Session 7

 When last we left our heroes, they had just performed the most consequential deed of their young adventuring careers: they had brought a city back from the dead. The winter moors of northern Amboria were crowded with bewildered souls who had been sleeping in their own beds in the year 91 of the Second Aeon and found themselves lying in cold snow some seventeen centuries later, staring up at an unfamiliar sky. The party guided those fifteen hundred displaced men, women, and children northward through the frost, distributing families among the villages of the Cheyth Valley as they went, and delivering the remainder to the empty seasonal quarters at Cheykor, where the miners' houses stood vacant and ready in the long winter dark. It was not a comfortable arrangement, and it strained the region's resources considerably, but with the cooperation of local landholders and the leadership of the survivors themselves, the immediate crisis was brought under control. By the end of winter, everyone had a roof over their head — if not, perhaps, any very clear idea of what century it was.

The spring that followed was a season of many smaller endeavors. Fjalenar set himself to the tremendous scholarly task of cataloguing the survivors' family lines, speaking to every household in turn and working to connect what remained of their ancient records to the existing archives of the Norinlakor — a work of heraldry and genealogy that already promised to become one of the more remarkable volumes in the north's scholarly tradition, even half-finished. Ineia rode out into the Cheyth uplands with her bow and her considerable luck and returned with the horns of a lesser hornbeast and a new scar to show for it. Tenuyala worked to preserve her standing with her order — and found, when all was reckoned, that ringing the Bell of Time and restoring fifteen hundred souls to the world counted for rather more reputation than a standard seasonal adventure. Inayin scoured the wilderness for hornbeasts and found nothing, which perhaps was not the worst outcome. Herek's amber-mining venture yielded a nugget the size of a man's head and a return on investment sufficient to replenish her silver considerably. And Talari tracked a notorious bandit lord named Abuksa to his lair in the hills above the Cheyth river valley, crept into his cave while he slept, made rather a lot of noise, and fled for her life through the hills with a furious, half-dressed bandit lord in hot pursuit — escaping by the narrowest of margins, and leaving behind her a man who now has a very specific grudge and an excellent description.

By the time the Feast of Summer came and went, the party found themselves summoned once more to the Crescent Moon Inn in Cheykor by Sergeant Abar, who arrived at table with a plain slab of paving stone and a look of mild concern. The stone bore a carefully inscribed message in a scholar's hand — very correct, very polished, and not quite that of a native speaker — addressed to Fjalenar of House Karjalkar by name, signed only as your smiling friend. The letter indicated that its author had been residing for some months in a location that local legends would, he said, readily identify; that his neighbors there were industrious people with considerable ambition and very little wisdom, whose work would reach its culmination at the turning of the moon; and that he had gathered information about certain of Cheykor's town elders and the party they serve. He invited the company to come before the full moon — eleven days hence — and to expect a difficult night. Two or three such stones had been appearing around town over the preceding weeks, one of them on the steps of the shrine. The great city named by Fjalenar's lore, and confirmed in every detail by Ineia's memory of the old bedtime stories, was Kyron Karr — the ancient, cursed, and wholly abandoned city on the Isle of Pines in the middle of the Cheyth, which no one in living memory has entered and survived. Into this pleasant destination the party was accordingly invited, by the sorcerer who stole their bell-metal hinge and stepped sideways out of time, to attend a difficult night. There was at least one piece of good news: a certain scholar named Varjalikan, called in by Abar as a specialist in the very matter of lost cities and cursed islands, arrived at the inn with a very large stack of manuscripts and the claim that he had found the only living man ever to have seen Kyron Karr and survived — and that, based on this man's account, he had drafted a plan for doing likewise. He asked, as a preliminary, whether any of the company had experience with drama.