming later. On to the events of the day.

After Badl’s scrying spell showed us that the half-dragon still lived, and that the Ambassador had set off on foot to pursue us, we agreed to teleport back to the ancient embassy and dispatch the half-dragon before he went back to his masters, whatever weird-ass cabal of dragon worship it is that we’re up against. We took a few moments to prepare, and then with a BAMF! I took us all back to the dome on top of the now-excavated Mulhorandi Embassy. A few Ascendeds were on a nearby ridge of sand, and we broke to assault them before they even knew we were there.

I turned Rock into a Stone Giant, and Badl took flight as an eagle. Nigel clicked his heels and launched into the air, and Adric cast Air Walk on himself and did the same. I started running towards the ridge, pausing a moment to drop a sonic fireball on as many Ascendeds as I could catch in one go.

Reptilian shrieks filled the otherwise silent desert air when my spell went off, and the Ascendeds turned to see us coming at them in a variety of shapes and at a variety of speeds. One tiny kobold tugged the arm of an Ascended and then cried out to their half-dragon commander, “Boss! The giant is back!”

Adric and Nigel got sufficiently high enough into the air to see the half-dragon turn towards us, about a hundred feet beyond the other side of the sand dune, and before he could do anything Nigel barred him from magical escape with a Dimensional Anchor spell and Adric summoned mystic chains to bind the half-dragon’s hands in hopes of preventing other spell-casting. I dropped another sonic fireball to try to contain any response by the Ascendeds between us and the half-dragon, Badl rained magical destruction on them from above and Rock merely ran straight through them, charging up to the half-dragon and plunging his sword deep into the villain’s chest.

The Ascended started to scatter, as Adric summoned shards of divine magic and another sonic fireball went off among them. One tried to scape into the air, but Badl wreathed him in magical ice and he hung there, trapped, until his corpse fell from the sky. Adric, not content to sit by and do damage from afar, charged in and held the attention of the Ascended spellcasters and passed along some divine judgement of the up close and personal sort.

Nigel homed in on the half-dragon, hovering nearby, and sunk more wounds into his flesh with his ferocious magic, and as Rock struck again and again, his swords a flurry of movement, the half-dragon gave off a burst of flame – Nigel taking the brunt of its effects – and then sank to the ground in a heap. As he did so, another of his contingency spells went off and, chained and surrounded by a magical barrier against teleportation as he was, he was further encased in a magical barrier that prevented us from getting to his unconscious form and finishing the job.

And really, it was over that fast. Nigel dispelled the protective bubble that sprang up around the half-dragon, and began to examine him for any further wards or magical devices. We stripped him of any armor or items that were magical in nature, then Nigel began an intensive examination of the man-dragon himself.

“I see two further auras,” Nigel said. “One is enchantment, one is transmutation. I’m out of Dispel Magics for the day. Whitten?”

I always have spells to burn. That’s just how it works for me. I studied the auras and then targeted them carefully, letting my subconscious do whatever arcane calculus is Nigel’s stock in trade. With a flick of a finger, the transmutation was gone; with another, the enchantment effect.

“He’s clean,” Nigel declared, and we bound the half-dragon and the one Ascended who was still alive, dusted ourselves off, healed Nigel’s wounds and then teleported back to the cave to begin deciding what to do with the prisoners after interrogating them. Upon our arrival we updated Katarina on our successful adventure and Adric sent a magical message to Mytheria asking him if he’d like to help us interrogate the half-dragon. Rock asked that I read the prisoners’ minds as they were interrogated, and so I set up shop behind the Ascended as he roused from unconsciousness. I reached out with my mind to open his to me, and heard words:

They are holding me prisoner and will probably torture me. Can you send help?

“Kill him, or knock him out, or something! Quick! He’s telepathically communicating with someone!” I blurted this out immediately, and the others were quick to end his life. With that, I focused my thoughts on the half-dragon, and this time I was surprised that there was no telepathic communication going on.

“Who are you? Where am I?” he asked, but his voice was… well, it wasn’t evil, per se. The others looked at me to know what he was thinking – how many ways was he imaging our slow death at this moment? – and his thoughts were nothing but the purest reflections of his words. He wondered where he was, and who we were.

He sounded confused.

Over the rest of our conversation, during which he spoke freely and openly and his thoughts showed no hint of lies or other duplicity, he told us that thirty years ago he had been locked up in a jail down south for the crime of having red skin and a dragon’s scales. Alec – yes, Alec, the one we’ve sought for what seems so long, that guise of Muad Tir’thalos we escorted around The Stormcloud’s Tomb and whose dragon we slew only a few days ago – had sprung the half-dragon from said jail and asked a favor of him in return: to go to an abandoned temple deep in the jungles of Chult and steal something.

The half-dragon didn’t say what, and when asked he replied he’d rather not say. His thoughts were plain, though: the unhatched eggs of a gold dragon. He’d done it, he said, because he was desperate, an outcast, on the run from authorities or lynchmobs or cultural norms in too many places to name and Alec seemed like his only out. After he’d stolen the egg, he met up with Alec again and Alec made him magically subservient against the half-dragon’s will. He’d spent every day since – thirty long years – in service to Alec in the efforts of the cult of the Mother. The cult, he said, were the Ascendeds and a couple of dragons. Mal’thalus – the one that “plays the Mother’s heartbeat” – is in direct operational control of the Ascendeds, but the half-dragon didn’t report to Mal’thalus. He reported directly to Alec, who would appear briefly every few months, give the half-dragon orders, and then disappear again. He had no special mental links with Alec, however, or the other Ascendeds – who could, he said, communicate telepathically with one another at will. It was that which I’d heard in the Ascended prisoner we’d killed just before he awoke.

“So are you still in thrall to Alec?” Badl asked.

“No,” the half-dragon said. I was reading his mind. I knew that he meant it. The enchantment effect I’d dispeled back in the desert was probably that effect.

We had freed the half-dragon from slavery.

“What’s your name?” Adric asked.

“Philip,” the half-dragon said.

The half-dragon has a human name. He’s called Philip. What a strange world we live in. His mother, he told us, fell for a drifter who wined her and dined her off her feet and onto her back. A few months later, he was born a freak. They were outcast. His mother tried to find a place for them to live, but it never worked. He turned to petty crime, then just doing whatever he could to get by. When no one wants you in their town square, you take what pay you can get in what inns will take you. He could have named himself Blood-Drinker McBloodBath, or something with a lot of unpronounced syllables the writing of which would drive one mad, but he still called himself Philip. Maybe it sounds dumb, but I felt a tremendous wave of guilt – not pity, because I don’t think Philip is the sort to appreciate pity and might be the sort to take advantage of it. I will readily admit to guilt, however, and here’s why: earlier that morning, when we had discussed what to do with the half-dragon, Nigel had raised the question of why we were going to go kill him. What if he surrendered? Would we rather just take him to a court of law and give him a trial? The conversation had run its expected course in short order: for what would we try him? What court had jurisdiction over “leading a band of evil, unusually tall, winged kobolds in an assault on a foreign embassy to a land that no longer exists?” None of that is what bothers me, though, because the plain fact is that adventuring in the name of good quite often involves murdering the evil and I have long made my peace with what I am willing to do when I truly feel that my life and the fate of the world is at stake. What bothers me is that my response was this:

“I am happy to let the field of battle serve as my courtroom.”

Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have said that. If I did, I would have at least thought about it first. My reaction was quick and total, however: the guy had tried to kill us, and for that he had to die ASAP. OK, fine, but what sticks in my craw is that if it had happened on the streets of, say, Waterdeep, I would have tried to contain the threat and then summon the authorities if for no reason other than to keep my name clean. Out here, in the desert, I was willing to make a snap judgement in a hurry and that judgement was largely based on one thing: that he was half-dragon, and surely that meant he could not possibly be good, or even merely not evil.

I am not worried that I’m a racist, and this isn’t some “oh, he’s just like me, I just turned out lucky” sort of mea culpa crap. What bothers me about this is that I didn’t even consider the option that he would just tell us everything and surrender. I didn’t even consider the possibility that he was magically compelled to do Alec’s bidding. I didn’t even consider a possibility other than killing him outright. I was the first one to take any offensive action out there in the middle of the desert. When everyone else was running or flying to get into position, I cast a sonic fireball on the first things I saw. When the Ascended was in communication with its colleagues, I shouted to kill it. My job is supposed to be to save the world. That’s in the job description most adventurers craft for themselves, but I’m one who’s actually done it a couple of times. I’m not now filled with some sort of self-doubt – I will never lie awake at night and wonder if Cyric would have been willing to sit down and talk things out, I assure you – but I do wonder if this marks some change in my perspective on the world and those I perceive as my enemies. Am I getting older? Am I starting to grow jaded to the ways of the world and the forces that sometimes threaten it?

Am I forgetting to look for the beauty in all things, and starting to focus instead on merely wiping out that which I judge to be deformed?

The answer to that, I think, is no. Adric and Badl have presented Philip with a choice: to choose, with their magical assistance, to renounce his ways and atone for the things he has done. He genuinely regrets much of what he did in Alec’s service, and he is honest enough with us to admit that he does not regret some of what he did because he simply isn’t wired to care all that much. Depending on which path he chooses, he will either wind up working to maintain Badl’s grove – an ironic and I think beautiful path for someone whose paternal heritage is to destroy rather than to nourish – or go to Sess’uadra and work with Berol in the temple of Kelimvor, working to clear more areas of that ruined ancient city. Berol’s city is a place of death, a place where life has not moved forward in thousands of years. In its crumbled center, the dead go to die with dignity and, in that work, Berol has ushered in the demise of some measure of our fear of death and the beyond, taken some of the tinge of betrayal and madness out of death that was brought into it when Cyric was death’s king.

We’ve already used his temple as a dumping ground once this month – we left that captured Drow there to do service rather than return her to certain death at her people’s hands – and I like to think that maybe Sess’uadra could, in time, come to be the place where more than ancient elven dreams and the sick of the modern world go to pass away, that it might become a place where people like Philip can go to let their pasts die and be reborn to a community that knows them only as a helpful and peaceful associate rather than a criminal or an outcast. I like to think that Philip could go there and lay to rest his hatred for those who were cruel to him and his mother, let what evil he has done sink into the ground and be buried by what good works he can do in their place. And maybe, in playing some part in helping that happen, I can let die my own creeping prejudice and cynicism, my own snap judgements made in fear rather than hope.

As we considered our options in terms of what to do about the Ascendeds scrying the temple, and the various unfriendly critters inside said temple, I tied a rope to my waist, cast Detect Secret Doors and set off through the sandstorm with the rest of our party holding onto the other end of the rope. Circling the roof, I confirmed that there was only one secret door I could find, and it was inside the small wing which sat atop the mithril globe – the same room we’d seen guarded by a mage and two thugs, and whose entrance bore a warning that the Mulhorandi Ambassador himself wished the room sealed.

