he Bell of Time Concludes*
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When last we left our heroes, they had just survived a brutal skirmish with Vulture Clan warriors at the walls of Thorankarr and stood reunited for the first time in weeks—battered, poisoned, and drenched from a rainstorm—with the full moon rising and a dying city at their backs. Eimalua wasted no time: she intended to ring the Bell of Time that very night and send Thorankarr's surviving population forward to safety, and she expected the party's help.
What followed was a lengthy and occasionally heated debate about temporal paradoxes, the feeding of refugees, and whether interfering in a historical massacre constituted a violation of the fundamental order of causality. Fjalenar argued—with some scholarly passion—that moving three thousand people across thirteen centuries was precisely the kind of small error at the bowstring that produced enormous errors at the target. The rest of the party argued—with somewhat less scholarly precision but more apparent common sense—that the alternative was watching those three thousand people be killed in front of them. The party also realized during discussion that they had no need to spend the moon dust for the return trip: the full moon provided sufficient power to ring the Bell, and the dust had been needed only to direct their arrival in 91 SE. Their supply could be held in reserve. In the end, Fjalenar's resistance gave way to something that might charitably be described as resigned investment, and the party accepted Eimalua's plan.
Eimalua led them through a postern gate she knew—she had spent months among Thorankarr's defenders, and had contacts on the walls—and for the first time the full party set foot in a city that, in their own time, exists only as a name in history books and a handful of tumbled stones. The carved stone streets, the fountain still running, the vaulted lintels: everything the stories had promised. And the catapult damage, the dead horse in the alley, the civilians scurrying furtively between doorways with the hollow eyes of people who know they are losing: everything the stories had not prepared them for. Above it all, the Bell Tower rose intact over the North Gate, its bell beginning to take on a silver sheen as the moon climbed.
The gate itself was the problem. Approximately fifty armed defenders were clustered around it, with more arriving as a renewed assault from the Nalshbori army seemed imminent. The party's attempts to talk their way in were not distinguished: a 97 on persuasion, a 96 on deception, and a guard whose wife had been killed three weeks ago who was entirely unmoved by warnings that everyone in the city would die tonight. The party apologized for mentioning his wife. This did not help. Their solution was less elegant but more effective: they dressed in the armor of fallen city defenders and walked in anyway, carried along on the general chaos of the reorganizing garrison.
At the base of the Bell Tower they found Priestess Satsanur—the oldest woman any of them had ever seen, slumped motionless in a chair before a small basin of water. Herek [SR: Ineia] went to check on her. She fell sideways out of her chair: not dead, but petrified, turned to stone. One of the guards at the stairwell had cracked clean in half where he had fallen. Someone had been here before them.
At the top of the tower, they found out who.
He was tall, dark-haired, handsome in a composed and slightly theatrical way, in long flowing robes. He knew Fjalenar's name. He called himself Thargash—the name Gathankol's men had given him. He had been, or perhaps still considered himself, the Nalshbori warlord's sorcerer. He had dealt with Satsanur because she had been, in his estimation, "far too short-sighted for her own good." He demonstrated this general attitude toward obstacles by raising a hand and freezing Tenuyala, Eimalua, and Ineia in place on the staircase with a holding spell—just long enough to make his point—before releasing them without harm.
He was not, he explained, interested in stopping them. The city was lost. Gathankol would burn everything. He was a pragmatic man who wished to see what came next. He invited them to ring the Bell and save the city; he would add a small invocation of his own. He was entirely pleasant about it. Fjalenar told him that someday he would wish he had killed him here on the tower. Thargash smiled.
Pressed by the sound of a battering ram beginning its work on the gate far below, the party rang the Bell.
Fjalenar spoke the poetic kenning—the invocation that named their destination in images rather than dates—and directed it home, toward 459 SE. Inayin seized the bell rope. With the help of another party member and a fate point well spent, the pull was a critical success. The clapper swung.
Just as it was about to strike, Thargash tapped his staff twice against the platform stones and spoke his own quiet words over theirs. A flash of light. He said "until next time, my friend." to Fjalenar, and stepped sideways into a small adjacent stream of time, and was gone.
The Bell rang.
It did not ring loudly, exactly—or if it was loud, the loudness had nothing to do with volume. It was the sound of time noticing you; of every moment you had ever lived occurring simultaneously. The inscriptions on the Bell's surface moved like water. Below on the platform, then in the square beyond, then throughout the city, people simply ceased to be present—a family in a doorway, a soldier against a wall, priestesses at a shrine, all becoming faint golden outlines that slowly dimmed. Ten heartbeats. Then darkness, and a long fall past stars that none of them had ever seen.
They came down wet and cold on the winter moors of northern Amboria, looking up at a winter sky, surrounded by approximately fifteen hundred bewildered souls waking up in the snow around them. The Bell had not come with them. One of the two bell-metal hinges was missing—Thargash had taken it in the confusion. The ruins of Thorankarr's bell tower were visible on the horizon, just as Eimalua remembered them. No Nalshbori in evidence. The nearest settlement was called Gielin, ten miles distant.
Those who had been frozen by the holding spell could not quite recall a man on the tower platform. Those who had not been frozen remembered him clearly.
"No one has ever done what you did here today," Eimalua told them. "You should be proud of yourselves."
The exact year remains to be confirmed.
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*The Bell of Time concludes. The Time of Kings continues.*
*Each present character receives three active advancements: one for the session, one for completing the adventure, and one for saving the people of Thorankarr.*
*Session 7 begins with seasonal undertakings. Winter has passed, or is passing. Fifteen hundred people from the year 91 SE are on the northern moors. What do you do?*
