Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[Boney]

When work begins on prototyping new forms of tributary, Tochter immediately gravitates towards Cadaeth's design based on entreating the Dreaming Wood to anchor a tributary stone, and Zlata towards Aksel's straightforward beseeching of Halétha. This leaves only Max unpaired, which means that more or less by default he ends up drawn into working on Niedzwenka's spirit-stones. If it were anyone else you might be concerned with how they'd react to such a domineering and condescending research partner, but you've come to know what makes Max and his ego tick over the years. In matters relating to his craft or his personal life, he's as easily nettled as he is slow to forget. But you've never seen it raise so much as a peep in his professional life, no matter how tedious or inglorious a task you give him. As far as you can tell, the reason for this is simple: he doesn't really care. Oh, he has pride in doing the best job he can, and is happy to be doing work that matters with people he likes, but at the end of the day all of this is just the price he pays for the salary, contacts, and resources to pursue his own personal vision of true transmutation.

So with impressive serenity he accepts the condescension of Baba Niedzwenka, accepting the menial tasks she places upon him and taking careful notes of every step of the way as the Hag Witch begins to gather the implements and offerings that she theorizes might be used to entreat or cajole a specific spirit into cooperation. Specifically a Melusine, a type of spring Naiad usually found in Bretonnia, associated with a bevy of tales in which they either assist and hinder knights errant according to their whims. Niedzwenka posits that a tributary is just a spring in reverse and with magic instead of water, so its creation could fall within the capabilities of a spirit. You leave them to it, trusting that Max will report back anything particularly of interest or alarm, and turn your attention to the other, more natural partnerships.

Cadaeth's problem, it seems, is not in securing the partnership of the Dreaming Wood, as Laurelorn's is as thoroughly tamed as is possible to achieve. The problem is that a Dreaming Wood does not comprehend things like Aethyric conductivity or regolith saturation or cardinality. One way to solve this is for the caster to fully and completely understand what needs to be done and open their mind up to the Dreaming Wood and simply ask it to do this; the other is to translate what needs to be done into metaphors that the Dreaming Wood can comprehend. The problem with the former is that it means that tributary creation could only be performed by someone that completely understands the task at hand and is willing and able to expose their consciousness to an ancient and alien consciousness made up of the combined lives of an entire forest, while the problem with the latter is that an entirely new set of metaphors will need to be built to fit the conceptual idiom of each new Dreaming Wood that is enlisted to create tributaries. The debate between the two temporarily reverses the splintering of the six contributors as it draws back in everyone else to input their own opinions.

Finally, Aksel's part requires him to travel back to Forest of Shadows to properly entreat Halétha in her own territory. Considering the short distance and relative safety of the journey, you're not sure if it would be proper to call it a pilgrimage, but you do so anyway as it adds some more dramatic weight to the task at hand. Zlata seems interested in traveling with him. You haven't pried into why, as whether it's because of the complicated relationship between Kislev's magic-users and the Hedgewise that border it or something just between the two of them, it's not your business either way. Or at least, it might aggravate them if you informed them that it actually is your business, and the risks of being found out while snooping are greater than the value of knowing for sure what's going on.

With all three projects in varying amounts of underway, you leave them to it while you turn your attention to your other responsibilities for a time.

---

Halétha, it seems, was in an obliging mood. After barely a couple of reportedly uneventful months spent in the Forest of Shadows Aksel and Zlata emerge once more with a scribed ritual to share. The exact details make you raise an eyebrow - that if the ritual is cast outside the Forest of Shadows, it requires that the caster be of the bloodline of the ancient Was Jutones, and that the ritual chants are in their ancient and largely forgotten tongue, could lead one to suspect that Aksel crafted the ritual to ensure that the Nordland Hedgewise could not be cut out of the project. But it's an entirely deniable suspicion, as it's far from the most obscure requirement you've heard of from a ritual, and the hand at work here may be that of Halétha herself. The other downsides of the ritual are the cost, as it requires and consumes a lodestone each time it is performed, and what happens if it is fumbled, as it not only riles up local spirits but also makes any spellcraft that might be employed to defend oneself from them more dangerous to perform. Considering the sorts of spirits that tend to accumulate in areas with excess magical energies that need draining away, that could get rather dangerous.

Hopefully the other two projects will find equal success.

---

You check in regularly with Cadaeth and Tochter's camp within the Golden Wood, but even then you find yourself having to communicate by exchanging letters as much of their efforts are located within the Dreaming Wood, which is not so conveniently accessible here as the Wishing Woods with its massive portal and obliging servitors. It seems that their efforts had seemingly responded to the dual contributors, as the ritual had morphed over weeks of iterations to require a second caster, and then after several months of unchanging effort, a breakthrough sees the ritual overhauled out of the Anoqeyån that Cadaeth preferred into the Lingua Praestantia that Tochter has been pushing for since the start. In the end the final piece of the puzzle was the inclusion of some sort of ritual drinking horn common to most of the nature deities you know of, and when the two of them finally emerge it's with a complete ritual ready for distribution. The ritual requires the presence of a Dreaming Wood, of course, but also requires that the caster has spent a significant amount of time within it recently, and if fumbled will permanently cut off the local copse from the Dreaming Wood. The responsible way to deal with this is apparently to clear-cut the lot, because the alternative is that the sort of malevolent creatures that the Dreaming Wood outright rejects can find refuge within it.

All the while you've been receiving regular reports from Max, who tells of Niedzwenka alternately cajoling and threatening a Bretonnian water-spirit into cooperation, though not as an actual contributor to the ritual, more as a sort of medium through which to operate. These reports do confirm that the ritual has grown to require a steady supply of biscuits, the acquisition of which you'd previously assumed to be the most minor form of embezzlement imaginable, and apparently hovered on the precipice of success pretty much from week one and refused to cross that final threshold for almost half a year. Eventually the formidable witch got frustrated enough with being roadblocked at the final threshold, and at being mocked for it by a surprisingly mouthy Bretonnian river ghost, that she took it as a personal affront and reworked it entirely so that it could incorporate any type of water spirit, apparently to lend her threats to replace the Melusine with more weight, as well as paring down the time it requires to cast from a full week to a mere two days. Max reports that it's hard to say whether the tension between Niedzwenka and the spirit was simply a demonstration of a heavy-handed and domineering form of spirit-wrangling, or if it was a product of a ritual that seems to enrage the spirit contributor upon failure.

The final round-up of results presents a triumph on all fronts, albeit one requiring a careful smattering of qualifying footnotes, as all three rituals are capable of creating a tributary and thereby bolstering the Waystone Network anywhere it currently stretches to. However, the plain fact of the matter is that you're unable to take this back to the Colleges and begin implementing it entirely in-house, though you're still debating whether to call this a problem or an opportunity, as by chance or, more likely, by design, all three require resources or expertise outside the domain of the Colleges.

The Haléthan ritual, dubbed 'Roots of Stone', requires a working knowledge of the near-dead language of Was Jutonian - only spoken by the Hedgewise and a handful of extremely isolated villages. A second major limitation is that to be cast outside the Forest of Shadows, it requires someone descended from the Was Jutonian: those members of the Jutones tribe that stayed true to the Goddess of the Forest of Shadows instead of leaving Her and it to attempt to conquer the lowlands of what would become Westerland, and returning with nothing to show for it but a faith in the God of the neighbouring Teutogens, Ulric. A bloodline only really found within the Hedgefolk of Nordland and Ostland, as it happens. Fair enough, considering the ritual does call upon said Goddess for her assistance, and that it can be cast within the Forest of Shadows itself without that limitation suggests that it might be an actual requirement instead of an attempt to make the ritual unusable to outsiders - it could be that for the Goddess to intervene outside of her domain requires the presence of a bloodline that has been faithful to her for millennia.

The Dreaming Wood ritual, 'Liminal Germination', is mainly limited by requiring both the presence of, and a considerable amount of time spent within, a local Dreaming Wood. You're not yet knowledgeable enough on the subject to be able to say how much of a limitation that might be, though your understanding so far suggests that the kind of places that most need magical energies drained out of them tends to have a rather unruly Dreaming Wood as a direct or indirect result. Of the three rituals, this one possesses the most Collegiate fingerprints, as it uses Lingua Praestantia and has incorporated as a requirement a sort of ritual drinking horn that would be easy to source from the Druids or the Cult of Taal. It is also, of course, of no use anywhere that does not possess a Dreaming Wood.

The Hag Witch ritual, whose Reikspiel name of 'Aethyric Impluvium' is almost certainly the work of Max, might be the crown of the three, as it takes a mere two days to perform instead of the full week the other two require, and can be performed anywhere where liquid water can be found. It does require the presence, if not strictly the cooperation, of a water-spirit, which is outside the expertise of the Colleges - perhaps the Cults of Taal and Rhya might be able to help with that, or perhaps, as a last resort, the Elementalists of Nuln - and presents a danger in that if failed, the magical effort invested in the ritual goes to empowering and enraging said spirit. Another limitation is that it requires a grasp of Scythian, the language of the ancestors of the Kurgan, Gospodar, and Ungols, which is kept alive only as the arcane language of the magical traditions of Kislev.

You don't really begrudge anyone for perhaps having influenced the trajectory of the ritual so that the Colleges could not effortlessly steal all three and cut out their creators. All three would, under a strict reading of the Accords, normally be the prey of the Witch Hunters within the borders of the Empire. And from a certain perspective, that this might force greater cooperation between Imperial authorities and the magical societies of the Hedgewise, Eonir, and Hag Witches could be a benefit, rather than a limitation, of what you've done here. All in all, you're happy to call this a victory.

Spoiler: Ritual rolls

Haléthan Tributary Ritual, First Draft
Type: Arcane
Arcane Language: Was Jutonian
Difficulty: Moderately Complicated
Description: The ritual calls upon Halétha to partially subsume a standing stone into the Hedge, so that it will draw magical energies out of the air and allow them to come to rest deep within the ground.
Consequences: If failed, local Winds will be riled up, making spellcasting more dangerous and aggravating local spirits.
Ingredients: Dowsing rod, standing stone, lodestone (consumed)
Conditions: The ritual must be cast by someone from the lineage of the Was Jutones, or within the Forest of Shadows.
Casting Time: One week.

Research Result: 68. Slightly increased casting difficulty.
Casting Attempt: 93. Success!

Roots of Stone, Second and Final Draft
Type: Arcane
Arcane Language: Was Jutonian
Difficulty: Moderately Complicated
Description: The ritual calls upon Halétha to partially subsume a standing stone into the Hedge, so that it will draw magical energies out of the air and allow them to come to rest deep within the ground.
Consequences: If failed, local Winds will be riled up, making spellcasting more dangerous and aggravating local spirits.
Ingredients: Dowsing rod, standing stone, lodestone (consumed)
Conditions: The ritual must be cast by someone from the lineage of the Was Jutones, or within the Forest of Shadows.
Casting Time: One week.

---

Dreaming Wood Tributary Ritual, First Draft
Type: Arcane
Arcane Language: Anoqeyån
Difficulty: Moderately Complicated
Description: The ritual makes a standing stone exist simultaneously in reality and the Dreaming Wood, allowing it to draw magical energy out of the forest and sink it into the ground.
Consequences: If failed, plantlife in the area is cut off from the Dreaming Wood. Usually this means they will be outcompeted by other plants, but it can become the residence of any number of beings that may be hostile to the Woods.
Ingredients: A seed from the locally dominant form of plant life.
Conditions: A Dreaming Wood must be present, and the ritual must be cast by at least two people who have spent at least a week from the last month within it.
Casting Time: One week.

Research Result: 46. More casters.
Casting Attempt: 38. Failure.

Research Result: 100. Solid work.
Casting Attempt: 41. Failure.

Research Result: 49. Two results.
Research Result: 47. Shift of language.
Research Result: 37. New ingredient.
Casting Attempt: 67+20 (Gambler). Success!

Liminal Germination, Fourth and Final Draft
Type: Arcane
Arcane Language: Lingua Praestantia
Difficulty: Moderately Complicated
Description: The ritual makes a standing stone exist simultaneously in reality and the Dreaming Wood, allowing it to draw magical energy out of the forest and sink it into the ground.
Consequences: If failed, plantlife in the area is cut off from the Dreaming Wood. Usually this means they will be outcompeted by other plants, but it can become the residence of any number of beings that may be hostile to the Woods.
Ingredients: A seed from the locally dominant form of plant life, a rhyton dedicated to a nature God.
Conditions: A Dreaming Wood must be present, and the ritual must be cast by at least two people who have spent at least a week from the last month within it.
Casting Time: One week.

---

Spirit-Stone Tributary Ritual, First Draft
Type: Arcane
Arcane Language: Scythian
Difficulty: Moderately Complicated
Description: The ritual forms an inverted spring that drains magical energies into the ground to fountain through the soil.
Consequences: If failed, the spirit will attack or attempt to escape from the caster.
Ingredients: Water drawn from the local river basin (consumed).
Conditions: Requires the cooperation of a Melusine.
Casting time: One week.

