TenThousandBrokenDreams/Session16

Mother Cypress speaks:

"Why hello, my dears. I see you’ve come for another story. What story would you hear tonight? Would you hear of how the Solar elder Minako the Wise repented of her role in the war against the First Ones, and of how she undertook to pry open the gates of Malfeas so that the lords of the Dawn Age might return to Creation? Would you hear of the successes she won in her endeavor, and of how the Yozis repaid her for her labors? Or would you hear more of the tale of the Sun’s bright children, and the fall of the Scarlet Realm??

"Then gather round, my children, and spread ears like elephants; that I may tell you more of the tale of the Solar Exalted, of how they came unto the Iron Tower to free the faerie queen Cessair, and of the dark hour of Calibration.

"In the course of the month of Descending Fire, the last month of the year 758 of the Scarlet Reign, many things had come to pass.

"On the Blessed Isle, the elders of the Houses met to discuss the future of the Realm. In the North, where the warlord named the Bull of the North had ravaged a dozen towns in thrall to the Realm, the legions of House Tepet gathered their forces. In the South, strange machines unseen for countless centuries moved and chattered in the hidden places among the fiery sands. The shark-prowed vessels of the war priests of Siakal roamed the islands of the West, looting and raiding. And a lone rider swept across the lands of the East, towards the Hundred Kingdoms, a great daiklave across his shoulders and the Wyld Hunt raving at his back.

"In the city of Tul Tuin, the docks creaked with the mass of packed Imperial junks and caravels. Another squadron of Ledaal troops disembarked, escorting elders of the House Ledaal to the Tower of Winds, while thugs butchered thieves in the shadow of the warehouses.

"In the black depths of the Tomb of the Anathema, at the base of the lowest stair, Rei of Nechara probed demon-carved fissures with a fishing line and hook. After many tries, she drew forth a shining crown of gold and garnets, its uprights formed as the ears of the wolf. ‘What a pretty thing,’ she said with a smile. ‘How could they have left you behind?’ She rolled it about in her hands for a time, admiring it, and then placed it upon her head.

"Her erstwhile men, the hulking bearish Urei and weasel-thin Iwa, argued over which path to take on the way to Tul Tuin, until they finally parted ways. Urei made his way into a lighted clearing, where hundreds of gathered figures stared and closed ranks around him. ‘Welcome,’ said the leader, a cadaverous figure bearing a spear of green light. ‘I see a strength in you that we can use. Perhaps you shall be of some help to us...

"And at the site of the Iron Tower, our heroes prepared to free the faerie queen Cessair..."

The Sun’s four children sat in the burned-out shell of a farmhouse as the sky lightened in the east. Their camp lay at the outskirts of the tilled land surrounding the town of Iron Tower. Rough woods lay to one side; on the other, farmland, houses, and roads arrowing towards the palisaded town nailed to the earth by the iron spike of the Tower.

Li tossed and turned in her sleep. Visions of Katsuro’s final battle still plagued her dreams. Whenever she closed her eyes, she was the elder Exalt once more, cutting down wave after wave of mortal and Dragon-Blooded soldiers on an icy plain, her burning sword howling for blood in her hands. And when she woke, that same hunger for blood echoed in her own heart. It tasted bitter.

Thorwald weighed his new pear-blossom daiklave in his hands. The great blade felt as light as a flower petal. Aekino had demonstrated the process of attunement the night before, but it had been nothing that he had not already understood at some visceral level. He had felt the pull of the blade, the need to join its Essence with his own. It was seductive, and so he had refused it

Aekino brooded. Visions of his gray-eyed lover Mnemon Dara flitted across his mind, and of his wife and child, left behind on the Blessed Isle these many months ago. And he thought of those soldiers of Tul Tuin doomed to die in battle and in civil war, and he sighed.

Zera sighted down his arrows, rolling each arrow-shaft between his fingers, searching for imperfections. He mused briefly on what dooms might come of fulfilling his oath to Idris to free her mother, the faerie queen Cessair, from the tower. Then he put that out of mind. What was done was done; he had made his choice. All that remained was to carry it out.

Around noon, dust rose to the northwest, marking the arrival of a line of soldiers from Tul Tuin. They came under the Ledaal mon, and their jade-armored leader’s banner did not correspond to any of Ledaal Vir’s progeny. “Reinforcements from the Isle,” Aekino muttered. All plans and action were postponed until the soldiers all made their way into town.