Upon my return we quickly discussed our options.

Rock advocated that he and I and others go there and simply kill all the Ascendeds. While I had no doubt that he and I could do so, I feared that we’d burn everything we had for the day on that, leaving us sitting atop a temple filled with enemies and down several of our many defenses. Rock’s enthusiasm for what he calls “villain-killin’” was admirable, but even I felt it might be unwise. Instead we settled for a bit of reconnaissance; I turned each of us into eagles and we soared up over Adric’s sandstorm and out to espy the camp from afar. As we watched, the Ascendeds concluded their scrying and opened another Gate, through which marched eight of the armored Ascendeds, 160 normal kobolds and one red half-dragon.

Half-dragons. Great.

As we watched, the Ascended formed ranks and began a disciplined march from their camp towards the Mulhorandi Embassy. Rock and I were quickly into the air and back to our friends to warn them of the enemies’ approach.

“They’re going to be pretty surprised to see this place excavated,” was a general conclusion, and we wondered whether their surprise might buy us some time or would simply encourage them to assault the Embassy all the more quickly.

“If we can let the two sides do some fighting first, we might get a glimpse of the Ambassador and we can pick our side from there,” Adric suggested.

“Should we try to warn the Set-worshippers inside to encourage a hasty battle?” someone else asked.

“We should let them start fighting and then we should force our way into that room, steal the artifact and teleport the hell away from here,” I said. “Today there are us, an army of Setites and an army of kobolds. Everybody’s here for the same thing, whatever McGuffin is inside that room. Tomorrow, I’m willing to bet there will still be us, the Setites and the Kobolds – but someone is going to have the McGuffin, and it might as well be us.”

“Villain-killin!” cried Rock, but I was quick to assuage his fears of a day without judicial bloodshed.

“Oh, we’ll kill villains, don’t you worry. Let’s just do it after we have whatever shiny is hidden inside, OK?”

“Well, how do we get it?” Badl asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “We run in, we spot the glowing whatever, we throw a sack over it and we teleport out!”

“What if it’s built into the place?” asked Nigel.

“I don’t know!” I replied, “That’s the point! It’s adventure!”

With that, we agreed to try to raise an alarm amongst the Setites upon the Ascendeds’ approach to encourage the quick onset of battle. Rock produced the magical bags that produce small animals and sent a boar and a cat into the Embassy with orders to find some of the jackal-men that guard the place. The rest of us hid in the sand a short distance away to observe. After a few moments, the boar returned but obviously it was the worse for wear as it was blooded and broken and animated only by the hellacious wasps that roam the halls of the Embassy. We watched as it emerged, obviously being used as a spy by the Setites inside, and in moments it was obliterated by a column of magical flame. The Ascendeds had clearly arrived and the red half-dragon clearly had magic to mimic the nastier half of his heritage.

A few moments later we noticed a few kobolds climbing up onto the roof of the embassy and reaching the apex of the same dome we had mounted earlier in the day. Whether they meant to cave it in, mar it in some way or merely enjoy the view was unknown, as I obliterated most of them with a sonicball. Apparently thinking this meant the gig was up, the Ascendeds’ forces blew a hole in the far side of the Embassy from us and we heard battle commence.

“Now’s our chance,” Katarina announced as Shadow reported back from his surreptitious inspection of the inside. Together we were transported directly through the walls and into the very room itself – the one behind the NO ENTRY BY ORDER OF THE AMBASSADOR OF MULHORAND door – where we found… a blank room. Shadow poked his head through the wall to keep watch and the rest of us set to examining the place for secret doors or unknown magic.

In short order we had determined that the room was blanketed in illusion and had managed to see past it; rather than a storage room we were in a plain room with a round trapdoor in its center. The doors out were warded in many magicks, and Shadow reported mere seconds after we arrived that a huge, black creature was lumbering down the hallway in our direction, its stride quick and with an obvious purpose. I read a scroll to seal the doors and Badl – thinking quickly and well – snapped his Immovable Rods into place against the center of the frame where the two doors met. Katarina bent over the lock with her tools and soon we heard both the lock click and the roar of an entity on the other side of the main doors: “WHO DARES TRESPASS IN THIS PLACE,” it bellowed, and we all knew that could be the voice of only one thing: The Ambassador.

Statecraft must have been murder back then, I thought to myself. Alas, there was no time for quips as the monstrous representative threw his weight against the door shattering my Knock spell and pushing even the Immovable Rods back a few inches. I polymorphed Rock into a Stone Giant and Badl transformed into a Dire Bear, then cast Animal Growth on himself. The two of them pushed back, and between them and the rods they held the door in place for a few precious seconds. As light sprang from the opened portal into the Mithril sphere below us, Adric threw up his hands in prayer and called down needles of light. Meanwhile Nigel and I each unloaded a spell but saw them wash off the Ambassador without effect.

At this point I should describe the Ambassador. Statecraft truly must have been murder in those days, because the Ambassador wasn’t someone I’d invite over for light appetizers, free drinks and some trade talks. He was enormously tall, stooped over in a hallway with fifteen-foot ceilings, and his entire body was made of something so black and smooth and absorbant that light seemed to fail to find its way back from him. He was somewhat like Shadow, but his form was terribly substantial compared to Shadow’s incorporeal state. When his fists swung he could chip gobbets of stone from marble walls and when he opened his eyes they twinkled like the dead stars of ancient skies. With a moan he would set dark energy upon us that burned living flesh and as soon as I realized I wasn’t going to be 100% effective against him I took on my favored flying form and dove down through the now-open trapdoor to at least see whatever was concealed in such a place.

When he saw the open trapdoor in the room and some of us starting to go through it, he cried out again: ONLY I CAN TOUCH THE SOURCE.

It was full of plants – brown-green weeds and stems wrapped around one another from years of growth and grown so fat with the foul brown ichor drunk by the jackal-men and used by them as a venom that it ran from their leaves and flowers into troughs placed underneath them so that it could be carried away and out of sight; whether processed first or fed directly into the pool where the jackal-men relax was unknown and unimportant. The plants themselves might be the McGuffin, I thought, save for the fact of the blue-white light that filled the room, spilling up out of a gap that circled the entire room where the floor met the curved walls of the mithril sphere. Nigel and Katarina dropped in after me and Katarina pointed to the center of the floor: “Another trapdoor,” she said, and in seconds she had swung it open to reveal an enormous and brightly-glowing sphere attached to a pedastal which was, in turn, sunk into the subfloor of the sphere.

“The shiny!” I cried, and Nigel and Katarina and I were on it in a flash. Detect Magic nearly left us blind when we cast it, and in the half-seconds we could stand to gaze on it we could learn only that it had multiple auras and effects – and, importantly, that the pedastal to which it was attached was something else, not a part of the magical mechanism itself.

“Let’s get this thing in a bag and get the hell out of here,” I said.

Meanwhile, upstairs, the Ambassador had wreaked untold havoc on Rock, Adric and Badl, but the three of them had put up a terrible fight in return and after punishing blows from Badl and Rock, and the vengeful magic of Adric, the Ambassador… ran. As Badl summoned an angry rhinoceros which in turn sank its horns into the Ambassador’s thigh, the Ambassador disengaged and disappeared by some magical means leaving my friends to take a couple of moments to regroup. No sooner had they caught their bearings, however, than they realized that the battle between the Ascendeds and the Setites was moving closer along the halls of the Embassy. Badl dropped a sleet storm in the Hallway to slow their progress, and indeed a few dying kobolds only barely managed to make it through before dropping dead before my companions’ feet. With a flash and a whiff of brimstone, however, the red half-dragon appeared before them and gazed up and down at Rock (in the guise of a Stone Giant), Badl (in the guise of a truly dire Dire Bear, fifteen feet long and as many feet wide) and Adric. A moment passed and the half-dragon opened his mouth: “Godsdamn, how many kinds of creatures inhabit this place!?”

“Sixteen!” Rock roared in reply. “If you count yourself!”*

With that, Rock raised his sword and charged the half-dragon. He struck so deep and so true, his sword biting so far into the half-dragon’s chest, that what Nigel later explained was called a “contingency spell” went off, something the half-dragon had prepared ahead of time in case things went poorly. As blood sprayed in all directions, so too did a spell familiar to my companions if of an unexpected element: a fire-based Acid Fog roared into life around them, emanating from the red half-dragon himself.

Badl and Rock backed out of the effect, losing sight of the half-dragon and thus unsure whether he had been struck dead.

As all that was happening, however, Nigel had pointed his finger at the pedastal which held up the Magic Whats-It and said, “OK, aiming…”

“Please don’t miss,” I said, hands on the silvery orb to try and catch it when the pedastal was disintegrated.

“Adric can regrow any limbs…” Nigel replied. “Probably.”

Pointing very carefully, he uttered a word and the air filled with ozone as the pedastal simply ceased to be. The orb – weighing several hundred pounds – crashed to the ground and we drew my blanket around it as quickly as we could. None of us, of course, could lift it, so none of us could hold it while I teleported us away.

“Stone Giant,” I said as I pointed at Katarina, and in an instant she dwarfed us all and lifted the blanket with the orb insde easily over one shoulder. “Now grab my hand.” She did so, and I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Aren’t you glad you walked into our store?”

A moment later she, the orb and I stood in our cave back in the mountains that ring this ancient desert.

As soon as we were gone, Nigel flew back up through the trapdoors and announced their need to depart. Rock, Badl and Nigel each reached for Adric’s robes as Adric cast Word of Recall to return them to the cave. Within a moment we were all together again in the cave with the glowing orb, hundreds of miles from the battle that still raged within the ancient Embassy’s walls.

“We should speak with Mytheria tomorrow,” Adric said.

“And I will cast Legend Lore to see what I can learn of this orb,” Nigel added.

With that, we slept with great relief.

The next morning, Adric communicated an invitation to Mytheria and we told him of our caper. He complimented our daring-do, and warned that half-dragons are mad and terrible beings, the red ones being most feral of all. Nigel cast Legend Lore on the orb and learned a short rhyme that told us something of its importance to Alec/Muad Ter’thalas:

When Muad Ter’thalas brought his ancient band
From the godless world of the elves, this device –
favored trinket and foundation of cities – was among
his most prized possessions.**

So Alec wanted this personally. And we stole it right out from under his nose. Delicious.

Badl decided to scry our foes from the day before to see what could be learnt about their fates, and on scrying the half-dragon he saw that being sitting on the dunes outside the Embassy, healed whole and resting his chin on one fist as he stared at a track of oversized footprints leading south, away from the Embassy, across the sand. Clearly those were the footprints of the Ambassador, headed on foot in our direction. We felt pretty safe, though, given how far away we were at this point.

