Session 11 Recap

 Time-lost on the eastern bank of the Cheyth, the company knelt first at the cold clean water to wash the night's work from their skins — the blood, the ash, the paint from their strange costumes they had worn for the strange play under the full moon. Inayin found that no washing would mend his eyes: they wept red still, a slow blood-weeping from each duct that would not stop. Before they left the bank, Ineia took up a small stone from the river and pocketed it (without explaining why she had done so). Their smiling friend was eager to be gone — not for the road's sake, but because he had no wish to spend a night so near the cursed isle, where she would not be glad of what they had done. Upon being asked, Thargash admitted that there was one across the river they could go to for help, one "Tengelbur, Lord of the Road" but he lay a week to the west, the wrong way entirely, and Thargash refused to go and meet him in any case. Where was he from? 

"An era which no longer exists; it is hardly to the point." So they struck a bargain: they would travel together East, but would go slowly enough that Inayin might heal as they walked. And as they walked, Inayin told them the whole story about what had happened to him in the Spring: the silver-haired woman at the forge, the lock of her hair knotted to his belt that no blade nor hand could free; his grandfather's pact in the under-waters with the primordial serpent; the dark blade that hungers for serpents and for men alike; the hunt for the gold-horned king of beasts and the test he had passed, or failed; and the doom laid upon him: to break his blood's curse, or to doom all the North.

From there, our companions traveled east, following the road where it led into a wood. But where the Serth Hatama should have stood grey and petrified, there rose Feiparojar, the Star-Wood, green from the roots to the sky, its great trees half of living stone, birdsong threaded with a far high harping, the very air tasting of rain and starlight; and each of them knew the place, though none had seen it in waking memory. Ineia foraged for herbs as they went, gathering a small luminous lotus, ancient mother of the sacred lotus, lifted still living from the wet earth. And in a glade they came upon the Star-folk themselves — six tall hunters in bronze, dark and fair beyond any people the company had known, who hailed them as kin and took them for wood-folk out of Orusena. Their leader named himself Ralarkh; though Fjalenar and Thargash were the only members of the party able to speak with them in the ancient tongue of Starland. A young huntress crushed a sprig of living amber — Amber-Heart, drawn from  trees that stand by  ancient springs — into Inayin's wounds, and they closed in a breath. But when she bent to his weeping eyes she drew back grey-faced: this was no hurt of the body but of the soul, a corruption past her power, and for it they must seek the star-priest Afālnela at Amirukarr. The hunters spoke warmly, too, of the Giver — a star of great power come to restore the Star-folk's lost craft, his marvels already spreading across the Hills of Jade — and the company kept their faces still, for they knew that fair name for what it was: Orkon, in the first hour of his seduction. This at last was some clue as to when they had arrived.

Off the road, herb-gathering, they lost the road. Days folded over them in that wood, and its beauty turned slowly to a snare — for it was enchanted still, and more than one of them felt the pull to simply stay, to let the world they knew go and dwell there always. A woman's voice came singing through the trees, sweet and half-familiar; and because they were not altogether fools in a magic wood, they did not follow it. At last Talari, hoping to get a sense of their location, climbed one of the great trees, but even from that vantage she could not see the road, only trees stretching every horizon, and in the east a far river snaking east beneath high hills — and nearer, in a broken bowl of the land, a ruin old grey stones jutting through the moss, a scant two hours to the north-east.

The stones were a forge — a Water-Steel forge, ancient and open to the sky and somehow living yet, and Inayin knew its hearth, for he had stood at these same stones in his own age, when only the central hearth remained. By the lip of its pool sat a young woman, tall, dark-haired, her every motion a kind of grace, trying and failing to finish a song. She turned, startled — and Inayin knew her face past all doubt. She greeted them in the old tongue; Fjalenar answered in the high courtly register (which is the only way he knew to speak a language he had only ever encountered in ancient courtly poetry) and accidentally spoke to her as a man who intends to woo. That is how she took it, before he could explain that they were merely lost. Her name, she said, was Kanle — though her friends call her Panathfei — a smith come a long way alone to keep this forge and to coax from the shades of the Stone Kings their lost secrets of craft; only a few centuries old, and still, she said, learning patience. She bade them warm themselves at her fire and rest. But one thing, she told them: they must by no means enter the waters when night falls. Why? 