Research Result: 37. New ingredient.
Casting Attempt: 68. Near Success, +30 on next attempt.

Research Result: 55. Increased casting difficulty.
Casting Attempt: 67. Near Success, +30 on next attempt.

Research Result: 120. Solid work.
Casting Attempt: 129. Success!

Aethyric Impluvium, Fourth and Final Draft
Type: Arcane
Arcane Language: Scythian
Difficulty: Fiendishly Complex
Description: The ritual forms an inverted spring that drains magical energies into the ground to fountain through the soil.
Consequences: If failed, the spirit will be empowered to attack or attempt to escape from the caster.
Ingredients: Water drawn from the local water basin (consumed), a biscuit (consumed).
Conditions: Requires the presence of a water-spirit.
Casting time: Two days.

---

Back when you were designing Rite of Way, you interviewed a number of logistical experts in the potential terrain-induced difficulties that one might encounter when trying to move at speed, and took rather extensive notes while doing so. You have to stretch to imagine who it might be immediately of note for - road architects? Artillery logisticians? - but if it was useful to you, it might one day be useful to someone else, and not every paper you put your name to needs to shatter the status quo and carve your name among the stars. So you spend the time to get your notes in order and get to work on converting it to something more accessible to someone that isn't you.

[Writing: Learning, 76+29-10(Faded)+5(Library: Geography)+1(Library: Logistics)=101.]

It was never going to be a page-turner, but you can take pride in making it at least easy to get at. You took out your long-standing dislike of vague tables of contents and absent indexes to ensure that if information within these pages was of use to someone, they'd be able to find the part that's relevant to them. Not the greatest contribution to your legacy, perhaps, but if nothing else, it will get your name onto the bookshelves of people who otherwise would have no reason to read your works.

[A Compendium of Terrain Obstacles, 2489. Subject: Common, -1. Insight: Common, -1. Delivery: Competent, +0. Thorough, +1. Varied, +1. Accessible, +1. Useful, +1. Total: +2.]

 

[Boney]

To prepare for your search for the missing nexus of Reikland, you stretched out a large map of the province on a table in a study of the former House Elwyn estate. "For Axe Bite Pass," you said to Johann, Max and Egrimm, "we're looking at the Counties of Bögenhafen and Osburg, and the Barony of Ussingen. And the March of Helmgart itself, of course." With a gesture, you mark the area with Aethyric colour. "For Grey Lady Pass, it's either Ubersreik, Auerswald, or Stimmigen - Wittgendorf is on the wrong side of the line between Nuln and Altdorf. So it's mostly going to be the Vorbergland, the fertile foothills between the Grey Mountains and the Reikwald. This is the breadbasket of the Reikland, and some of the most heavily populated lands in the Empire outside of its cities, so it's either going to already be a landmark or tucked away really well." Then the four of you descended upon the Library of Mournings to search through their records of Elven settlements in those areas to narrow down the possibilities. Considering the Library is named that because it holds the administrative records from when all of those were the constituent parts of the nascent Kingdom of Elthin Arvan, you're reasonably certain they'll have what you're looking for. Once you've marked the map with every record of Elves building so much as a lean-to, you transplant your search to Altdorf and compare your map against the hall of records in the Palace of Retribution, which is known more officially as the Imperial Courthouse, and to search for anything odd that might be traces of ancient construction left off the official maps. The room you commandeered descends into studious silence, only occasionally broken by someone voicing their discoveries.

"The Hägercrybs are dotted with ancient cairns attributed to the Unberogens, and the Hill Dwarves used to have mines in the area. The northern stretch would be in the right area, though it's more east than I think is likely."

"It looks like there was an Elven trade outpost around where Bögenhafen is now. The Unberogens fortified the ruins around -400 IC and called it Boigenfastis, but it was levelled by greenskins about -200 and wasn't rebuilt until after Black Fire Pass. It could be that the nexus was there, and it was destroyed or buried in rubble then."

"Sigmar is said to have had a magical tomb built near Grey Lady Pass to contain the body of a Chaos Champion that had been raised by Nagash, and continued to harry the tribes after Nagash was defeated. His shamans might have recognized the power of a nexus and used its power for it."

"I suppose Ubersreik is out, if there was anything significant in its catacombs it would have been discovered while the Skaven were being expelled from under it."

"Maybe so, but the fortress of Black Rock is outside its walls. Maybe it was named for the presence of a literal, and particularly impressive, black rock?"

"Tor Fanloc, which was in the Seifenhügel, looks very close to where Midfurt is now."

"No, Midfurt's on the Blut, it couldn't be the location of an outpost in the Seifenhügel."

"I know you said west of the Nuln-Altdorf line, but there's a rather strange clock tower in Kemperbad that drove mad the one who made it. A Magicker experimenting on a Waystone, perhaps?"

"Apparently there's a Waystone in Grünburg that a local noble wants to turn into a statue of himself? Probably not what we're looking for, but I'll make sure someone has a stern word with him."

"It's a bit far north, but there's a castle in the southern Skaag Hills that's just called 'The Horn', and I can't find any record as to why. Could be it was built on something horn-shaped."

"There's a castle called Stychelschloss but I can't find any records of a Stychel dynasty, and it's only accessible by a roadside inn with a ferry that's called 'The Nobody Knows'."

"The 'stychel' could have been taken from the Bretonnian for 'stylus', that would make sense if it was an Elven research outpost at one point."

"Paranoth apparently has a tower near Eilhart? I don't think that would be it, but I'll ask the Jades to be sure."

"It's a ruin nowadays, but Taal's Horn Keep near Helmgart supposedly had a Waystone inside it."

"Reikland," you say with a sigh after the possibilities keep accumulating, "has too much unexplained oddities tucked away in its nooks and crannies. How are there this many unanswered questions this close to Altdorf?"

"There's always something more pressing that needs attention," Max says. "If a weird castle or a ruined temple isn't actively spitting out monsters, then it gets ignored in favour of dealing with the ones that are."

The four of you spend a while sorting the possibilities in order of how promising you find them and sorting out the path you'll take to investigate them, glad to have a Gyrocarriage at your disposal instead of having to slow yourself to the pace of Max on Shadowhorseback.

---

Two weeks pass in a haze of Gyrocarriage flights, mediocre taverns, and souvenirs that Max insists on accumulating from some of Reikland's most milquetoast landmarks, until you find yourself somewhere north of a nowhere town allegedly famous for its red cheeses, chasing a faded mark on an Elven map of questionable significance, with Egrimm having accumulated more and more reasons to be elsewhere as the stretch of unremarkable villages grew longer and longer. "I still think that it's just a label for this part of the Reikwald," Max says, lagging severely behind you and Johann as the two of you stride tirelessly through thick undergrowth. "It was just the word 'Athel', like on the other maps, and I don't think that smudge was enough to be the remnants of a whole other word."

"Best to be sure," you respond shortly. "It was the same plain handwriting that they used for places like Tor Fanloc and Tor Yvanithress. Elven cartography usually gets really fancy when a forest needs labelling. Besides, after two weeks of looking at thoroughly unimpressive rocks in thoroughly unimpressive villages, we could use a change of scenery." Branulhune appears in your hand to hack through a particularly thick tangle of lianas.

"Does the body good to get a bit of fresh air," Johann agrees, casually backhanding a probing Bloodsedge branch that had taken an interest in him.

"Maybe your bodies," Max grumbles back, trying to untangle his boot from a briar. "Mine is quite happy in civilization."

But Max's intermittent chorus of grumbling is eventually silenced when the steepening terrain funnels you down a narrow pass almost entirely clogged with hanging vines that need hacking through, and the first indication you have that you've found something is when Branulhune gives a judder of increased force as it finds itself impacting stone instead of wood, and it shears through the stubby pillar that had once been half of an archway. You and Johann, and Max when he catches up, look down at freshly-exposed white stone that contrasts starkly with the brownish-green of moss covering the exterior. Soon after that the corridor of stone opens up into a dense forest of trees and pillars, both identically overgrown with moss, and then leading into a maze of likewise identically overgrown cliff faces and stone walls.

"Huh," you say.

---

As the three of you poke through the ruins, you revise your estimate up from outpost to full-blown settlement, but at no point do you find anything that sheds any light as to its purpose. Though by all appearances it's been at least centuries since the last time these ruins had visitors, the last people here certainly were not Elves, as the place has been thoroughly picked clean of anything not nailed down. That plants the seed of a suspicion that the people of the Empire were not to blame - not because they're too noble to loot ancient ruins, but because if it was them they'd have quarried the ruins for stone as well - and that suspicion is proven quite correct when you start to recognize that among and sometimes atop the elegant lines of Eltharin is the cruder but still flowing curls of Belthani ideograms. When the scale of the place sinks in, you search for a place flat enough to land a Gyrocarriage, then you and Max begin to set up camp while Johann makes his way back to civilization to fetch Adela and start ferrying supplies in.

"This doesn't fit with all the other nexus locations," Max says to you as you clear the landing area of debris. "It's isolated and defensible and far from trade routes. Even going from Altdorf to Helmgart bypasses it."

"It might have been built as the Elven equivalent of Karak Norn," you say. "We know that getting over or through the mountains was tricky for the network, so it might be it needs to be tucked right up against the foothills instead of being able to thread the needle of the pass."

"If it was the same as Karak Norn, it'd be at Helmgart, or at least closer to it" he replies. "Maybe in that Waystone at Taal's Horn Keep."

"Once Johann gets back we'll scout the entire place and settle it one way or the other," you say with a shrug. "It's the Belthani graffiti that interests me. Maybe they learned how to make nexuses here, if they didn't know it already."

"Or they might have just picked it clean. According to some histories, they didn't even have bronze before the arrival of the Imperial tribes. Upgrading from soft native metals to Elven steel would be an incredibly big deal for them."

It doesn't take too long for the Gyrocarriage to arrive - unlike you, Johann is capable of almost his full speed in dense forests - and the three of you begin a thorough and systematic sweep of the ruins. To your mild surprise, at no point are the three of you ambushed by anything more threatening than strangler vines and some kind of corvid defending its nest. Truly uninhabited ruins are very much a rarity in the Empire, and you suspect that these will not remain uninhabited for long now that you've reopened the overgrown entrance to it. Your search eventually terminates at the central building, a large, domed building topped with the jagged remains of what had once been spires.

"A temple?" Max guesses.

"Not with that much energy pouring out of it," Johann replies. "There's definitely no leylines coming into here, right?"

"Unless it's coming deep underground and from the west, no," you say firmly. "So where's the energy coming from?"

"And why is it mostly Ghyran?" Johann asks. "Didn't you say that a leyline outflow would necessarily have a core of Dhar?"

"Ones from Waystones would be. I haven't made a study of Nexuses yet, I'd assumed they just scaled up the workings of Waystones."

The three of you cautiously make your way up the ruined entranceway, framed by ruined arches, and into the building proper. The interior is a single immense room extending several meters below ground level and topped by the dome, dominated by a massive, floating shape of marble fringed with gold, at least twenty meters tall and shaped like an angular plumb bob with concave faces. It floats on a point of crystal several meters above an identical crystal inset into the floor at the centre of what looks to you to be a much larger version of a Waystone base. The room is ringed by a walkway at the level of the object's crystal, and extending out over the floor below are what look like three control platforms, each with a control object of marble and crystal embedded at their points.

"I retract my argument that this isn't likely to be the nexus," Max says after a long silence.

"Definitely looks the part, doesn't it?" you say. "But while we've already ruled out it doing nexus things, it's definitely doing something."

"It's fountaining Ghyran into the air, is what it's doing," Johann says. "That might explain why the Vorbergland is so fertile."

"Ghyran doesn't just come from nowhere," you say. "And it can't be a portal like the Tarn of Tears unless it's dumping the other seven-eighths of the outflow elsewhere."

"Well, if it's not coming from a leyline and it's not coming from the Aethyr, what else is left?" Max asks.

"The Reikwald's Dreaming Wood? It can't be, Cadaeth told me that it's dormant," you reply.

"Did she say why?" Max pushes.

You search your memory. "'The magic that once sustained it disappeared'," you reply slowly. "Well. I guess we found where it went."

Johann looks the nexus up and down. "They turned a Nexus into a massive Aethyric shunt draining the magic out of the Dreaming Wood?"

"Taking magic that would make the Reikwald a lot livelier than it is, and instead using it as a sort of magical fertilizer," you say. "I wonder if it was the Elves or the Belthani that did it."

"Even if it was the Elves, then the Belthani left it be," Max says, looking at the densely-scrawled graffiti covering the walls. Perhaps you're just projecting, but here it looks a lot more like research notes than the incidental street graffiti you'd imagined the runes outside to be. "I thought they were all about living in harmony with the natural world."

"It's a lot easier to live in harmony with a dog than a wolf," Johann says.