The half-dragon, surrounded by dead and wounded kobolds, stood up and dusted himself off with a weary sigh. “The Orb is gone,” he said to no one, “The Ambassador is gone and the heroes are gone.” Turning to a specific kobold, now, he pointed roughly at him. “And you,” he said to the wounded kobold, “Get to be the one to tell Alec about this.”

Sucks to be that guy.

—-
* He’s quite right, too, if you count all the polymorphs and Alter Self spells active: the thug jackal-men, the mage jackal-men, the Ambassador, hellwasps, humans, a gnome, an ape, a tressym, a shadow, kobolds, Ascended, a half-dragon, a winged elf (I can’t remember the technical term), a stone giant, a dire bear and a rhino.

** This is from memory, and is NOT remembered correctly. I have it written down in my character notebook, however.

Editor’s Note: This is a summary written by Adric; that week I had another obligation and couldn’t be at the game. I think it’s awesome! Note that calling myself Editor is a misnomer, as I did not edit this at all. Just FYI.

To clarify briefly, one of the things done to deal with the swarms of Hellwasps was that Badl cast a spell to produce 31mph winds in a huge area, thus effectively pushing the enemies so far away as to not be a concern. I forgot to mention it in my last update.

And now, on with Adric’s update! Many thanks to Adric’s player for writing this!

======================================

After the last jackal fell, things were oddly calmer, despite the howling swirl of the wind Badl had conjured up. Adric and Rock moved down the corridor toward the central plaza to check on things. As they passed the crossing tunnel, they saw enormous swarms huddled left and right at the edges of the wind spell, awaiting its departure to pounce. As they moved on, they found the plaza apparently deserted.

“I think I’m going to fill a wineskin with some of that honey,” Rock declared, “is that a bad idea?”

“Probably, but I’ll keep a _word of recall_ ready in case something bad happens. Just run back here.”

“Unless I fall and you have to come get me.”

“Oh yeah,” Adric replied, “except then.”

Rock crept up to the raised pool and dipped his waterskin into the nectar. He noticed three steel skulls in the bottom of the pool. Ad libbing, he pulled out his spear and attempted to skewer one through the socket. He succeeded. Beyond all specter of surprise, of course, the sockets began glowing bright red and all three began to form bodies of the nectar substance itself, and advanced on him– slowly. very slowly.

He retreated back to Adric’s position in the shadows of the tunnel, put away his waterskin, pulled his bow and launched an arrow in tandem to Adric’s flame strike. the beings seemed unharmed– and still advancing. It was time to fall back.

We met back up with the main body and waited to see if any of them followed us all of the way– one did. It seemed immune to magic and packed a NASTY wallop. Rock knew he couldn’t even stand toe-to-toe against it for long. Nigel hollered something about “constructs” and “adamantine” and Rock pulled a stowed adamantine greatsword and squared off against the monster. Nigel recalled a particularly potent spell of force power, that could penetrate even the most resistant of creatures. Between the two, they brought the being down. Rock pocketed the skull with the nectarskin.

When Adric tried to heal Rock’s wounds he found them incredibly resistant to his spells. He found he had to focus twice as hard as usual in order to cure Rock’s wounds. At this point, the party decided they had accomplished about all they could at their current strength and needed to retreat and ponder their next move. Nigel dropped a wall of stone (only 3 inches thick, unfortunately– did we read that right? that seems thin) over the entrance to the cave and grabbed our teleport partners, and bampf!

Only, things didn’t go quite as planned. those riding with Whitten seized in pain as their biomagical signatures were briefly scrambled in a double zero division error. Whitten knew there was now a serious risk of becoming permanently stuck here until the pain of this transitional world killed them all. He refocused his karmic efforts and managed to get them all back to the cave in the next instant. (Editor’s note: Just my frickin’ luck, the one time my Fatespinner special abilities are needed and frickin’ work, I’m not there for it. )

As the party hunkered down in the quiet cave, they pondered what they had learned and more importantly, what their strategy would be for the following day. As Adric moved among them sharing the last of his healing energy, Nigel suggested blasting through the roof of the central room. Appreciating the dramatic flare of Nigel’s ever-direct approach, Whitten was drawn to the idea.

“It doesn’t leave us any escape route for those of us who can’t fly,” Rock replied. Air Walks and Fly‘s were counted. “We should send a group in the front entrance as a feint.”

“I can Stone Shape the wall,” Adric suggested.

“But I thought you only split your forces if you had a numerical superiority,” Badl said. “Er, that’s what a pack of wolves once told me, anyway.”

“If we break the roof of the place, but DON’T kill all of the baddies, we’ve got no way to close the barn door,” Adric cautioned. “I don’t want this evil getting out of its bottle.”

“We could Dimension Door,” Nigel supplied. “That limits how many can come in that way, though.”

Deciding to prepare for the broadest of these contingencies, but not an actual assault plan, the depleted and battered party’s eyes began to droop toward sleep. It was about then that a gentle spark of inspiration nudged the party’s thoughts.

“Adric, can’t clerics control the weather?” Nigel asked.

“With suitable caution for the disruption for the natural flow, one of my highest abilities is the ability to control the local environment,” Adric replied. “In this area, I could pull in a fierce sandstorm, blowing in any general direction– But be careful what you ask for, once called, it takes on a life of its own. We could be eating dust for days.”

It was then Badl and Nigel hatched an idea of sweeping scope– literally. “If you can get a vicious sandstorm, I could whip a smaller area of that into a sand-blasting excavatin’ tornado with my winds,” Badl explained. “We could have the whole place excavated in hours.” Whitten made a note to add “Archaeological Excavation” to the skills section of the TTC business cards.

The next morning, the party sat in the cold cave eating their daily Feast, empowered by the captured rod. This is the ONLY way to “dock a day’s rations” in the field. After breakfast, they bampfed back to the slaughtered camp outside the dungeon. Only it wasn’t there any more. The stone wall had been clawed open and the bodies, so carefully buried the day before, had been exhumed and taken inside.

“More wasp factories,” Badl concluded grimly.

Adric moved a mile or two off, to center the storm away from the dark conical pit in the sand from his 6 mile diameter sandstorm. Badl channeled the down-swept winds into a controlled tornado-forced winds that swept tons of sand aside. In a rod-extended fury, three hours of excavation had revealed most of the former Mulhorandi embassy. Thinking their might be more, the party moved off to see if any other buildings lurked in the immediate area. After another three hours, the entire complex became revealed. The main structure was the only building in the area. It was reasoned that we had explored approximately half of the area from the inside. Our excavation had briefly discovered the original “ground” of the time. A brief puff of white smoke was almost all anyone saw of the expanse of humanoid bones that littered the ambassadorial bailey.

Around the exterior, the party iscovered two “additions” built into the side of the embassy. The most interesting was the side addition that seemed to match up with the guarded doors inside. The room seemed to rest upon a lower basement room, constructed entirely of a silver metal. Badl alchemically identified it as “mostly mythral.”

“Could this be something the dwarves were charged to protect?” Adric asked?

“We’re being Scryed!” Nigel’s warning ceased all further speculation.

“I see a dozen masked winged-orc mages. They’re mounted. They’re scrying INSIDE the building. They’re only 5 miles–THAT way! They don’t seem to be looking for us. I think they’re trying to get a Teleport lock inside the embassy!”

We’ve got 45 minutes before one of our enemies teleports into our other enemies’ den. Do we let them fight and take out the “winner”? Do they think this storm is anything other than natural? Do they know we’re here, too?

We popped back to the nomad camp and picked up Nigel and Katarina, telling them of our experience out in the desert. None of us were exactly thrilled about the idea of going down into whatever ruin had been excavated, but off we went, lycanthropes or no. This is where we separate the adventurers from the hobbyists, I guess.

Upon our return we decided that first we should bury the dead. This was hard and difficult in the sand, and we had little in the way of magic to help us and I am left wondering what I would do without magic in a given day. I use a lot of magic. I really wonder if I would like myself very much if I didn’t have it. But, of course, I do, so no worries.

We did what we could to pay our respects, however, and then we ventured down into the ruin in what has become our standard exploration formation: Katarina and Shadow at the front, Rock a few yards behind them with a torch (to better act as bait for anything nasty) and the rest of us a few more yards behind him in a mass. We didn’t get but a few feet into the place, however, before Katarina noticed two small alcoves to either side of the masonry hallway. Peeking into one, she saw an enormous – seven feet if it was an inch – man-jackal; by this I mean it had the body of a (very tall) man and the head of a jackal. It’s just that simple. These were the “lycanthrope” footprints we’d seen outside, shooting that theory down without anyone missing it very much in its demise.

I am rarely so glad to be wrong about something as I was to be wrong about lycanthropes being there.

The eyes of the jackal at whom she looked swung open as he heard our approach, and with a red glow it called out in what I can only describe as an early sort of Common that there were intruders. In the opposite alcove, an identical man-jackal responded by opening his own, red eyes and beginning to stride forward. Katarina leapt through the shadow to their backs and Rock drew them back out towards the opening where we collectively began to lay down the smack.

Other than their size and their appearance, there didn’t seem to be anything special about these man-jackals. Then we all noticed the sweet aroma that originated from them, and when one opened its jaws and tried to bite Rock we were able to see that a black, viscous liquid dripped from its teeth and gums and smelled like rotting honey.

Poison.

After taking out those two man-jackals, we performed a quick autopsy and were able to confirm that their stomachs were full of the stuff. Weird! We didn’t let this one tiny drop of oddity in the bucket of experience deter us from exploration, however, and as we progressed forward we noted a couple of empty alcoves and then an intersection where a long hallway arched forward out of sight to either side and, concealed behind a decorative stone wall, our own continued forward at a slight decline. We figured we were probably standing on the outside of a very large, circular complex, and progressing forward we made our way with great care to what is probably the center of the building.

In it, we saw a dozen more man-jackals. They lounged – lounged, like civilized beings, utterly relaxed in their posture and demeanor – around a large pool which seemed to be filled right to brimming with more of this same, black, moldering honey. From the pool the man-jackals would take lazy gulps, lapping it up and then settling back into repose. Still, even if they were deeply at ease we knew it would be tough to take a dozen of them at once. We crept back away, very quietly, and at the intersection of our hallway with the outer rim of the circle of the building we decided to go right and see what we could find.

Shortly, we found more man-jackals, including one dressed in a robe and decorated by a head-dress and staff that were clearly of Mulhorandi origin – as I suspected the man-jackals to be, as well, given their resemblance to some of the iconography of the Mulhorandi gods we’d seen when we vacationed there several years ago. They stood obvious guard over a large, stone door which had something inscribed on it; from our angle, however, we couldn’t make out the words. Katarina crept forward to try to see what they protected, but one of the beasts had the unlikely fortune to spot her as she crept through shadows. With that, another battle commenced and we learned that while the plainer, more common brutes are mere thugs the ones dressed in robes are spellcasters. Between us, however, we were able to take them all down save the spellcaster, who disappeared and, we knew, would raise the alarm with his kin.

