Though powerfully tempted to meddle with the final version of the accords to sneak in surreptitious tributes to Ranald and Halétha, you reluctantly think better of it in the end, and allow the Kislevite scribe to do his work of creating five copies of the accords uninterfered with. Tzar Boris has the honour of putting the first signatures on them, and from here it will go on quite a journey through the Old World before finally setting off for Ulthuan, and then one copy of each will return to the signatories.
You return to Laurelorn with Eltharion, you in your Gyrocarriage and him atop a majestic Griffon called Stormwing that draws all the attention that your Gyrocarriage usually gets and then some. When led through the headquarters of the Waystone Project he examines all the prototype components with a blank face, his soul churning with
Shyish as he consults whoever or whatever he consults. He takes a copy of the ritual for Liminal Germination immediately after it's described to him - it seems that nearly all of Ulthuan is covered by something equivalent to it, though not always forest-themed, and it would be directly applicable in some places and hopefully easily adapted in others.
Your efforts at grappling with the Leyline problem seem to fascinate him the most, and he spends some time scrutinizing one of the bags of rocks, by force of will alone remaining resolutely unbaffled. He listens to your theorizing on the Titan-metal used in the original capstones, and confirms that the Kingdom of Caledor would have the ability, though not necessarily the inclination, to make more of the stuff. Though he doesn't outright say it would be expensive, it's implied enough that you're happy you considered the alternatives.
The Grey Lord contributions make him quiet and thoughtful, and he seems disappointed to hear that you've had very little dealings with most of them. When he asks about a Lord Sarriel you're forced to admit you've not heard the name until now, and he drops the line of inquiry. The Dwarven contributions seem to make him maudlin, and you notice him lightly touching the hilt of his sword several times, as if to remind himself it's still there.
By the end of it, he's convinced enough of your progress that he sees no problem with sharing now what a stingier Elf might demand a completed Waystone prototype for. He opens his mouth and says nothing that your ears can hear, but which causes a ringing in your soul. You have him repeat it, and this time you catch the string of orphaned Eltharin diacritics that somehow texture the unbroken quiet. You repeat it back to him, fighting the urge to cough from the tickle of rippling Winds within your throat, and he nods. Of course the password for interfacing with the controlling intelligence of the Waystone Network would be an Anoqeyån tongue twister.
That was the immediate payoff you were hoping for, but he doesn't stop there. He confirms not just the existence of Albion, but tells you something of its nature, or at least what Elven legend tells of its nature. It is, he says, one of the few intact remnants of what was once the northern half of the continent of the Old World, where the Old Ones made their stand against the forces of Chaos pouring in from the newly-formed Chaos Wastes. The Sea of Claws, the Sea of Chaos, and the jagged mountains of Norsca were all carved out by weaponry and magical puissance unimaginable in modern times, or so he claims, destroying the massive verdant paradise that stretched for hundreds of miles across the top of an unimaginably large plateau. It is said that the Old Ones left the world before that war ended with the creation of the Great Vortex, but the Vortex was built atop a nascent Waystone Network consisting of the standing stones the Old Ones left behind, and when the Elves sought to expand it out into the rest of the world, they found that Albion had already joined itself to Ulthuan.
All this is Elven legend, because as far as Eltharion knows, Elven adventurers have had as little luck as human ones in actually travelling to the island, though he mentions that the mists of Yvresse were either based on or inspired by insight gleamed from Albion's protections. In his words, 'even if you set out from Northwatch and follow the leyline, you lose your way long before you ever spotted mist, let alone land'. Apparently many a sailor has tried, with the Cothiquans apparently taken personal insult to an island almost directly opposite their coastline that refuses to cooperate with the desires of their explorers and merchants.
Finally, he delivers on Ulthuan's part of the requirement to disclose the location of the nexuses within their lands, rattling off a list of eight locations in Ulthuan that will mean nothing to you until you're able to consult a map - Tralinia, Port Elistor, Lothern itself, Summersong, Whitefire Tor, Tor Anroc, Northwatch, and Rokhame. He also cites three locations within the Great Ocean, none of which are particularly surprising - Arnheim, the colony city just south of, and perpetually besieged by, Naggaroth; the Fortress of Dawn, the outpost and harbour on the southern tip of the Southlands; and the Citadel of Dusk, the same on the southern tip of Lustria.
All in all, a refreshingly practical and straightforward experience with a representative of a place usually known for not being those things. If Eltharion and those like him remain the go-between for the Old World and Ulthuan, you foresee a very prosperous partnership in your collective futures.
---
Looking at a map of the southern Empire has always made bridging the body of the Black Water and the rivers in the Reik Basin a beguiling possibility, but actually traversing the land in question has historically been enough to dissuade most from any further consideration of the possibility. The Dwarves of Zhufbar are about as far from most as can be, and over the past decade have carved out a titanic amount of stone between the massive lake and the Upper Aver to make way for a series of locks and canals to allow passage of river vessels between the two.
