Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] Plan You Must Deploy Additional Waystones v2
-[*] Overwork: Yes
-[*] COIN: The Gambler
-[*] SERENITY: Aethyric Vitae 2/2
-[*] Waystone: Deploy in Kislev (Praag Region) (Niedzwenka, Zlata) (do this first)
-[*] Waystone: Deploy in the Empire (Sylvania) (Elrisse, Tochter)
-[*] Waystone: Deploy in the Karaz Ankor (Black Water) (Thorek)
-[*] Tributary: Dreaming Wood (Nordland/Laurelorn) (Hatalath, Sarvoi, Cadaeth, Tochter, Elrisse, Aksel)
-[*] JOHANN: Waystone: Seek the lost Black Fire Pass Nexus (The Gambler)
-[*] MAX: Write two papers: Linguistic Drift in Lizardmen Glyphs; The Polyphenic Theory of Lizardmen Society
-[*] EGRIMM: Auditory Seviroscope ("Wind chimes") (Spend 2 CF for a Journeyman with Auditory Magesight to assist)
-[*] KAU: Seek an exchange arrangement with another Library or a Karak's archives to be able to make copies of their corpus (Karak Vlag)
-[*] EIC: Assist in the creation of the magical route through the Schadensumpf, both personally and with the EIC's influence and resources
-[*] Eike Actions: Auditory seviroscope, EIC magical route
-[*] Eike Study: Learn spells, enchanting lessons from the Grey College (1 CF)

Vote tally

As used as you are to simply dropping by people whenever you want a word with them, that tends to be more frowned upon at the echelons of power you're currently dealing with, especially with foreign rulers. And considering your history of dropping by Kislevite rulers, Boris might take it as some sort of veiled message. So you suppress your normal impulses and send word through the proper channels, and word comes back through the proper channels. Boris' response to your announcement that Praag is going to be the first beneficiary of the Waystone Project's greatest success spends only one line on gratitude, but the length of the rest of the letter is, if anything, even more fulsome than if he'd spent several paragraphs on it. That Boris is taking the time to personally brief you on the political situation of Praag instead of leaving it to an underling or simply letting you figure it out for yourself speaks to how seriously he is taking this.

Praag's status as one of the three major cities of Kislev makes it a major piece on the political board, and for that reason it's something of a surprise that it's not only under the control of an Ungol leader, but that it has been in an unbroken chain dating back to before the arrival of the Gospodars and the birth of Kislev. When the Gospodars arrived, they took the Ungol capital of Norvard and renamed it to Erengrad, and rebuilt the sometimes-Ungol town of Dorogo, sometimes-Ostermark town of Pelzburg into Kislev City. But while they established an iron grip on their new frontier with the Empire - well, technically the Ottilian Empire, as this was in the early stages of the Time of Three Emperors - they were unable or unwilling to do the same to Praag. Initially it would likely have been largely about not wanting to disrupt the flow of silver out of the mines Praag controls, and later it may have been out of a caution towards further aggravating what had unofficially become the Ungol capital, and with it all of the Ungol settlements and nomadic groups that had been displaced to the colder, harsher, less fertile lands of the north. Even after two secession attempts over the centuries, Praag remains ruled by an Ungol Z'ra rather than a Gospodar Boyar.

Of course, the dynamic changed after Praag's near-destruction in the Great War Against Chaos, and though Tzar Alexis did make some attempts to rebuild it, Tzarina Kattarin was too busy tormenting the southern cities to care much about the ruins of the northern one. Towards the end of her reign it seems to have rebuilt enough to be desirable again, and the Kalishinivik family seems to have been established in Praag as part of some attempt to suborn it, but that was foiled first by the dethroning of the Tzarina and later by the family's purging after the Battle of the Shirokij. Praag seems to have benefited from what might charitably be called the hands-off ruling style of Tzar Vladimir, and with Tzar Boris' powerbase having been established as a good relationship with the Ungols rather than dominance over them, it seems primed to do even better. Praag's state is dire at a glance, but when looked at from far enough back, you can see it clawing its way slowly but surely out of the devastation left by the Great War. The current Z'ra, Rudolf III, is new to the throne and looking to establish himself, and Boris believes that securing his cooperation should be simple as long as your Waystone can perform as promised.

You, Niedzwenka, and Zlata arrive in Praag aboard a captured longship that Zlata managed to borrow from Erengrad and Niedzwenka has piloted in defiance of current and wind, its threatening silhouette rather disrupted by it being full of a massive stone obelisk rather than Norse raiders. Someone under the Tzar has been talking to someone under the Z'ra to get everyone on the same page, and you're expected and awaited by a representative of the Z'ra. What you don't expect is someone wearing the robes of a Magister of the Gold Order, who looks deeply intimidated and is making no attempt to conceal it. "Lady Magister Mathilde Weber?" he asks as you step up onto the wharf, and at your affirmative he hands over a set of papers containing his Wizarding credentials. His papers are in order, but a supplement to them answers one question and raises several more - Magister Conrad Becher is banished from the Empire. Banishment as a punishment is most common for Wizards who haven't done anything wrong themselves, but whose former Apprentices have done something very wrong indeed. Banishment from Altdorf is the most common and banishment from Reikland isn't unknown, but banishment from the Empire is much rarer, as it's a rather narrow slice of offences bad enough to get one banished entirely from the Empire without crossing a line into earning execution or Pacification.

"I primarily serve Praag's silver industry," he says, in response to some of your unspoken questions and while carefully sidestepping some of the others, "though I also serve as an advisor regarding combatting the endemic Za beasts, as well as matters regarding the Fire Spire and the Deep City. It was decided that I would be the point of contact regarding this matter."

"Oh?" you say neutrally.

He very visibly weighs up who he's most intimidated by in this moment, and decides that it's you. "I described to them the services that Grey Wizards are known for performing for the Empire, and that may have been a factor in the Z'ra leaving this matter in my hands, rather than addressing it personally" he admits, "but it is also true that the Z'ra does not speak Reikspiel and knows little of matters of magic."

You stare the man down for a moment, then nod. "That will have to do," you say. In truth having a cowed Magister as your point of contact will probably be a great deal easier than dealing directly with a foreign ruler, but there's no need to let him relax just yet, at least not until you write back to the Colleges and find out what mischief this Magister got up to. "This is Ice Maiden Zlata and Baba Niedzwenka, serving as representatives of their traditions."

"A privilege," he says, bowing lower than the circumstances call for.

"What is the Z'ra's position regarding the deployment of Waystones in their lands?"

"Though I have endeavoured to impress up on the Z'ra that your reputation is beyond doubt, time and harsh experience has taught Praag wariness regarding promised solutions to the taint that bedevils it. You have the same terms available to any that claim to bring miracles - you may attempt whatever you wish to attempt in the worst corners of Praag, and any talk of bankrolling that solution begins only with proven results."

You smile in anticipation. "That sounds very acceptable to me."

A few days later, you receive word from Altdorf in response to your request for information on Magister Conrad Becher's current standing. It seems he got himself involved in a counterfeiting ring that itself was later suborned by some sort of heretical organization, and then became an informer for the proper authorities and was instrumental in bringing that organization down. Though it did all work out in the end, the adulteration of specie is a very serious crime and using the Wind of Metal to make it impossible to identify is not the sort of purpose that the Colleges have in mind for their graduates.

Reading between the lines, the impression you get of Conrad Becher is someone who either has a stunted but not completely disabled sense of morality, willing to perform moderate misdeeds but with a line he will not cross, or someone who completely lacks morality but who does possess common sense. Not ideal, perhaps, but you can work with this. Your cause is righteous and you have the backing of the majority of the continent behind you, so the same impulses that led him to report his former employees will make sure that if push comes to shove, he'll side with you over the Z'ra. The 'or else' is already hanging very loudly in the air without you having to do something as gauche as actually say it.

---

With Conrad's nervous guidance, you're able to identify multiple different approaches that could be taken in Praag. While eventually the plan would be to have Waystones everywhere you can think of and everywhere that anyone else can think of too, the first Waystone is going to attract significantly more attention than the twentieth, and establishing the right sort of reputation with it could make your future endeavours a great deal easier.

The first, and also the least offensive and most politically resonant, is to place the first Waystone underneath the Karlsbridge - named after Z'ra Karl the XII, beloved by the locals of Praag and everywhere else remembered only as a failed secessionist - to service Old Town. On one side will be the ruins of the Fire Spire, a monument to Praag's past fruitful cooperation with foreign magical traditions, and the Magnus Gardens, the only wholesome place to be found within Praag's cursed walls and named for Magnus the Pious. Its connection point to the greater network will be a Waystone within the gardens, the centrepiece of the Celestial Observatory, now bereft of those attuned to Azyr but still faithfully reporting the position of the planets, with the Waystone representing Söll. Future Waystones will be established in Old Town, which is the least tainted but most densely-populated quarter of Praag. Least tainted in Praag is still fairly tainted by any sane estimation, and taming the oddities that disquiet the densest (albeit least-threatened) portion of the local population will be a crowd-pleaser and will ideally generate a quiet acceptance for future, more ambitious deployments.

The second is going right for the throat of the taint within Praag, by placing the first Waystone underneath the Bridge of Death - so named because it's the bridge that many crossed to sign up for Praag's defence at the Citadel and few of them ever returned. Situated at the heart of Old Town and in the shadow of the Citadel of Praag, a Waystone placed here will be safe from retaliation by any thinking servants of Chaos that might be found within Praag, allowing for further Waystones to be deployed one by one upstream in New Town. New Town is where the streets bleed pus, the walls rearrange themselves at night, and the bodies of those slain in Praag's sacking somehow still linger to disgorge disease and insects and worse. This will undoubtedly do the most good for Praag in the long run and will be looked well upon by the kind of person who has a Wizard in their employ to explain that to them, but in the immediate term most citizens of Praag will only know of riled-up denizens of Chaos and the inevitable death toll that taking and holding parts of New Town to establish Waystones within them will reap.