"A lot of people would consider trading a magical and unruly forest for turning otherwise marginal foothills into a breadbasket to be an absolute steal," you say. "Including, I'd guess, the current nobility of the Reikland. This complicates things. I was hoping it was just a matter of finding a dormant Nexus and turning it on."

"Well, not really," Johann says. "If Marienburg's nexus is blocked or destroyed and there's no other way to reconnect the leylines, then turning this back into its original purpose - which I think would just be a matter of rotating it from the Aethyric back to the spatial - would be much better than letting everything east of the Grey Mountains turn into wasteland."

"That's true," you say, brightening up. "And at least now we know to protect it - Gods know what troubles the Skaven or Beastmen could cause with this place if they found it first. Or just someone that'd want to knock it over so they can strip the gold off of it. And you know what? Since this is what makes the Vorbergland's grains and vines so profitable, it would be easier to justify a tax or a corvée on it to see to its proper defence."

"A fort, or a chapterhouse, maybe," Max says. "Does Rhya have any Knightly Orders?"

"They've got a few heavily-armed monasteries, that would work. Or the Jades might want to set up a branch here," you say.

"Well, this much marble would probably pay for a fair bit of it," Johann says. "Tor Lithanel might even be wanting to buy it."

"There are a few interesting possibilities," you muse, brightening. "That does seem like it would make for some interesting debates."

---

While the Library-We is coming along quite well in terms of organizing and maintaining the library itself, they're still very resistant to the idea of complete strangers coming into their home and endangering their books with their presence, and have a tendency to lurk alarmingly around anyone they're particularly suspicious of the intentions of. Some might say that this is an inherent downside of the We as librarians, but in your experience, a significant amount of human librarians have the exact same attitude towards visitors. And if you were completely honest, you're not entirely opposed to having a constant guard making sure your rarer volumes aren't being mistreated. So you're happy to consider the education of the Library-We to be entirely on course.

But while the role of librarians plays to a number of the strengths of the We, the same could not be said of them as a scribe, as it is a necessarily nomadic role. To regularly uproot a We from its webs and expose its Egglayers to danger as it travels en masse to a new job site would be very distressing to them, and likely equally distressing to whoever it is you ask to host a colony of giant spiders. No, unless you can think of something particularly novel, your scribes would have to be rather more prosaic than your librarians. There's three basic approaches that come to mind: you could commission the efforts of an established organizations who are already extremely capable of performing this role, such as the Cult of Scripsisti or Clio or the Runescribes Guild, giving you a ready-made workforce that is ready to go from day one and willing to expand their capabilities if needed. You could seek out individuals with the necessary skillset on a per-job basis, either spreading the net of the EIC to seek out those with that skillset or just going directly to the universities to offer work to their students, giving you as much flexibility as possible to scale up or down the workforce as needed. Or you could hire on a full-time staff on a permanent retainer and train them up more or less from scratch, drawing from either the local population or from the orphanages of the Old World, tailoring them to your needs and guaranteeing their loyalty.



From where will Mathilde recruit an army of scribes for the Library of Kron-Azril-Ungol?

Outsourced:
[ ] [SCRIBE] Cult of Scripsisti
Dedicated to the Goddess of Writing, considers the creation of accurate copies to be their religious duty. Will build ties to the Cult of Verena. Reikspiel, Tilean, Old Reikspiel, Classical.
[ ] [SCRIBE] Cult of Clio
Dedicated to the Goddess of History, considers the preservation of historical documents to be their religious duty. Will build ties to the Cult of Verena. Reikspiel, Tilean, Old Reikspiel, Classical.
[ ] [SCRIBE] Runescribes Guild
Highly-skilled, diligent, and extremely reliable. Reikspiel, Khazalid.

Gig work:
[ ] [SCRIBE] Empire
Skim from literate citizens willing to travel for work everywhere the EIC has a presence. Reikspiel, Kislevarin, more languages as EIC expands.
[ ] [SCRIBE] Universities
Take students from the universities of the Empire who are looking for work to fund either their education or their drinking habits. Wide range of languages, but can tend to be a bit unruly. Reikspiel, Tilean, Estalian, Kislevarin, Old Reikspiel, Classical.

Permanent employees:
[ ] [SCRIBE] Locals
Will demonstrate the value of literacy to the local population, and will be reasonably loyal and self-sufficient. Reikspiel, Tilean.
[ ] [SCRIBE] Orphans
You can take your pick of literate orphans from throughout the Old World, and train them up from scratch to guarantee their loyalty. Reikspiel, Tilean, Estalian, Kislevarin.



Thus concludes the work Mathilde performed these past months, but not every waking moment was filled with work. With whom did she spend her free time? The five with the most votes will be chosen, not counting those locked in.

[+] Social interaction initiated by someone else (locked in)

Laurelorn
[ ] Max
The entire time you've known Maximilian, he has been pursuing his own goal of true transmutation via magically-enhanced blacksmithing. Check in to see how he's going with that.
[ ] Thorek
See what inroads Thorek has made with the Major Houses of Tor Lithanel.

Karak Eight Peaks
[ ] Panoramia
In the wake of an apparently quite controversial paper, Panoramia is finally taking her Magisterial exams. Be there to observe the fallout and offer moral support.
[ ] Gretel
She's apparently getting involved in the Karaz Ankor's ambitions in the Border Princes.
[ ] Okri
You've met Loremaster Okri of Karak Eight Peaks once before. Pay him a visit and see how his great ambitions for heavily-armed Ironbreakers delivered by Gyrocarriage are going.

Foreign Relations
[ ] Sylvania
Meet this would-be Markgraf Nyklaus for yourself.
[ ] Middenland
See how the Ulricans are going with their new Eonir coreligionists.
[ ] The Black Water Canal
Pay another visit to the canal project, and see if there's any further signs of sabotage.
[ ] Druchii Diplomats
Check in on these unexpected visitors to Tor Lithanel.

Friends Abroad

Following Up
[ ] Brief the Emperor
Though the Waystone Project is in early days, you've had a few early wins and have uncovered some important information about the Waystone Network as it relates to the Empire's security.
[ ] Amber College
Check in on the salamanders.
[ ] Gold College
See what's become of their research into Skaven technology.
[ ] Skull River Ambush
Look into the investigation of the mining of the Skull River, and any consequences of it.



- There will be a five hour moratorium.
- As always, feel free to suggest ideas for social actions, especially ones I've okayed and then forgotten about. I feel like there's at least one or two of those.
- Egrimm is missing from the latter part of this turn because, erm, I forgot he was along for this task. There's no concrete results he could have delivered above and beyond what you got if present though, you only lost out on the pleasure of his company.

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] Panoramia
[*] Brief the Emperor
[*] Sylvania
[*] Thorek
[*] Max

[*] [SCRIBE] Locals

Tally

"Your Majesty," you say with a bow, as Emperor Luitpold enters the Mappa Mundi room of the Imperial Palace, where an immense mosaic map of the Empire covers the floor.

"Lady Magister," he responds with a nod, and gestures to the man following him in. "This is Graf Otto von Bitternach, Chamberlain of the Seal."

"We've met," you say as you shake the Graf's hand.

"Her advice was quite helpful during Marienburg's talk of barring the First Fleet from the Sea of Claws," he agrees.

"Dragomas said you had news regarding your project with the Elves of Laurelorn," the Emperor prompts.

"I do, with several facets to it. What do you know of the Waystones that dot your realm, your Majesty?"

"They're ancient Elven artefacts that ward off dark magics, I believe."

You consider this. Whoever came up with that layman's explanation was quite clever: it explains what they need to know and minimizes the chances they'd get it in their head to mess with them, either out of fear or ambition. "In effect that's true, but their actual mechanism is rather more involved. You see, when magic first entered the world, it accumulated over centuries until it became thick enough to sustain entire armies of Daemons, who went on to rampage through the continents and besiege the isle of Ulthuan. In response, the Asur created the Great Vortex to drain away excess magical energy, allowing them to break the siege and banish the Daemonic armies. In the centuries that followed they met and entered into an alliance with the Dwarves, and together they built the Waystone Network across the world." You wave your hand and glowing streams of light spread across the floor, forming themselves into the pattern of Nexuses and leylines as they were in the time before the War of the Ancients. "They achieved equilibrium, with the magic flowing in from the Northern Wastes being balanced out by the magic flowing out through the leylines. But the War of the Ancients turned the Elves and Dwarves against each other, and in the end the Elves of Ulthuan abandoned the Old World, save for a couple of holdout colonies that refused to leave. Our ancestors filled the vacuum, building our own cities upon the ruins of the Elves and, either knowingly or not, protecting most of the most important Waystones. But not all."

You point to Ostland, and three points of light go dark. "The Brass Keep, the Blood Fane, and the Tower of Melkhior are all now held by dark forces, making the Forest of Shadows that much darker." You point again, this time to Ostermark. "Mordheim was destroyed, and it's no coincidence that the Vampire Wars began soon after." You point to Westerland. "Almshoven was destroyed by a Plague Fleet during the Great War." You clench your fist, and all the streams of light flicker and disappear. "We teetered on the edge of oblivion and didn't even realize it. But Fort Solace was established soon after with an Asur-supplied monolith at the core of its lighthouse." You wave your hand and the light reappears, rerouted through this new junction. "To get to the Great Vortex, the leylines have to get past the mountains. And currently, the only place they can do that is through Marienburg and its holdings, the maintenance of which is dependent on the largesse of the Asur. Which, I feel, adds an uncomfortable factor to the rather strained state of relations between them and us."

"Would they go so far as to hold it hostage?" Emperor Luitpold asks, his eyes turning to the Chamberlain of the Seal.

"Hard to say," Graf Otto replies after a moment of thought. "I doubt Ulthuan would actually follow through on any veiled threats - that sort of thing would be ruinous for their reputation in the Old World - but if Marienburg wasn't in the habit of slipping leashes they'd still be a province."

"There has been suspicion that the mining on the Skull River was the work of rogue elements within Marienburg," you mention. "And my contacts within Tor Lithanel suggest that Ulthuan would have a limited ability to replace destroyed Waystones."

"So some rogue brinksmanship could end up flinging us right over the edge, even if most of Marienburg doesn't want it," the Emperor muses. "Why did the Elves build this with a single point of failure in the first place?"

"Good question, one I've been digging into myself. And what I've found is that they didn't." You point to Wissenland. "Bugman's Brewery, built on the site of the Dwarven settlement of Kazad Thar by members of Karak Norn's royal family. My suspicion is that this was once part of an alternate route for magic to flow, from there to Karak Norn to the Elven settlement within Athel Loren. But the reputation of the Asrai in this modern era suggests they are no longer the sort to leave immense magical power untouched. So feeding them the magical runoff from most of a continent could be... problematic." There's murmurs of agreement from your audience. "For this reason, I suspect the Dwarves of Karak Norn might have removed this possibility millennia ago, most likely during the War of the Ancients."

"You haven't asked them?" the Emperor asks.

"Not yet," you reply. "It's a minefield of taboo subjects, so should only be approached with great forethought and delicacy."

"And Karak Norn are an odd bunch, even by Dwarven standards," Graf Otto adds.

You point to Reikland, and an isolated point of light appears up against the mountains. "And then there's my most recent discovery: Athel Yenlui, hidden in the foothills north of Helmgart. And I do mean hidden, if I didn't have a map from the Eonir pointing me straight to it I doubt I would have found it at all. Once a Waystone allowing magic to flow from Altdorf to Castle Parravon, but since adapted into what we're calling an Aethyric Shunt. The purpose it now serves is twofold: it is why the Reikwald is so much milder than the Drakwald or the Great Forest, and it is why the Vorbergland is so fertile."

The Emperor frowns. "I take it that it can't continue doing that while serving this Waystone Network of yours?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Well, at least it defangs the hostage scenario. They'd be able to confirm the existence of this Athel with their contacts in Ulthuan, and that would dissuade them from following through, since it would unite the Old World against them without actually putting overwhelming pressure on the Empire. Speaking of Ulthuan, any sign of them sniffing around Tor Lithanel?"

"Not yet, though the Naggarothi are making overtures."

"Won't be long until Ulthuan arrives then, mark my words," Graf Otto says.

"But if we're going to make use of it," the Emperor says, "we need to make sure we keep a hold of it. Especially if it's currently responsible for the relative bounty of the Reikland." He walks over the map, gingerly stepping over the magical light signifying the leylines, and leans over to consider the position of Athel Yenlui. "It had to be there. The Margrave of Helmgart might be able to afford the cost of garrisoning it, but that would get the Graf of Eilhart and the Baron of Ussingen up in arms, even though neither of them can afford it. Might even be easier to foist it off onto the Graf of Schilderheim since it's accessible via the Schilder, but then the Graf of Holthusen would oppose it. No, it'll have to be someone else." He pauses, his frown deepening. "Would the Elves try to claim it?"