The serpent.

Ineia's Diary, hills of jade (session 11)

 We landed on the East side of the Cheyth river. The air here smells of rain and starlight. The water was clear, and I couldn't stop staring at it--right through to the bottom! I couldn't have imagined it a few hours ago, and here it was. The trees on either side were so many colors of green. I was amazed. I wanted to dive into the water, though good sense held me back. It was, after all, still the Cheyth. I had agreed to cross that way, but every stroke of the oars pulled me farther from the side I wanted to go to. My home--my own home--just six hours in the opposite direction! To travel thousands and thousands of years and not spare 6 hours!!! I think I could recognize my home even then. I'd know the rocks, I'm sure of it. 

That is why, when we landed on the wrong side of the river, I needled Thargash about the man in the tower. Apparently his name is Tenglebur, and Thargash deeply dislikes him "He is an ass" were a few of the exact words. Thargash told us that Tenglebur (with some others, I think) had somehow broken time, which had somehow made Thargash's friends disappear, and maybe a wife? But I was very confused at this point, and not quite sure. At any rate, Thargash's dislike for the man was a solid character reference as far as I was concerned. I WAS curious about Tenglebur, of course, but mainly because the Manor would have been situated in his land. Obviously, my fathers portion is much (much) smaller, but I was still very curious what kind of man Tenglebur was. I do think the land remembers men. Some of them, anyway. Maybe if I met him here I'd be able to recognize him in some way in my own time. 

I kept needling at Thargash till finally he said, "Look, it was me who brought you here and aren't you glad I did?" Which I was. And I stopped arguing. Of course I was glad. But my heart was already starting to ache. I took a moment to clean up in the river (and wash off that terrible white paint!), and gazed at the opposite shoreline. I wondered if one or two places were a bit familiar, but I know it was my wishful eyes playing tricks on me. Shorelines do change, even in one person's lifetime, and it would be many lifetimes before I was born. I picked out a stone from the shore, a smooth white one that would fit in my palm. It had never seen corrupted waters. That was something to think about. 

Thargash had agreed to take the pace slowly, for Inayin's sake. We set off, and I searched as I walked for herbs. What if I could find some plants that had become extinct in the many years between our times? What if I could keep them alive and plant them in my piney woods? We have lost so much from the dark times and the Nalshbori and the many wicked things--what if I could bring one or two of them back? A hard knot settled in my stomach that hasn't left. It was like I could see the burnings, and the future withered woods around me, imposed on the cool and pleasant path that was in front of me. I did find herbs, though. They were nestled in the shade of two different trees, near the base. I dug them up carefully, dampened my skirt hem (which i'd cut) and wrapped them gently in the moist fabric. They like cool, shady places. The flowers were small and white, they almost glow. Like a lotus, but more beautiful than any sacred lotus I'd seen.

We traveled for awhile and then met a Treian hunting party. They, of course, spoke Old Treian, which most of us do not speak. Fjalanar does, though, and Thargash. Fjalanor introduced us, and when I realized Thargash could understand I went over and asked him to translate. He seemed happy enough to whisper in my ear.

All the Treian's were taller than us. The men were bare chested, the women graceful. They were all beautiful--both the men and the women. They assumed we were of the Ancient Sothbori, who dwelled in the woods across the Cheyth. One of the women was a healer, and when we asked help with Inayin's wounds she quickly pulled something golden out of a leather bag and crushed it into the wound. It had immediate effect. I longed to ask her so many questions, but I was at least able to ask--through Fjalanor--what the herb was? It was living amber, the heart of a tree. I was in awe. But also felt sick. This is what we'd lost. 