The third route is to overlook Praag entirely to get the ball rolling on pushing back the Chaos Wastes, by placing the first Waystone underneath Praag's River Gate with an eye to establishing Waystones in the headwaters of the Lynsk. When the Chaos Wastes crept south during the Great War and only partially receded, the new foreshore of Chaos encompassed previously-productive grazelands, forests, and mines, as well as forward outposts to guard against incursions and waypoints for trade with Karak Vlag and Cathay. Reclaiming those will not just make Chaos' position slightly less advantageous should there be another Great War, but will also benefit the economy of Kislev as those industries can be restored and cattle, lumber, ore, and trade can flow south once more. But all that might fall on deaf ears for people whose lives and livelihoods are contained within the walls of Praag.

A fourth possibility does present itself, which wouldn't please any of the major groups as much as the other options but would earn a potentially very useful ally in taming Praag and its surrounds: the northern end of the West Side, where an empty piece of land that was once the city commons and graveyard. It was where the refugees of the Great War made camp, and their slaughter when the walls were breached has left such a mark on the area that no seed planted in the soil will sprout, and every body planted in it will rise again, earning it its new name of the Bleakness. The Cult of Dazh is very prominent in Kislev, and their Temple of Dazh's Blinding Luminescence directly overlooks the Bleakness, so they intervened with the establishment of a crematorium to process the city's dead. The grim practicality of the Kislevites and the fact that it's the holy flames of Dazh being used to cremate the dead mean that this practice is not quite as upsetting to the locals as it would be in a city of the Empire, but it would still please the locals in general and the Cult of Dazh in particular if this necessity was banished. That said, it would mean that the Waystone's riverine capabilities would not be on display for its first introduction to the world.

Flanked by a Hag Witch from Erengrad and an Ice Witch from Kislev City, and with your point of contact more focused on what the attention of a Grey Wizard would usually mean for the likes of him, there's nobody present who is both willing and able to opine strongly on the subject. The decision is entirely yours.



[ ] Karlsbridge and Old Town
This will please the citizens of Praag.
[ ] Bridge of Death and New Town
This will please the Z'ra.
[ ] River Gate and Northeastern Kislev
This will please the Tzar.
[ ] The Temple of Dazh and the Bleakness
This will please the Cult of Dazh.
[ ] Other (write in)



- There will be a six hour moratorium.
- In the long run, all three four approaches and all other approaches imaginable will be taken. This is about how the Waystone Project will be perceived, not about what it will accomplish. It will affect not just how the locals feel about it and how they help or hinder it, but will also be a factor in what other rulers might expect if the Waystone Project came to their lands.
- If there's another approach to this that you think has a different set of trade-offs to the given options, feel free to suggest or ask questions about it. Maps being used for this portion of the quest can be found here: Map of Kislev, Map of Praag.

 

[Thebigpieman]

SILVER ROAAAADS, TAKE ME HOOOOOME!

Click to shrink...

To the Karak, I belong!

Click to shrink...

West slope of Nar, mountain penthouse

Click to shrink...

Take me home, Silver Roads

Click to shrink...

You did this.

Take Me Home Silver Roads

Towerin' peaks, Karaz Ankor
World's Edge Mountains, Pillars of Grungni
Life is old there, older than the trees
Eternal like the mountains, grumblin' in the deeps

Silver Roads, take me home
To the Karak I belong
Karaz Ankor, Valaya mama
Take me home, Silver Roads

All my Ancestors gather 'round her
Miner's lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty, carved into these halls
Bolsterin' taste of Bugman's, teardrop in my eye

Silver Roads, take me home
To the Karak I belong
Karaz Ankor, Valaya mama
Take me home, Silver Roads

I hear her voice in the mornin' hour, she calls me
The grumblin' reminds me of my Karak far away
Trundlin' down the road, I get a feelin'
That I should've been home yesterday, yesterday

Silver Roads, take me home
To the Karak I belong
Karaz Ankor, Valaya mama
Take me home, Silver Roads

Silver roads, take me home
To the Karak I belong
Karaz Ankor, Valaya mama
Take me home, Silver Roads

Take me home, (down) Silver Roads
Take me home, (down) Silver Roads​

 

[AsuraAtlas]

 

[ReImagined]

"I am the very model of a modern master magister."

Click to shrink...

To the tune of the Major General's Song

I am the very model of a modern Magister Lord,
I've information mystical, lexical, and the greatsword,
I know the Winds of Magic, and study the lores heretical
From Necromancy to Waaagh, in manner confidential.
I'm very well acquainted too, with matters linguistical,
I understand Eltharin, both spoken and cryptographical,
About Queekish translation I come bearing a lot of reports,
With many cheerful facts about the state of besieged Skaven forts.

I'm very good at surreptitiously leading armies on campaigns;
I know the secret places where the War Below has made champaigns:
In short, in matters mystical, lexical, and the greatsword,
I am the very model of a modern Magister Lord.

I know our mythic history, the Old Ones and draconic tales,
I meddle in trade affairs, I've a fond favour for setting up sales.
I write of matters from the terrain to Thaumomycological,
In faith I can advise on anomalies theological;
I can tell certified Zhufbars from the Clan Skryres and Wissenlanders,
I know the recipe to a pie that calls for two colanders!
Then I can light a fire with a swig from a flagon most potent,
And orchestrate with music so the simple task is not silent.

Then I can write an explanation in Khazalid Klinkharun,
And flee by shadowsteed Panoramia's retribution
In short, in matters mystical, lexical, and the greatsword,
I am the very model of a modern Magister Lord.

In fact, when I can tell what is meant by a "mammoth" and "rampire,"
When I can tell at sight a goblin shaman from a vampire,
When such magics as divine and chaos are surely not for me,
And when I know precisely how to make an Orb of Sorcery
When I have learnt what progress has been made in my modern waystones,
When I know more of Ranald than a priest faking his gambling loans
In short, when I've a penchant for acquiring magical lore,
You'll say that a better Magister Lord has never been before.

For my influential Great Deeds, though I'm plucky and adventury,
Have only taken place recently—less than half a century;
But still, in matters mystical, lexical, and the greatsword,
I am the very model of a modern Magister Lord.

 

[RwconHD]

"Patriarch of Light" (incomplete)

Spoiler: Source

(Vicar of Bray Parody).

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7SM4MLQNPI
attempts at rhyme were thrown out the window, Eichenherz of Grey College was the preceding Patriarch per info page, this was the product of 20 minutes, so bear with me

In Emperor Dieter's golden days
When competition no harm meant.
A zealous light patriarch man I was
so Eichenherz's no opponent.

Unto the college so I preached
The first supreme came from white I followed
And futile are those that challenge me
Volan's rightful heir that is me.


CHORUS
And these are the articles I will maintain
Unto my dying days, Sir.
That whosoever Volan's staff may wield
I will be the patriarch of light, Sir.



When storm of magic came to Altdorf
And loyalty no good meant
A victim to Tzeetch's spawn Horx was I
So I was locked up in Crystaline

Into the vaults the traitor went
The first patriarch's book he defiled
So perished all the patriarchs
Who couldn't see the storm coming like me



CHORUS
And these are the articles I will maintain
Unto my dying days, Sir.
That whosoever Volan's staff may wield
I will be the patriarch of light, Sir.


A night of thousand duels commence
An end to the colleges' fraternity
So Patriarch supreme and alone I was
Sole voice of reason in the storm

The brash red flame no wisdoms meant
The college's doom they invited
I banished the templars from my hall
And mourned the death of my rash peers.

CHORUS

And these are the articles I will maintain
Unto my dying days, Sir.
That whosoever Volan's staff may wield
I will be the patriarch of light, Sir.

........

 

[Glau]

An EIC Interlude, Part Four


Martin Brunter had not, in fact, filed a claim at the tax office.

He had not paid to get a magistrate to enforce his father's will, at least none that Eike could find any record of. There was no claim, and definitely no counterclaim, and certainly no appeal on the books of any of the courts in Altdorf.

She did, however, find a copy of the actual will itself, and there was no Lord mentioned who might have disputed it. The tax office, when she went to double-check the information she was given at the start of the mission, did have the elder Mr Brunter marked as decreased, but lacked a magistrate or local Lord's signature to validate a new authority. One of the clerks, in response to her questioning, confirmed that property never claimed reverted to the local Lord after 13 years.

It was at this point that Eike, fed up with running hither and thon across Altdorf, began to speculate. The lawyer she saw in the younger Brunter's office was meeting with the same Lord who stood to gain the entire escrow account of a quite successful gambling house if it was never claimed. The same Lord who had apparently leaned on Brunter to give quite a lot of gold to friends of his.

And the same lawyer who had apparently been paid quite a lot to file the unfiled will, and then pursue fictitious actions, and keep Martin Brunter strung along. As he was duped into paying river pirates AND auctioning their goods.

One part of her said that she was assuming that Lord Swallowvale was already guilty, as she didn't know that the friends of his were pirates, nor that the goods were sourced from piracy. The other part was feeling quite a lot of sympathy for a poor young businessman who was apparently being robbed of his inheritance, charged for the privilege, and then strung along as a convenient fall guy for the Lord should he ever feel some heat upon him.

It was a bit of an agonizing dilemma that she wrestled with up until almost the last moment before she had to leave Altdorf, though the ulgu in herself whetted itself against the feeling of it. Whether to risk alerting the Lord that someone was on to him, and setting the whole investigation on a time table, or to immediately remove his leverage.

In the end she decided that she had a Civic Duty and she felt bad for the young man, so she showed the copy of the will to the clerks at the tax office and testified that she had seen one Martin Brunter running the business well and honestly (although part of her wondered how much of that was a lie, he seemed awfully credulous to be running a gambling house) and the magistrate overseeing it signed of with barely a glance and a muttered "bloody grey apprentices always meddling".