"No," you say confidently, "the revanchist faction going extinct is what allowed them to reach out to us in the first place. Besides, they're as bad as Altdorfers about how insistent they are that their city is the best place to live."

"One of the Cults, maybe, or the Jades or Ambers. We'll see. What of the Project itself?"

"Investigation of the medium-sized Waystones is ongoing, but we've managed to recreate the smaller, supplemental ones using a few different magical paradigms. Actually implementing them would be long-term projects - my best estimate is that a team of four magic-users could meet the needs of a province within a decade - but if they are put into place, then the benefits of reducing the amount of stagnant magic would be widespread. Citizens will be healthier and saner, there'll be less mutants and Beastmen born, storms of magic will be rarer, there'll be less mayhem on Geheimnisnacht and Hexensnacht, and less power available to Necromancers and Sorcerers."

"Shouldn't be that hard a sell to at least set it up around the cities and larger towns. What do you mean by 'magical paradigms'?"

"There's a Jade Order ritual that requires interfacing with an established forest. I'm not sure if Reikland would qualify because of the effects of the Aethyric Shunt, but that should work fine for Talabecland." He nods, and you continue. "There's a Kislevite Hag Witch ritual that uses a water spirit to establish them, that would be suited for the southern provinces and Reikland."

"What's the legal status of the Hag Witches?"

"They don't perform magic directly, they wrangle various kinds of spirits to get things done. According to mainstream doctrine in the Empire, that would make them closer to Priests than Wizards. Besides that, the ritual can be performed by our own Wizards as long as they can secure the cooperation of a water spirit." He nods. "Finally, there's a ritual dedicated to a minor Goddess worshipped within the Forest of Shadows called Halétha. This one seems to me the most flexible as it can be performed anywhere as long as it's done by a member of their priesthood, but legally it's tricky. They're associated with the northern branches of the Hedgewise, a rural magical tradition that's as old as the Empire, but has splintered over the years into a number of different belief systems. The Grey Order has been working on bringing some of their branches into the fold, and their involvement in this project is a part of that, but the efforts of the Templars to stamp them out has made them slow to trust."

He nods. "Dragomas and Yorri clash often on the topic."

"A question, if I may," Graf Otto says, and the Emperor nods his assent. "You say this magic flows through Bretonnia to reach Ulthuan. Does this mean that there are more vulnerable bottlenecks within its borders?"

"I've attempted to secure Bretonnia's involvement, but they seem to feel snubbed by their not being host to the Project, so I can only speculate, but the geography of the Tilean-Estalian border suggests it might be a point of vulnerability, and the dire state of Mousillon suggests that Gisoreux would now be another. The only point I've confirmed as an exit point for magic on the Old World is Los Cabos in Estalia, though Castle Lyonesse may be one as well."

"Are you suggesting," the Emperor says slowly, "that the entire Empire might be lost to the Chaos Wastes if a single Estalian city-port were to fall?"

"I don't think it would come to that, your Majesty. Ulthuan appears to be keeping a close eye on Los Cabos, and should it be endangered I believe it likely that they would either defend or replace it, as they did to Almshoven. I suspect that they have come to rely on a constant influx of magic to maintain their realm."

"Disquieting nevertheless. Thank you for your work in this endeavour, Lady Magister, and I task you with continuing it. The benefits you describe are worthwhile, and though I do not like to hear of these hitherto unknown vulnerabilities, I'd much rather know about them now than when the razing of some southern village dooms the continent."

"It is an honour to serve, your Majesty. I will pass word of any further developments via the Supreme Patriarch."

---

Markgraf Nyklaus Schurz, as it turns out, is Markgraf twice over. First, as one of many sons of the Markgravine of Essen and therefore, as Markgraf is an inherently militant title, automatically entitled to call himself by the title he must be ready to inherit should his mother and many older brothers be slain at that frontier of the Empire. And now, though not yet announced to the Empire at large, soon to be the warden of the much greater march of Eastern Stirland. The man himself is a disconcertingly intense fellow a few years your junior, wearing the extravagant twin-tailed hat of a seaborn officer and has a goatee that juts alarmingly out from his chin.

"Do you know what a caul is?" he asks you abruptly after introductions are exchanged.

You look at him quizzically. "The headdress?"

"Haha, in a sense. Very rarely a child is born with part of the sac that contained them still clinging to their scalp. Among certain sects of the Morrites, including my own family, it is considered a sign that the one that bears it is to become the next Andanti, the Morr-blessed slayer of Vampires, that my family believed itself part of the bloodline of. Incorrectly, as it turned out. So very many years trained in a form of combat senseless to merely mortal men, and a jaunt into Sylvania to awaken what was thought to be my birthright. It was, in all respects, an utter farce. One that in all likelihood would have killed me, were it not for your very self, and your Grace, carving a bloody swathe across it and distracting all the worst horrors that dwell in its shadows. Instead it scarred me, and killed my handlers, and gave me opportunity to leave for the other fraternity that considers the caul to be a mark of greatness: sailors. A less glorious brotherhood, perhaps, but one that manages to produce more than one worthy a generation.

"It was, I can now admit, a youthful tantrum, but one I will never regret, as it taught me the measure of myself, and over the years earned me glory enough that I could return to my disgraced family and snatch back the petty titles that was all they could truly pass down. Now I return to the place that made a lie of everything I thought I was, and the place that I will teach the lie of what it thinks itself to be. Sylvania has not existed for centuries, not since the Von Draks went extinct in the maw of the Vampire. It is now, and will never be more than, Eastern Stirland. I will spill the blood of those that found it comfortable to pay their taxes in the blood of others, and I will allow all the others the gentle mercy of taxes in unsanguine kind. It will be as blissfully moral a task as the pursuit of the fanged ones, as those that resist deserve all the evils that I will pay unto them, and all that welcome me will deserve all the mercies that they will learn to be normal in every other corner of our realm."

You take a moment to take in his slightly manic speech. "Your ambitions, at least, are the equal of the task before you."

"And am I? After all, is that not why you are here? To pass judgement on the man that will finish the job that your younger self began?"

You return the man's frankly evaluating look with one of your own. "I'm mostly here to make sure you're not actually a Vampire. The rest is curiosity."

"Can you actually spot that?"

"In my experience, yes. I suspect that there are some who may be able to make their soul look like that of a regular human, but it would take constant concentration and an extremely deft hand to be able to make ambient Winds react normally to it, and that's only if they knew they needed to do so."

"Fascinating. Is whatever you're currently doing more important than Sylvania?"

"Funny you should ask, it might actually be better for Sylvania..."

A long and detailed conversation about Sylvania and the many different possible approaches to taming its horrors, you part ways a lot less unsure about leaving Sylvania in his hands. He's clearly out of his depth, but aware of it and willing to keep digging as far down as it takes to entrench himself. Short of doing the job yourself, that may be the best you can ask for. He's also a touch on the overly energetic side, but that's far from the worst of character quirks that might be expected of the sort of person willing to take this job. That's not to say you won't turn a careful eye in his direction from time to time, but you might not need to have a blade ready every time you do so.



- Happy fifth birthday to the quest.

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Unfinished business

[+] Social interaction initiated by someone else (locked in)
[*] Panoramia
[*] Thorek
[*] Max

[*] [SCRIBE] Locals

Max's workshop in Karak Eight Peaks has been in active use for a decade now. It is no longer merely a place full of metal, it is a place where metal died and was reborn. Such a place is a lodestone for Chamon under normal circumstances, but when a Gold Wizard was actively wielding the Wind to help along that rebirth, it creates by accident a place as attuned to the Wind of Metal as any deliberate process could manage. In the process, he has driven off some of his neighbours and attracted others who find their personality or profession resonate with the Yellow Wind. His workshop here in Tor Lithanel is not quite at that same level, but it is well on its way to it from Max duplicating his preferred array of implements, which add up to a shockingly large weight of metal, making them far too weighty to shuttle back and forth as needed.

"When I was a Journeyman, I thought it would be as simple as making a tool, then using it to make a better tool, then using that to make an even better tool ad infinitum," Max says to you, running a hand over the hanging tools. "As if the quality of a tool was a completely linear scale, and that it was directly increased by the quality of the tools that made it. I now realize that it's much more complicated than that, but the basic premise remains applicable: that properly applied, the Lore of Metal can allow a blacksmith to achieve results beyond their skill level. And there's an ancillary benefit: that when approached with the proper mindset, practice performed under Law of Logic can teach you more than practice under normal circumstances." He gives a self-deprecating little chuckle. "It could be that I've lost sight of my original goal, but if the only permanent transfiguration I achieve is to transform myself into an extremely skilled blacksmith, I would still consider that worthy."

"Even so, this is more tools than I've ever seen in any Dwarven workshop," you observe.

"That's true, and it's a complicated topic. The Dwarves have a Toolmakers Guild, but it's a young guild, and in times past tradesmen would make their own tools. Having specialized craftsmen do it makes a lot of sense for most guilds. Better tools makes for better goods, and a Master Toolmaker could make a better saw or hoe than your average forester or farmer. But it didn't catch on for the Metalsmiths because they can make their own metal tools for much cheaper while being better off for having made it exactly to their needs instead of to a standard template. But a century or so back the High King made a decree that if a Journeyman made their own tools, they still had to pay dues to the Toolmakers. So it's becoming more and more the norm for a smith to have a set of standardized tools made by a Toolmaker, instead of everyone making their own set for their own specific set of needs and hands."

You frown as you consider that. "That sounds... uncharacteristic of Dwarves, actually."

He gives a bashful chuckle. "I'm describing it as someone who takes pride in their own unpractically wide selection of hand-made tools. It does make sense if you consider that it allows a crafter to do their best work with someone else's tools, instead of only being able to operate at their peak within their own workshop. They can work to full effectiveness in a mine, or an outpost, or on a battlefield. It's what made the Okral possible, that the same tools could be found in just about every workshop throughout the Karaz Ankor, and that they could be used to full effect by just about every crafter to be found within it. From the perspective of Dwarves that have embraced that approach, needing specialized tools is a crutch of the insufficiently skilled. But I'm a Wizard. Entire roomfuls of accoutrement is entirely normal for us. So I'm taking that to its natural extreme by crafting specialized tools to my own specifications and preferences at every opportunity.

"And," he says, eyes brightening as he swerves into a tangent, "that's a topic of fascination in itself, now that we're making inroads with the Eonir. So much of our own practices are influenced by the Dwarves that there's very little variance between the tools used in the Empire and those used in the Karaz Ankor, but the Elves developed their own solutions to the same problems long before the Elves and Dwarves crossed paths. I know better than to describe any one in particular as being superior to the alternative, but there are undeniable strengths and weaknesses to each solution, and if you have both tools at hand then you've got two strengths, right? And after that I went looking further, and while Tilean and Estalian tools are clearly derivative of Elven designs, there are other cultures that are... well, not untainted, but either uninfluenced or showing original insight, or possibly some third influence. I was kicking myself when I first realized that the sickle that I've seen a thousand times on Panoramia and Tochter is distinctly different to our Dwarven-influenced knopfsichel or the Elven-influenced harpē of Tilea. Tochter's pointed me towards the archeological specimen storage of the Jade Order's investigations into their origins so I'm going to be looking into those next time in Altdorf, and then I realize the Kislevites came over the mountains a thousand years ago, they've got to have their own set of implements, right? So I-"

His enthusiastic monologue begins to fade into the background as your attention turns elsewhere, but then it fades back in when he mentions Roppsmenn woodworkers whose tools consist solely of various kinds of axes, and the part of your mind that's never not looking for connections draws a circle around that and links it to the axe-dense Hedgewise culture of Ostermark with a question mark. After that there's no turning your attention away from the conversation, so you instead lean into it instead, and after you suggest the Nehekharans and he wonders if they wouldn't have been influenced by the nearby Elven colonies on the Arabyan coast, it spills over as you find and rope in Elrisse and Sarvoi to give their own perspectives on the issue and you resign yourself to the rest of the day being immersed in this archaeo-taxonomic investigation into handtools.

---

On a typical Wellentag, the streets of Marienburg would be crowded with people and goods moving to and fro, and with the people trying to sell goods and services to the crowds. This day is very different. What few people can be found on the streets are moving quickly and avoiding all eye contact with each other, and only a few boats are moving only the most urgent of cargo. There is a storm brewing, both literally overhead and metaphorically below, and the tang in the air has a touch of divine fury to it. Manann's displeasure rolls through the city as thick as the morning fog, and nobody wants to be in the vicinity when He and His soldiers make the source of it known.

A peal of thunder rips overhead, and as the echoes fade away they reveal the tolling of bells that has begun all over the city, following the cue of the three bells atop the Grand Cathedral of Manann. As rain begins to fall, the few remaining pedestrians accelerate to finish their business, spurred not so much by the drumming of rain as the declaration of war inherent in it. Services to bless the footsoldiers of the faithful conclude across the city, and temple doors swing open to spill Templar-Marines into the streets. Falling into step behind them come the black-capped city watchmen and a rainbow of family militias, the pointed absence of one in particular declaring to all the grim business that they are now set upon.