Everywhere I look--beauty. 

Everywhere I look--loss. 

A few general questions and we discovered that Orkon had already come as the giver, and we were likely drawing close to the coming doom. When we asked for help with Inayin's eyes they drew back in dismay. They didn't have anything to help with that kind of injury, but recommended us to a small village, Amurkarr, down the path where a certain Priest of Raos named Anfanella lived. He might be able to help us. 

We continued on, and somehow managed to loose the path. We wandered in the woods for days on end--5 days, I think--and were reminded that even though this wood is cool and beautiful, it is still magical and still not safe. One afternoon Inayin and I both heard a voice singing. He told me it was the enchantress he'd become engaged to. I told him to cover his ears and don't follow the voice. We tried to go the opposite way. The next day Telini climbed a tree, and spotted some ruins just a short distance away. We headed toward them to seek shelter, but then we all heard the singing. I was dismayed. The last thing Inayin needs right now is an enchantress in the woods. But we all agreed it was following us and must be faced. 

We stumbled into the clearing and found an ancient water forge, and beside it a beautiful young woman. Inayin recognized her, of course. Fjalanor began to speak, and something about the look on her face--I tugged on Thargash's sleeve and asked what they were saying. "Oh," he drawled out in amusement, "he's wooing her with the words of Neras to Kanle." I elbowed him. I assumed he was making fun of me. Maybe he was. But Fjalanor? He'd come to the Manor because of my mothers letter--and then hardly spoken to me. Well, he had spoken to me. But not like... I was confused, and angry, and annoyed and in rather a poor temper and found out later that the rest of the conversation had something to do with a snake in her precious water forge. Inayin wanted to kill it. Of course he did. He assumed it would be a service to her. 

I assumed it was her pet. 

Well, if it was her pet, so much the better. She already had one man enthralled with her, now Fjalanor too. I KNEW we shouldn't have followed the voice. I KNEW it. 

Session 10 recap

 When last we left our heroes, they stood ringed by the Vulture Cult in the torch-lit square of Kyron Karr, their smiling friend looking on, the unmasked priest Varjalikan promising to reach back through time and murder Sencan in his cradle. Inayin opened the fight before he could begin it — a perfect thrust of the Red Fang longsword into his side — but the wound closed itself even as it bled, and as Varjalikan turned, the kindly scholar's face fell away like a dropped mask to show the horror beneath. Inayin felt the cold grip of Carrion Fear settle over him. Then the bone-white cultists came on from every side, and the square became a grinding business of clash and counter and falling heads. The party bled for it — Inayin worst of all, struck down with blood running from his ears and eyes and nose into a dream — but they were the better blades, and one by one the cult was cut down. Varjalikan broke and ran for the river with a speed no old man should have; Ineia's arrow took him in the back, and Tenuyala ran him down at the dock's edge, kicked him flat, and took his head from his shoulders as he stared at the shaft jutting from his chest.

In the dream that took him while he bled, Inayin smelled woodsmoke and woke to find Panathfei standing over him, poking him with a stick — and the smiling friend beside her, the two of them "catching up." When she laughed, it was the wizard's voice that came out of her mouth. He told Inayin he was a failure at many things, that he had "failed his way into your story," that his road and Panathfei's had diverged in strange ways, and that before long they would meet "the original versions of the two of us." Asked whether he meant to wipe Amboria from existence, he answered only: not erase it — just reset. Then Inayin's eyes snapped open to Ineia's hands on his wounds, and the smiling friend, very much awake and unbothered, grumbling that he had tried his best to warn them and it was hardly his fault if none of them could read. The fight was won. The cult was dead. And the smiling friend told them to hurry — the sky was greying far too early, the play's hold on the dead city already slipping, the genius beginning to wake.