As we started a hasty retreat I clasped my hand over the helm I keep for just such occasions and ran up to the stone door they’d guarded. In the ancient pictograms of Mulhorand it said:

NO ENTRY, BY ORDER OF THE AMBASSADOR OF MULHORAND

In an instant, I knew we were in a place that was ancient – but not nearly as ancient as The Tomb – and a great deal of new information was made plain to us. With it, however, were raised just as many questions.

No time for that then, however, as we ran back to the exit and tried to prepare a defense for the assault we knew these beasts would bring to bear. Knowing we could always just run outside and let Nigel seal the entrance with a wall of stone, we decided to test our mettle and try to take out as many as we could. Soon, the air filled with yips and howls and growled orders and – oh yes – the terrible buzzing of the wasps we’d fought earlier that day. I did what I could to try to stop their advance, filling the air with fogs of sonic energy to slow their advance. As I laid down suppressive sonic fireballs over the fog and the others went toe-to-toe with any that made it through that disruptive mist, we were able to wear their numbers down a great deal. Finally we sent Shadow ahead when they ceased their advance and he returned to report that there were still several, both brute and spellcaster, and several swarms of wasps just standing around waiting for us to relax our defense. We decided to lure them in, then, and dropped our spells just long enough to let them begin to rush us; in an instant we’d trapped several more and begun to lay further waste to their number.

Eventually we were out of spells and there were only a couple left. Rock, Badl and Bonzo had fought fiercely to protect us, with many dead man-jackals at their feet, and Adric had alternated between smiting and healing as he is equally good at both. Nigel and I were almost spent of magic, and Katarina had riddled more than a few man-jackals with bolts and stabbed a few in the back with her blade. Seeing us all still standing, though, the two or three brutes left to fight stopped in their tracks (ha ha – tracks) and one turned to another:

“They are too strong for us. We must go and wake the ambassador.”

With that, they took off running and we heard the distance erupt with more yips and yowls as man-jackals cried out to one another for help and aid.

“We need to get out of here,” everyone pretty much said at once. With that, we retreated from the excavated entrance to the building, Nigel sealed it shut with a spell and we returned to the cave to rest for the night; and, with our rest, to consider any number of questions.

For one thing, the Mulhorandi are an old nation. We know this. They brag that they are the oldest of human kingdoms, and their history easily extends somewhere from three to five thousand years into the past.

We also know that the Anauroch Desert was once home to a race of powerful wizards, called the Netherese. Their kingdom fell some thousands of years ago; the histories are vague, but I want to say two or three. Thus, it is entirely possible, and not really that surprising, that they would have had diplomatic relations with the Mulhorandi.

If an ancient site of power were in the center of the Netherese Empire, the wizards who rules the Netherese would certainly have known it. It might, in fact, have been part of what drew them to settle here. And, of course, if this building is the embassy of the distant and ancient land of Mulhorand, easily contemporaries to the Netherese, then this may be the Netherese capitol.

What is surprising is that the Mulhorandi ambassador would, you know, still be here. It’s not like his social calendar’s had anything on it since the Netherese passed into history. This leads to three possibilities:

• the Mulhorandi ambassador is actually a contemporary Mulhorandi sent here by his government for no apparent reason,
• the Mulhorandi ambassador went for a lie-down some, oh, five thousand years ago and has been “asleep” ever since, and those beasts are going to go knock on his door for a very long time before realizing that perhaps he’s simply never going to answer it after all, or
• the Mulhorandi ambassador is some sort of undead who could still be alive down there, and if so, almost certainly unspeakably powerful with regards to magic and other arcane knowledge.

What separates the adventurers from the hobbyists, however, is none of that.

What separates the adventurers from the hobbyists is that we want to go back anyway.

Five years ago, my friends and I fought and killed a dragon.

The dragon was green. I don’t remember its name. I’m not sure we even knew, then, that dragons have names.

There was a kid with us. He was this guy from a local constabulary, basically, who’d come with us to see what its deal was. He died before the fight even started. The poor kid stepped into the woods to take a leak and the dragon killed him without a thought.

Five minutes later, when we were fighting the dragon, nearly dying – when it was just my friends and me, shouting and crying out in pain and anger and putting everything we had into ending this specific menace – I knew that kid had to be dead in those woods, knew that dragon must have gotten him. I wondered whether the kid had seen his own shocked expression reflected in the scales of that terrible beast or whether he had his back turned and didn’t even know what hit him.

Back then, if asked, I would have said that there were probably ten dragons in the whole world. I mean, c’mon, it’s frigging dragons. They’re huge. How many of them can really be tucked away, unknown?

Back then, I didn’t know how big the world is.

I didn’t know a lot of things.

Rock and Badl brought back one of the winged kobolds that they’d managed to capture. They chained him up in one of the unused cells – bedrooms, not jail cells – in Candlekeep. Rock had more scouting to do, so off he went into the woods while Adric and Katarina and I helped the priests continue to clean and organize the vandalized parts of the library. We did a bit more making of plans – Badl wanted to speak to the stones in the Keeper of Tomes’ offices to see what he could learn about the False Prophet from five hundred years ago, and Badl and Nigel wanted to interrogate the winged kobold.

Adric and I were there for the beginning, but Nigel and Badl were more willing than we were to amp up the more, um, physical aspects of interrogation, so Adric and I went back to helping clean.

Nigel and Badl were able to find out a great deal. Long story short, the winged kobold agreed to play a sort of game with them: every time he answered a question, he got to ask one. And, in time, Nigel and Badl were able to learn a few things about the Mother, and about the winged kobolds – Ascendeds – and about whence they come.

It turns out that their powerbase is a place called The Cauldron of Birth, in a mountain range called The Spine of the World. This is a range of high mountains far to the north. It is cold there, and snowy, and from what I have read of the world it is a place where the sun does not set and rise on exactly the same schedule as here, with weeks-long days in summer and periods of equal night in winter. He also told them that there were more dragons than the few, abused youths we have seen in their service – the one gold we captured and the one copper Rock saw with them before they left for another plane. There are two free adult dragons – one black, one red – in their employ, or in league with them, or otherwise of a cooperative nature. One is named Charwing, the other is named Mal’Thalus.

Charwing, the Ascended said, “walks with the Original.” Mal’Thalus, on the other hand, “plays the Mother’s heartbeat.”

We could find out nothing more than that from the Ascended in question. Badl turned him into a small, harmless lizard, and that was the end of that.

The time had come, I decided, to see what we could learn from the normal kobold we had captive in another cell. That afternoon, I disguised myself as an Ascended, via magic, and teleported into the kobold’s little room. Grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, I shook him back and forth and demanded to know why he dared subvert the Mother’s divine plan! Who are you to question the Mother’s wisdom? I roared. Truly, it was one of my better performances. The Mother has allowed you to be held in this place that you might tell these pathetic mammals of the glory of her ways, that they might know their doom before it comes to them! Now speak, when they ask you questions, speak to the glory of the Mother and perhaps you will be rewarded in due time with some small measure of a life after this!

When I reappeared back in the hallway outside, Nigel was bent double with laughter. After a few minutes collecting ourselves and letting the kobold stew in his own juices, we strode in and told the kobold he had one more chance to tell us what he knew.

“I’m ready to talk! I’ll tell you everything!” he cried. We feigned indifference and rolled our eyes and with great patience allowed him to tell us his tale: namely, that he was part of a normal brood of kobolds that worshipped the verminish but largely benign kobold god until the day came with the Ascendeds showed up, killed the priests that wouldn’t cooperate, converted the ones who would and explained to the kobolds of his brood that they had been misled by a deceitful thief of a god and had greater lives awaiting them in the service of the Mother. The Mother was the mother of all dragons, from a time before names, and that the kobolds were as much the children of the Mother as dragons themselves. After that, this poor little kobold had been pressed into armed service and had spent a few scant weeks in the service of the Ascendeds. A part of the Mother’s propaganda, of course, was that kobolds who were very good would get to grow wings and become tall and turn into Ascendeds, themselves.

The Ascended Nigel and Badl had questioned, however, hinted that perhaps this was more fairy tale than truth – a useful lie, but a lie all the same.

Afterwards, Nigel clear the halls and courtyard of any priests, guards, scholars or others – after initially refusing, and then very gallantly acquiescing to my requests – and I reappeared to the little kobold in the guise of an Ascended. Together, we raced through the halls and across the courtyard and I set the kobold free in the surface world, stripped of all arms and armor save a small knife to be used to feed himself. I told him that the Mother’s will had been done and that now he should count himself lucky to escape with his life. I hope – fervently – that he will not harm some unsuspecting folk out in the world. Regardless, I had to give him a chance. I couldn’t just kill him and be done with it.

After all, that’s what the dragon did, all those years ago, to that kid who travelled with us.

That afternoon, the Keeper of Tomes summoned us to his office to thank us for our work. We asked him about the False Prophet and he said a very strange thing: that no one knew how or why the False Prophet changed or was changed, but that he had been a fine and wise leader prior to his sudden turn to evil. Then, one day, he was simply different. Most bothersome of all, Demion – the god these priests serve – did not notice the change in his servant.

Badl obtained permission to return, to speak with the stones, and with that we set off towards the mountains surrounding the Anauroch Desert in hopes of finding Mytheria, the gold dragon we were told lives in that remote place.

Adric flew us most of the way, then we touched down to release the lizardified Ascended, then he flew us the rest of the way. Once there, Nigel and I proceeded to study it as a teleport point and then I jumped back and brought Badl, Bonzo and Katarina from Candlekeep to the Anauroch Mountains. Rock and Badl had scouted out a cave with a small stream originating in it where we could set up a camp from which to begin our search for Mytheria and while Nigel and Katarina began setting up our base, Rock and Badl went into the woods to scout and hunt while Adric and I went to a logging and mining town a couple hours away (by foot – we were there in minutes) to start feeling out the region for how inhabited it might or might not be.

What a surprise Nigel and Katarina received! While setting up the camp they heard a woman’s voice crying for help. They went warily out of the cave and started calling out in response, trying to determine what the emergency was, and where the woman might be. No sooner had they started to respond, however, than an enormous gold dragon appeared out of the air above them and pinned Nigel to the ground. After Nigel and Katarina abandoned their various means of concealing their minds, the dragon inspected them thoroughly and found them… well, not exactly lacking, but not exactly exemplars of the mammalian races, either.