---

House Akkerman, you had been only vaguely aware, was one of the ten families of Marienburg's Directorate. Now their legacy is the ruin and bloodstains you now look upon, having arrived in response to invitation carried by bird and courier. "A full-blown pleasure cult?" you repeat in surprise.

"Aye," says Arkat Fooger. "We'd thought it was just the upper levels of the family, but it wasn't just the family militia that held the walls when the Templars arrived. We've started going over everything they've touched in the past decade to see what else we might have overlooked."

"I'm surprised you're not trying to keep this quiet."

"Some of the families wanted to - Akkerman had been part of the Kuyper bloc, after all - but the Cults voted in favour of disclosure. It'll hurt our good name for a few years, but if it turns out the Akkermans have been getting up to evils in our name it'll be a lot worse if we hadn't made the truth known." He shakes his head. "Say what you might about the Sigmarites, at least when they were around people used to think twice about getting on the wrong side of the Mountain Dwarves."

"You think they might have been behind the mining?"

"I think the possibility existing is enough reason to get our disavowals in now."

You nod. "Such forces have been unusually active lately," you observe. "Might be why they went down fighting instead of sacrificing whoever it is you suspected and rebuilding - their rivals wouldn't have given them the time to do so. Who looks to be in line to replace them in the Stadsraad?"

"House de Roelef."

You rifle through your memories for the name, and find it in your previous conversation with the Dwarf during the wedding at Karak Eight Peaks - they're the family that currently dominates luxury imports from Tilea, Estalia, and Araby. "I thought you said they were the ones with the most to lose by the canal opening."

"I also said that it wasn't nearly as much as everyone is making it out to be. Everyone's looking to abandon a ship that's just had some of the wind taken out of its sails, and it's letting the de Roelefs pick up options and interests and contracts for silvers on the guilder."

"It's the wealthiest families that have seats in the Stadsraad, isn't it?"

He snorts. "Such is the entirely coincidental pattern among the entirely fair elections of the Burgerhof."

"How is 'wealth' decided when the value of things like options and interests are so open to debate?"

"Ways and means," he says with a smile.

Ways and means largely established by the bankers and moneylenders and insurers, you would already have been willing to wager, and you now take his smugness as confirmation.

You spend the day interviewing various Marienburgers that were either involved in or witnessed the attack on the Akkerman manor, and being shown what remains of hidden rooms within it. Though you're far from an expert in the matter, their words and the unpleasantly pleasant malaise that lingers in the air is certainly damning enough for you to write a report to that effect. Should Marienburg be implicated in wrongdoings throughout the Old World, their disavowals will ring slightly truer for having been written in advance - and to many Dwarven ears for having been attested to by yourself, which is undoubtedly why you were asked for by name. Not true enough to completely pull Marienburg out of the fire, but perhaps enough to avert the next Sack of Marienburg being at Dwarven hands. While part of you has felt at times that Marienburg has a certain amount of harsh justice owed to them, nothing good comes from allowing the machinations of Chaos to play out unhindered.

---

The academic calendar of the Jade College is built around the ebb and flow of the seasons, as the Green Wind itself ebbs and flows with them. At first glance this makes perfect practical sense, with theory and lore being taught when Ghyran is scarce and sluggish and more practical lessons scheduled for when it is more abundant and responsive. However, it is the equinoxes and solstices that reveal the surviving mysticism underneath, as the evaluations and promotions that take place on these days are made part of festivals and ceremonies much older than the Colleges of Magic. This torn identity is why Panoramia has found such comfort a very long way away from Altdorf, and why she has been so reluctant to return to it to be evaluated for a rank she has long since earned. The simple fact of the matter is that she does not wish to pay thanks and venerations to whichever being may be behind the sobriquet of the Earth Mother, not with the unanswered question dangling heavily over the head of the Order. But nor can she find it in herself to do as Paranoth does and argue for a complete severance of the Druidic traditions, or what many irreligious others do and merely mime along to the chants. Her return to Altdorf has only come about because she is finally ready to lock horns directly with the matter, come what may.

To this end, she has written and published a paper: A New Perspective on Ghyranic Faith, drawing from the works of Volans and the words of Cython, as well as some of your own observations about the relationship between reality and the Winds. The argument put forth within will inevitably be subject to just as much evaluation as the rest of the tests that decide whether someone is to be presented with the gold sickle that is the symbol of a Jade Magister, and by binding it to her evaluation she has ensured that the assembly of High Druids cannot place the matter into the eternal limbo that has engulfed the question of the Jade Order's religiosity. The traditions of the Order of Life dictate that Journeyman are to be evaluated and either promoted or not on Sonnstill, which means Panoramia has turned her promotion prospects into a roadblock that will force the hand of the High Druids.

'All things,' the paper's abstract reads, 'from the greatest beings of the Aethrian to the least mote of soil, act in accordance with their natures. All endeavours, however humble or ambitious they may be, succeed or fail based on how well one accounts for those natures. It is for this reason that Volans, when laying down the doctrine that would dictate how magic is to be wielded in our lands, argued against the involvement of the Gods. The nature of the Gods comes from the same place that all momentum, identity, and personality in the Aethrian does: the collective minds and emotions of mortals. This uncountable multitude of minds gives rise to unimaginable complexity that is the root of the divine mysteries of the Cults, and is why Magisterial doctrine is not built upon the continued benevolence of deities.

'The nature of the Winds, in contrast, comes from the physical world; the nature of Ghyran is dictated by soil and water, by life and growth. It is a nature already found within every living being, and cultivating our understanding of these things is already the chief concern of our Order. The Green Wind asks nothing of us, and when it acts in accordance with our wishes, it is because we have created circumstances where doing so is in accordance with its nature. Yet despite asking nothing, it shapes everything. There is no God that shapes the lives of its worshippers more than Ghyran will have shaped the most powerful and respected of Jade Wizards.

'When Teclis came to the Druids and revealed that the God they thought they worshipped was, in fact, the Green Wind of Ghyran, it shattered their faith, driving two thirds into the nascent Order of Life and the remainder into hiding. Ever since our initiates have picked at the remaining shards, seeking some inner truth to put lie to Teclis' revelation. In doing so we overlook the truth we already live, the divine mysteries we already pursue. We ignore the prayers that are our spells and the pilgrimages that are our harvests. The answer that our grandmothers should have given to Teclis all those years ago is the one I believe the Order of Life should embrace: Yes, we worship Ghyran.'

---

While the Jade College is usually quite welcoming to visits from other Orders, the holy days of the solstices and equinoxes are an exception, open only to those who have dedicated their lives to the Order. So you loiter near the entrance of the College at the time Panoramia said she would emerge, and when she finally does it is with weariness etched on her soul and a deep frown on her face - but with the gold sickle of a Jade Magister upon her hip. She makes her way over to you and into your arms, and her breath tickles your neck as she groans out decades of complicated emotions that have been alchemized into frustration.

"They gave me an Apprentice," she says after she gathers enough will to lift her head once more. "One who'd be Journeying now if there wasn't concerns about her losing herself to magical addiction."

"Ah," you say as you consider that. Magical addiction is poorly understood by the Colleges, with even fundamental facts like whether it's an addiction to spellcasting itself, to exposure to the raw Wind, or even just to surroundings attuned to that Wind still being debated - or even if it actually is just a single phenomenon rather than a number of different disorders that manifest similarly. It was relatively unknown in the Grey College, possibly because the nature of the Wind puts a hard limit on how much Ulgu can be applied to a given area before the effects start being less agreeable to its wielders. Someone too magically confounded is no longer able to experience confusion or doubt at all, and too-thick mist just becomes opaque. Or it might be because there is a natural apex of ambient Ulgu at dawn and dusk that cannot be rivaled or extended by any artificial means. But more primal Winds like Ghyran and Aqshy lack these natural protections against escalation, and the hard limits on how much a given area can be overgrown or burned until it is no longer satisfying to one enthralled by their Wind is only reached long after the area has become very hostile to continued life.

Others still argue that there was no such thing as magical addiction, and the acts blamed upon it were simply power being misused, the same way a naturally strong peasant of poor character might use violence to enforce their will on others, or a noble of poor character might abuse their authority to fuel their vices. That someone who causes destruction with magic and then blames addiction is doing so to cover for malice or poor judgement.

In any case, it was a mercilessly artful counter to Panoramia's argument in favour of veneration of Ghyran itself: to place in her care someone whose domination by the Jade Wind was a burden to the Jade Order. The assignment itself was at surface a rebuke by burdening a newly-minted Magister with a substandard Apprentice they had not sought, but beneath that was a refutation of Panoramia's thesis with an example of someone who could be said to already follow that philosophy and brought suffering to themself and others thereby. It neatly cornered Panoramia: she could either refuse the Apprentice, which would make her lose any credibility, because if she could not guide a single Apprentice, what makes her think she can lay down a path for the entire Jade Order? Or she could take on the Apprentice and encourage a following of the will of Ghyran, which could very easily deepen the addiction and result in a walking disaster of an Apprentice that would forever be a black mark not just on Panoramia's arguments, but on her career as a whole. Or she could walk the Apprentice back from the brink of magical addiction by enforcing Collegiate authority over that of the whims of Ghyran, which would force Panoramia herself to actively argue against her philosophy from being a rival to the secular and deitatic branches of the Jade Order's schism.

"Her name is Sofia," Panoramia says distractedly. "She's Estalian. She ended up with us after a chartered Witch Hunter caught her in southern Stirland." You wince. Anyone that arrives at the borders of the Empire and claims magical ability can get transport to Altdorf, so for her to be travelling within the Empire with magical abilities raises serious questions as to what she's up to. For her to be in Stirland only adds to those questions, because she would have had to travel through quite a lot of the Empire to get there, even if she arrived via the Border Princes. "When was that?" you ask, counting back the years worriedly.

"Early eighties, probably."

"Ah," you say again. So just after the stamping out of the Black College. That adds an extremely bad answer to why a foreign magic-user might have been travelling through the eastern provinces. Though it might not have been her choice - necromancers, being in the business of not taking 'no' for an answer from death, aren't in the habit of taking it from prospective recruits. Perhaps she'd been abandoned in Stirland after some wretched kidnapper had found that their customer base had come down with a bad case of Battle Wizard.

"No solid proof," Panoramia continues, "but it was enough that the Amethysts didn't want her. But for her to be getting a third chance with me, even if it serves a political purpose, means she must show promise."

"And the Jades have had eight years to hammer the Articles into her, and you'll be able to work with what's left isolated from other influences," you say, joining in her search for a silver lining.

"And if I can't whip her into shape, I'll hand her back to the Order, or to Gunnars, and be done with it." She smiles sadly. "That's what Ma still doesn't get. This wasn't me playing her game, this was me presenting terms. Every concession I'm willing to make is in it. If they still won't accept it, me and my golden sickle are very comfortable staying in Karak Eight Peaks, far away from them and their games."

You give her a soft smile and squeeze her shoulder in commiseration, and the two of you turn and begin your long trip home.



- The Toolmakers Guild thing is canon, and this is my attempt to make sense of it.
- 'Aethrian' is the term Volans used for the Aethyr, also known as the Realm of Chaos or the Warp, possibly because 'Aethyr' is also used in some places as a collective term for the Winds of Magic.

 

[Boney]

Among the reference materials that Elwyn Manor had begun to accumulate after you had taken it as the base of the Waystone Project are a set of maps covering the Old World and some of the adjoining regions, and it's brooding over these that you find Thorek. "What news from Marienburg?" he asks as you enter, his eyes piercing.

"They've just purged one of their Great Families," you say as you walk over to him and run your eyes over the maps. "And with ample cause, by all I saw and heard. Absolutely riddled with pleasure cultists."

He frowns. "Does that implicate them in the Skull River business?"

"Possibly. If Marienburg has more reason than dread to think so, that might be why they're doing the purging out in the open, to get ahead of it before anyone else gets any evidence."

"What other possibility do you have in mind?"

You'd been considering that since you left Marienburg. "Akkerman was part of the leading bloc of the Directorate," you say. "And they've been replaced by one of Fooger's choosing, who's forming his own bloc. Their guilt is certain, but the degree of it could very easily be exaggerated - if not now, then certainly by the end of the month. I don't doubt every major family in Marienburg is rifling through their own sins to see which ones can be convincingly buried in the rubble. What reputation do the Foogers have among Dwarves?"

"They are as the silt they dwell upon, or so I'm told," he says. "Easy enough to tunnel through, but you have to do it all over again on the way back, and there's never any possibility of unexpected profit while doing so."

Converting from mining metaphor, that's praising with faint damns, especially when a comparison to mud was there for the taking. You nod down at the topmost map, where the topic of the conversation features prominently. "Marienburg on your mind?"