The ride back on the riverboat had her biting her nails over the decision even as she put her mind to more productive uses; a notable downside of all the ulgu training she reckoned. Still, by the time the boat docked and she was running down the gangplank to the reserved table at Mary's, she thought she had her justifications pretty well marshalled.

There was a bit of a mood to the town but she didn't think too much of it as she greeted the hochlander and they established cover over the appetizer course, until he asked her, "So, what did you learn?"

Eike took a breath, about to launch into her prepared notes, and then cocked her head to the side as instinct and an odd swirl of ulgu near his head made her twig onto something.

"Well, it wasn't very exciting, maybe you could tell me your side first? Something's changed since I was last here."

The hochlander grinned.

"Well, I was at the hidden docks and this ship came in, you know? Bunch of guys still covered in blood unloading crates, and guess who shows up with a few wagons and a dozen guards? So I figure it's a shame, since I was hoping to make it a lesson for you, but I had him dead to rights consorting with river pirates and took the shot."

"Took the... You just killed him? Like that?"

"It is a capital crime, and I am a recognized agent of justice through the college. There was no reason to wait."

"Then I guess I learned I saved a man a trip. And that we should really tie up the lose end of that lawyer- he had me running around so much! Let me tell you all about it..."

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] Bridge of Death and New Town

Vote tally

Long after your decision is made, your mind continues to linger on the irony of the Bridge of Death being one of the safest places in Praag. Its other name - the Empty Bridge - is an example of what your task here seeks to banish, as it seems that some sort of haunting means that anyone crossing at night finds themselves followed by a figure that is always growing closer but never quite reaches them. This level of benign disquieting seems to be the norm in Old Town, in stark contrast to the constant threat of death and worse to be found in New Town.

This is information you're not about to share with the crowd of onlookers that assembles as soon as the town criers spread word of what you're up to. Inconvenient, but quite necessary, as the population of Praag would likely react badly to unknown foreigners performing unknown magic in the heart of their city. As it is they're keeping a safe distance despite their curiosity, most likely because the town criers made it very clear that any attempt to interfere with what was announced as 'a bolstering of the City's defences against Chaos' would be considered treason of the vilest sort.

With the aid of a treadwheel crane that usually lifts cargoes out of the river instead of much more literally into the river, the Waystone is very gingerly lowered into the Lynsk, to a very relieving lack of anything unexpected happening. And then it continues to be lowered, and after its peak dips below the waterline and quickly out of sight in the murky waters, continues still. You were told that the river was about seven meters deep here, which sounded a lot shallower in your head than it does as you watch more and more rope disappear into the murk. You'd be a lot more concerned about that if it wasn't for the magic of delegation and specialization.

Niedzwenka clambers over the railing with surprising grace, and the Lynsk seems to jerk alarmedly as she makes contact with it, the water level dropping as the watercourse tries desperately to shrink away from her and then rippling fretfully as she disappears underneath. There's much comment and discussion among the onlookers about this, especially as seconds stretch into minutes, but nobody seems to think that the woman is at any actual risk. When she emerges again, pulled up by the rope that lowered the Waystone, she is, of course, dripping wet, but the water coming off her seems to lack any of the foulness that flows in the waters below. As soon as her feet are back on the bridge, there's a momentary writhing from one of the spirits entrapped somewhere upon her person, and the water pours hurriedly off her and slinks away before something worse than mere eviction happens to it. "The weight of it sunk it good and hard into the silt," she says, "and the river knows exactly where it is. This will suit."

Some of the crowd find themselves entertained enough to trail behind you as you make your way up the road to the beginning of the switchbacks that lead up to the Citadel, where a statue with weather-worn features stands squinting at what once was the far distance but is now the wall of a building that has grown several stories since the statue was erected, which itself bears innumerable layers of paint that have covered generations of graffiti depicting what the citizens of Praag thought the statue would like to be staring at. Underneath the hollow statue, and perhaps explaining the local fascination with it, is a Waystone that connects directly to the nexus underneath the Citadel.

With a hand on the statue's calf you bring yourself into contact with the local spur of a network that spans the world. You speak a very specific string of silences, and the eddy of magical energy causes a larger movement of magic within the Waystone, a ripple that fades away into the distance and then dies down. And though no sense you can identify can spot anything further happening - including several senses most humans lack - you know for a fact that somewhere in the world, something immensely powerful just started moving.

Uncaring of both common sense and the less common sort that can quote the propagation speed of magic through various mediums, a wave of magic approaches that makes visible the thin layer of power that sheaths the magic flowing through the leyline. That invisibly thin layer of power suddenly swells and stretches and shoots out a new tendril, pushing through the resistant rock below without any care for inefficiency in the direction you have indicated. As the tendril reaches the river it almost seems to hesitate for a moment before it continues, acting with caution that was absent a moment ago, and with oozing slowness it engulfs the Waystone, energy moving to and fro as it explores this new addition to the network. Then it fades away again to almost nothing, and the scraps of ambient magical energy that the new Waystone had already absorbed from the Lynsk begin to flow underground towards you. For now the flow is aggravatingly molassic, but with time the stone below the city will adapt in nature.

And just like that, it's done. The first Waystone in countless generations planted with the only hint of a ceremony being a series of satisfied nods shared between you, Niedzwenka, and Zlata. That's because the next Waystone is going to be paid for in blood, as a foothold is carved out of the tainted ruins of Newtown. And not just blood, because the resources and expertise to build that Waystone are going to be assembled and paid for by Kislev, because part of being a sovereign state is that you become distinctly less sovereign if you just let foreign interests build infrastructure in your country. So you've laid out the requirements for the Tzar's people, including lists of where the required expertise might be found, and when the Tzar has chosen and negotiated with whoever will be assembling Kislev's new Waystones, they'll be given instruction in how to do so, and they will go about their work as you turn your attention to the next corner of the world in need of Waystones.

---

"The Waystone network in Sylvania is in better shape than you might think," Markgraf Nyklaus says, unrolling half a dozen maps showing different corners of Sylvania and weighing down the corners with an assortment of weaponry he had concealed on his person. "The Von Carsteins infamously saw humans as cattle, but morality aside, that meant they had a vested interest in keeping them alive. So they kept the network in working order near population centers, and used something called 'balefire' to create wellsprings of Dhar where and when required instead of just having a constant sky-high level of corruption. There seems to have been something of a self-balancing mechanism to it - the less forward-thinking Vampires would be less prone to caring about long-term wellbeing of the human population, but they'd also be the ones that would want all of the Necromancers under them focused on conquest and expansion, so they didn't want to dedicate Necromancers to having undead do the mining and smelting and treefelling and blacksmithing that would arm and armour their armies."

You suppose that makes sense. Despite Sylvania's reputation, the continued existence of a human population within it that is sane enough to function puts a limit on how bad the taint could be. "It seems to already be concentrated along the rivers," you observe.

He nods. "That's where the people are, because most of the rest of Sylvania is either hills or forest. But there's opportunities for your riverbound Waystones if you look for them - upriver of Drakenhof, the former site of Drakenhof Castle, is pretty severely tainted, as is the upper half of the Eisig, where Vanhaldenschlosse was. There's also economic opportunities in the east if the woods there can be tamed and some farmland carved out of them, which the Waystones would make easier. On top of the direct benefits of more acreage to tax, if a few baronies can be carved out, that's some blank slate territories that can be populated with people that don't have thousands of years of Vampires on their necks."

It seems the Markgraf has been keeping an eye on your exploits. You let a raised eyebrow be your only comment on the matter. "Very good. The model of Waystone we've developed requires contributions from a Runesmith and a High Wizard. For Stirland, the most viable source of High Magic would be the Eonir, either from their magically-inclined Major Houses, or from the Grey Lords."

"Runesmiths isn't going to be too much of a problem. I was reaching out to Zhufbar before I had even stepped foot inside Drakenhof's walls. Eonir I'm less familiar with. What would sway them?"

"The Major Houses are wading cautiously out into the world of international trade, so trade goods and hard currency aren't without value. You might be able to garner their curiosity as well, as Sylvania is not just steeped in a form of magic they know next to nothing about, it also has a history as deeply marked by the Skaven Wars as their own."

He gives you a long, evaluating look. "They're not going to be the wrong sort of curious about it, are they?"

"They already have a strong theoretical knowledge of pure Dhar use - the sort the Druchii use, if you're familiar with that - and they very rarely use it outside of academic study of it. And they already have the sort of Dendromancy the Asrai have, and make very limited use of that. Besides, these are beings that already count their ages in the thousands, so the main draw of Necromancy just wouldn't be there for them." And if they were going to be tempted by it, there's very little you could do to get in the way.

"Academics, then? If they're cut from the same cloth as the Order of Lorekeepers, I can live with that."

The rest of your service to Sylvania is fulfilled by coming back some months later when the Markgraf is able to free up the time to be ferried to Laurelorn. As it turns out, after House Tindomiel made their contractually-owed and very emphatic first refusal to delve into the land of necromancy and corruption, the Markgraf beelines straight towards an audience with the Grey Lords instead. You don't know what conversation went on in the Wishing Woods, but when he emerges it is with the promised aid of two Grey Lords, Seilph and Sarumar. From what you've managed to glean from their reputations, Lord Seilph is likely motivated by what some might consider an unseemly interest in questionable magics and Lord Sarumar is there to yank on his leash if he fails to obey the 'look but don't touch' rule. And with the Grey Lords actively involved in the project, it will become trivial to shake loose High Wizards willing to do scut work if it gives them the ability to work alongside their usually-reclusive neighbours.

While you're handling that, Elrisse and Tochter follow up on what the Markgraf said by doing a very cautious survey of the eastern woods of Sylvania. What they find is that by Sylvanian standards the woods are positively quaint, and even by the standards of the rest of the Empire they're only moderately terrifying. The factors that have led to this are seemingly manifold, from the geographic distance between them and the more central hearts of corruption of Vanhaldenschlosse and Mordheim, to the buffer zone of relatively pure running water that flows from the titular torrent of Zhufbar, to a proportion of secret worshippers of the Dark Moor among the local population, to the simple fact that marching a necromantic army through there won't get you to anywhere worth conquering.