Luckily, Badl and Bonzo and Rock appeared at the sounds of Nigel’s screams and eventually everyone was able to explain why, exactly, the group was in that cave with a bound and wounded gold dragon youth. After hearing their story – with special emphasis that it was Nigel who insisted we get the young gold to an elder who could reeducate it – Mytheria agreed not to kill everyone on sight and then took off to find Adric and me.

Speaking of Adric and me, we were sitting in a bar in the logging town talking to some friendly locals and offering to come by to do what we could about tending to the sick and injured – logging is a dangerous business, as anyone who has lived on a frontier knows too well – and entertaining both sick and whole. In walked a beautiful, elven male who introduces himself as Mytheria.

“Mytheria?” Adric and I manage to squeak this out from around our beers and when Mytheria said he’d already talked to our companions and wished to meet us back at the cave, Adric and I were quick to agree.

Back we went to the cave in a flash, and together the six of us sat down and talked with Mytheria and told him what we’d heard so far – of Charwing and Mal’Thalus and the Mother and all the rest. Mytheria had heard of CharWing – an impulsive and trouble-making young black dragon when they’d last met, several hundred years ago – but was unfamiliar with talk of The Mother and all the rest. Mytheria took the young gold we’d brought for him to care for and told us that we had his permission to operate in his territory. In the desert itself, where we aimed to go, we would need the help of guides and goods from the human nomads with trading camps on the outer edge of the desert. Inside, he said, we would find blues and bestial reds, wicked and destructive and hostile to one another as well as outsiders. We thanked him for his kindness and cooperation, and bedded down for the night.

The next day, of course, was no less strange than any other.

In the morning, Badl and Adric and I teleported to Candlekeep so that Badl could speak with the stones in the Keeper of Tomes’ office. On doing so, the stones told him that they remembered the time of the False Prophet. One day, they said, metal shoes had walked across the floor and surprised the Keeper of Tomes. There had been a scuffle, and then the metal-clad feet and the person attached to them were simply not there anymore – and in that instant, the Keeper of Tomes became the False Prophet.

Muad Ter’Thalas, we all agreed. Muad had come and taken over the Keeper of Tomes, probably in the same way he had acquired the identity of the halfling called Alec.

After that time, the stones said, there were frequent visits to the Keeper of Tomes by Ascendeds. They would arrive in broad daylight, confer for a time and then leave. So, by this, we surmise that Muad Ter’Thalas used Candlekeep as his base of operations five hundred years ago. Was the Mother on the move even then? Was that some earlier, aborted attempt at a grab for power? Or was it merely the normal operations of a secret and subversive sect as it slowly but surely built its power?

After Badl’s interview of the stones, we traveled to Waterdeep to get some shopping done. We bought some scrolls and various supplies, did some asking around – I paid a moderate sum to the Guild of Historians to try to found out some things about fifty thousand years ago only to have them initially laugh at me. “Fifty thousand years? The world didn’t even exist then!” And so forth, naturally. I told them to look anyway, and that I’d pay their finder’s fee if they came up with anything worth knowing. Stupid historians – did the world even exist then? This is why I think I need to be around fifty thousand years from now, in some form or another. This is how the world ends up in trouble: the world forgets.

On our return to the cave, we cleaned up our camp and made our way through the air over the mountains and down to the edge of the desert. We found one of the trading camps and learned that a tribe of nomads from near the center of the desert was due into the trading camp any day now and though they were largely hostile to outsiders it was possible they would guide us to the center of the desert. We waited for a little while – did teleport studies, and the like – then decided we could at least try to reconnoiter the desert ourselves from the air. Nigel and Katarina stayed behind in case those nomads arrived while Badl, Bonzo, Rock, Adric, Greebo and I took to the sky to see what we could in the center of the desert. A few hours’ flight to the north, what we saw were two nomads walking together under the blazing sun.

We landed in front of them, at a respectful distance, and called out to see if they were okay. One had a grievous wound on his back and the other staggered a bit. They approached, then stopped, declined our offers of assistance and insisted they had to get to the nomad camp. We asked again if they would like healing or other assistance and they declined. I asked if they would like to be teleported directly to the camp so they could seek assistance from their own people, and again they declined.

By this point, everything about them was suspicious. So, of course, I tried to read their minds.

They didn’t like that very much.

The sad thing is, the guys themselves were basically already dead. One of them actually was already dead, and stank of rot. Adric attempted to turn them, and we learned that while one was technically alive the other was simply a zombie. His body melted… but in his place were thousands of bright red wasps. At this, the other one’s body, well, exploded as thousands of wasps poured out of his skin.

Then they attacked us.

It is not easy to fight thousands of tiny enemies.

Eventually we were able to get them contained magically, wear them down over time, and get rid of the threat they posed. With that, however, we knew we had to keep going to see if anyone else of their tribe were possessed or in need of assistance. On we flew, and in short order we arrived at a sight I hadn’t expected: an archaeological dig, smack in the middle of the desert. Around it were tents, and inside and outside of those were a few dozen corpses, all violently slain, people from a nomadic tribe and a few of their foreign clients who had come here to dig up what appeared to be a temple. The entrance – or an entrance, anyway – had been exposed, and from within came several interesting sets of footprints: two pairs of Ascended footprints, which emerged from the temple or tomb, climbed to the surface, then pushed into the sand and jumped into the air. The other prints were sort of half man, half wolf or dog.

Lycanthropes.

And those prints came out, ran all around the camp, and then went back inside.

And so, we have probably found another of the places of power – my term for whatever these places are that were so important the ancients used a crude map of them as their coat of arms fifty millenia ago.

And there are probably shape-shifters inside.

And the last people who got here were all horribly murdered.

So now I’m going to jump us back to the camp, where we can pick up Nigel and Katarina. And then, we’ll have to tell the nomads of the camp that the tribe they told us about probably won’t show up anytime soon.

And then we have to come back here, and go inside, and face whatever’s in there.

Today, I’m not so sure I love my job.

On days like today, I think of us as a small skiff on the choppy seas of history.  As we drive on slowly into the dark unknown the waves lap and then swell and then roar around us, the past spilling into our boat in greater and greater quantities and I fear we will be swamped, overturned…

I don’t really know where I’m going with that metaphor, but hey, a diary is just a rough draft for a saga, as my mother once said.  So, I’ll work with it later.

We’ve had a couple of very interesting days here at Candlekeep.

Rock, Badl and Katarina went into the big tunnel – the escape route for the flying super-kobolds and their more normal kobold minions – to try to track our foes’ retreat.  There they found a single, injured kobold – the normal kind – nursing a broken leg and hiding in the dark.  They were quick to capture it and bring it back for questioning, and we learned a bit more about our enemies from it.

While all that was happening, the rest of us were speaking to the priests and scribes of Candlekeep.  They live in a castle, sure, but they don’t often get attacked.  They had never seen creatures such as the super-kobolds before, and they had no idea why they would have been targeted or their library set ablaze.  We started running down the list of search terms we hoped they would be able to help us with – Fae’Rath, the Three-Faced Man, Stormcloud, The Mother, et cetera – and one of the youngest priests started to get fidgety and mumble to himself.

"The book, the book," we heard him say, and when I pressed the priests of Candlekeep as to what had the kid in such a fit then they tried to wave it off.

"That is Averim the Fool," one of them told me.  "Believe nothing that he says.  He is capable only of lies."

Let me tell you, that is precisely the way to get my attention.

Averim set off in a dead run, gibbering to himself about his book, and I turned myself invisible and shot off after him through the keep.  I followed him to his private cell where I found him yanking a stone out of the floor to reveal a little cache he’d clearly made or discovered there and used to hide some of his things.  He was talking openly to himself, hurried and anxious, and he seemed distraught to find that "the book" was missing from his little hidey-hole.

I crossed my fingers, dropped the spell so that I appeared in front of him out of thin air and then said, "What book, Averim?"  I have learned in my years of adventuring that a few blunt words from a normally loquacious tongue can have a jarring effect that leads to effective interrogation.

"The book!" he cried.  "They took it!  It’s gone!  I had it here, safe, and they took it!"

I tried to remind myself of what the priests had said of Averim’s truthfulness, but so far so good, so I pressed on:  "What is in the book?"

"The truth…"  Averim was the sort of calm fidgety that the truly insane can sometimes exhibit, an unnerving mix of certain madness and near self-awareness.  It’s like watching a drowning man try to stay afloat.  Some days I really don’t like my job.  "The truth I saved from the room of lies."

On the other hand, I was undeniably getting somewhere.

"What’s in the book?"

"The story of The Mother," Averim said, and I could have hugged him if I weren’t so busy keeping an eye on where his hands were and whether they were empty of knives.

"What’s the book called?"

"Malleus Draconus," he replied.  The Hammer of the Dragon.  "The Voice told me where to find it, but now the kobolds have taken it away.  No one knew where it was, it had to be them…"  Averim steeled himself for a moment, though, and said very seriously, "You can’t believe a word I say, though.  Everything I tell you is a lie.  Ask anyone."

I was, of course, immediately reminded of the old Mulhorandi puzzle about the twin brothers, one of whom always speaks truth and the other of whom always speaks lies, but I don’t really remember the solution to that one and I’m pretty sure I’d just kick them both in the nadgers and see who said it felt good, anyway, and regardless this wasn’t that situation so I just sort of had to fly with what Averim could give me himself.  Buried somewhere in that addled head of his was something undeniably important and I was determined to find it out for myself.

Eventually I was able to sort out that The Hammer of the Dragon was a book that had been kept in the catacombs of the keep in a section called The Room of Lies.  Apparently books that are not merely false but dangerously false – dangerous in a mystical, perhaps magical way, not books that are merely controversial – were kept out of sight.  We asked the priests why they kept these books around if they were the sort that could turn someone’s brain inside out and they were terribly offended by the thought of destroying any words, even dangerous ones.  Averim, they said, managed to bypass all the wards and protections that stood between the public and even most of the private areas of the keep and The Room of Lies, a mystery they had not yet solved, and gained access to the books themselves.  In reading them, he had been driven mad and now, they believed, everything he said was a lie.  According to Averim, though, there was a voice that he had heard speaking – only he could hear it – that told him the way into The Room of Lies.  It was not addressing him directly, he said, it was merely recounting to itself the ways to circumvent the keep’s defenses, and he did the things it spoke of doing and found himself, eventually, in that room.

Naturally, he could no longer recall precisely what it was that he did to achieve that goal.

We gently prodded the priests and scribes as to voices and spirits around the place and learned that there is an unidentified protective spirit that had always guarded the keep.  Why didn’t it act to repel the kobold attackers?  Hell if they knew.