Easier said than done, even if one is fully aware of the scale of the most immediate and obvious task. One thing that had to be done to make the canal possible was to divert some of the waters of the Blue Reach to the Aver Reach. As these two branches meet at the Halfling border town of Dreiflussen to become the Aver proper, in the grand scheme of things, this is fine. In the less grand scheme of things, the village of Hardenburg has had its watermill left high and dry from the dropping water level, and the Countess of Sigmaringen and the Grand Mayor of Schramleben are complaining of some ephemeral loss of status from having a less grand river running by their towns. Zhufbar mollified some of these concerns by upgrading many of the roads in the region, which also served as a way to usefully divest themselves of some of the waste rock that digging the canal had generated.
Another problem is the Black Water itself. Carved out by an immense meteor impact millennia ago, rich veins of gromril and warpstone can be found in its deepest recesses, the former attracting the Dwarves to found two Holds on its banks and the latter generating new forms of horridness in the deepest abysses, as well as worsening whatever may have already been there. The Dwarves of the Golden Age drained the Black Water for a time to mine out much of the gromril, but enough caverns and crevasses remained submerged for the myriad forms of ancient and malevolent life to survive and nurse their grudges in, allowing them to repopulate the resurgent waters. While the Dwarves are quite practised at warding off attacks from the worst of these beasts, a more exotic concern is that some of the smaller examples of this uniquely foul ecosystem might colonize the rivers of the Reik Basin. It's hard to imagine worse than the likes of Stirpikes, Reik Eels, and Bog Octopi, let alone the interlopers from the Sea of Claws, but you don't doubt that the depths of the Black Water would be up to the challenge.
In the face of Dwarven obstinance and ingenuity, these obstacles have been dispatched at a cost of several years of additional work, but this just seems to have given Zhufbar's diplomats and traders more time to drum up interest in the matter. Time that they seem to have put to very good use. There is a critical mass of important personages that an event attracts that, when reached, begins to draw in more and more who may have had no interest in the original purpose of the event, but definitely have an interest in the networking opportunities it presents. From a beginning guest list of one Elector Count and two Dwarven Kings, this event managed to reach that threshold almost immediately and has been accumulating momentum since. The first solid indication of this was the Chancellor of the Imperial Treasury making plans to attend, which drew the attention of the notables of the Old World just as, in rapid succession, Councillors from Karaz-a-Karak, Karak Eight Peaks, Karak Kadrin, and Karak Vlag were added. At that point just about every Elector Count recognized the need to send someone, as did most of the Tilean City-States. Even Marienburg has sent someone - the High Priest of Manann, possibly the only person on their Directorate with an interest in the matter but no suspicion of involvement with the matter of the mine on the Skull River.
It would have been dramatically appropriate to have this event somewhere overlooking the canal itself, but one end is still the Black Water and the other is still right on the border of Sylvania, and the sheer density of potential major political incidents attending makes that a rather fraught proposition. There was some discussion about building some sort of stage atop Barak Varr's riverine Ironclad and having the event atop the Black Water itself with enough of the rest of the brownwater navy present to shoot down any uninvited guests that might try to claw their way aboard from below, but the rapid inflation of the guest list put an end to that possibility and in the end it simply takes place in Zhufbar. Though that does mean a lack of spectacle for the event itself, most attendees will have to pass through the canals and by the many ships Barak Varr has berthed in plain view of the passage to reach it, and again when they leave.
You arrived via one of the telescopic launch bays that Zhufbar is riddled with, and fled into the Dwarfhold as a flock of clucking Engineers descended upon the Gyrocarriage to see what horrors a human
Zhufokri pilot might have inflicted upon it. The Feast Hall is festooned with the banners of Barak Varr and Zhufbar and already filling with guests, but your eyes are drawn to the display in the centre of the room. It is a massive model of the Black Water, the Aver Reach, and the mountains that divide the two, the tallest of which are twice your height. The canal weaving its way through valleys and foothills while descending from chest height to the floor displays the staggering scale of the project and the amount of artisanry and ingenuity it must have taken at a glance, and the tiny model ships sitting atop the flat blue surface of the water reinforce the demonstration of naval might that the visitors had to pass to reach here.
You're used to having the initiative at events like this, but it seems that news of recent events and your reputation have preceded you. Again and again you politely rebuff earnest questions from the sort of person who knows nothing about Waystones but quite a bit about how lucrative the Elven trade can be, and are quite curious about Elven signatures alongside that of the Tzar and the Emperor. None of the questions touch on matters of Kislev's rivers, and when Wilhelmina takes you into a quiet corner for you to confirm that Kislev's upcoming canal to bypass the Mazhorod ford is only going to be the first stage of a much more significant project, her cackle unnerves everyone brave enough to hover nearby. Then she launches herself like a projectile in the general direction of the representative from Ostermark, because if Kislev's going to be in play soon, then the Karak Kadrin canal becomes a lot more significant and the mere detente with the League of Ostermark will be insufficient.
