TenThousandBrokenDreams/Session12

Mother Cypress speaks:

“Hello, my little night birds. Come closer, come closer, that I may tell you a tale, for surely that is why you have come to me again. So what tale would you hear? Would you hear of the scavenger prince Varnalish of Mokuren, most fearless of ruin-sifters, and his adventures in the buried labyrinths of the cities of the First Age? Would you hear of the perils he overcame in those forbidden places, of the beasts and hungry ghosts he overcame, and the treasures he won from the tombs of the ancients? Would you also hear of how the scavenger prince Varnalish finally transgressed once too often against the buried and the dead, and of how dark and terrible powers enslaved his immortal soul? Or would you hear more of the tale of the Solar Exalted, and the end of the Second Age?

“Then gather round, my children, and spread ears like elephants; and I shall tell you more of the tale of the Sun’s bright children, and their quest for the tomb of Kuro the Raven and Blessed Wind.

“The Sun’s children stood poised for flight at the edge of the woods a short ride from the Tower of Winds, with soldiers of the prince Ledaal Vir descending upon them. How did this come to pass? Two nights before, the Moon-child Dancing Water confronted his reborn lover, Tepet Aekino, at the foot of the Iron Tower. Aekino’s guardsmen saw and heard much of this confrontation, and when Aekino returned to the Tower of Winds the next night, they gossiped with their fellow soldiers in the barracks of that place.

“By the next morning, the news of that event had filtered up to the prince’s captain, Shield Willow, who informed the prince of what this might mean. The prince then summoned his cousin Aekino; but Aekino had already slipped away with his sworn brothers and his guards. Unsettled, the prince sent his eldest son, Tristen, to follow them with many soldiers and bring them back to the Tower of Winds.”

Our heroes fared poorly in their attempt at flight. The grievous wounds dealt them by the deathknight Forty-Four Devil Blossoms still pained Zera Thisse and Thorwald; they slumped in their saddles, unable to press their horses on to the same speed as the others, and quickly fell behind. Unwilling to lose his brothers, Aekino dropped back to join them. Thorwald, with equally reckless stubbornness, tried to drive Aekino onward while holding back the oncoming guards with his great blade. And as the pair halted to argue, the guards came up around them.

Li and Zera watched through the trees as Aekino argued with their comrade Thorwald and negotiated with cousin Tristen. Voices carried clearly in the calm forest air; they listened as Tristen made clear that he had come at his father’s behest to bring Aekino to audience, and they heard Aekino demand that his comrades go free. Tristen made no objection, as he saw the others as nothing more than Aekino’s servants, who did not fall within the scope of his orders.

Aekino rode back to the Tower then, in the company of Tristen and Martin and Thundercloud Star and all the guards. Thorwald rejoined his other comrades, and the three found themselves a secluded spot among boulders and thickets upon a hilly slope where they might rest, and plan, and make ready for their brother Aekino’s return.

Rumors had flown like crows throughout the Tower in their absence, croaking in every open ear. Wary eyes followed Tepet Aekino as the guards escorted him to his lonely suite. Likewise, when a freshly bathed Aekino entered the audience hall in his finest robes, the courtiers gossiped in low tones as they watched him slyly from behind their gaudy silk fans. But the prince disappointed them; Aekino begged that they might speak in private, rather than spreading stories far and wide, and Vir granted his request. They retired to a small parlor, attended only by Tristen, Martin and Thundercloud Star.

When they had settled into that pleasantly decorated chamber, with its teak paneling and its tapestries in comforting shades of green, Vir informed Aekino of the rumors he had heard of the encounter with the Lunar in the lodge at Iron Tower, of how the shapeshifter had addressed Aekino familiarly, and of how Aekino seemed in fine physical shape for having been knocked through a wall immediately thereafter. Tristen egged his father on, but Vir seemed willing to listen, though he called upon both Martin and Thundercloud Star to provide their own versions of events. Thundercloud made clear his suspicions about the event, particularly regarding how he and his guards were ordered to keep their distance from the scene. Martin, for his part, put the best face possible on all of Aekino’s statements, though Vir made it clear that he viewed Martin’s words as less than objective, for he knew of the burgeoning relationship between the two.

The discussion went on for some time. Vir seemed tired and irritable; Tristen, lofty and amused; Martin, sarcastic; Thundercloud Star, stoic; and Aekino turned on the tears, expressing sorrow and dismay that he had to relive that night, and that he faced such distrust he faced from his relatives. Tristen and Martin sniped at each other with barbed words all the while. Finally, Vir could take no more; he ended the audience, informing Aekino that they’d speak again on the morrow.