All of which, believe it or not, brings us back to that one injured kobold Badl and Rock and Katarina found in the earthen tunnel the kobolds used to escape.  Bringing it back up, healing its wounds and then questioning it, they were able to learn that the kobolds worked for the cause of this thing called The Mother.  Who is The Mother?  She is, he said, the mother of all dragons and she has no name because she is from before the time of names.  When they asked the kobold about the gold dragon we still have tied up out front, why its wings were torn off and it was enslaved if it claimed to worship a big mama dragon, the kobold was disgusted.  "Modern dragons," he said, "Don’t deserve their wings.  They have gone against the ways of The Mother, and they will all be punished."  Interestingly, the kobold seemed to think that they – kobolds – are just as much The Mother’s descendants and rightful followers as today’s dragons, and I got the feeling from what he told my friends that perhaps they even see themselves as the dragons’ superiors since they are aware of their "rightful" place as followers of the agenda of The Mother.

At any rate, Badl and Rock were able to determine that the kobold was desperate to tell them everything he knew but terrified of the idea of betraying The Mother.  We might just have a plan for taking care of that little mental block, though I think I’ll save that for the end of the story.

The kobold told us that the kobold army would be long gone down the tunnel, but Rock still wanted to see if he could track them so he, Katarina and Badl went back into the tunnel to see if they could find a trail to follow.  The earthen walls had been shaped, obviously, with the occasional odd three-clawed set of score-marks in the walls.  About a hundred yards down the tunnel, they also found a figure – just a guy, a bit funny-looking, sort of fish-man in the face – standing around in the dark.  They didn’t reveal themselves to him, but he was aware of Badl’s presence in bat-form and the worst thing he did was throw a pebble at Badl to try to shoo him away.  With the possibility of a friendly entity down there or, we had to admit, a potential enemy, we had to get down there ASAP and try to assess the situation.  We all geared up and went down there, arranging ourselves such that Badl would scout ahead with Katarina and Shadow close behind.  Rock would hang back and Nigel, Adric and I would go in the middle, well-lit, to act as bait or a friendly greeting.  Upon seeing us, the guy – whose faced looked altogether uncomfortably like that of a catfish – spoke to us in a friendly tone and we started to parley.  That didn’t really last very long, though, as he told us freely and immediately that the kobolds had hired him to get them here, to Candlekeep, and hired him to stay behind to guard their backtrail.  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the walls of the tunnel opened and out stepped two enormous, blue creatures that seemed to be under his control.

With that, battle commenced.

Badl, Bonzo, Katarina, Nigel, Adric and Rock all concentrated their efforts on the two big blue guys while I dropped a Sonic Fog on the black-grey fishman to keep him in place and start wearing him down.  Our concentrated efforts made short work of the guy’s minions, and we all gathered around the fog, waiting for it to lift, in hopes that the guy would have been crushed to death by its vibrations.  Just for good measure I laid down some sonic fireballs in the middle of it to try to take care of any potential for him to survive.

Sadly, it appeared he was immune to that sort of thing.  When the fog lifted, he was still hale and hearty and he simply took off at a run for the exit.

"Do not pursue me!" he cried over his shoulder, "For I have magics that could kill any one of you with a touch!"

Fat chance, I thought.  He would have used it already.  

So, we chased him down and trapped him at the end of the tunnel and just before we drove home the final blows he reached out one hand and placed it on Bonzo…

…causing Bonzo to crumble into a sticky red mass on the floor.

So much for calling his bluff.

I was, frankly, distraught over the death of Bonzo.  He was such a dapper ape, friendly and loyal and strong.  Badl, for his part, took it on the chin.  "Death is a natural thing," he said.  "I will ask Silvanus whether Bonzo is to be resurrected or whether his time had come, and we’ll go from there."  I admire his adherance to his religion, but if it were Greebo who’d been turned into a patch of steaming guts on the floor then frankly I’d have been trying to twist that wizard’s head right off his neck with my bare hands.

After it was all over, Nigel stood over the creature’s corpse and rubbed his chin and finally said, "Death Slaad… I remember reading about them somewhere…"  Apparently they’re mercenaries and powerful wizards.

And they’re immune to sonic damage, which I just find terribly off-putting.

As we searched the end of the tunnel, which was sealed against further chase, we found a thinner portion of the stone wall at the end and magicked it open to reveal a smaller tunnel concealed behind it.  Rock, being fast and good at tracking, volunteered to run ahead and see what he could see.  Eventually he encountered a few bands of kobolds, many of them priests and some of them the winged super-kobolds who’d led the assault.  They had small camps and other temporary bases of operations for the assault, and he found them preparing their evening meals and readying for departure.  

Among them, he saw a copper dragon that had, like the gold one in our care, been stripped of its wings and was being used to draw a large, wooden cart loaded with the kobolds’ supplies.

Eventually, four of the priests gathered together over an arcane symbol drawn into the earthen floor, began an extended chant, and created what was unmistakably a portal into the other Planes, this one dark and dreary and essentially ink-black on the other side.  The floor under them, the portal itself, seemed to yawn open and swallow the priests, and the band of kobolds and their taller masters marched through in orderly fashion.  Once gone, the portal disappeared and so we at least knew that the kobolds had left.

On his way there and back, Rock had also spied a water-cut cavern at one point along the tunnels.  On the far side of the shallow pool formed by natural seepage there was clearly hand-built stone construction and he hazarded a guess that this was one of the sunken corners of Candlekeep itself.

What most interested him about it, however, was the door cut into the side.

When he returned and told the rest of us this, we decided to investigate it immediately.  After all, the priests of Candlekeep had approved our going down here to assess the security of their fortress and here was an underground door into the basements themselves – the place they kept what they called their most dangerous tomes.  We all stomped down there and had a look and were able to enter the keep itself with little effort.  Inside, we found long-abandoned halls and stairs and what was clearly a decades-forgotten (at least) basement with storage areas and old casks and the like.  We also found a door with what was clearly a magical ward on it, one designed to wrack a trespasser’s body with pain.  Rather than try to risk going through it, we searched the room for secret exits and found one on a perpendicular wall.  We could find no mechanism to open the door, though – not even with the use of my magic, which reveals such things with only a little study – and so Katarina shadow-jumped us through to the other side of the door to study it from that side.

Immediately upon getting there, though, we were greeted by what I can only describe as an enormous, ghostly set of jaws.  These were clearly the jaws of a dragon, and a female voice filled my mind:

"What is your name?"

"Whitten Silvervoice," I said aloud.

"What is your purpose here?"

"To assess the security of the keep to help protect the priests?"  I was terrified at this point, because I was now working on, what, my third dragon this week?  Fourth?  Hell if I remember.

After a few interminable seconds the voice said that I could continue.  I heard Katarina – we were in complete darkness, other than the image of the bony jaws – have a similar exchange.  With that, we threw open the secret door.  Our friends stood on the other side, wanting to know who the hell we were talking to.  We explained, and then the group continued on a good bit more cautiously.

At the other end of the secret passageway we were able to see into a room that was, clearly, The Room of Lies.  Its shelves were lined with books chained to the shelves and the books made a chattering and chittering and rustling noise as they strained.  It was a strange and disturbing sight, the sort of thing one imagines a dangerously magical library to be but doesn’t really want to experience, and at one end of the room were three books in a sort of special display:

• one book held in a shaft of bright, white light
• one book held in a metal cage
• and one book chained inside a tank of water.

Nigel and were, immediately, eager to get those books open and see what they contained.

"You don’t want to do that," Adric said.

"Yes we do!"  Nigel and I were quick to agree.

"One of them had to be caged!  Are you crazy?"

"But one of them is all lit up all sweet and special!  White light!  That’s all purity!"

"I’m willing to bet the one kept underwater has something to do with… fire."  Nigel was really, really into the idea of a dangerously potent book about fire, and he kind of licked his lips a little as he said it, and Adric nodded at him.

"It probably does.  So what does that say about the book that’s held in a column of bright light?"

"Ohhhhhh," I said, realization dawning.  So much for that.  Adric had managed to talk me and Nigel out of ganking those books for later study.

While that was happening, though, Badl was getting interviewed by those bony dragon jaws.

After he told what he was doing there, and the voice said he could proceed, he stopped and asked it, point blank, "Who are you?"

The voice, I think, was so glad that someone simply asked that it told him its whole story.  The voice, it seemed, is the protective spirit of Candlekeep.  Six hundred years ago, she was a powerful dragon whose lover was among the priests of the keep.  A false prophet came to power in those days, she said, and as he tightened control over the keep and over the books and knowledge it kept in its walls, he also worked to eradicate all that had ever been written about himself so that no one would know that his claim to power was illegitimate.  

One of the books that contained information about him, she said, was the Malleus Draconus, the book stolen, hidden and in turn stolen again from Averim the Fool.

The Malleus Draconus, she said, was not a false book.  It was, however, a book that contained information about the real identity of The False Prophet.  As such, it had to be hidden away in The Room of Lies so that The False Prophet would not know of its existence and be unable to do away with it to protect himself.  So, it was not that book which twisted Averim’s mind, it was the other books in that room which he had read.

Eventually, her lover tried to lead an uprising against The False Prophet, and her lover was slain.  The False Prophet killed her lover and then killed her, too, but she was able to stay tied to this plane, mourning her love, and swore to spend eternity protecting the place he had lived and died from invasion.  This was, she said, over six hundred years ago – if she’d counted correctly.  

She’d never heard of The Mother, or Fae’Rath, or any of that stuff, but much to our surprise she did know of a gold dragon in the area.  Sort of.  She told us that when she was alive there was an ancient gold dragon that lived in the mountains surrounding the Anauroch Desert, between here and home.  If we wanted to transport our captive, insane gold dragon to one of its own kind to see if it could be healed and rehabilitated, she said, that would be one place to start.

Once we were back upstairs, we learned from the priests that they had searched their records and could find nothing on any of our search terms.  However, our time here was far from wasted, as we have learned a new dimension to all of this – the worship of The Mother, and of the book it appears her followers stole – and we have at least managed an incidental choice in where to go next.  One of the places of power Nigel and I identified on the map in Sess’uadra is smack in the middle of the Anauroch Desert, so if we’re headed there with our captive dragon anyway…

And in the meantime, we still have this captive kobold locked away in the keep.  An idea we’ve discussed is having me teleport into his room in the guise of one of the winged super-kobolds, slap him around for daring to question The Mother’s all-knowing, all-encompassing plan which includes him being captured by these filthy, filthy non-kobolds so that he can tell them of the truth of The Mother’s ways to serve her greater, mysterious aims, and then, after he spills his guts with (he thinks) the approval of his superiors, we hand him over to the priests and scribes of Candlekeep to assist them in cleaning up the place from the attack.  At that point, what’s he going to do?  Travel to another plane to find his companions?  Not hardly.