You begin to scout the lay of the crowd to consider your next move when you notice the tell-tale signs of the attention of the Dwarves turning towards the Master Engineer of Zhufbar, indicating him as the winner of what must have been a civil but hard-fought battle for status among the canal's many contributors. You hustle over to refresh your drink while politeness allows your attention to be elsewhere. Dwarves approach speech-making with the same thoroughness and lack of mercy that they do a battlefield, and if there are members of the audience that cannot appreciate a mere twenty minute digression relating to an unexpected granite cross-seam interspersed with loose shale and the cunning employed to carve a tunnel through it without casualties or structural deficiencies, then that speaks to a deficiency within those listeners.
---
Once the speech draws to a close, you use the vantage point you had spent the speech identifying and occupying to oversee the now-resumed social flow of the room. The representatives from Nordland and Middenland are very pointedly ignoring each other, and the High Priest of Manann and the High Priest of Manhorak are circling each other warily without directly engaging. The Markgraf of Sylvania flows with gregarious confidence through the crowd, backed by a posse of the subordinate rulers of Sylvania. The Undumgi have sent a representative draped in silks, and you frown at him, knowing that his outfit is made of failed experiments stitched together with strands of Cathayan silk rather than the genuine article. At least, you console yourself, Francesco must be confident that he's closing in on a solution to have spent the time, effort, and money to drum up interest in We-silk.
You manage to intercept Wilhelmina as she bustles from one victim to another to ask the latest news from the EIC, but it seems this time all the news is what you've made yourself and all of the EIC's immediate plans have been upended by the necessity of getting in place for the new canal before anyone else has a chance to.
As soon as Wilhelmina moves on, you find yourself enveloped in the fluid mechanics of the gathering. You're quite used to standing aside from it and delving in only on your own terms, and usually the robes of a Grey Wizard are sufficient to make that happen. But it seems something has changed in the perspectives of the movers and shakers of the Old World, as a great many of them approach you of their own accord, some just to exchange a couple of pleasantries, others to ask your opinion on matters abroad, others still that think you have information on the inner workings of one flashpoint or another and might be convinced to divulge a crumb or two. You're consulted on matters of Sylvanian investments, on the character of the new Tzar, on the Nordland-Middenland conflict, on the perennial Marienburg issue, and on dozens of other matters, most of which you have no involvement in and some of which you've never heard of before.
It's a more bewildering experience than it should be. The simple fact of the matter is that you're no longer an opportunistic interloper at an event like this, where those that have the power to shape the future of the Old World meet and mingle. You have become one of those people.
It's a rather sobering thought, but this being a Dwarven event, there's a ready cure for that. The company of a refreshed flagon helps you reacquire your equilibrium and delve back into the crowd, ready to meet the self-assuredness of all those present with your own. There might not be any further useful intelligence to be gleamed from this event, but many of those present will be allies or opponents in your future endeavours, and there will be value in being able to put faces to names.
Library Purchases:
[ ] [LIBRARY] Colleges of Magic
Name four magical, non-divine topics to acquire all available Empire books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr booksellers
Name three public topics to acquire all available Empire and Dwarven books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Library of Mournings
Name two non-magical topics to hire Cityborn scribes to copy all available Laurelorn books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Back-fill.
Instead of seeking books on specific topics, give a very broad direction and have your bookselling contacts grab everything on it that you don't already have, with special attention to existing but incomplete topics. Possible categories: Dwarven religion, human religion, geography, war and combat, social science, natural science, applied science.
Dwarf Favour Purchases
Aethyric Vitae can be spent instead of favour at an exchange rate of 3 favour per gallon; for Rune-related purchases, this will also guarantee the cooperation of Runelords who may otherwise be disinterested. To use this, simply add 'paid by Vitae' or similar to an item you are voting for.
[ ] [DWARF] No purchase.
[ ] [DWARF] Write-in.
College Favour Purchases
[ ] [COLLEGE] No purchase.
[ ] [COLLEGE] Write-in.
Other Purchases
[ ] [PURCHASE] No purchase.
[ ] [PURCHASE] Write-in.
- There will be a twelve hour moratorium. I considered having a longer one so that Christmas would be wrapped up before voting opened, but that felt a bit condescending when I wrote part of this update on Christmas. So I'll just say that if there's something you'd rather be doing than grapple with this, you should. The quest will still be here when you return.
- That said, merry Mondstille and a happy Year Blessing to all that celebrate it. May your Taal-log burn all week long, and may the children of Ulric remain a safe and respectful distance from your village.
- Ulthuan's assistance will be automatically sought during future Waystone actions that they'd have useful insight into.