As far as you can tell, the only reason that the woods are as untouched as they are is reputation. If the maps drawn so long ago had had the border between Ostermark and Sylvania follow the Templa instead of the North Stir when the rivers split at Hundham, then there would probably be at least one more town and three or four villages in the same area. If anything, the main service Waystones would do to this area would be to reassure would-be colonists that the Sylvanian-ness of the area is being seen to. And when steel does the job of taming that land, it is stone that will get the credit. Adding on that tamed frontier to the already relatively tame lands between the Drak and the Templa, as well as the ongoing efforts in the Hunter's Hills and the Council of Manhorak taking the lands between the Eisig and the Drak as their natural heartland, the terrors of Sylvania will be hemmed in to the woods between the Eisig and the Steinbach, a chunk of territory that measures in at perhaps a fifth of their original range.

Sylvania is, appropriately enough, already dead. There's just a lot of work left to do with axe and flame before it gets the message.

---

"Forty of these," you say, tapping on the schematics, "equidistant around the shore." You tap a map of the region around the Black Water. "According to the range of estimates of how much exposed warpstone there is underwater, the ambient level of magic in the water will reach an equilibrium at somewhere between a quarter to a twentieth of the current levels within a year of completion."

The King of Barak Varr and the King of Zhufbar look from the maps to Thorek, who nods once.

That is the end of the meeting.

---

Okay, sure, a great deal of discussion about logistics and details and timelines with all sorts of people went on in the coming weeks, but there was no more that needed actual debating after that point. You had given the Dwarves a path to tame the land on their doorstep, and they began marching down it immediately. That moment is a memory you will treasure, even if the messy little details take away from some of its shine when candor forces you to mention them.

---



Praag-Lynsk Waystone Expansion, using Riverine Waystones, by Cothiquan Wizards. Began 2491, focused on cleansing of Chaos taint from Praag.
Templa Colonies, using Riverine Waystones, by Grey Lord Seilph and Grey Lord Sarumar. Began 2491, establishing farming and logging villages in the Misty Wood and Tangled Wood.
Cleansing of the Black Water, using Riverine Waystones, by Lothernian Wizards. Estimated completion date: 2496. Estimated completion of all currently planned fortifications of Waystone sites: mid-2500s.

 

[Boney]

You don't quite burst into King Belegar's private quarters. One does not burst into the private quarters of a King. But the unseemly haste with which you jam the necessity of a meeting with him through the usual procedures are the royal equivalent of doing so. "I need to know what your plans are for restoring Karak Eight Peaks' Runesmiths Guild," you open the conversation with when you finally reach him.

"Still being negotiated between the Thungnissons and the Ironbrows. Very much in the Ironbrows' favour, considering the circumstances. Why?"

"I approached Karak Vlag about a book exchange deal, thinking they might have books that the Fire Spire had left with them for safekeeping. The Fire Spire being a tower of magical research in Praag that was destroyed during the Great War Against Chaos, it predates the Colleges but it sounds like at least some of their precursors might have been involved with it, so ours would be the best remaining claim, and the only one that can be legally made under the Empire and Kislev's laws. The problem is, they had thought about what I might be after and come to a completely different conclusion, that I was there to solve the question of the property of their Runesmiths Guild."

"Weren't the Thungnissons claiming those, as the original Runesmiths Guild that all the others split off from?"

"They tried, but made their claim while also saying that the Vlagians with knowledge of Runesmithing they allegedly shouldn't have should also be turned over to Thungnisson custody. That didn't put the Vlagians in much of a mood to turn over anything. So their theory was that I was being sent as an adit to bypass the obstacle - if the books are turned over to the custody of the Karak that currently hosts Thorek and Kragg, then there's nothing to criticize and they can be held in trust until the Runesmithing Guild can be properly refounded - which could then happen alongside that of Karak Eight Peaks'. I didn't want to correct the misconception without checking to see if you might actually be interested in the idea."

Belegar's brow furrows, his initial wary frown giving way to one of careful consideration. "There might be something to that," he says after some rumination. "Part of why the debates are dragging on is because they can. The refounding of the Ironforges is going to be entirely from scratch, all of the secrets that were once unique to them are now all either lost or absorbed into the Thungnissons or the Ironbrows, so there's nothing to tempt anyone into transplanting themselves to here. But Karak Vlag's Runesmiths were descendants of those driven enough to go north on the research expeditions, but loyal enough to remain within the World's Edge Mountains - that's a respected combination. And they had a very respected reputation for stone-based Runes, where most others specialize in metal-based. All the orphaned knowledge that might be recovered from their notebooks and private libraries... that would get some heads to turn. It would give me a pick to wield in this whole situation." He looks to you. "For this to not come across as you intruding on business that you shouldn't, I would have to cast you as the avalanche that uncovered the seam. Not the most flattering role."

You shrug. "It wouldn't even be inaccurate. It's not the first time I've reshaped the landscape to fill the shelves, and knowing my luck, it won't be the last."

---

Your subsequent meetings on the matter are full of carefully-chosen words and intense silences, but after thoroughly vouchsafing the security of your library and when the talks were on the verge of being presented to the Runesmiths as a shored shaft, you find a place in conversation to gracefully bring up the matter - though the intense silence that was the initial response made you question whether you had actually done so. But after an equally intense sidebar, the worryingly lithe Vlagians lay the matter out for you. "If the Kron-Azril-Ungol were to come into possession of the originals of certain volumes in a more heavily distressed state than they were last known to be, would it be prepared to take on the burden of not answering those questions?"

That answers a suspicion you had and then some, all but confirming to you that in their long tenure in the Aethyr, not only did they bend the trust of the Fire Spire enough to peruse the books left in their custody - people already dead at that point, though the Vlagians had no way of knowing - but they did so thoroughly enough that there might be some dogears or margin notes or collateral damage that would raise unanswerable questions.

"It would be," you reply, "especially since I believe that nobody remains who would have greater authority than the Collegiate side of the KAU partnership to demand those answers."

"Empire authority over Kislev Wizards?" Interestingly, they use the Reikspiel word for Wizard instead of the Khazalid Zhufokri or any of the less flattering alternatives.

"Kislev's Ice Witches are dominant, and they see users of magics other than that of the Hag Witches as guests in their lands at best, to be cautiously watched and not allowed to outstay their welcome. The Fire Spire was able to exist in Praag because the Ice Witches avoided the city, not because they had any kind of agreement with it."

"Would they agree with that if the full facts were presented to them?" Their language is terse, even by Dwarven standards, and it would be easy to take it as hostility, but that just seems to be how the Vlagians speak of important matters.

"If the question was presented alongside a stack of books on magical lore looking for a claimant? Probably not. But to my understanding, that is the current state of affairs."

They take some time to discuss that answer between themselves, probably more time than it would have taken if you had given a less honest answer. But when they do return, it is with an estimate of weight and volume that will be added to the shipments already planned, and the quiet understanding that the matter is never to be discussed again. The main thrust of the discussion continues on, and the eventual conclusion is a simple one: when, in the fullness of time, the Runesmith Clans of Karak Eight Peaks and Karak Vlag are refounded, it will be as Brother-Clans, more so than is usual for even the descendants of Thungni. And until the day when they take shared possession, there will be an extremely well-defended chamber deep in your library that not even you can enter.

Concealed among those shipments is a few shelves worth of books for you to sort through at your leisure, mostly in Reikspiel with a minority in Kislevarin dialects. The distress the Vlagians referred to seems to not be any physical damage - they're actually shockingly well-preserved for their age - but a great deal of Khazalid notes in the margins that, from the brief skims you've been able to give them, would raise a great deal of questions that it is now your responsibility to not answer. You look forward to being able to carve out enough time to sort through them.

---

"So, what is it that made you look at ten million acres of spider-infested forest and say, yes, I think I can find one specific rock in that?"

"We could get lucky."

Johann gives you a searching look. "Do you know something I don't and you're being coy about it, or do you mean the other thing?"

"The other thing."

"Oh. Okay. Let's see this forest, then."

Johann is a treasure, and not just literally. You smile and clap him on the shoulder. "And besides, this isn't going to be just anywhere - it's going to be somewhere very significant to either the Beastmen or the Forest Goblins. That makes this a matter of information, which means we can use what the Dwarves already have as a starting point, and even if we don't actually find the stone, any information we do get along the way will still be useful in other ways."

He perks up. "Like old times, then?"

You return his smile. "Very much like old times."

---

"Not entirely like old times," Johann says after the first few raids, which fulfilled the primary objective of confirming the accuracy of Dwarven information but turned out rather dire on the secondary objective of incidental looting. Anything the Beastmen couldn't immediately make use of was immediately broken or torn or otherwise ruined, and anything in Goblin custody very quickly met a similar fate by accident. "Even different in that there's actually some normal coin, rather than those horrible warpstone ones. Why do they even keep them, anyway?"

"Both would take it just to spite whoever they were taking it from, but just as we have the Silk and Ivory Roads, so too do the Greenskins have a trade network that leads to the Chaos Dwarves - a 'Steel Road', or a 'Fire Road', I suppose one could say. And some Beastmen tribes have been known to collaborate with Chaos cultists within the Empire, and sometimes with the Norscans, and so know to accumulate the coins those trade partners would value." One might even call the trade link between Beastmen and Norscans an 'Ice Road', you consider. You wonder if it's worth pursuing more information on the subject with an eye to future papers - it's somewhat outside your usual specialities, but the pleasing symmetry of the names of the two conceptual roads begs to be elaborated further upon. And it might be something you can tie in to Roswita's research into the economies of the Vampires.