"Mine and many others of late. That city seems to have a lot of beards in its fists." He taps the city with more force than emphasis requires. "I've got the foundations laid for trades with Miriel, Mardil, and Filuan, but only one can go ahead without needing infrastructure built up to support it - the Mardil deal is for Runic luxury goods, which demand a price that could turn a profit if it was delivered by a Gromril gyrocopter." You almost bring up that you'd thought that the knowledge of luxury Runes was lost, before you remember you're talking to the world's greatest living expert on rediscovering lost Runes. "But Miriel wants metal, which needs at least a decent road, and Filuan wants stone, which is only practical to move by water."

"You'd ship ore by road?"

"What Dwarf worth their beard would export ore to Elves? No, ingots. It's easy enough to get them from Karak Kadrin and the Young Holds to Middenheim, but there's no overland route that would service. Barak Varr to Tor Lithanel is a long route through hard waters for unfinished goods. So we'd need to either secure Nordland's cooperation and ship them from Salzenmund to Tor Lithanel, or hunk them all the way from Wolfenburg to Salkalten."

You nod along, having considered very similar matters yourself. The Empire wouldn't be able to supply metal to Elven standards, but the Dwarves very easily could, though they'd charge a painful price for the privilege. That makes overland routes possible for Dwarven metal where it wasn't for human ore, but that doesn't entirely solve the problems. "The subject of a road is a tricky one for Laurelorn. There might be ways to arrange something that let trade carts pass but not armies, but that's easier said than done."

"Aye. Now stone, stone is actually easier thanks to Gotrek's Expedition. It'll take a generation to get Karak Vlag's mining and smelting back to acceptable levels of quality and quantity, and a generation more before they've stockpiled enough to even think about starting to sell it. But if anything they're even better stonewrights now than when they were lost to us, and it's viable to haul the stone to the western end of High Pass and barge it down to Praag. Getting it from there to Tor Lithanel presents an opportunity to rope in a fourth family - House Teleri, the former boatwrights. I've sounded them out and they're interested in being so again. Less so than they should be for returning to the path of their Ancestors, mind, but that's the material we have to work with."

"An opportunity?" you ask.

"The balance of power between the two factions here is only in our favour by a hair. If we're going to be investing here, we need to be looking to bring more families over to our side and shoring up those that already are. Right now only three families are really dug in on our side - Fanpatar, who've taken a liking to the Middenheimers after fighting alongside them, Ellemakil, who are dominating the clergy of the new Cult here, and Tindomiel, who you've lined up to build the Waystones."

"Yavanna are going to be handling the spice trade, too."

"Good, that makes two families nominally on the isolationist side that'll stand to lose money if they succeed."

You run through your mental list of the Major Houses. "By that metric, that leaves four families on our side that might still be swayed back, against two on theirs that might balk if it looks like they could win."

He nods. "Still work to be done."

That, you reflect, is a very Dwarven approach to the situation - when in doubt, fortify. It's not a bad instinct by any means, and all else being equal you'd much rather have the political situation nailed down than not. But whether or not it would be the best use of your time to pin down the remaining families on your side and continue to erode the isolationists is not so clear-cut.

---

From your meeting with Thorek, you go to catch up on the news from the EIC to see if there's anything that might shift the geopolitical roadblocks obstructing those trade deals, and you find the opposite of what you were hoping but pretty much what you were expecting. The piece of geopolitical drama dominating news from abroad is in Nordland, as the Grand Baron finally makes his counterplay to the alliance between Middenheim and Tor Lithanel. To the very great relief of anyone with sense, it does not come in the form of troops spilling into the forest, but instead a foray into the business of the Cult of Ulric, reaping a harvest of would-be heresiarchs sprouted of the Cult's historical baggage. The deployment and subsequent desertion of the Winter Wolves, of course, looms large in the minds of many, but so too does the Vow of Celibacy that the Cult of Ulric had forced upon them after missteps during the Time of Three Emperors, which any non-Middenheim schism would have no reason to uphold. That the aforementioned Vow has led to a Cult that almost entirely excludes women from any positions within its Orders is another point of friction in the minds of many. The Teutogen origin of the Cult of Ulric has led to strong streaks of exclusionism and supremacism among many Teutogen Ulricans, leaving many Ulricans of other tribes to feel less than sanguine about a Cult that harbours such elements and has never been headed by someone not of pure Teutogen descent. And that the Cult has historically focused a great deal of attention and resources grappling for political influence in Middenland instead of focusing on concerns in other provinces has led to similar discontent with branches of the Cult that hail from other corners of the Empire.

All of these fracture points have finally come together, as the High Priest of Salzenmund and the High Priestess of Sudfast have become a locus for disaffected elements to rally around, calling for a Cult of Ulric that speaks for all peoples, not just Teutogens, for all provinces, not just Middenland, and with all voices, not just those of men. Though they haven't yet formally broken with the Ar-Ulric, it's just a matter of time, and various elements within the Cult are moving to back one side or another. In abstract, this seems like a just and worthy cause. In the actual, this could have worrying repercussions for the matter of Laurelorn.

---

The final piece of business to close out the decade is the matter of recruiting a small army of scribes for your nascent library. Tempted as you were by the idea of taking a page out of the Light Order's book and winnowing through the orphans of the Old World for scribes, in the end practicality wins out. The existing human and Halfling population of Karak Eight Peaks already represents a ready supply of recruits that can be counted on to be trustworthy, loyal, and reasonably self-sufficient, so why complicate matters? You have a word with Francesco Caravello and Hluodwica Stoutheart to have them spread word among their people that there's reliable, safe, well-paying jobs to be had by anyone already literate or willing to learn to be, travel to exotic locales optional. As for teaching them, you spend some time weighing the pros and cons of bringing in the University of Altdorf or the Cult of Scripsisti or building something from the ground up to provide training before you realize this is already a solved problem - the EIC already has the means to teach literacy to recruits that can easily be rented out by the Library until enough of the scribes are trained enough to start training others. The only real drain on your time in the entire process turns out to be personally handling the first wave of prospective recruits until they acclimate to the presence of the Library-We.



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 fourteen hour moratorium so people can remember their plans.
- This will probably have a pretty short voting window (though still minimum 24 hours) because I wrote most of the turn vote before I remembered the purchase vote is a thing.
- The ingot trade does not preclude future ore trade. There is demand for both expensive high-purity metal ingots and a cheap source of smeltable ore.

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr booksellers: Metallurgy, Bretonnia, Athel Loren
[*] [DWARF] No purchase.
[*] [COLLEGE] No purchase.
[*] [PURCHASE] Druchii: Bretonnian Extensive (100gc)

Vote tally

As you turn your attention to planning the coming months, it's with the warm glow inside you provided by having solid progress to show for your efforts thus far. With three proven methods of tributary creation the possibility opens up to actually start delivering tangible results to the Old World, and with the Runic component of the Waystones investigated an argument could be made that you're halfway done with figuring out the Waystones. Probably not a good argument, as all indications are that the remaining portions are going to be where the most difficulty and complexity is going to be found, but an argument nonetheless. You also have the stamp of approval from the Emperor himself, which may come in very useful as both shield and cudgel in the months to come.

Because on the other side of the coin, things seem to be getting complicated. Chaos is, if you can trust the word of a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch - which, just for the record, you absolutely cannot - beginning the inexorable burgeoning that will culminate in a thirteenth Everchosen, and the jostling for position among the Cultists is having geopolitical repercussions throughout the Old World and beyond. Laurelorn's re-emergence into world politics is making more and more waves, as they break bread with Druchii and Dwarves while those opposed to them begin to organize against them and their allies. And, of course, Ulthuan officially weighing in on the matter of Laurelorn and the Waystones has yet to occur, but the looming inevitability of them doing so casts a shadow over the entire matter.

Part of you wonders what's going on in Swamp Town right about now.



You have five action points (AP) you can apply without engaging in overwork. For every two AP spent across all members of WEB-MAT, including recruiting new members, you can spend one 'free' additional AP with any member of WEB-MAT. WEB-MAT actions are performed by Mathilde alongside that person when possible, such as studying something alongside that person, cowriting a paper together, one teaching the other, both of them learning something new, et cetera.
Current overwork status: [ ] [ ] [ ]
Each box will be filled by one action of overwork, and will take the two turns after that to fade as you recover. The first box incurs no penalty. The second will give a -10 penalty to all actions during the first turn of recovery. The third will give a -20 penalty to all actions on both turns of recovery.
Overwork incurs no penalties on the turns taken, only on the turns recovering from it. You can take as many actions of overwork as you have unfilled boxes.
When you use overwork it fills the left-most empty box, so [-][ ][ ] becomes [-][+][ ], not [+][-][ ]. All boxes recover in parallel and independent from one another, but second and third apply maluses on your actions during that cooldown period.

WEB-MAT: Magister Maximilian de Gaynesford, Gold Wizard
[ ] MAX: Learning: specify what and from who. You may pay for a trainer.
[ ] MAX: Study an artefact: specify which.
[ ] MAX: Receive dictation: specify which two papers or one book will be written.

WEB-MAT: Magister Johann, Gold Wizard
[ ] JOHANN: Learning: specify what and from who. You may pay for a trainer.
[ ] JOHANN: Study an artefact: specify which.
[ ] JOHANN: Write a paper: specify which.

WEB-MAT: Lord Magister Egrimm van Horstmann, Light Wizard
[ ] EGRIMM: Attempt a Windherder enchantment with Egrimm (specify what)
[ ] EGRIMM: Learning: specify what from who. You may pay for a trainer.
[ ] EGRIMM: Study an artefact: specify which.
[ ] EGRIMM: Write a paper: specify which.

WEB-MAT: Other
[ ] WEB-MAT: Hunt an apparition with a member of WEB-MAT (specify who and which)
[ ] WEB-MAT: Attempt to recruit someone to WEB-MAT (specify who)
[ ] WEB-MAT: Enchant or otherwise modify your Gyrocarriage (specify how)


The Waystone Project, Recruitment

[ ] Attempt to bring an Order into the Waystone Project (specify which)
[ ] Attempt to bring a non-Order magical tradition into the Waystone Project (specify which)
[ ] Attempt to bring a human Cult into the Waystone Project (specify which)
[ ] Attempt to bring a Major House or Ward into the Waystone Project (specify which)
[ ] Attempt to bring a Karak's Runesmiths into the Waystone Project (specify which)


The Waystone Project, Research

[ ] Waystone: Capstone
[ ] Waystone: Foundation
[-] Waystone: Build an Elven Waystone
Requires Capstone, Runes, Foundation, and Leylines to be fully and successfully completed.

[ ] Waystone: Nexuses
Specify which: Marienburg (Almshoven and Fort Solace), Forest of Shadows (Brass Keep, Blood Fane, Tower of Melkhior), Mordheim, Los Cabos, Bugman's Brewery.
[ ] Waystone: Tributaries
Specify which type: Scythian, Lornalim.
[ ] Waystone: Mapping
Specify two of: Bretonnia, Tilea, Estalia, Araby, Badlands.
[ ] Waystone: Other Networks
Specify which: Karaz Ankor, Kislev, Laurelorn, Athel Loren, Nehekhara.


The Waystone Project, Development

[ ] Waystone: Tributary Design (select one or multiple: Ranaldian, Druidic, Ice Witch, Runesmith, Teclisean)
[-] Waystone: Tributary Prototype (no untested designs available)
[ ] Waystone: Leyline Prototype (select transmission medium: Air, Material, River)
[ ] Waystone: Leyline Keyphrase Negotiation (select one: Ulthuan, Naggaroth)


The Waystone Project, Deployment (NEW)

[ ] Tributary: Haléthan (specify province)
Roots of Stone requires a Nordland or Ostland Hedgewise caster to be used outside of Nordland, Ostland, or Ostermark.
[ ] Tributary: Dreaming Wood (specify province)
Liminal Germination requires the caster to spend a significant amount of time in the local Dreaming Wood. This is safe-ish in Nordland, Reikland, Hochland, and Talabecland, dangerous in Middenland, Ostland, and Ostermark, and impossible in other provinces.
[ ] Tributary: Water Spirit (specify province)
Aethyric Impluvium requires the presence of a Water Spirit, the easiest source of which would be cooperation with the Cult of Taal and Rhya, the Elementalists, or Hag Witches.
[ ] Tributary: International (specify country)
Share information and expertise on how and where to create the tributaries to supplement existing Waystone networks.


For the above options, remember to also state who you will be researching or performing this with. You can specify as many or as few members of the Project as you please, as well as bringing in people from outside the Project if you pay for their services or convince them in some other way. If the only ones involved are members of WEB-MAT the action can count as a WEB-MAT action. In general the fastest progress will be made by involving only those with the most applicable knowledge, but also keep in mind how each individual might feel about being included or excluded in a particular investigation. For the Tributary actions, the details of how exactly it is pursued will be the subject of a subvote after Mathilde investigates the options and possibilities, but will generally involve getting the okay of local authorities, then finding, recruiting, or striking deals with people with the ability and inclination to spend the next several years creating tributaries.