Martin wished to escort his gorgeous cousin to his quarters, but Tristen demanded and received that privilege. As they traversed the narrow halls of the Tower, Aekino tried to mull over certain facts that had come to light during the audience – that the Wyld Hunt was en route to Tul Tuin, for instance, or that Vir had sent out his troops to guard the Tomb of the Anathema and all nearby Manses, in accord with the message that Aekino himself had brought to the court from the dead hand of Ledaal Amaya – but Tristen insisted on chatting. Between the two distractions, he all but walked into an unfamiliar denizen of the Tower, a small, pale, worn-looking fellow with a clear family resemblance to the Tower’s ruling family.

When Aekino and Tristen reached the guest suite, they drank and conversed, each attempting to pick the other’s brain, but Aekino’s heart wasn’t in it. Part of his mind pondered the pickle he was in, trapped in the Tower without his comrades, perhaps facing some dreadful doom at the hands of his host if his Anathema status came out. Another part considered the worn-looking fellow he’d met in the hall, one Ledaal Laris, yet another member of Vir’s extensive brood. Of all of that line, only Laris remained mortal; neither god-blood nor Dragon-breath touched him. Tristen revealed this and more: that Laris had had a twin, who had died some years earlier when Vir and Cessair fought for the throne. Now he lingered on, half a man, lacking any drive or conviction, withering in the brilliant light of his talented and magical siblings. Aekino thought it terribly sad.

Outside, the rest of the encamped Circle had no time for sadness, for instead they contemplated their many troubles, and sought a means of extricating their brother from the Tower of Winds. They mused, too, upon their own escape from their brother’s fate. Li surmised that the Dragon-Bloods, seeing Aekino’s comrades as servants, must have thought them beneath notice or contempt. Thorwald rumbled that, had he command of the guards, he would have slain the Circle outright, lest they survive and lay plans to free their brother (as, indeed, they were in the process of doing). Zera smiled grimly and observed that the Dragon-Blooded were too arrogant to take mortals seriously, and that would be their undoing.

As they discussed plans for freeing Aekino, they discussed what might come after. They quickly came to a consensus, that they would free Cessair as Zera and Thorwald had pledged to do, but that reaching the old Tomb of the Anathema must come first. They needed the power that they hoped might lie locked in the Tomb if they were to defeat their enemies: perhaps the Dragon-Blooded of the Tower, and certainly the deathknight Forty-Four Devil Blossoms, who still pursued Zera Thisse with dark and unforgiving rancor.

Aekino refrained from joining Vir and his children at dinner that night, claiming that a flux of the bowel kept him closeted in his quarters. This was, in some ways, a shame. For a wonder, all of Vir’s surviving children guested beneath his roof, and they gathered with him at table.

Tristen, the eldest, sat at his father’s right hand. New come from his seat at Longcorner, the slim and elegant Mela-child sipped the cold white wine of Mokuren as he cast subtle aspersions upon his siblings. The next, sister Tanith, at their father’s left hand, watched the others from behind her veil of pale hair. Only occasionally would she venture some small comment or lock eyes with her closest ally, fiery brother Martin, who exchanged abuse with Tristen at regular intervals from his seat at the foot of the table. Laris sat silent as a ghost beside her, eyes mostly upon youngest sibling Rivander, who seemed particularly belligerent that night; his bastardized Immaculate training had focused his Essence without calming his rebel nature.

Had Vir hoped for a peaceful gathering, he was disappointed. Tristen called Martin an incestuous freak, Martin called Rivander a vicious woman-beating thug, and Rivander had something unpleasant to say about everyone. Even the usually-quiet Laris and Tanith found opportunities to taunt and jibe their sibs; when Rivander made a veiled threat against his sister, she replied, “Well, I do fit the profile; I’m a woman, and I’m defenseless.”

Their father tried to calm things down by turning the discussion to this subject or that, but his children would not be swayed; they could find some cause to heckle one another on even the most innocuous of topics. The bickering, combined with occasional bitter comments about Vir’s concubine Mari of Stonegarden, finally drove him off, and the mood grew even more spiteful with his departure. Had our heroes been present, surely they would have placed bets on which sibling would be the first to commit fratricide.