And so, we’ve managed to learn a little more.  The Mother is some ancient ideal of dragons worshipped by kobolds.  The False Prophet was apparently someone worthy of mention in The Hammer of the Dragons and once ruled this place.  The kobolds who worship The Mother showed up here, stole the book that describes The False Prophet and tried to burn the place down.  And, to top it all off, they’re able to hire weird-ass spellcasters from other dimensions to guard their back-trail, meaning they’ve got deep pockets.

Whatever it is we’re dealing with, it’s big.  It’s not often that we hear of dragons, much less see them.  Now they’re popping up all over and every time they do it involves ancient history.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that once we’ve figured it all out someone has to stick around for eternity just to explain it all to the future when the time comes. Read the rest of this entry »

Several years ago, I ran a spy network.

That sounds so flashy, doesn’t it?

I did, though. It was arguably rag-tag, but it got me information from far corners I couldn’t visit on a regular basis and some places where I wasn’t terribly welcome. It was one of those things that just happened, you know? I made friends with some people who always had their ears to the ground and then I started exchanging information with them and then we needed a way to identify ourselves to one another so I handed out tokens by which these friends of mine would know one another.

We were the Obsidian Arrows.

Those days are long gone, now. Someone in the group was selling our information outside the group – information about me, about my friends – and it had to stop. So, we disbanded. I keep up with most of them still, but I haven’t had to reach out into the world and make connections like that in a long time. A life without adventuring is a life that requires very little news of the world. For all the fast-paced changes adventuring brings to one’s world, the world outside the sphere of the hunt, of going out and finding trouble and fixing it, doesn’t change much. To the average fishmonger in the street, every day is pretty much like the day before it, and when you spend a few years off your feet and on your ass, you get used to that sort of thing.

It’s funny how quickly the old habits come back, though, when they’re needed. Adric and I ported down to Arabel to start rounding up Lothanderians to come guard The Tomb and while we were there I dropped off a note to Lady Lall at the palace. It was just a simple hello – we haven’t seen each other in years – but before the day was over Adric and I were eating dinner with Lady Lall and her husband, swapping old stories and catching up and discussing adventure, and news of the world, and Alec. When I asked her whether she’d heard anything about him, or more likely heard that anyone was moving through the city looking for him, she hadn’t. But, she said, she’d let me know if she did. She said she’d have a priest of Lothander cast a Sending to get word to me wherever we are. Just like that, the old strands assert themselves and the web is spun anew. I need eyes in the world, lots of them, and have no idea where they should look except Everywhere.

Adric was able to rustle up some help at the local temple in Arabel, and then we were off to Selgaunt, through the air, to report to Adric’s home temple and corral more support. We were welcomed there, as well, and Adric was able to track down a big lead on Alec: six months ago, an apparent halfling calling himself William had been through the halfling community in Selgaunt asking after his "brother," Alec. He was reserved and quiet and, we got the impression, kind of cranky. He was tight-lipped, but he’d say that much: he had a brother named Alec for whom he searched.

I should note that Adric and I disposed of the evil axe wielded by one of the orcs who had also tracked Alec to The Tomb. The temple of Lothander in Selgaunt said they knew a guy who hates magic and apparently gets his jollies destroying magically enhanced devices.

Through a series of teleports here there and yonder, I was able to deliver Adric and some of his compatriots to The Tomb and pick up Rock and Bliss in Sess’uadra. Bliss studied the cave to turn it into one of her teleport points, Badl took Nigel and me to his grove so that we could study it as an ultimate, secret fallback point, and then Rock, Bliss and I returned to Sessuadra. There, Rock and I talked to Berol about what had happened so far and I questioned the halflings Alec had hired as "muscle" on the trip from Lurien to The Tomb. They reported a number of odd things – Alec would say he "felt" they were close, but he used no maps, and every now and then Rodeo, who was merely a monkey in their company, would run off into the woods for a few hours. Alec had otherwise been personable and somewhat tight-lipped, but nothing had stood out as unusual. They did note, however, that the Lurien Far-Riders Guild (I take it they are amateur historians and archeologists) had waved and shouted at Alec as they rode out of town and Alec had played it off as his colleagues saying goodbye. Sounds to me, frankly, like Alec stole something from them – or destroyed whatever they had that held some clue to The Tomb to prevent anyone from following his footsteps.

With another day spent doing "clean-up" work, Rock, Bliss and I teleported the halflings down to the Lake of Steam, then from there to Dambryth, from which the halflings could make it home. Before they left, though, I told them that Alec may have done some very terrible things and that more people may come asking questions of them – or, in fact, Alec himself may show up to try to prevent them from giving anyone any information on him. I told them to keep an eye out for anyone coming through looking for Alec and, if anything happened, to write to my address in Dambryth.

Then, I gave each of them a small arrowhead I’d had made from Blood Iron in Dambryth. "These will be the sign of anyone who speaks for me," I said, and I sent them on their way.

Life’s a funny old thing. History repeats itself, both large and small.

While we were gone, though, Badl and Nigel were hard at work gleaning further information and crafting useful scrolls and magical foods to help us on our journey. Before beginning that, however, the two of them retreated into the woods near The Tomb to scry Alec and try to determine what he’d been up to. Badl found a small pool of water, sanctified it in the name of Sylvanus and then cast a spell to show him where Alec might be.

In the pool, he saw an image form of a bullfrog surrounded by shadowy figures. One of them leaned forward, looking out through the image. Its face was strange, hard to describe, but Badl said that though it looked a bit like a doppleganger, it was not a doppleganger; it was all grey skin and dark-black eyes. It gazed solemnly in their direction for a few moments, then reached forward and with a wave of a spindly hand dismissed the scrying.

Strange, that.

Badl tried again, a while later, and this time he saw Alec again, not the bullfrog, though he stood slackjawed, shoulders sagged, a blank stare in his eyes. And this time the grey creature stood nearby with another observer: Muad Ter’thalas, the elfy-elf who rose from the debris where Alec had been and declared that no half-breeds would best him that day. This was something new and very strange, that Alec and Muad would be two different people. Up to this point, we had debated the precise nature of the relationship but we had largely agreed that Muad and Alec were probably the same body in different shapes (we’d had competing theories for how that worked – was Alec/Muad a shapeshifter, or was Alec possessed by the spirit of Muad when he was chained to the chair?) but now we saw them as physically distinct entities. Not for long, though, as that same, spindly hand reached out and waved off the scrying.

Strange and stranger still, though, was Badl’s third attempt to scry Alec. The next day, Badl summoned up another image of Alec and this time we saw him on a mule, on a road, riding towards a monumental snow-capped mountain in the distance. Alec stopped the donkey, faced the scrying and said – all blank stares and slack jaw now gone from his face – "I don’t know who you are, but I’ll tell you what I’ve told everybody else who’s done that to me today: I bought something from the Red Wizards to stop this from happening again." With that, he held up a necklace, put it around his neck, and the scrying abruptly ended.

So that settled it. Alec was back in the world, and back in possession of his mind. We wondered how – I suspect that the polymorph spell Badl cast on Alec worked but only affected that form, and that Muad, whatever he is, is capable of acting independently but uses Alec as a convenient cover, and that his time in the grey, cloudy plane where we spied them together was wherever Muad’s allies reside, capable of restoring Alec to his original state despite the power of Badl’s curse. Regardless, I figure the mountain in the distance can safely be assumed to be one of the other Places of Power – the one far to the north, beyond the barbarian wastes – and that he is making his way to each of them in some order and with obvious haste. We had to act, and quickly – but we didn’t have enough information to do so with confidence.

Badl had suggested Candlekeep and Adric had suggested the temple to Oghma in Elmwood. Since I could get to Elmwood right away, and they owe the Tinker Trading Company a favor or two, Rock and Nigel and I jumped to Elmwood with an open purse and some specific research requirements. Nigel picked up and learned a spell that reveals the legends attached to people, places and things, while Rock went for a jog and I got a tour of the new wing they built last year with TTC money.

I have to say, I loved just appearing in their lobby and giving the man behind the desk a bit of a start.

After asking the Oghmanites to begin searching their archives for whatever they might have on Stormcloud, Muad Ter’thalas, the Three-Faced Man, Fae’Rath or the schism between the dwarves and elves, we jumped to Selgaunt to arrange a trip to Candlekeep, courtesy of the Wayfarer’s Guild. Then we jumped back to The Tomb, where Nigel went to sit by skeleton of Stormcloud and cast Legend Lore in search of information.

As he meditated, Rock and I watched him and watched the skeleton for any signs of something bad happening. After a few minutes, Nigel opened his eyes and told us the few lines that had appeared in his mind: Stormcloud had lain there, even after his master’s escape, and now awaits the return of the Three-Faced Man to take his reins again.

With this, and with more Lothandrians arriving courtesy of a Wind Walk, the main party jumped to Selgaunt and then, from there, back across the continent to Candlekeep. The Wayfarers were kind enough to allow Nigel, Bliss and me to study their underground waystations as teleport points for future use (the extra fee was entirely reasonable). Upon arriving, we stood at the base of a high hill that rose to a cliff overlooking the Sword Sea. We could make out the keep itself, a small tower and a larger cathedral surrounded by a low wall. We all breathed a bit of a sigh of relief

What surprised us was the way the cathedral, where the priests of the god of runes and writing keep their library, was on fire.

"Is it always like that?" Someone in the party – I’ve forgotten who in all the excitement – asked the Wayfarer this when we saw it, and he shook his head.

His reply: "I’m afraid it isn’t, and we don’t handle cases like that," and then he was gone.

Well, we had little to do but try to save the cathedral, naturally, so Badl jumped on Bonzo (who took off running up the road to the keep), Rock blazed past everyone else on foot, and Katarina stayed behind to protect Bliss while Adric, Nigel and I leapt into the air and started flying towards the keep. Upon arriving, we found the most disturbing of sights: an army of kobolds – plain, normal kobolds – assaulting the castle under the command of what appeared to be man-sized kobolds with wings.

Kobolds who were six feet tall and had big, leathery wings.

It’s impossible to describe how quickly we swung into action. I dropped a cloud of sonic disruption on the ones trying to bash down the door to the tower – from the top of which came occasional rocks and pieces of stone being dropped in an attempt at self-defense – while Nigel started blowing up bands of kobolds carrying casks of greek fire towards the cathedral. Badl and Bonzo jumped the wall and ran into the cathedral itself to put out the fire, and Adric and Rock tried to assess the overall situation.

In literally no time at all we had the kobolds on the run. They just weren’t prepared for what we were able to dish out, and even as I sent Greebo to check on the defenders at the top of the tower and bellowed for the kobolds to throw down their weapons and surrender, Badl quenched the fire in the cathedral’s sanctuary and looked around to see a gold dragon, covered in scars and its wings cut off, curled up on the temple’s altar.