Lovely Laurelorn
[ ] Explore one of the Wards of Laurelorn (specify which: Storm, Rain, Frost)

Self-Improvement:
[ ] Receive training: specify who and what. (acquaintances may train you for free, or you can hire someone with money or favours)
[ ] Attempt to learn Battle Magic at the Grey College. (1 College Favour per attempt)
[ ] Attempt to gain control of one of your Arcane Marks (specify which)
[ ] Try to see through Pall of Darkness with your improved magical senses.
[ ] Practice shooting while invisible. (applies to Substance of Shadow and Invisibility)
[ ] Branulhune's ability to disappear and reappear at a thought allows entirely new forms of combat. Continue to work on them.
[ ] Attempt to finish off the Grey College spellbook by learning Shadow of Death, Cloak Activity, and the MAPP.

Research and Publishing:
[ ] Study an artefact: select which.
[ ] Write a paper: select which.
[ ] Write something else: write in.
Once per turn, you can write a paper or write a 'something else' without spending an action thanks to your Tower of Serenity.
[ ] The Second Secret of Dhar teaches how to collapse it upon itself. Practice upon local Dhar taint, and very cautiously see if this works with Warpstone.

Aethyric Vitae (19 gallons):
[-] Create Orbs of Sorcery solo (requires one of each Power Stone) (insufficient CF)
Mathilde will have full control over what happens with the resultant Orbs, including the option of presenting the full collection as a shockingly impressive fait accompli. Any Power Stones Mathilde does not have will be acquired for 5 CF each.
[ ] Create Orbs of Sorcery with College buy-in (no cost)
Mathilde will not have to source her own materials, but will have to negotiate in advance what happens with the resultant Orbs.
[ ] Attempt to create a liminal realm (NEW)

Enchantment and Spell Creation:
[ ] Enchant an item: specify what and how (current skill level allows for Fiendishly Complex spells and lower; you may use Windherder to attempt to enchant something with spells from different Winds)
[ ] Attempt to create a spell (see Approved Spells threadmark)
[ ] Attempt to codify Rite of Way so that others can learn it.
[ ] Attempt to capture an Apparition (optional: specify which)
[ ] Turn a staff (specify for whom) (optional: specify from what)

Foreign Relations:
[ ] Involve yourself in current affairs: specify what and how.
Current examples: Eastern Stirland pacification, Marienburg affair, Black Waters project
[ ] [ ] [ ] Travel to Nagarythe at the invitation of Ambassador Daroir, and join their eternal war against Naggarothi invaders for three months.

Personal Relations:
[ ] Spend time assisting or ingratiating yourself with someone else: specify who and how.
[ ] Spend time investigating a character without their knowledge: specify who.
[ ] Teach Eike (specify what)
[ ] Wolf is fully grown, very smart, and a Very Good Boy. Train him further. (specify what he will be taught)
[ ] Wolf is fully grown and very magical. Deepen your familiar bond. (may unlock a new familiar ability; risks obsession)


The Eastern Imperial Company
Your share of EIC profits: 220 crowns / turn
Current Focus of the EIC: Eastern Stirland
EIC Handler: The Hochlander
The first AP spent in this category is free. Any additional choices cost 1 AP.
[ ] EIC: Completely hand over management of the EIC intelligence apparatus to the Hochlander.
[ ] EIC: Found an auditors division, to make sure the ledgers are in order.
[ ] EIC: Insert agents into a particular province, cult, company, or institution to start gathering their secrets. (specify who)
[ ] EIC: Reach out to Roswita, and have the EIC start passing on tips about any tax evasion or other naughtiness by the EIC's rivals.
[ ] EIC: Improve and expand the EIC's paramilitary river navy. (optional: specify how)
[ ] EIC: Have the EIC keep tabs on mercenaries so that they can be more easily hired if needed.
[ ] EIC: Gather as much Ithilmar from throughout the Old World as possible to resell to the Eonir for a one-time profit
[ ] EIC: Attempt to establish a trade route with the Eonir (pick one: ore, charcoal)
[ ] EIC: Negotiate and plan a magical route through the Schadensumpf to allow for easier trade with the Eonir without compromising their defences

Kron-Azril-Ungol
Status: Being colonized by a new We, training and recruiting human and Halfling scribes from Karak Eight Peaks, open to braver members of the general public.
The first AP spent in this category is free. Any additional choices cost 1 AP.
[ ] Begin copying the full corpus of a Partner Library. (specify which) (NEW)
Current options: The Mootland Genealogical Library
[ ] Seek the publishing contacts to start acquiring large amounts of books from a nearby realm (specify which: Bretonnia, Kislev, Tilea/Estalia, Araby)
Gives wide and easy access within a language, but is subject to local restrictions and is a less efficient use of the Library's acquisition budget than other methods.
[ ] Seek an exchange arrangement with another Library or a Karak's archives to be able to make copies of their corpus (specify which, eg: Great Library of Marienburg, Great Library of Altdorf, Ancient Library of Carroburg, Karaz-a-Karak Archives, Karak Vlag Archives)
Difficulty will depend on the size, prestige, and disposition of the library in question, and the relative impressiveness of Kron-Azril-Ungol.
[ ] Seek an agreement with a Cult to have access to their libraries (specify which, eg: Verenans, Myrmidians, Sigmarites)
Difficulty will vary heavily depending on the Cult in question, but can allow access to rare tomes and esoteric subjects.
[ ] Set up a no-questions-asked bounty system for books within the Cult of Ranald
Results will be unreliable and depending on what is sought may result in blowback, but this may allow you to acquire books that would otherwise be entirely inaccessible.


Apprentice Eike Hochschild

Spoiler: Character sheet

Diplomacy: 7+1+1+1-2=8
Martial: ?
Stewardship: ?
Intrigue: ?
Piety: ?
Learning: 11+2=13
Magic: 1+1=2


Traits:
Grey Wizard: She has the ability and education to wield the winds of Ulgu, the grey magic of shadow and illusion.
Apprentice: She has reached the level of training where she is able to begin learning the simplest of spells. Her Master is Lady Magister Mathilde Weber.
???
???
???
Mark of Ulgu: She bears the Mark of Ulgu upon her right arm, signifying the claim that the Wind has laid on her soul. +1 Magic.


Diplomacy:
Colleges of Magic (1/3)
Empire of Man: Under the tutelage of her grandmother, she has achieved a solid understanding of the provinces of the Empire. +1 Diplomacy
Eonir of Laurelorn: A period of immersion in Tor Lithanel during her teenage years gave her a solid understanding of the Eonir. +1 Diplomacy
???
Politicking (1/3)

Martial:
Fitness (2/3)
???
???
???
Pistols: She was taught to wield her grandmother's weapon of choice from a young age. +1 Martial

Intrigue:
???

Stewardship:
Accounting: As heir apparent of the EIC, she has been taught the arcane art of double-entry bookkeeping. +1 Stewardship
Trade: She has a basic understanding of the endless flow of goods and gold that keeps civilization running. +1 Stewardship

Piety:
Old World Pantheon (Northern) (1/3)
Old World Pantheon (Southern): Having grown up in the softer corners of the Empire, she is familiar with the more civilized of the Empire's Gods.
Shallya (1/3)

Learning:
Economics (Old World) (2/3)

Languages:
Reikspiel
Lingua Praestantia
Tar-Eltharin (Eonir accent)


Magic:
Waaaghbane (2/5)

Spells known:
Glowing Light
Marsh Lights

Specify which of the above actions Eike will be present for and (hopefully) learning from, as well as what she will be directed to study when she's not doing so. Her study may involve lessons you pay for, or tutoring from your employees and allies. These do not cost AP.
[ ] Eike Actions:
[ ] Eike Study:


Ranald's Coin - specify which face it will be set to
[ ] The Gambler: specify an action this will apply to.
A +20 bonus to up to two dice rolls resulting from a single chosen action.
[ ] The Night Prowler
As long as you are outside of private property and within a town or city, nobody will question your presence and nobody will be able to find you if you do not wish them to.
[ ] The Deceiver: specify how this will be used.
Lies you have developed beforehand will be delivered perfectly. The listener may believe you to be mistaken, but they will never believe that you are lying. Cannot be used to tell truths.
[ ] The Protector
When you act in a way that defends an individual or group from a danger that you did not cause, they will become aware of what you have done and will believe you acted selflessly in doing so. Rule of thumb: if you have to explain why this might apply, it probably doesn't.
[ ] The Father
Ranald's daughters, and Their followers, will recognize you as being worthy of trust and faith.

Spoiler: Accumulated Artefacts

Ranald's Coin (note from Ranald: don't)
Vampire skulls
Branulhune - investigate the odd flash when it is desummoned underwater

Books and rubbings from an Asur explorer of Lustria and the Southlands
The Vampire Prophecies of W'Soran
Vlad von Carstein's study notes of the Carstein Ring
Ghyran Nut
Kurgan Shrine to Mannslieb
Kurgan enchanted weapons

Spoiler: Potential Papers

Note: Fresh and Refreshed papers confer a +10 bonus; faded ones a -10 malus.
Papers get one step less 'fresh' each turn: Fresh; Fading; Mostly Faded: Faded. Only the first and last have an effect on the diceroll.

Observations on the Windfall north of the Dark Lands (FADED)
The Black Orc Warboss' worship of Only Gork, and what you saw of the Rogue Idol ritual (FADED)

Preliminary paper on Aethyric Vitae (TIMELESS)
Coins of Nehekhara's Fifth Dynasty (TIMELESS)


You can literally write the book on a topic for the same amount of effort as two papers; this can be split over multiple turns. You don't need to have all the pieces to do so, but it would be more efficient and impressive if you did.
Aethyric Vitae (missing: creating Orbs of Sorcery, creating liminal realm)
The Currency of Strygos
The Currency of Tylos
Coins of Nehekhara's Fourth Dynasty
Coins of Nehekhara's Sixth Dynasty

- There will be a twenty-four hour moratorium for people to remember their plans and remind me of what I've inevitably forgotten to add.
- Shoutout to @picklepikkl and his Brief History of The Waystone Project, which was a very useful resource for refreshing my own memories and may help others do so too. As might some of the other player-created informational posts.
- Shoutout to @pucflek for commissioning this particularly beautiful rendition of Mathilde and Belegar overlooking the western gate of Karak Eight Peaks. It and the rest of the fan-art created or commissioned for the quest live in the Fanart informational threadmark.

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] Plan Codifying and Swords
-[*] Overwork: Yes
-[*] COIN: The Gambler
-[*] Attempt to codify Rite of Way so that others can learn it. (The Gambler)
-[*] Branulhune's ability to disappear and reappear at a thought allows entirely new forms of combat. Continue to work on them. (Hand-switching)
-[*] Branulhune's ability to disappear and reappear at a thought allows entirely new forms of combat. Continue to work on them. (Double-tap)
-[*] Waystone: Capstone (Hatalath, Thorek, Elrisse, Egrimm, Max, Johann)
-[*] Waystone: Leyline Prototype (River) (Sarvoi, Cadaeth, Baba Niedzwenka, Elrisse, Aksel, Tochter)
-[*] Tributary: Water Spirit (Stirland) (Baba Niedzwenka, Zlata, Max)
-[*] KAU: Seek an exchange arrangement with another Library or a Karak's archives to be able to make copies of their corpus (Nuln; use KaK Metalsmithing Guild Boon)
-[*] EIC: Attempt to establish a trade route with the Eonir (charcoal)
-[*] SERENITY: The Black Orc Warboss' worship of Only Gork, and what you saw of the Rogue Idol ritual (FADED)
-[*] Eike Actions: Branulhune training, EIC action
-[*] Eike Study: Study Petty spells

Tally

The first step in developing a hand-switching technique for Branulhune is to develop at least a basic ability to fight with your offhand. There are techniques within the Imperial half of the style you currently practice that already utilize this, based on the idea of gaining momentum with the dominant hand and then switching to the offhand to transfer that momentum into a strike from an unexpected direction. They're also from the part of that style only used when fighting out of formation, so it's not a skill you maintained as you started to incorporate Dwarven techniques, which as a rule avoid any sort of wide sweeps that would be impossible in a narrow tunnel. While that means starting from scratch, it also means you have a clear foundation to work with, as Branulhune doesn't preserve momentum when dismissed and resummoned.

It is, you quickly discover, very difficult, and you're thankful that Kragg had Branulhune scaled down for you instead of making it the standard size of the Empire's Greatswords. You shelve the matter and see to your other business for several weeks as you alter your regular practice to emphasize building up strength and dexterity in your offhand, and when you turn your full attention back to the matter you've only just developed enough skill to threaten an untrained child. Luckily for you, there is just such a child available to match this level of ability.

Or so you thought.

"Okay, Apprentice," you say as your training sword clatters across the room for the third time. "It's time to talk about which extracurriculars you took back at Altdorf."

