Of Salt and Steel
Second Day of the Twelfth Month 293 AC
You give a small nod in response. You had not really planned on teaching mind magics yet, not until you have more lore and preferably teachers from the githzerai, but you are not truly opposed to the notion. After all, you would be visiting the Monastery of the Unbroken Circle soon to deliver the flesh-forged beasts you had agreed to trade them last month.
"Alright then, I'll teach you all I can," she tries to sound confident, but does not quite manage it and little wonder, as she had not trained anyone before in her life. Although you are not the perfect judge of the weaving of thought, emotion, and rippling unreality that makes up her art, you suspect she is only now begining to delve into its deeper mysteries.
"There are others you might learn from," you explain to the knight. "Not here, not of this world, however, but from former slaves of the Deep Ones who hunt and make war upon them now across the Infinite Spheres."
Ser Harras opens his mouth to ask something of the matter, but thinks the better. "Don't need to bother a king with telling tales. I'd rather read an account."
The alchemist looks rather upset at the decision, but he does not second guess it. "You've a means to take us to Volkmark Keep, as you did to... wherever that was before, do you not, Your Grace?"
"Gogossos," Vee explains shortly. "No point in troubling the boy's mother with anything she might have heard of the place. It's safe as... well, it's safer than 'round here really."
"Alas, I cannot gainsay you," the knight says. "I hope that it will not always be thus." The words are perhaps a touch more sincerely meant than they would have been an hour ago.
Thus you set off at first upon the ether striding, and then once you are on Harlaw, flying unseen upon shadow steeds following the knight's directions to the southwest of the island where, on a lonely finger of stone thrust into the ocean, lies your destination. Volmark Keep is typical of the Iron Islands, which is to say there are squat, heavy towers worn by wind and wave, their crenelations jutting into the cloudy sky like the half-rotted teeth of some leviathan that had dragged itself upon the shore. Perhaps the very beast that flutter upon its banners?
Unsurprisingly given past events, you are greeted with suspicion by the garrison the Reader had left to guard the keep, lessened only slightly by the presence of the Knight of the Grey Garden. Whether learned from the Watch or discovered on their own, the Iron men knew the trick of asking unexpected visitors to bleed and step away to prove themselves human.
Once you pass the gate, you enter a keep filled with nothing but echoes and ghosts, and the marks of battle ever-present. Here the stone is scorched by alchemist's fire, there blood had seeped into the wood of the door, staining it perhaps for centuries to come. As you descend deeper into the keep, however, less wholesome things than blood and death make themselves known. Fragments of enormous shells, scraps of meat still rotting within filling the air with a heavy reek, shattered vases from whose remains you can just make out forms humanoid and ichthyic twisting, embracing, and merging. Even you cannot make out what the statute that dominated the former temple had been. The attackers had broken it very thoughtfully indeed.
"This way," Ser Haras motions past the torn and burned remains of a tapestry to what must have once been a hidden entrance.
As soon as Jeyne crosses the threshold, she startles, looks back over her shoulder, eyes at first narrowed in concentration, then wide in confusion. "There are remains everywhere, but I can't sense anything behind us..." she takes an experimental step back and looks at the rest of you. "And now I can't see anything in front of us. There is a veil here, opaque both ways."
"Yes, I... noticed," Ser Haras says a touch awkwardly, unused to speaking so openly of his powers. "Loras was able to see though it well enough with his magic, even found the door with what he called a simple spell."
"That's odd..." you muse.
Had the Eaters of Minds known of the Harlaw knight's powers and taken pains to guard against them specifically? A bit more experimentation confirms the distinction. You, Vee, and even Ser Richard who has trained himself to see auras without need of a spell, can see through the veil as though it were not there, but to Jeyne and Harras it is as a curtain of lead. There is not much more you can learn at a glance and so you move deeper.
"This shit again," Vee curses at the sight of oily black veins coiling through the granite like worms through a carcass.
Bilestone.
The ritual chamber seems wholly formed from the substance, a perfect octogon carved by magic rather than mortal hands. All along the floor and walls countless curves and spirals intertwine to form patterns the eye strains to follow. A drain of sorts in the ceiling still dribbles salt water. Beneath it, you spot a single small shoe. It had likely been lost by one of the children in the chaos of the battle, or as Ser Haras and his men were struggling to get the children to safety.
"Water was pouring down from here on the children, almost like the Blessing of the Sea the Drowned Men give," he explains. "I'm not certain if the Mind Eaters' positions mattered, we were too busy killing the damn things."
"Of course," you nod looking over the chamber.
What tongue would this chamber speak in? you wonder.
Would you understand its whispers? Would you even wish to?
How do you investigate?
[] Use Legend Lore on the whole keep
[] Use Stone Tell on the Bilestone
[] Use Touch of History on the shoe
[] Write in
OOC: And here we are at the on site investigation. Not yet edited.