Our heroes were otherwise occupied. Aekino mulled over spells in his suite, while Li and Thorwald slept in their thorn-bordered camp. And as Li slept, she dreamed terrible dreams, dreams of battle and slaughter, in which she stood against an army upon an icy plain, in the shadow of a great stone crag that rose from the ice like a giant’s needle, and a great daiklave of orichalcum and red jade spat fire in her hand and hewed down her foes by the hundred. Thorwald slept more easily, for his dreams were pleasant; he dreamed of traveling through these lands in an earlier life, among both mortals and spirits, encouraging the elementals to build on the behalf of mortals, to raise up walls and crops, to bring rain and sun at the proper time; and through all of that dream, the spirit Fourth Breeze walked at his side, his constant companion.

In any case, had our heroes been in any place other than where they rested at that time, to observe other events in that region, there were other proceedings of greater import for them to spy on than a quarrelsome family dinner. For beneath a large manor house in Tul Tuin, one whose blue-green roofs towered over the lower quarters of the city, there lay a nest of hidden corridors and chamber; and in one of those, a terrible rite grew to fruition upon that last night of the fourteenth month, beneath the new moon.

There in a great round room filled with chanting and sickly sweet smoke, thirteen figures stood, masked and cowled, their arms upraised as they faced one another. Each bore ritual implements of some strange black metal, knives and wands and censers that gleamed weirdly in the torchlight. Drugged slaves lay insensible before them on stone slabs, from which runnels led to a circle of black metal in the chamber’s center, inlaid into the stone floor; and a darkness grew there as they redoubled their chant.

“Come to us, Alveua,” called the leader of the summoners, and the darkness roiled in the circle. “Alveua!” the others cried as one. “Alveua, Keeper of the Forge of Night,” the leader intoned, “come to us. Alveua, Great Maker, we welcome you here. Alveua, drinker of the blood of innocents. Alveua, we open the door. Alveua, we open the way. Alveua, we give you blood. Alveua, we give you purpose. Alveua, come to us. Alveua. Alveua.” And all the while, the others chanted, their voices growing louder and louder. “Alveua,” they shouted. “Alveua,” they roared. “Alveua. Alveua! ALVEUA!”

Black knives fell. Dark blood flowed. It flowed, and flowed, and flowed, pouring through runnels to that circle of black metal. There, the darkness thickened, and congealed. There, it took a human shape.

* * * * *

Our heroes, of course, knew none of this. So when they awoke sometime after midnight, with only the faintest light growing in the east, they did not go forth to slay those who would call the agents of Malfeas into the world. Instead, they supped on the remnants of the evening meal and mulled over their plans to rescue their brother Aekino.

Fortunately, a new plan came to them with the return of the wind-spirit Fourth Breeze. This time, swayed at last by his dreams of other lives, he acknowledged the spirit as a friend and companion, one whose unswerving loyalty he did not (in his mind) deserve. And with that arrival and that acceptance, a new plan arose. The spirit Fourth Breeze, gleaming like mist and moonlight, flew to the Tower; and as he had carried Zera Thisse while that worthy was wounded by the deathknight’s blade, he now bore Tepet Aekino across the sky, from a suite atop the Tower of Winds to a wooded slope where his comrades awaited him.

Their travels over the next few days concern us little. For a week they rode east through the woods, over hills that grew steeper as they progressed. Then they stopped briefly at the town of Turtle’s Cross, one of the Five Towns that supplied Tul Tuin with grain (from which the surplus was then exported by barge to the rest of the River Province), to obtain supplies. Zera Thisse slipped into the small town at dusk in the guise of a grizzled woodsman. There he found a Tul Tuin garrison; he gambled with townsmen and with soldiers in a tavern in hopes of winning a soldier’s bow, but the scout wouldn’t stake the thing. His pouch bulging with the coppers he’d won, Zera went on to slip into the garrison like a shadow and make off with a bow and quiver of arrows; he went on to fill a sack with vegetables filched from closed-up market stalls. He left his winnings for the farmers as payment, for he was an honest rogue.

And he returned to his comrades at their camp, where they made a savory stew of vegetables and of rabbit and squirrel that Li and Thorwald had caught. And after a good night’s rest they continued on their way. They would reach the Tomb soon. There would be guards aplenty, and perhaps traps and curses and the like. There would be adventure, clean and without politics, and they savored the anticipation as they rode beneath the leaf-dappled morning sun.

(Note: all PCs received 3 XP for this session. Aekino and Zera received an additional 2 XP for contributions. XP totals to date: Aekino 71, Li 64, Thorwald 66, Zera 71.)