Tempting as it may be to just keep raiding outlying outposts to see how long it will take Johann to question whether you actually have a plan, his form of Magesight has proven more attuned to some forms of energy than yours in the past, so you bring him in on the overall plan: to prod the Goblins until a Waaagh forms, and then to see what happens. Ideally the point that it forms around will give you the general location of their most important rallying ground, which would hopefully be their foremost holy site, which theoretically would be where they keep their most important artefacts, which presumably would include any stolen nexus monoliths. On top of that, the mustering could potentially provoke the Beastmen into their own mobilization, which very easily could bring the two groups into conflict, or present an opportunity to trick one side or the other into thinking they already are.

You're not unaware of the staggering amount of provisos built into that plan. While it would be nice if everything goes off exactly as planned, perhaps due to some sort of divine intervention, you're completely prepared for this to break down somewhere along the way, and to take advantage of the opportunities that breakdown will present to learn more about the area and its inhabitants. It's a plan more in Heidi's usual mien than yours: go into a complicated situation, introduce a new disruptive element, and be ready to take advantage of the opportunities that will inevitably emerge as the knock-on effects ripple outwards.

The next few raids go according to plan, as does the consequences of those raids among the Forest Goblins, and even at this early point you're learning new things. Where the resonances of the smaller, reactionary Waaaghs you encountered in the Karak Eight Peaks campaign were choruses of contrasting notes and the larger, nation-destroying Waaaghs that carve themselves into history you imagine to be more orchestral, the incipient Waaagh of the Forest Goblins is a single tone, high and sharp, hovering incessantly in one specific point behind your eyes like the prelude to a headache. Presumably other forms of monocultural Waaaghs would similarly differ in their expression - it's a topic that has received some attention in papers you've read, but so far the only widely-agreed upon taxonomy is a division between the 'Little' and 'Big' Waaaghs, and even that would likely still be debated if it weren't for Waaagh Grom being such an undeniable demonstration. And as the processes of a Waaagh concentrate the forces of the Forest Goblins and force its regional leaders to vie for supremacy amongst themselves, you search the area around where this is happening for a Beast-Path.

A Beast-Path, in its most basic form, is a path through undergrowth kept clear by frequent passage of Beastmen travelling to and from their camps, water sources, and hunting grounds, and it is dangerously difficult to distinguish them from game trails carved by the hooves of goats and deer. But over time and as a Beastherd grows larger in both size and number, the paths are carved deeper and deeper until they form half-buried highways between encampments, holy sites, and meeting places. At their extremes, they burrow into liminal pathways called Worldroots that once linked the primordial Dreaming Woods together, allowing Beastmen to travel between areas of forest without care for the intervening terrain. It takes some time for you to find one since you've had very little experience with Beastmen, but when you get near enough all you need to do is follow the sinking feeling in your gut that would be an entirely natural response for someone less dangerous than yourself. You carve a path through the thick undergrowth that masks the edge of the Beastpath and then begin to prod at the Waaagh field emanating from the struggle for dominance occurring over the horizon, sharpening your Ulgu into nasty little jabs that only disperses the Waaagh for a moment, but causes it to roil as violently as a sizable skirmish would. With time and patience, there is only one possible response to such a provocation, and your Gyrocarriage takes you out of its path and allows the largely spider-carried response to flood into the Beastpaths.

In theory, such a conflict could escalate forever, drawing in Beastmen from across the continent through the Beastpaths and calling in more Waaaghs from the Badlands and World's Edge Mountains. In practice, such a conflict only serves the short-term belligerence of the two groups without catering to their long-term ambitions or desires, so it will only continue for so long. Perhaps one side will achieve local dominance, perhaps the other will decide to seek greener pastures elsewhere, most likely things will simply die back down to the baseline level of conflict between the two. If you put in enough time, effort, and perhaps the assistance of someone as knowledgeable about Beastmen as you are about Greenskins, you could probably keep the flames stoked for long enough to exterminate one side and greatly weaken the other, but that would be a far greater investment of time and effort than you've slated for the task at hand.

After a few hours for the Goblins to muster and charge off, you have Adela fly to the point where the Waaagh had been concentrated and find a point where the canopy is interrupted by a lattice of spiderweb. The battle between your curiosity and caution is decided when Adela points out that the clearing is too regular to be natural, formed by a rectangle of ancient trees that cannot have been cultivated by Goblin hands, and the girl needs only a word from you to unleash flames onto the webs and burn enough of a hole through them for the Gyrocarriage to fit through - though only after waiting long enough to see if there are any remaining spiders that might respond to this destruction, of course. Adela touches down inside the clearing without powering down the engine, and the moment you step out you can feel it. The power of Mork, yes, but it is out of tune with the power you're familiar with, underlaid with something else. This holy place is a pentiment, a palimpsest - a surface layer over something deeper and older and truer. The shadows here are impenetrably deep, and would remain so even if the webs above were removed entirely. They retreated in a circle around the hole of sunlight that Adela's fire let in not as a surrender to it, but as a welcome.

You called on a divinity to seek something ancient and lost, and in this place, it is impossible for that divinity to find anything but this. This place was sacred to Them before the name and form that you know, before the name and form that others know, before any name still spoken on this world. This place is more ancient than anything you can name, and more lost than anything you can comprehend.

"The Goblins don't have it," you say to Johann as the Gyrocarriage lifts back off. "It would be impossible for them to keep it anywhere else."

From above, you watch the Waaagh advance deeper into the forest, and then deeper still in a direction that cannot be found on a compass. Those that eventually emerge claim victory, and you have no way of knowing or caring whether they are telling the truth. The fulcrum you seek is held by the Shadowgor Warherd within the Beast-Paths of the Forest of Gloom. Recovering the legacies lost within the Forest of Gloom would take your full attention for more time than you can spare from the Waystone Project, but would be about much more than one specific rock.






---

The Empire's roads are thick enough with various subspecies of entertainment troupes that only the poorest and most remote of villages will go more than a season without a visit, and some of them boast histories and traditions older than some provinces - they probably don't really, but they boast all the same. The older ones claim to date back to a time when it was illegal for women to be professional actors in some provinces, which had the natural result of creating demand for the kind of men who could convincingly play the characters of women. Some troupes maintain that taboo for various reasons, some very complicated and some very not, and some of those that don't still find the dynamic to be an interesting one to play off of.

The immediate relevance of which is that when you request a Journeyman with auditory Magesight to assist with your idea for an auditory seviroscope, the Wizard that responds - a fellow Grey who is able to take a break from their undercover duties in a Reikland troupe due to their overwintering in Altdorf - has you unsure whether their aggressively contradictory approach to gender cues is a personal choice or a professional requirement. You do know that your inability to read how complimentary or not their calling you 'My Lady Sotto Voce' is, is going to get very distracting in the coming weeks. Their name, at least for the purposes of this collaboration, is Kas.

"This isn't that novel an idea," they say once you've laid out the idea: a device that translates the amount and type of ambient magical energies into something audible. "The Wissenland circuits are filled to bursting with expensive automata that perform a single task poorly. Ones that do music especially. Start turning a crank on the wrong corner in Nuln and local shopkeepers will beat you with sticks."

"It did strike me as a novel application of very well-established principles," Egrimm agrees. "There'll be some trial and error in getting the Wind-sensitive side to properly harmonise - sorry - with the musical side, but that's it."

"The immediate question is the exact form it will take. My initial thought was some sort of weathervane that can give a warning tone when needed, but going from silence to noise is a much more complex process than going from a 'correct' noise to an off-tone one, and I doubt many people will appreciate a constantly-shrieking weathervane they have to listen for shifts in pitch for. Some sort of 'wind chimes' would be an easy alternative, but it could be easy to tune out something that you're constantly hearing. So an alternative is for something that needs to be actively used and will be actively listened to - and to prevent completely reinventing the axe, some sort of already-existing instrument strikes me as the most straightforward route."

"Oma likes to say that if it's got to travel, best if it can be fixed by anyone with a forge," Eike pipes up. "Well, ideally by holding it against a big rock and hitting it with a smaller rock, but that probably isn't likely with this. Oma was talking about guns and carts, but it seems like it would apply here, too."

You nod in agreement. "If it's clockwork, then you'll need a clockmaker to fix it. That's probably not something you can find in all towns. Something more based on plumbing might be a bit easier to find, but still not ideal. Something musical, though, it's a dire village where nobody can repair at least a teufelsgeige. Even if it's closer to being an organ, there's always folks that can fix those circulating around the Sigmarite churches, even in the middle of nowhere."

"Entertainment troupes are happy to fix local instruments for a few coins, too," Kas says.

"There you have it, then," you say. "And if it's an instrument, then it'll actually see use as an instrument. It's all well and good to tell people to crank the noisebox every day to see if anything's off, but if it's what they use for music then they really will be listening to it every day."

"And be that much more able to pick out dissonant notes," Kas says. "I've seen reviews complaining about an instrument being a quarter tone out of pitch."

"It also has some folkloric weight to it," Egrimm muses. "An instrument that twists itself off-key in the presence of danger is the sort of thing I'm sure I've heard a folktale about somewhere. And if we say it works because it's made from some sort of holy wood or something, that'll be that much easier for some to accept."

"The reputation of your Order will make that more easy to convince people of," you say.

"And yours, in some areas," Egrimm replies with an odd little smile. The tone he used is odd, an inch away from well-practiced slickness but some element deliberately left out to prevent it all from harmonizing, which must have taken more effort than actually following through. Your first thought is that he's toying with you, but he's not watching you closely enough for that. He's not amused by your reaction, but by his own - he's mocking himself for defaulting to that form of oily flattery when it's entirely unnecessary.

"There are mystics in eastern province troupes that find grey to be the colour that gets the best reception," Kas... agrees?

"In any case," you find yourself saying to move the conversation along, "the question becomes one of which form of auditory seviroscope we'll be building."



