Part MMCMLVIII: An Ancient Weaving
An Ancient Weaving
Eleventh Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC
You set your pale Runestaff of the Old Gods upon the stone and once more summon scores of eyes to fly into the dark, though it is dark only a moment longer as with another wish you craft a crown of brilliant light upon one of their number to carry forth, careful to keep the blessed raven at the heart of the conspiracy.
The bridges seem solid enough and not inclined to pluck ravens out of the air, and so you dare to set one down upon it. Ripples pass over its oily surface, and a groaning sound almost too low to hear passes through the whole structure... then nothing. You experimentally command the bird to take flight again, and it does so without any trouble. Meanwhile you direct most of the ravens towards the island that seems at first empty and uninteresting, until one of the keen-eyed birds, in imitation of its true-born kin, spies a glint upon the stone of the plinth itself. What had seemed before to be one great pillar of the same timeworn granite as the rest of the city is now revealed to be capped by bands of gold, True Silver, and you suspect other precious metals hidden by eons worth of filth piling on from above.
"See if you can brush off enough to figure out what all the materials are. That should give us some clue as to its purpose," Lya suggests. A good thought for a beginning. You still do not fancy taking a walk on a slime bridge however quiescent it may now appear.
Methodically brushing against the pillar, you find that the topmost layer of gold is by far the basest substance the pillar holds. Below that is True Silver and then Adamantine. Fourth comes a disk of rust-red Djezet of which you have only heard but never seen. Fifth is Horacalum of which a bare handful is worth a kingdom's ransom as you had found in Armun Kelisk. Sixth and strangest to see is Noqual, the mage-bane, for few indeed are the artificers skilled enough to bind its disruptive influence into any sort of complex spellcraft.
A raven's wing brushes a mere half-inch below the level of the bridge, not from any intent to dive there yet, for the pit is deeper than even the crown's light can reach, but the simple jostling as the birds fly through the dead air and a web of ethereal green flares into being, like the substance of specters spun into silk. Another slime, you realize, at once amazed and surprised to see such vast creatures, simple as their life may be. The flicker of the raven's death hardly registers against your senses, though the fact that the enormous web flickers back into the ethereal realm does.
"So the net will kill you, but the bridges are safe," Dany muses. "Let's see if it holds up when something that's not a spell construct tries..." Without further fanfare she flies up onto the bridge... and much like with the raven, nothing happens.
"Should have used foretelling," Ser Richard says darkly.
"We do not have unlimited sorcery, Ser Knight, and given the scope of this... device, I suspect we will need them for something far more urgent than testing our every step like a walking stick when walking through a swamp," Malarys says, though not unsympathetically.
"You have an idea of what this might be?" you ask, wondering if it is the same thing that had crossed your mind as soon as you saw that the magic-hating material was the lowest circle.
"A trap to keep something in... a very old trap that somehow managed to function through the waning of magic, which means it must have been designed with that in mind," he replies thoughtfully. "Given that it, like the false serpents, is based upon simple forms of arcane life, we can conclude that it was part of the city's original design, perhaps the last part set up before its destruction. A great many answers lay at the bottom of this shaft I suspect... but also a great deal of peril to open without knowing the precise purpose and nature of the apparatus."
What do you do?
[] Break the web of ethereal slime to see what is at the bottom of the shaft
-[] Write in
[] Continue onward to find more information about this place before disturbing it
-[] Write in
[] Try to study it further
-[] Write in
OOC: Somewhat short again, but there is no way of getting around the fact that this is a break point given what you just learned.
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