"You know what Herdstones are?" Lord Magister Luuk says after you enter the tower, not looking up from the battered kettle he was patiently watching.
"Gathering points for the Beastmen," you say. They'd come up a time or two in Regimand's travels.
"They're also the complete opposite of Waystones, which scares the shit out of anyone with sense." He scratches at his shoulder, where the angry red of a new scar is visible under his leathers. "If you can interrupt them while they're setting one up, and drag the thing away before they summon reinforcements, you've got a menhir attuned to Ghur but not yet tainted by their rituals. It was a stroke of luck to find one just as you asked for this." You suppress a smile. "I carved out a recess in the side of this one, and you need to fill it with heart-blood of wild animals spilled by the blade I left in it, that's the 'key' you asked for. Wild, mind - nothing domesticated. Once it's full, the chosen subject drinks it, and as long as they drink most of it the transformation should take hold. Tea?"
"Yes, please."
He busies himself, and a minute later hands you a chipped stone mug of surprisingly pleasant dandelion tea. "When one of us transforms, we hold what we truly are inside of us, and so when the spell ends we revert. Someone else does not have the training to hold who they are within them, so the transformation sinks deeper into them until nothing remains untouched. So the menhir also imbues a second spell into them, which does the remembering of what they were."
You nod along, but are struck by a sudden suspicion. "Imbues how?"
He shrugs. "Some strange tangle of energies one of the other Colleges came up with a few years back." You repress a sigh. Ambers. Sometimes it seems like they keep more secrets by accident with their disdain for the trappings of civilization than the Greys do on purpose. "Assuming nobody dispels it, it should activate when the subject sleeps. Ideally that will be when whatever emergency they were transformed for is dealt with, but I figured if they were rendered unconscious they're probably done for anyway."