[ ] Wind Chimes
Though more common in the southern realms, tinkling chimes hung up in open areas to ward off misfortune and evil spirits aren't unknown in the Empire. Their near-constant chiming would mean that anything it detects would be immediately announced, but could mean that those who could have heard that warning might have gotten in the habit of tuning out their sound.
[ ] Fiddle
Wherever you can find a man dancing, it is likely it will be a fiddle he is dancing to. How common it is in life and in folklore makes it a good candidate for this at first glance, but its simplicity might work against it here, as the most common form has half as many strings as you'd need for the full range of Winds to be easily audible.
[ ] Spinning Lyre
Known as a peasant's lyre in cities, indicating its popularity in rural areas. Its other name is the hurdy-gurdy, coming from the unmistakable and rather alarming warble caused by changes in humidity, showing just how sensitive it naturally is to small changes in its material. The instrument itself is a hand-cranked stringed instrument with keys to change the pitch of the 'melody strings' and separate 'drone strings' to provide a constant accompaniment, presenting plenty of room for eight strings for eight Winds, or having the Wind-sensitive components in the keys and having the drones sensitive to the presence of Dhar.
[ ] Portativ
The portative organ is a row of flues with associate keys played with one hand and a small bellows operated with the other, which can be easily carried on one's back or slightly less easily in one's arms. Its size makes it less convenient than more easily portable instruments, but will make it more easily maintainable by anyone that can work metal than something more fiddly might be. While full-size organs are most commonly associated with the Cult of Sigmar, more portable ones remain popular even in areas where Ulric or Taal and Rhya are more dominant.
[ ] Other (write in)



- The plan voted on did specify wind chimes, but I felt it was a matter that deserved some specific attention - not so much for the advantages and disadvantages of specific forms, but for the... what are the kids calling it these days? Ah yes, the a e s t h e t i c . It's also not going to cause the next update to take longer than it otherwise would because there's still the other remaining actions to be written without needing the result of this vote.
- Also it is often overlooked how musical the medieval world was - most people in the Empire would not go an entire day without hearing someone playing music, and you would have to go to considerable effort to avoid it for an entire week.
- Also also it is shockingly difficult to find a premodern wind chime design that did not involve penises.
- No kind of instrument is invalid for a write-in, I'll figure out a way to make it work if it turns out people really want Sevirotuba or whatever to be a thing.
- Reading through the new additions to the library (and getting a glimpse into the Vlagians' adventures in Worst Narnia) and sorting them into their proper categories will be a social action.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

My Lord,

I hope this letter—and the script contained within—finds you and yours in the finest of health.

As per your instructions, I have completed my tour of the theatre circuits of the central and eastern Empire, and have composed what I consider to be the definitive version of "The Hunter Count's Shadow". The full script is perhaps my finest work, and it could not have been completed without your most generous patronage.

As you are aware, the play is a retelling of the deeds and legacy of both Electors Van Hal, and how they brought the cursed province of Sylvania to heel. It originated among the performing troupes of Stirland, with each troupe performing their own variation of the play, depending upon the size of the cast, the resources at their disposal, and the tastes and attitudes of their audiences. Whilst the play can accommodate any number of players, smaller troupes typically boil the cast down to four key members: The Hunter Count, his daughter the Grand Countess, Baron Blutdorf, and the Dämmerlichtreiter. Amongst many of the performers who practice this play, it is considered bad luck to speak the true name of the Dämmerlichtreiter. In deference to this superstition, I too will refrain from speaking her name in this letter.

Whilst I have no doubt that you will peruse my definitive edition at your leisure, allow me to provide a summary below, along with some of my own notes.

The play opens with a monologue by the former Elector of Stirland, Count Alberich II Haupt-Anderssen, where he waxes lyrical about the misfortunes of his house. One variant, popular in Altdorf, features a young "Empress Heidi" fleeing into the shadows beneath the Dämmerlichtreiter's cloak, but otherwise Alberich stands alone on the stage. It ends with the former Count begging for any power to save him. He then departs stage left, where a cacophony of laughs and screams can be heard. Some of the more ambitious troupes use powders to create brightly coloured smoke, although on at least one occasion this resulted in the stage catching fire.

Of an important note is that in all future scenes set in Eagle Castle, the cast will only enter and exit from stage right—stage left is barred, and considered to be bad luck should an actor accidentally follow Count Alberich to his doom.

The play then introduces our principal cast—Elector Count Abelhelm, Baron Blutdorf, and the Dämmerlichtreiter. The Hunter Count cuts a strong, noble, and heroic figure, as befitting the main character of the play. The Dämmerlichtreiter occupies one of two roles—either she is following behind the Count, silently copying his every action, or she exists upstage, behind the acting area, where she can be seen dueling foul cultists, arresting corrupt merchants, or kidnapping traitorous nobles. Throughout this, she speaks not a word, and yet exhibits an unmistakable presence upon the stage.

Baron Blutdorf, meanwhile, is her complete opposite—dressed in bright colours and bells, he is, to put it succinctly, the clown of the performance. At first glance he is a witless fool, and yet his every action results in a favourable result for himself and the Count, belying a cunning wit beneath his humourous facade. A popular character amongst the people, and one that adds much needed joviality to the play.

Act 1 can end in a variety of ways—in Stirland, the death of Count von Stolpe and a declaration of war against Sylvania is always popular, whilst Ostland favours the destruction of the corrupt Stirlandian League (to the point where performances that omit this subplot are liable to result in riots). I believe I have threaded the needle between these two plot beats most artfully.

Act 2 then picks up with Count Van Hel amassing a great army to lead into Sylvania. This act has little in the way of dramatic speeches, being little more than reenactments of famous battles from the Hunter's Hills campaign. I have taken it upon myself to elevate this section above the base violence typically seen in less cultured depictions. I hope you will find my original piece, the "Ballard of the Singing King", most entertaining.

The crescendo of act 2 is, of course, the tragic assault on Drakenhof. I am sure historians will have many complaints about how there were actually two battles of Drakenhof—one at the town, and one at the castle—but for artistic reasons I have merged them into a single battle. It is here, of course, that Count Van Hel takes his fatal wounds at the hands of Countess von Carstein, before herself falling to an enraged Dämmerlichtreiter, wielding the Orc Hewer in her liege lord's place.

The final scene of act 2 returns to Eagle Castle, where Van Hel's secret daughter, Grand Countess Roswita, is introduced. The Countess, in her naivety, curtly dismisses the Dämmerlichtreiter, who leaves without a word. The scene ends with Baron Blutdorf giving a scathing retort to the Countess, casting off his bells and wiping away his face paint—a gesture which symbolises the sudden tone shift into horror and despair in the third act.

The final act is the darkest and most harrowing act of the play. The Countess, alone and isolated, attempts to secure her father's sacrifice into a lasting victory, but her every effort is countered by the machinations of a nameless vampire. You will not find this vampire in the dramatis personae, for no actor will take on this role. Instead, this character is only known through the consequences of their unseen plans—traitorous servants, butchered guards, and a growing sense of darkness and isolation around the Countess.

Some variants attempt to draw a parallel between the trials faced by the Countess here, and the trials faced by the late Count Alberich, who perished in dishonour at the start of the play.

I have rejected this interpretation as disrespectful towards the Countess, and have rewritten it to present her as a strong and stoic hero, defying one of humanity's greatest enemies even as it takes everything from her. Her defiance and strength of will in this most darkest of hours is something I feel will inspire and uplift the masses, and creates a hopeful thread through the bloody tragedy of this act. I hope your Lordship will find my interpretation agreeable.

The play ends very suddenly—the Dämmerlichtreiter will simply appear onstage, the head of the unseen vampire in one hand, and a proclamation from the Emperor promising reinforcements in the other. This is typically the only time the Dämmerlichtreiter speaks—reciting the words of the Emperor himself, rather than voicing her own words.

I find the moral of the play most obvious—the silent and steadfast loyalty of the Dämmerlichtreiter wins the day, and shows how loyalty doesn't just reward those who exhibit that finest of qualities, but also rewards those who cultivate loyalty in their followers. I did draft a speech by the Countess hammering this point home, but test audiences were far too drunk by the end of the play to truly appreciate it. It also places emphasis on the role of the Emperor, granting him both the power and the grace to solve the problems plaguing the Countess. Some versions even go further, and specifically name the Orders of Magic as the saviors of Stirland. This isn't a popular version, as it presents a distrust of magic as a tragic flaw, but there are enough former soldiers in Stirland who have fought alongside wizards who appreciate the practicality of the matter, even if they themselves have not quite overcome their own discomfort.

I expect that this play will draw criticism from the usual quarters—from the Ulricans for being pro-Emperor, from the Sigmarites for being pro-magic, from the nobility for the overreach of the Grey Order, and from witch hunters for depictions of dark powers. And yet I expect these objections to cancel each other out, as the Hunter Count's legacy is historical fact, and the Dämmerlichtreiter—the real one, not the character in the play–holds much influence in halls of power across the Old World. By presenting these two characters in a flattering light(along with Countess Roswita), it would be easy to deflect criticism of the play as criticism of the individuals in question—an insult few would be foolish enough to speak out loud.

Should you find my work agreeable, then you would be pleased to know that I have already begun to compose a sequel—"The Shadow of the Mountain King", which follows the Dämmerlichtreiter's journey to the realm of the dwarves and her war against the greenskin menace. Such an endeavour of course requires me to make that pilgrimage myself, and your continued patronage would be most appreciated towards that end.

I eagerly await your reply,

Your loyal servant.

---​

All the talk of dramatic troupes and "Lady Sotto Voce" made me wonder what an in-universe dramatisation of the Stirland arc would look like, and then the Muses put me in a headlock and forced me to write the above. Also I wrote half of it drunk, half of it hungover, and all of it on my phone's notes app, so any errors are entirely of my own making.

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] Portativ

Vote tally

The debate between the spinning lyre and the portativ is more closely fought than you expected, but in the end the durability of the portativ wins out over the portability of the spinning lyre. That makes the next step in this process a great deal simpler, as instead of having to find a luthier cleared for magical topics, you simply enlist the Perpetual in charge of the Gold College's plumbing. A day of work creates an enchanted set of pipework that cannot be called an instrument but can be called a proof of concept, as the noises it makes change reliably and proportionally to the presence of Winds. The next step is to replicate the enchantment without the enchantment.