In the afternoon, Zera Thisse assumed the shape of an Eastern peasant in a ragged smock, under which guise he made his way to the town gate. The venal guards exacted a “Calibration tax” from him, clearly nothing more than a petty bribe on a day when farmers and villagers needed to get behind town walls to spare themselves the ill fortunes of Calibration. He made his way around the town’s military street grid without drawing undue notice. He saw that the place was built for defense, with thick-walled buildings inset with arrow slits on the upper floors, and ordinary citizens bearing arms. In the central plaza where elaborate guest lodges flanked the rust-streaked tower, the hundreds of Ledaal soldiers had pitched their tents. But none of these things stopped Zera from slipping in and out of town unseen, and reporting his observations to his comrades.

“So there are many soldiers?” Thorwald growl. “Good. Li and I will burn a few farmhouses, and they will come running.”

“Wait,” said Zera. “It might not be necessary. Aekino and I will slip in first, and see if we can free her from the tower. Stay here and keep watch for golden fire. That will be our signal to start your distraction.”

Thorwald grumbled. “A signal, eh?” He seemed put out to be denied the opportunity for battle. Zera could only grin.

Aekino and Zera disguised themselves as traveling minstrels. They slipped through the city gate in the last hour of the day, just before the guards sealed it for the five days of Calibration. After paying the guards’ extortive tax, they pressed through a thickening crowd of townsfolk and soldiers making merry for the start of the Calibration festival. The sounds of drums and bells and laughter filled the air, mingling with the smells of incense and wood smoke, of roast meat and festival cakes.

They made their way through the gambling and partying soldiers around the tower with ease. At the tower door, Aekino’s musical gifts and Zera’s glib tongue sufficed to get them through, as they explained that they were musicians come to play for Queen Cessair for Calibration. Zera waved a document he’d forged the night before; purporting to have come from Vir’s hand, it proclaimed their musical worth and granted them admission.

“To play for the queen, eh?” The sergeant scratched his chin. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that… Good luck.”

Inside the tower, more soldiers were playing at cards and dice. The duty officer within laughed at the scraggly pair of ‘musicians.’

“I’m sure the queen will enjoy your music,” he said with a smirk. “She enjoys music so much, that the musicians we send up never come back.” He turned and barked at a young soldier. “You! Escort these gentlemen up to the gate. Maybe, if you’re lucky, she won’t eat you too.” The soldier turned pale.

Upstairs, a pair of guards bearing iron-tipped spears waited before an iron-barred gate. They unlocked the gate and allowed our heroes through. Up the stairs beyond lay a door. The faintest noise of conversation drifted through it.

Zera swallowed and knocked.

A pause. The scuffing of slippers beyond the door. The clack of the lock. The door creaked ajar, and the apprehensive face of the queen’s daughter Tanith peered out.

She recognized Aekino despite his disguise. Her expression turned to fear. “Leave,” she hissed. “Leave now! While you still can!”

A clear, melodious voice came from within the room. “Dear daughter. Do we have guests? Please, let them in.”

Tanith’s face fell. She opened the door wide to admit our heroes to the queen’s den. That round chamber was heaped high with riches. Between windows of thick red glass, there were tapestries of richly colored silk, furniture of exotic Eastern hardwood inlaid with jade, and shelves of books bound in calf’s leather adorned with gold leaf, all of them strewn about in glorious profusion. And behind a dragon-fan screen of rice paper on a red-lacquered frame they saw the silhouette of the queen.

Even her silhouette was beautiful. Her voice was like satin and roses, and Zera shivered as that voice tried to free something deep inside him.

“It is the one I told you about,” Tanith said, speaking of Aekino. “And one of his men.”

“Really?” purred the queen. “Let me see.” Arising from her seat, she stepped out from behind the screen.

Zera’s heart stopped for an instant. He gaped. Even Aekino blinked in astonishment, his mouth dry. For the queen transcended mortal beauty. Beneath a fall of pale hair, her face was astonishingly, ethereally perfect; and yet they knew that, were they to look away, they would not be able to describe her features, nor even the color of her eyes.

Aekino recovered himself. “Your Majesty,” he said with a respectful bow, “I am Tepet Aekino, and this is my brother Zera Thisse. We have come on behalf of your daughter Idris, to rescue you from your prison.”