He led them to the boats, declined to row, and watched the water as they pulled for the eastern shore — and when they looked back, the island behind them was no ruin at all, but Kyron Karr whole and shining in the days of her glory. While they had fought, he had turned the city's opened gaze away from the priest's chosen moment to one of his own, and carried them along it. They came ashore at dawn before green and rolling plains where the withered wood should have stood, in an age before the Nalshbori were so much as dreamed of, with the Seven Hills of Jade — that would one day become the Black Hills — rising some miles east. He told them at last a little of why: that everyone he had ever loved was stolen from him long ago, their souls drowned in the Well of Silence at the end of the world, and that he believes a road to that Well can be found among the cities of Lanenomen as they stand here, now, in their splendour. His name, he allowed, they could call Thargash — though he admitted it was not truly his. And so, time-lost and a long walk from anywhere, the company set out beside their smiling friend into a world ages gone. 

Session 9 Recap

When last we left our heroes, they had crossed at dawn to the Isle of Pines and gone in painted and costumed behind Varjalikan to meet the genius of the dead city. The pines opened all at once, and Kyron Karr lay before them under the afternoon light — still beautiful, its pale walls and pillars and broken domes weathered to the colour of old cream, its streets paved not in stone but in bones. Cormorants roosted black on every ledge and lintel, watching with eyes like wet stones, and Varjalikan touched the amber bird at his throat and said only, "There she is."

He told them the river had never drowned Kyron Karr at all — the Cheyth had merely cut it off and starved it slowly to death over many months, and that nothing which had ever come to the city had been permitted to leave. A prison, then, that they had broken into; the question was whether the Cheyth would let them cross home again. Moving inward toward the public square, the party found a recent camp in a roofless house — bedrolls and crates for four or five people, dried nightshade and blind-man's-kiss and heather, charcoal sigils in no language they knew, and scattered everywhere pieces of carved red amber in the shape of vultures. When Varjalikan began pocketing the amber and denying it, and then amber began appearing in the party's own pockets though his hands came out empty, they understood witchcraft was afoot, hauled him bodily out of the house, and threw every cursed piece back through the window before pressing on.

The cormorants followed at a hundred yards, drawing closer with every step, until the party reached the great square — sixty feet across, the ruined inn at its centre where merchants once ate bread and salt, hundreds of birds gathering silent on the broken walls. While Varjalikan and Herek cleared bone and set the ring of torches for the stage, the others searched the marketplace and the old tavern. They turned up little of worth — ancient coins stamped with a long-dead king, common across the kingdom and proof of nothing — but the tavern held stranger things: a message scrawled large across the most intact wall, *"It's about time,"* and a row of broken pottery shards that, gathered one by one, spelled out a sentence — *pay better attention to the amber* — and behind a sealed clay jar in a wall-cabinet, the single charcoal word *two*. Someone was watching them, and trying to tell them something. They carried the great jar back to the square as a souvenir, and at sundown Varjalikan staged them all and the play began. He danced into the torchlight reciting the prologue; Herek as the merchant broke bread and begged peace; Ineia rose as the city in all her pride; the dark citizens mimed the murder and cast the bodies into the river; Inayin gave voice to the Cheyth's cold judgement; and Ineia, as the city, wept for her starved children and her ruin and yet stood at the last unbroken — proud, yet unbound. The cormorants froze. The stones groaned and shed dust. The sound of running water rose and then fell to absolute silence, and for the first time in two thousand years Kyron Karr was simply a ruin and nothing more. "I think we did it," they said. "I think we did it."

And then their smiling friend was standing in the north-eastern corner of the square, weather-stained and implausibly clean-shaven. "Hello again, Fjalenar of the House Karjalkarr. I see you received my letter." But it was not the smiling sorcerer he turned to name — it was Varjalikan. "Is it still four boats at the steading upriver," he asked, "or have you brought in more since last week?" 