There exists in thought experiments the concept of a 'mundane enchantment' - all the inner mechanisms of an enchantment, normally formed of a complex gantry of criss-crossing magical energies, being replicated step by incredibly laborious step by manual mechanisms made of Wind-sensitive materials. It's almost always a very impractical thought experiment, as it would require a mind-boggling amount of time and effort to make and there are some enchantment mechanisms that just cannot exist somewhere that is subject to the laws of physics. But if one scales down their desires from the enchantment to a point where the question arises as to whether it is an enchantment at all, then you manage to yank the project back into the realm of the feasible.

That was your original plan, but you start having to rethink it once you actually get your hands on a portativ and dismantle it. You'd originally thought the keys would be the place to incorporate the mechanisms, but they are only ever either open or closed, and while having slightly more or less resistance in the presence of Winds might be something a skilled player would notice, that's far less useful than what you had in mind. The part of the portativ that actually makes noise is one solid piece of metal with no moving parts. Obvious in hindsight, perhaps, but you've never had reason to give the matter much thought before. That might have been quite the roadblock if it weren't for what is apparently called the languid, a small flat plate of metal or wood that blocks most of the pipe and forces the air to move in the way that creates the characteristic resonating sound of organ pipes. Even very small changes in the dimensions of these plates will have very noticeable changes in the sounds that those pipes produce. That makes your job simpler. Maybe not simple, but simpler. Also not all that interesting, but it is for such purposes Teclis gave us Apprentices. You give Eike a moderate bag of silver, a list of materials from the Gold Order, and the names of a few organ-builders in Altdorf that the Light Order considers reputable.

---

A week later you have several large sacks of organ pipes marked with the Rune of the Wind they are supposedly sensitive to and a hand bellows to pump air through them, and the four of you travel from College to College and go through the laborious and noisy task of testing each one for how they sound in the presence of their respective Winds. Here Kas comes in very useful as they are able to record the difference in tone from baseline with some sort of runic alphabet used for musical measurements. You build a set of different instruments based on how dramatic the difference is between their baseline and in a Wind-rich environment, and bring in a compliant organist willing to perform a song on an array of different instruments in different places, and most notably during the next full Morrsleib. One is picked out that is very noticeably off when there's high levels of Winds around, not terribly thrown off by merely mild amounts, and is suitably alarming when all eight tones are altered by the presence of Dhar, making even the jolliest and most familiar songs take on a deeply disquieting aura.

The only remaining step - well, okay, there are arguably still steps like demonstrating this to various authorities and distributing schematics to all corners of the Empire, but the only remaining step before you can call this prototyping complete - is selecting a name for what you have created today.



[ ] [PORTATIV] Write in



Eike has learned:
Entertainers (1/3)
Engineering (1/3)

---

You were expecting, and half dreading, half hoping for having to spend a great deal of time walking a bunch of supercilious Elven Mages through every little step of the enchantment. But after a few clarifying questions you answered through mail, the Mages seemed to get enough of a grasp on the base concepts to start prototyping. You'd begun to very hesitantly allow yourself to consider what you might do with the time you'd set aside for this, and then House Fanpatar gets in touch with you to request your advice on acquiring large amounts of very specific reagents. Reading through their requests and doing some mental calculations, this speaks to a shaky grasp of the core principles leading them to lean on brute force instead of a more elegant and efficient harmony. Normally, this would be cause to intervene and try to get the project back on track, but for an infrastructure project like this you want brute force. You don't want the structural capacity of a bridge to be exactly right, you want it to be far in excess of any foreseeable load in even the worst of circumstances. So you begin to work through the EIC to smooth the acquisitions that the Mages require.

There are, of course, many kinds of wood that grow and thrive in swamplands, but the Eonir have exterminated them in the Schadensumpf to prevent the forest from encroaching on the swamp. You're far from an expert on the matter, but luckily there's someone much closer to being one very close at hand, and Panoramia is able to point out a few hardy species to send samples of to the Mages that would have been overlooked by Plan A: picking every type of tree with 'swamp' in the name.

Commissioning various regional mining guilds to quarry blocks from a handful of inselbergs in appropriately swamp-like conditions is the easy part. The part that requires your personal touch is explaining to them in a very clear and Wizardly manner that it really had to be from those specific rocks, and substituting seemingly identical granite from somewhere more accessible would actually be extremely detectible and extremely in breach of contract.

Trolls are horrid creatures, but everything that makes them a terror in life makes them very useful in death. River trolls are far from the worst of their varieties, but their preferred habitat brings them into regular contact and inevitable conflict with taxpaying citizens of the Empire, ensuring that there's always a bounty on them. That means you don't have to commission adventurers from scratch and for full pay and expenses to get your hands on parts of them - all you need to do is to put enough of a price on those parts to nudge the risk/reward calculations of the job ahead of the other work available in the area. Soon enough, very carefully sealed barrels of viscera are making their way towards Laurelorn.

'Bog iron' originates as nodules of iron-bearing minerals that can be found in certain kinds of wetlands. Some say they come from natural processes involving specific grasses and algaes, others say they are gifts from the Swamp Gods for which veneration and reciprocal gifts are owed. For political reasons you will not be weighing in on the debate, but what you might be willing to reveal your feelings on is how surprisingly difficult it is to get your hands on it. It turns out that the problem here is one you're surprisingly familiar with - Karak Azul didn't pick its name out of a hat, it's called that because it sits on some of the richest iron deposits in the known world, and someone went and reconnected it with the wider world, and centuries of accumulated ingots hit the Empire's metal markets. Thankfully you've got contacts within an organization that also values the metaphysical aspects of bog iron and has continued to gather it even after doing so became more expensive than the much purer Dwarven ingots, and though they don't have much of an opinion on the Eonir, they are in favour of being paid by the Eonir at a time when they have so many more opportunities for expansion than they have gold to fund them.

[Rolling...]

It's in this final task that Eike comes to the fore, basically taking over that entire facet and interfacing directly with the Council of Manhorak to ensure a steady stream of material that matches what the Eonir require of it. You only keep half an eye on what she's up to because her maturity in general and her expertise with this in particular warrants a decent amount of trust, and if her curiosity leads her to taking the opportunity to pry into some of the secrets of the Council of Manhorak, then you're okay with letting it happen. If this is the point where she overextends and gets herself into trouble, then at least it's with an organization you have enough pull with and power over to keep it from spiralling out of control. In the end nothing concerning seems to come of it, and Eike ascends another notch in your assessment of her.

In the end, there is no grand opening or other celebration of the completion of the magical road through the Schadensumpf. While the Queen is pushing for greater ties with the outside world, that this can so easily be seen as a means for outsiders to bypass some of the most formidable defences of Laurelorn - ones that had so recently been instrumental in the defeat of a particularly dangerous Beastherd, no less - makes it a poor centrepiece for that particular cause. So it simply appears in the space between one day and the next, a network of solid paths over boggy hillock and bottomless murk, strung like bunting between invisible waypoints that can be shuffled around to present as straight or as windy a path as desired, or no path at all. You can see a dozen places where it could have been done better, and a dozen places where your intuition insists that it should not be able to work at all. Such are the wonders and woes of other peoples' enchantments.



Eike has learned:
Economics (Old World): She has an understanding of the bigger picture of the flows of money and goods throughout the Old World, and what causes those flows to shift. +1 Learning
Theogenesis (1/3)

---

Before you add them to the long list of topics you've added to the literature upon, the question needs to be asked of yourself: what do you actually know about the Lizardmen? The answer is shockingly little, and what you do know can be interpreted through various different lenses to get a very different picture of them as a whole. Even their name is a riddle, as they are thought of as lizards shaped like men by some, and thus as beasts to be guarded against or culled, and as men shaped like lizards by others, and thus as a society to be negotiated with or warred against. Even your two papers play into this duality, as the one on their theorized polyphenism would frame them more as a eusocial hive and therefore, to most readers, as mere insects incapable of thought, but the one on their alphabet begins with the presumption that they have an alphabet, which is the domain of thinking beings.

You do find obscure mention of them in the scrolls about the works of the Old Ones you received from the Eonir, who with frustrating brevity mention them as tools of those Old Ones that are turned to various purposes as they shaped the world according to their mysterious whims. However, nowhere does it specify whether the mechanisms of their being wielded were along the lines of one giving orders to an underling, a command to a dog, a call to a herd, or bait to a beast. One impression you're getting of these Old Ones is that they favoured elegance in their doings, and creating a species that unknowingly fulfilled the purpose of their creators while pursuing their own needs and wants seems like the sort of thing they might find apropos.

This leaves you with something of a problem in that you're going to have to get creative for this paper to be more than a mere distillation and translation of Lathruai's efforts - you want there to be some sort of contribution by yourself, even if that is just bringing in other perspectives as well. As is so often said in matters of the pen, to steal from one is plagiarism, but to steal from many is research. So you get to researching.

You make what use you can of the Old One texts - largely restricted to making the sort of lofty comments and references that suggest you know a lot more than you're letting on and really only serve to make it clear to everyone that you have access to sources that they don't - and then begin to draw from a better populated portion of your library. Books on Arthropods, acquired to help you better understand the We, are used to supply a solid grounding on the form of polyphenism that the Lizardmen are theorized to possess: one mirroring the worker-soldier-queen model of ants and bees and the We. As the paper takes form the comparisons to the We are made perhaps slightly more than is strictly necessary, in the hopes of prodding more attention towards your book that can teach them more of the matter. You draw from your books on Dragons and Draconids - did you get those in the wake of your encounter with the Dragon Ogres during the original Karak Eight Peaks Expedition, or after the discovery of Cython atop Karag Zilfin? - to head off one potential counterargument, saying that the known mutability of Dragons is heavily based on the presence of Winds and so you would not get a balanced ratio of varying forms of Dragons out of a single 'hive'.