”We have sworn an oath,” Zera added sourly.

“Indeed?” The queen’s face was impassive, but her eyes sparkled with laughter. “What a dutiful daughter she is. But not dutiful enough, I think. Did she not tell you to bring my heart?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My heart,” said the queen. “My husband has it, you see. I gave it to him, once. He keeps it in a cage above his bed. You do not have it with you, and I cannot leave without it.”

“That’s a shame,” observed Zera unconvincingly.

“Isn’t it, though?” Cessair replied. She stepped toward Zera, and he felt his knees go weak. How could this inhuman creature, this soulless thing, arouse such desire within him? “Perhaps you would be so kind as to bring it back to me?”

Zera stepped back. “Maybe,” he said, caution writ upon his brow. “And maybe, while we are doing you this favor, you could do something for us? You have been here a long time. You know the story of Kuro the Raven and Blessed Wind, perhaps better than any now living. There are things you could tell us, things that we would know.”

“Perhaps,” she replied. “And perhaps you might promise that you will do me no harm after you deliver me to my daughter? You seem less than favorably inclined towards me, Zera Thisse, while your oath seems rather specific.”

Zera frowned. “I am less than inclined to agree. But we shall see; perhaps we can discuss this further when we bring back your heart.”

“I look forward to that discussion.” Cessair stepped forward once more, her hand outstretched toward Zera, who flinched away. “Your heart is full of anger,” she continued with a smile. “There is so much of it. I can relieve you of some of that burden, if you wish.”

“Get away from me, you witch!” snarled Zera. Only Aekino’s urgent entreaties diverted the young Night Caste from drawing a blade then and there and assaulting the faerie queen.

Having chosen the liberation of Cessair’s heart as their next goal, our heroes had to sneak back out of the tower. Tanith set forth a plan which worked splendidly: they obtained an empty wine-cask from the cellars beneath the tower and concealed Aekino within it, and while Zera took on the guise of a soldier, they had the cask removed from the tower and carried out into the city. Without ceremony, Zera and a wine-sodden Aekino slipped out the gate and returned to their comrades, to whom they explained the new state of affairs.

Li accepted this new turn of events with her usual detachment. Thorwald, for his part, was confused. “I do not understand,” he complained. “If he has had her heart all this time, why hasn’t he killed her?”

“I think he loves her,” replied Aekino slowly, as if the idea were new to him.

“This makes no sense!” snapped Thorwald. “Where I come from, if you love someone, you do not lock them up inside a tower!”

Zera said nothing as Thorwald and Aekino argued. He only stared into their tiny fire, watching the flash and flicker of fire and sparks, until Thorwald gave him a hard look. “She has bewitched you,” Thorwald declared.

“No!”

“She has,” insisted Thorwald. “I can see it in your eyes.” With that, he took the iron necklace that he always wore, that all of his people wore to ward off the Fair Folk, and handed it to his brother Zera. “Wear this,” he said. “Clearly, you need it more than I.”

After a couple of hours of discussion, our heroes broke camp and made their way through the night to the road to Tul Tuin. As the sky lightened with false dawn, they passed the place where they had turned south to follow the demon-trail to the valley of ashes and black bones. In that faint light, they could see the grayness had spread to the hilltops there. Li muttered a quiet curse. “It is a terrible thing,” she said, “that such a thing might come to pass.”

Thorwald scowled. “Swear to me,” he said. “Swear that we will return and deal with this.”

Aekino raised a single perfect eyebrow. “Another oath?”

“Swear it!” insisted the Northman.

“Why do you require this of me?”

“Because!” Thorwald snapped. “We never do what I want!”

The others laughed. No oath was sworn, and after the moment’s levity passed, our heroes traveled with heavier hearts on that twilit road. Come the morning, they had arrived at Tul Tuin. Thorwald claimed to recall, from his former life as Blessed Wind, a back way into the Tower of Winds. So they circled about the city and found themselves a campsite amidst the trees, from which they might look out at the rubble, underbrush and scree that lay in heaps upon the side of the Tower’s promontory.

The Circle waited for the sky to darken so that they might safely approach the Tower without being spotted. As they waited, their Lunar ally Fetek Breath-of-Midnight joined them, descending from the sky in the form of a banded hawk. When night fell, they moved at last under its concealing darkness, and soon found what they sought: an opening, concealed by centuries of overgrowth, which led into the caverns and tunnels that slumbered beneath the lowest cellars of the Tower.