— and Varjalikan answered, unflinching, "Five, actually. I was expecting complications."

Inayin alone had marked it: through the whole play the scholar had clutched the amber bird at his throat and muttered under his breath, and that bird, he saw now, was a vulture. The party lunged for the amulet and Varjalikan struck their hands away with shocking speed, and at last he set down the mask entirely. He was, he said, a scholar and a high priest both; every word he had told them of the city and the rite was true; and the charming little play they had just performed was the final act of a far greater working. They had rung the bell of time to save a thousand souls — he meant to save far more. With the genius's sight now opened and willing, he would turn her gaze not on the city's sin but on the deep past, on the founding wound of the Black Hills, and reach back to kill the heir of Sencan in his cradle before ever he forged the sword — to undo the ancient wrong at its root. The party named it for what it was, dark magic to mend dark magic, and refused him; and as they refused, figures stepped out of the grey ruins all around them — armed, armoured, powdered bone-white to vanish against the ash of the city, each one marked on chest or cheek with the red sign of the vulture. "Pay better attention to the amber," their smiling friend said. 

Session 8

 When last we left our heroes, they had been summoned back to the Crescent Moon Inn in Cheykor by Sergeant Abar, who had brought with him a slab of paving stone bearing a letter for Fjalenar from the Smiling Sorcerer, and a tall grey-haired specialist named Varjalikan who had spent the better part of twenty years studying the cursed Isle of Pines from a distance. Varjalikan now produced from his stack of manuscripts the source of his confidence: an old account from the royal library at Sencankarr of a poet — the only living man known to have set foot in Kyron Karr and walked out again — who survived a night in the cursed city by telling its genius stories until the sun rose. From this, Varjalikan had composed a play, a ritual reenactment of the city's founding sin, by which he proposed to entrance the city's spirit long enough to find Fjalenar's friend and quit the place alive. He distributed scripts and costumes around the table and assigned roles: Herek as the merchant of Sencankarr, Ineia as the voice of Kyron Karr herself, Inayin as the voice of the Cheyth, Fjalenar and Talari as the dark citizens who enact the betrayal, and Varjalikan himself as witness and chorus. He suggested arriving on the island at dawn, spending the day in preparation, and performing the play at nightfall.

The party had eight days of preparation. Inayin [SR: Ineia] walked the western bank of the Cheyth for the better part of a week, watching for movement on the water and finding, near [her] own family's holdings, the tracks of someone who had moved a boat or two overland from the hills down to the river some days before — boats now apparently in the water, sailing upstream after dark. Herek searched the docks for a fisherwoman named Fyarifu who had reported strange sounds from the island the previous winter, but the woman was not in town and no one would say when to expect her. Late on the night before they sailed, the party walked to the well-shrine and stood through Fyala's midnight office of lamentation. Afterwards she heard them out and warned them plainly: the trial they were going to was not primarily a physical trial; weapons would not avail; what waited on the island was very old, very powerful, dead already, and entirely confined to that earth. She told them that what they would face was a test of the soul and of the mettle, that any unresolved anger or quarrel between them would be turned against them, and that they should hold Fjalenar's smiling friend at arm's reach. She blessed them. She said she would look forward to the story when they made it to the other side.

At midnight on the appointed evening they pushed off from the docks of Cheykor under a moon nearly full. Inayin took the steering oar; Ineia took the sail. The Cheyth was patient with them in the spring quiet, and they rowed and ran with the wind upriver through the dark. The grey light of dawn was just moving across the eastern sky when they put in at the western shore of the Isle of Pines — perhaps the first Ambori to do so in the better part of two thousand years. Varjalikan drew a long breath as his boot touched the sand. "Finally here. My whole life — finally here." They had the day. They dressed in their costumes; he painted their faces in the old fashion, white and bright, the way the ancient drama was once played. Then he turned toward the dark heart of the wood ahead, and he said: "Now we go to meet her."