The two of them gazed at one another, but the dragon made no move to attack and Badl, of course, had no desire to start a fight with a gold dragon. Bonzo scared off the handful of kobolds at the back of the sanctuary and Badl and the dragon simply watched one another for a few moments, each sizing the other up.

Around this time, however, two more winged kobolds rose into the air over the cathedral and started casting spells at us. Adric, Rock and Nigel were able to make quick work of them, and as they piled into the cathedral, Rock called out that there was a gold dragon there. Everyone wondered what to do to help it when the last of the winged kobolds appeared and commanded the dragon to attack:

"All of the two-legged betrayers must be made to pay. Now destroy them in The Mother’s name!" He was killed immediately, of course, but as soon as he spoke the gold dragon – a gold dragon, the very embodiment of good and rational thought – turned on my companions in a rage. Nigel responded by turning into a smaller gold dragon and trying to reason with it, but it would hear nothing of it – instead, it reprimanded him for not aiding an elder – and it set to attacking us. Rock took it on from the front while Badl turned into a bear easily the size of the dragon itself, perhaps larger, and started tearing it open. Adric moved to heal the party while I dropped a sonic fireball on it from the side. Soon, it had been rendered unconscious, and Nigel had sent for Katarina and her friend, Shadow, so that Shadow could drain its strength. Nigel, somewhat to my surprise, felt terrible guilt for having fought the dragon – he struck the last, crippling blow – and insists that tomorrow we raise it and try to reason with it when it’s weakened and disabled.

In the meantime, I flew up to the tower to find that the defenders there had worried that Greebo was a familiar of one of the kobolds. Rather than kill him, though, they’d captured him in a butterfly net.

My cat was extremely pissed off about this.

I landed with a flourish and announced, "Whitten Silvervoice, Tinker Trading Company. We’d like to use your library. Is everyone okay?" I was then told of the dragon – the defenders were shocked we had defeated it – and the attack by the kobolds and their unusual leaders. Greebo was released – they were wise enough to take my advice and point the opening of the net away from themselves when letting him out – and I assured the defenders that they were now safe. They insisted, however, that we kill the dragon rather than try to figure out why it attacked us at the kobolds’ behest. "It’s sick in the mind," one told me. "Our best priests tried everything, and nothing worked. It cannot be brought back to reason." I took their advice into consideration and returned to the party – noting that the kobolds had not surrendered but had taken off en masse in defeat, which was good enough – to report what I’d learned.

Rock, meanwhile, set off through the cathedral to see if there were more fires to extinguish. He found, instead, dozens of dead priests and other defenders, all murdered by the kobolds, with many of the shelves overturned and books in heaps around the library itself. Ancient tomes lay in piles, covered in oil, clearly ready to be burned. Our arrival had disrupted the kobolds’ plan. The books were safe, if in disarray, and the kobolds and their masters had retreated through a large hole in the ground behind the cathedral that led gods-know-where under the earth.

So, we’d saved the day. The library’s hardly in a state to be quickly searched, but the books are safe and whatever knowledge it holds is there to be found. In the meantime, we have a mostly-dead dragon tied up and drained of its strength in the courtyard of the keep and a bunch of priests grateful to us for our assistance. Tomorrow, we hope, we’ll be able to get the assistance of these priests and try to figure out where the hell six-foot kobolds with leathery wings came from and what that one was talking about when it commanded a gold dragon to attack us in the name of The Mother, whatever that is.

Yet another dimension has been added to all this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Yet another name goes into the mix, another secret exposed. I cannot escape the worry that this is even larger than we had originally thought, given how many ancient and unknown things have been seen recently. Last time I worried that this had caught the attention of so many gods. Now? With even more secrets unearthed?

What I know for sure is that secrecy is a kind of power. To lie unknown in the darkest shadows of memory, not even whispered amongst the greatest sages, is a kind of power I’ve never wanted but I can understand. That so many forces would cast that off to act, would expose themselves to discovery, must surely mean that whatever they seek is all the greater than even the power conveyed by being forgotten by all the modern world.

If they’ll do this, what won’t they do to attain their goal?

And what is that goal, anyway?

Read the rest of this entry »

We defeated Alec.

Well, sort of.

As soon as the elfy-elf we had known as a halfling named Alec appeared
where Alec had been, Nigel and Greebo and I concentrated our efforts on
defeating his dragon, once known to us as an ape named Rodeo, and Adric
dispelled the wall of force holding Badl, Rock and himself
captive.  In short order, Rodeo was dead and Alec was slicing
Nigel to ribbons with a sword.  Cornering him, though, turned his
back to the rest of us and Rock and Adric were quick to attack. 
Badl took the shape of a tiger and waited for Nigel to get out of the
way, but even as Nigel tried to make an escape Alec hissed that he was
leaving Nigel something to remember him by and then delivered a blow we
were sure had struck Nigel dead.

Even as the elf’s sword struck Nigel in the chest, though, Snowdown
appeared behind him – a ghostly visage, serene in the face of such
destruction as we’d all wrought – and with a brush of her hands closed
just enough of the wound to let Nigel fall unconscious rather than
merely dead.  With that, Alec opened a portal and stepped into
another world, escaped.  That portal, though – the land beyond was
dark, unlit, and the stale air that blew through was clammy, bearing
the scent of dust and old bones.

Rock and I know that scent.  It’s the land of the dead, where we walked with other friends many years ago.

I have to confess that as soon as Alec was gone and we realized we’d
all survived our encounter I let out a cry of celebration.  There
were some high-fives exchanged, and as Badl healed Bonzo of his wounds
I thanked him for holding my equipment.  Bonzo even got a cape out
of the deal, being elected to wear whatever garment it was that Alec
had in halfling form.  The literal ape is simply too adorable, in
the same sense that a small dog in a sweater with a dog sewn onto it is
adorable, in his white, formal shirt and his crimson cape.

After tending to his ape friend, Badl turned his attentions to the
newly-dead dragon and the valuable reagents that can be gleaned from
such a corpse.  He and Nigel went to work, pulling out all sorts
of scales and juices and squidgy purple bits they would stuff into
sacks and vials and whatnot.  Yech.  Some days, adventuring
is not for the beauty-conscious.

After, we discussed what the day’s events had changed.  Badl
explained to us that natural shapeshifters are able to overcome the
effects of his polymorph spell, and so we are relatively certain that
Alec is a shapeshifter.  Yet again, their skullduggery is
afoot.  I really must start reading people’s minds when I ask them
The Question.  Adric emphasized a need to get some force or
another here immediately so that we could move on in our
investigation.  Nigel advocates that we get to Myth Drannor and
try to learn more about
these places as soon as possible.  As usual, I am full of nothing
but
concerns and a singular dearth of good ideas.  All I can think of
is my
worry for the friends I’ve made in all the parts of the world. 
Sometimes I feel that I am compelled to adventure less for love of this
life and more out of a fear of the ignorance that comes with
retirement.  Surely, I tell myself, there are evil cults and
sinister
cabals in brooding towers and shadow-drenched caverns in every corner
of the world, and surely no one can expect to stop them all.  Still, it is better to be the ones kicking in their
front doors, knives clenched in our teeth, spells at our fingertips,
than to sit at home and wait for one evil or another to interrupt
dinner with an apocalypse.

Rock and Adric are convinced that Alec – who said his real name, Lod
Tearthalas – is actually the Three-Faced Man.  As the illusionary
elf had told us, the dreadful Ur-dragon buried in The Tomb was the
mount of the Traitor, and true, Alec did have a dragon as his
mount.  I’m not sold on this idea, though.  Alec/Lod cried
out, at one point, that he, “first among elves,” would not be “defeated
by half-breeds and lesser races,” during our fight.  He might
consider himself some sort of heir apparent to the legacy of the
Three-Faced Man, but we know that the Seers of Kelemvor actually saw,
in their scryings, Alec being taken hostage by the Drow.  Adric
and Rock wondered whether this meant that Alec the Halfling was
possessed by Lod, restrained as he was in the same chair used to hold
the Traitor while his dragon died, but I really can’t make myself
believe one way or the other.  It hardly matters, in a way, given
that one way or another an elf from days so ancient no elf remembers
them has returned and has uppercase-P Plans.

Badl offered us his druidic glen as a teleport-point, so at some point
in the next day or two I will try to accompany him there so that I can
spend time studying the sight.  In the meantime, Nigel had a
shopping list of spells for us, specifically one which would let us
identify the vast horde of magical equipment we have gathered in our
time here, one which will prevent scrying, and some other spells that
would prove most useful to him.  Rock, Adric and I jumped back to
Elventree where we reported everything to Bliss (Rock’s wife) and
Jaycon, the leader of the defenses of the town.  He told us after
hearing our story that shortly after we left some of the High Elves who
have made their camp near Elventree came through town and examined
every halfling they could find.

We left Rock to spend the night in Elventree and Adric and I jumped to
Arabell, where we hoped to finish off Nigel’s shopping list and meet
with the Lothandrians in that city.  I dropped a note off at the
castle letting Lady Lall know I was to spend the night in her fair
city.  I have not seen her in some time, and at times like this I
somehow feel I need every powerful friend I have.  Upon visiting
the Lothandrians, their high priest at this temple stumblingly told
Adric and me that some other members of Adric’s order came through
recently looking for a halfling named Alec.

What Adric and I didn’t tell him was that when Adric questioned the
departed souls of the orcs they fought at The Tomb two days ago, they
told him that they had come in search of Alec because their god,
Grumsh, had sent them a vision of the orcs marching under the command
of “fell masters,” stripped of their freedom and enslaved by some other
force and that Alec somehow held the key.

Kelemvor sent us to the Tomb, where we learned a Beshaban had come on
behalf of her ill-omened Goddess.  Lothander and Sylvanus each
sent their own representatives (Adric and Badl, respectively), and
while there we met violently with orcs of Grumsh.  Now we find out
the High Elves know of Alec, as well, and more Lothandrians than Adric
have been sent to seek Alec, also? 

Many gods and many people have been mobilized by this one being, and
none of it bodes well for our world.  It is never a good sign when
the gods themselves chase mortals.

Tomorrow, Adric and I will travel to Selgaunt, where he hopes to gather
some of his fellow Lothandrians to bring back to The Tomb to secure
it.  I need to get to the Kelemvorian temple in this city, also,
and have them cast a Sending to notify Berol of the latest
developments.  If Alec has escaped into the land of the dead,
Berol must know – it’s his god who rules that place.  I admit, I
hope to learn whether Lady Lall has heard of these rumblings, as
well.  The Cormyran peerage is a complicated and bureaucratic web,
but its many strands carry much information.  If I happen to find
a Sunite temple in Selgaunt, well, all the better.  Any source of
information we can tap will be useful to us in days to come. 
After all, what if Alec/Lod already knows of the other four places of
power?  What if he’s on his way there now? Read the rest of this entry »