Lighting the way with the golden glow of his caste mark, Thorwald led his comrades through the tunnels. Rough cave walls soon gave way to cut stone. Through a door, they entered a maze of barrels and casks and racked bottles laden with cobwebs and dust. “Ah,” Thorwald said with a complacent smile, “it is as I remembered it.”

Sidling upwards, they made their way into the lower levels of the Tower proper. Dodging the servants going in and out of their quarters, they slipped past the laundry rooms and entered a narrow stair by which the servants accessed the upper levels. After a brief detour to avoid a servant descending the stairs, forcing them to knock an unsuspecting court clerk unconscious and leave him tied up in his room, they climbed to the highest floor without incident.

The servant’s stair did not let directly into the prince’s quarters, but instead onto a guarded passage. After muffled debate as to their next move, Fetek took mouse shape and slipped under the door, past the guards, and into the prince’s richly appointed chambers. There, hanging above Vir’s fine four-post bed by a chain, he saw a cunningly wrought double cage, wood within iron, which held a beautiful songbird with feathers of white and gold.

But the room also held two Dragon-Blooded elders, for Ledaal Vir and one of his cousins had chosen that place to play Gateway. This might not be so easy! Fetek slipped back under the doors and into the stair to warn the Solars.

“Who could the other one be?” Aekino mused. “That doesn’t sound like one of Vir’s children.”

“Does it matter?” grumbled Thorwald. Aekino had no reply.

They spoke in whispers in the stairwell as they tried to divine a plan to sneak the bird out of Vir’s room without anyone noticing. The fact that Gateway games had been known to last for months dampened any enthusiasm for outwaiting the Dragon-Bloods, a strategy not much to the liking of Thorwald and Zera in any case.

Zera finally settled on a simple and direct plan of action. Taking the form of one of the Tower servants, he walked past the guards and into the prince’s room. There, ignored by Vir and his cousin, he walked up to the bed… and leapt atop a bedpost, seized the cage and its chain, flipped back to the ground and bolted out of the door.

It worked, for about three seconds.

The Circle fled down the narrow stair. Behind them, Vir launched himself forward, a sword of fire blazing to life in his hands. Li, who had held back, drew her blades in a blaze of golden Essence and parried the first fiery stroke, while Thorwald thrust past her with his white jade daiklave. Vir pressed them back with skill and fury, while Aekino, Zera and Fetek leapt the stairs three by three down below.

Level after level swam past the warriors, until they emerged from the stair in the servant’s levels. There, Li spun her blades through the movements of ‘Hummingbird Takes Flight.’ Vir’s eyes widened as Essence whirled and blazed around his foe; he kicked the door shut in her face, but her blades tore through it in an explosion of bleached and burning wood. His parries impaired by the narrowness of the stair, Vir reeled back as blood dripped down from deep gashes on his forearms. “Anathema!” he cried.

With a roar, Thorwald tore another door from its hinges and smashed it into the doorway, barring it for a crucial moment. Through the door he shouted his retort: “This is not your day to die!”

As the pounding of soldiers’ boots grew louder, Li and Thorwald ran to the cellar stairs. The door shattered behind them. They burst into the wine cellars, where they caught up with the others. Zera tossed aside a cask of fortified wine with a grin. He had poured long trails of the stuff across the cellar while the fight raged above. Now, as they sidled out of the wine cellar and into the caverns below, and as the soldiers made their way into the dim maze of casks and bottles, Zera launched an arrow of flame into the morass of alcohol-sodden wood.

The explosion was heard halfway across the city. Closer up, as they ran through the tunnels by the light of Li’s anima, they could hear the cries of the dying. Not long thereafter, they burst out of the caverns and into the night. Then they parted ways. For Li and Thorwald blazed like beacons; they could not travel in secret. So the two golden warriors traveled north, towards the city of Idris. And Zera Thisse, accompanied by Aekino and Fetek, bore the faerie queen’s heart south and east to the Iron Tower.

(Note: all PCs received 3 XP for this session. Thorwald received an additional 2 XP for contributions. XP totals to date: Aekino 82, Fetek 60, Li 77, Thorwald 81, Zera 86.)