With the lizards shaped like men side of the equation taken care of, you turn to the men shaped like lizards side and find a lot more examples to disprove. The society of the Beastmen seems like a good fit at first glance, but what few know is that the 'Beastmen' that emerge from the forests to torment the Empire are the result of their own internal caste system, rather than an accurate cross-section of their 'natural' forms, and plenty of creatures that fail to fit into the 'standard' forms of Gors, Ungors, Centigors, and Minotaurs are either preyed on by those higher in the hierarchy or wiped out in the earliest skirmishes due to their lack of equipment and their being treated as disposable by the Wargors. Similarly the Bull Centaurs of the Chaos Dwarves, the Stormvermin of the Skaven, and the Skin Wolves of the Norscans might give one the impression of a polyphenic species until one digs deeper and finds that all three are more likely explained to be mutations induced by the terrible Gods of those respective peoples.

Then you turn to the example of the greenskins, and find that it cannot be so easily refuted. The perspective of an adventurer with a background in apiary had reached the conclusion that the Lizardmen were hives with some sort of undiscovered spawning chamber where the reproductive caste gave forth the others, but one with more familiarity with Orcs and Goblins could just as easily imagine a chamber where some sort of seedbed gives forth multiple forms of related and cooperating creature. Lathruai's notes even compared the size of the smallest caste to Goblins.

As is often the case with such things, an unexpected blockage in the flow reroutes the entire course of the paper. You (well, largely Max) go back and rework the paper to frame it as an evaluation of what is known and a few sets of theories that might fit the facts, and one of the theories being the one you've built up from scratch more solidly justifies your name forefront on the paper.

With that one more or less in the bag - more more than less, though there's still a fair bit of work on Max's part before a final revision will be waiting for your stamp of approval - you turn to the matter of linguistics and the original focus of Lathruai's investigation. A lexicon of both the Lustrian and Southlands dialects of Lizardman runes is useful in itself, but that Lathruai has mapped the drift between the two by roughly estimated age presents a deep and fascinating question. The main question to ask is whether the natural state of the language of the Lizardmen is static, like the dead, scholarly, and artificial languages of the Old World like Old Reikspiel and Classical and Lingua Praestantia, and there's something about the Southlands that is causing it to drift, or if the natural state of the language is the same as other living languages and there's something about Lustria that's keeping that process from occurring. You don't know anywhere near enough about Lizardmen society to begin to guess, but it's still an interesting question to raise.

As you study the runes, you notice that there are echoes and rhymes that can be found between the glyphs here and those of Anoqeyan if you look for them, but they're also there between Anoqeyan and Khazalid and, if we're being honest, between both and Dark Tongue. Some people use this as the basis for some sort of overarching theory that all languages are ultimately related, but it can equally be taken to mean that there are fundamental truths about the universe that can be reflected in spoken or written language and the only way a language wouldn't have commonalities with every other is if it deliberately rejects those truths. Ghur in Lingua Praestantia and Anoqeyån is the same as in Dark Tongue, and conceptually very similar to Gor in both Beast Tongue and Khazalid. Any search for linguistic links needs to be eternally cautious about following the false echoes of these reflected truths.

Which is what you tell yourself over and over and completely fail to be convinced by when you find that of all the rune lexicons you peruse, the one with far and away the most apparent commonalties with the Lizardman glyphs is Norscan. The vector for this apparent information transfer must surely be the Norscan colony of Skeggi in the New World, the only reasonable place for any prolonged contact between the Norscans and the Lizardmen, and you find more evidence to support this suspicion when you notice that none of what they seem to have adopted has carried with it the deviations contained within the Southlands dialect. But though you've never really had much reason to give its existence much thought, you'd have assumed the only thing they'd be taking from the Lizardmen would be gold and death, not flourishes from their Runic alphabet. Either the Norscans have a hitherto unsuspected affinity for archaeology, or there's something else going on there. As frustratingly confusing as the question is, the thing about academia is that an interesting and novel question is almost as much of a contribution as an answer is, so you work it into the paper.

After far too long of staring at different Runic alphabets, you think you can start to see the trajectory of lingual evolution converging back on its origin with Lizardman-influenced Norscan veering back towards Khazalid and, perhaps, to some theoretical universal precursor. But you're starting to get the same flashes of recognition when looking at the patterns in cobblestone streets, so maybe there's just a finite amount of ways to draw straight lines in two dimensions and you need to take a break.

You leave what you've produced to Max to do his usual magic to. Far from your best paper, but academia always needs bricks even if it's the capstones that get remembered.

Some time later, the final drafts of the two papers are presented to you. The former one is as you expected, but the latter seems to have worked in the day-to-day details from Lathruai's diary to take the reader upon the same journey of discovery that she had, giving the attentive reader a grounding in the Lizardman runic alphabet along the way. It ends as abruptly as the notes do, but in this version as a culmination as a sense of dread formed by the highlighting of the danger of the waters that Lathruai had been sailing and an emphasis on the absence of friendly sails. It then switches to Max's usual and much more scholarly voice to inform the reader that the documentation was intercepted between the Dark Elves who likely acquired it and the Chaos Dwarves who would have ultimately received it, and it does so in a way that implies without actually saying a great deal of swashbuckling adventure that didn't actually happen, and sinister plots to rob the civilized realms of this insight that never actually existed. You sign off on the publication of these papers with a smile.



[Polyphenic Theories of Lizardmen Society, 2491. Subject: Uncommon, +0. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Competent, +0. Very Exotic, +2. Alien, +1. Precious, +1. Shared Credit, -1. Total: +5.]
[Linguistic Deviation in Southlands Lizardmen Runes, 2491. Subject: Uncommon, +0. Insight: Confirming, +1. Delivery: Thrilling, +2. Very Exotic, +2. Varied, +1. Accessible, +1. Shared Credit, -1. Total: +6.]
[Greater attention drawn to Araneae Sapiens: +1.]

---

Eike is finishing her fifth year as a Wizard and her third under your tutelage, and under a normal trajectory would be halfway to beginning her Journey. She has a good grasp of the most-used Petty Magics of the Colleges, but though she has enough raw power and control to reliably cast Lesser Magics, so far she's only learned your own understanding of Aethyric Armour. This isn't necessarily a problem yet since her skills in other areas are developing nicely, but it's still something to be aware of, so you've decided to give her some time at the Grey College to learn some more spells from the expert teachers there, as well as to develop her understanding of enchantment. The question is what spells she should be learning, and whether she should stick to the unlearned spells in the tiers she has already demonstrated ample skill with, or whether she should begin her forays into the spells of Grey Magic proper. As her Master, you have the sole authority to make that decision for her.

There is also the question of her studies into enchantment. There are two paths open to Eike: to develop a skill in Enchanting based upon your own, or to develop one of her own. Your enchantment paradigm is based on your very acute Visual Windsight and a natural knack, but Eike's Windsight is Intuitive and her own natural talent lies more in understanding the Aethyric compatibility of various materials. The only parts of your understanding that you can reliably communicate are your understanding of Runes (non-Dwarven, it stands repeating even in the privacy of your own internal monologue) and the suite of petty spells that are able to substitute for a reasonably well-stocked laboratory. Though you've found a number of niche uses for those spells over the years, you've rarely had need to perform enchantment outside of extremely well-stocked laboratories, and considering Eike's background, you don't see her hurting for resources in the future. It might be better to sign off on her learning whatever she can from whoever is available, rather than just signing her up for classes that will further develop her understanding in the basics.



Vote for as many spells as you want. Eike will learn the spell that has the most votes first, then the second if she rolls well enough to still have time remaining, and so on. At average rolls Eike will learn about three spells.

Simpler Magics
Eike can reliably cast magic at this level.

[ ] [SPELL] Sounds
This is the sole remaining unlearned Petty Magic, and will be easier to learn than the others. Finishing the list of Petty Magic will increase Eike's Magic characteristic, allowing her to reliably use Relatively Simple spells.
[ ] [SPELL]Blessed Weapon
This will teach the basic version of the spell, not Mathilde's mastery of it.
[ ] [SPELL]Dispel
[ ] [SPELL]Magic Alarm
[ ] [SPELL]Magic Lock
[ ] [SPELL]Magic Mapping
Formally known as Mathilde's Multidimensional Aethyric Polysevirric Projection.
[ ] [SPELL]Move
[ ] [SPELL]Silence
[ ] [SPELL]Skywalk



Tougher Magics
Eike will have to make conscious effort and risk miscast every time she casts spells at this level.

[ ] [SPELL]Bewilder
[ ] [SPELL]Doppelganger
[ ] [SPELL]Eye of the Beholder
[ ] [SPELL]Mathilde's Multidimensional Aethyric Projection
[ ] [SPELL]Mindhole
[ ] [SPELL]Mutable Visage
[ ] [SPELL]Shadowcloak
[ ] [SPELL]Shadowsteed
This will teach the basic version of the spell, not Mathilde's mastery of it.
[ ] [SPELL]Take No Heed



Enchantment

[ ] [ENCHANT] Basics Only
This will only progress Eike's basic Enchantment skill, and so will not prevent you from trying to teach her Runecraft and Tool-Free Enchantment.
[ ] [ENCHANT] Freeform
This may allow her to develop her own style as an enchanter or learn one from others, which may end up incompatible with your own.



- There will be a twelve hour moratorium. Voting will not be in plan format.
- I think what the Portativ is doing is shifting music from major key into minor in the presence of Dhar, but I don't know enough about music to be sure if that makes any sense.
- I'm not giving you any examples of organ names to start with because I can't think of any, but any ideas that I like may be edited in.
- See the Spellbook threadmark for a full description of the available spells.
- Learning the basic version of a spell will not prevent you from teaching her your Mastered version later, but won't make it any easier either. It would also make it possible to develop her own Mastery. If she does develop a Mastery, it would prevent her from learning yours.