She lowers her sword from the point-out guard that had looked awkward right up until you tried to hit her. "Well, it wasn't Greatswording exactly, Master," she says. "The Carroburg Greatswords weren't willing to spare someone just to train one person. But Oma was able to organize someone from Bergo Academy to train me in the basics of the spadone."

You frown as you walk over to and recover your sword, trying to recall what little you'd read of it in Imperial-written books. "Sweeping vertical slashes and pommel strikes, right?"

"Not exclusively, Master, the sweeping is for the killing strike with the stercke, after a parry or flick with the schweche. But yes, that's the style."

With a sliver of willpower you surround yourself in Aethyric Armour. "Demonstrate."

To her credit, she doesn't hesitate, and you have only a moment to wonder whether that's due to trust in you, or her intuitive Windsight telling her it's safe to do so. She batters her way past your offhanded guard, flicks the tip of your blade across your face - that would have taken at least an eye in actual combat - and then whirls into an underhand swing that connects with your gut hard enough to send you a step backwards, and you smile to yourself as the next stage of practice starts to look a lot more interesting.

---

[Eike studying the blade: Martial, 47+10+10(Library: Greatswords)=67.]

A week of training allows you to get the measure of Eike's ability with a blade, and if she's not quite at the level you were when you joined the Karak Eight Peaks Expedition, she probably soon will be, as you find her spending a fair amount of her free time in drills and delving into your books on the subject. Certainly good enough to leave a few bruises on you when you face her wielding a two-handed blade in just your offhand. You leave her to that as you move on to the next stage of your own development: battering away at training dummies with a blade that flickers from hand to hand. The first drill you settle on is one that would probably be horrendously likely to get you killed if you tried it against any but the most passive or unaware of opponents, but raising both hands above your head and then raining a series of blows with alternating hands in something like a double-time cadence serves as a good first foray into the idea as well as being viscerally satisfying. As you'd expected, it is much more straining to bring a greatsword to swinging speed with your offhand than it was with both hands, even if you stick to downward swings. What you hadn't expected was how unintuitive it is to split off enough of your attention to bring your empty hand into position for the next swing.

It occurs to you that what you're trying to achieve is very much like one of the advantages of a two-weapon style, but the only two-weapon styles you have access to are the sword-and-dagger style of Tilean duelists and the dual axe techniques of the Slayers, neither of which align with what you're hoping to achieve here. Dual sword styles would likely be much more useful, but the only ones you're even vaguely aware of are those of the Wardancers of Athel Loren and the Shadow-walkers of Nagarythe, neither of which are currently accessible to you. So you press on and do your best to develop from scratch what you're sure they've already mastered.

[Mathilde studying the blade: Martial, 79+23+10(Library: Greatswords)=112.]

But develop you do, apart from losing most of a day from discovering that Eike has moved her own modest collection of books about greatswords into the Library and being subsequently ensnared by the concept of feigned thrusts. Once you manage to free yourself and settle on a few drills that allow you to alternate swings without leaving yourself open to being gutted, you bring in your Apprentice once more, and though she adapts impressively fast and manages to reliably parry at least the first two swings of any given flurry, that it's impossible to judge the arc of a swing before the sword appears means that it's not something that she can maintain. Before long you've moved on to more skilled opponents, and find that while some of the most skilled of the Undumgi and Ulrikadrin are able to develop counters to the technique, they're only able to do so after they're exposed to and defeated by it several times - a learning opportunity that you don't intend to offer to any of those who might find themselves on the wrong side of Branulhune. You're very pleased with yourself as you take notes and sketches of the drills you've developed.

[Branarhune aspect developed and mastered: hand switching.]
[Greatsword, Master (4/?)]

So far you've burned through less than half of the time you set aside for training, and the remaining matter concerns the subject of your previous sessions that wasn't quite so fruitful - the guard bypass, which was greatly hindered by Branulhune's sheer destructive power, which you weren't able to turn off without also turning off the ability to be dismissed and resummoned that the technique relied upon. But now you have the training blade Branithune, the blunted steel of which leaves dummies intact and sparring partners merely bruised. But it has occurred to you that an alternative to the guard bypass technique exists that might be its equal and should present fewer difficulties in developing - the double-tap.

The double-tap would start with a normal swing that would be allowed to impact the target's defences, ideally shattering whatever blade or shield or limb tried to obstruct it and dispelling any magical defences they possess, and then use what you have learned from developing the momentum dump and the hand switch to immediately make another swing at the same angle. If done correctly, this should result in the target being struck twice, first by the shrapnel of their shattered weapon or shield and a second by your sword. Even in a worst case scenario, against an opponent fast enough to catch or deflect your blade or holding something durable enough to withstand the impact, it forces them to repeat that feat a second time almost immediately. In contrast, a properly-developed guard bypass would, as its name suggests, slip straight past any attempt to block or deflect or otherwise impede your swing and directly impact the target once. For most imaginable targets, either would be devastating enough to remove them from the battle and very likely from life. For the very few exceptions - and for most of those exceptions, you really should avoid crossing blades with them in the first place - the double-tap would be better against those who depend on armour or raw endurance to withstand blows, while the guard bypass would be better against those few who may possess magical weapons or shields able to stand against Branulhune.

Or you could spend twice as much time and effort to develop both, despite the fact that being capable of both would only represent a very marginal increase in your deadliness.

[ ] Double-tap
[ ] Guard bypass
[ ] Both



Eike charsheet updated:
Martial: 8+1+1+1=11
Greatsword (2/3)

Eike has learned:
Greatsword: Eike has developed a basic understanding of the Tilean spadone style, with a few Imperial flourishes. +1 Martial



- A short update today, to let this matter be hashed out while I work on the rest of the turn. There will be a one hour moratorium.
- If 'both' is chosen, then Mathilde will attempt to finish one this turn, which will leave the skill at 5/6 and it will need to be completed on a future turn.
- Eike's Martial of 11 is after adding the +1 from completing Greatsword.

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] Guard bypass

Tally

In the end, you settle for the guard bypass. A big part of your reasoning is that it depends only on the Rune of the Unknown, where the double-tap relies on the exact combination of runes that exists only on Branulhune. You have some nascent ideas about formalizing this into a style, and for that to have value it needs to be usable by more than one weapon in the world. Another advantage is that you're not starting from scratch with this - you've already had as much practice as you could acquire with Branulhune and a finite supply of training dummies.

That one clean strike that flickers past a parrying blade or blocking shield and then clean through the enemy on the other side makes for an incredible mental image was not given undue weight in your thought process at all.

With training blade in hand, you inflict yourself on training dummies to refresh your muscle memory and then head down into the Undumgi training grounds to impose on their hospitality once more. You find plenty of takers who are keen to test themselves on your latest innovation, and reactions vary from put out to impressed when your sword vanishes just before it hits a raised sword or shield and then reappears inside their guard to bounce harmlessly against armour. Regaining the lost momentum in a timely manner is tricky, but it's a problem you've gotten used to compensating for. After a few days of practice you've uncovered two major problems. The first is that a sword doesn't stop existing just because you got past it, and in fact can be considered to be as much past your guard as Branulhune is past theirs. The average swordsman won't have the reaction time to take advantage of this, but you wouldn't be going to all this trouble if you could count on only ever going up against average swordsmen, so you allow the most skilled of the Undumgi enough time to adapt to the technique and then do your best to avoid their counterstrikes. The second is unexpectedly sartorial: that if Branulhune seeks to reappear in the gap between weapon and body, it needs that gap to be moderately open and clear of obstructions. The more cunning of the Undumgi quickly learn to block very close to their body, and one actually turns up to training one day covered in cloth ribbons that obstruct the space Branulhune seeks to reappear in as long as they keep moving.

Neither renders the technique useless, they just require practice to be able to identify at a glance when the technique can be used without leaving yourself vulnerable or opening yourself up to counterattack. By the time you've left the Undumgi and moved on to Ulrikadrin, you've come to realize that safety is even more of a concern as you originally thought, because no matter how good you get with it, you'll only ever be able to pull it off most of the time. So you work into your practice a return to a defensive stance after the strike using a variation on the momentum dump technique.

In the end, you're as pleased with the technique as the Undumgi and Ulrikadrin are that you're on their side.

[Eike studying the blade some more: Martial, 78+11+10(Library: Greatswords)=99.]

As an added bonus, Eike has been a constant shadow through this journey, sparring with the youngest and greenest as you honed your techniques against the oldest and most skilled, and whenever you put the practice blade down for the day she was right there to pick it back up. When you started waking her up in the morning to join you for your regular drills and exercise she reacted with unnatural eagerness for someone who'd just lost their morning lie-in for the foreseeable future. Her skill with the blade is growing in leaps and bounds, and at this rate you might only be moderately beside yourself with worry when it comes time for her to walk out into the world alone.



Trait acquired:
Branarhune: You have invented an entirely new set of sword techniques that take advantage of the Rune of the Unknown, making most conventional defensive techniques useless against you. +1 Martial. When wielding Branulhune: martial skill of human-size opponents is not applied while they are defending, unless they know of Branarhune and either know of or are able to come up with countermeasures to it.

Skill acquired:
Greatsword, Master: Your foundation of Empire Greatsword and Dwarven Gazulite techniques has been further honed by the research, training, and practice involved in your own invention of an entirely new style. +4 Martial

[New book topic available: Branarhune.]

Trait discovered:
In Awe of Mathilde: Every story Eike grew up hearing about Mathilde has convinced her to make the most of the opportunity to learn from her directly. This will be replaced by one of Mathilde's traits at some point during her Apprenticeship.

Eike has learned:
Fitness: Beneath her robes lies the muscle of a warrior rather than the soft flesh of a typical wizard. +2 Martial
Greatsword, Advanced (1/3)

---

"Waystone Gold," you say to the contributors you've selected to study it with you - the Light Wizards, the Gold Wizards, Thorek, and Hatalath. They're gathered around a table that you've laden with surprisingly light samples from the Colleges - they're heavier than iron, but much lighter than gold or even silver. "It's known throughout the world, but as far as I can tell, only as the metal you find atop Waystones. These are samples of Waystone Gold from the archives of the Gold Order, inherited from some of the less law-abiding alchemists that won pardons with their contributions to the Great War."

"Those are two different metals," Johann points out.

You look from the pile of ingots to the single intact pyramidion that the Gold Order could supply, which look the same to your untrained eye. "How so?"

"They both seem like the same alloy, but the properties are different." He picks up one of the ingots and turns it in his hands. "I suppose it looks like - well, not looks, but you know - six-carratus gold? Since it's one part gold to three parts something else. Calling it 'gold' at all would be a hallmarking violation if possession of it wasn't already extremely illegal. But the ingots are different to the pyramidion, they're..." He frowns. "Cloudier?"

"What do you mean, cloudier?"

"Like... less lodestone-y?" Halath has picked up one of the ingots and is looking back and forth between it and the pyramidion.

"Even though neither is magnetic?" He nods and shrugs. "Okay. So... being melted and recast altered them in some way." You consider that. "Which means that most of the pre-Teclisean studies on it are useless to us, because anyone willing to deal in the stuff would have melted it down as soon as possible to make it less identifiable, long before it reached any alchemist."

"Actually, probably all of them," Max says. "Modern studies don't source new materials, they use what we already have."

"Well, that complicates things. Johann, can you identify the other contributor to the alloy?" He shakes his head. "How many metals can you recognize on sight?"

"All of the Classical and Dwarven metals."

"That gives us a clear place to start our investigation, then. Thorek, do the Dwarves maintain a collection of unknown metals?"

"Aye, the Metalsmiths Guilds each maintain their own collection for study, and there's the trophy vaults in Karaz-a-Karak. I'll take your lad around, see if he can recognize it anywhere else."

"I'll have Lord Turuquar have a look at it too," Hatalath says. "He gets rather intense about this sort of thing. He's here because of his studies into Ithilmar, he wouldn't take 'gift from Vaul' for an answer and kept trying to sneak into Vaul's Anvil."

You nod, and then frown as you recall that's the name of a volcano. "Do you mean the shrine atop Vaul's Anvil?"

"No. They'd have killed him for that. As it was, they were just very concerned."

You shake your head to banish the several additional questions you have. "Okay, then. We'll reconvene once we have some answers to discuss."

---

"It's Titan-metal," Johann reports to a reconvened table. "It shows up in Ogre weapons from time to time."

"Samples recovered by Karak Azorn Rangers two thousand years ago confirmed the Titan Holds as the source of the metals, hence the name," Thorek says.

"Lord Turuquar will be pleased to hear that," Hatalath says. "All he knew of it is that it came via the Gates of Calith, and his inability to give a better answer clearly vexed him."

"Was he able to identify the difference between the two metals?"

"The way a metal cools after being smelted can have effects on its properties. The effect in question is not the 'standard' way that the alloy forms, so those properties only exist in the unaltered pyramidion, not in the re-alloyed ingots. He's working on replicating the pyramidion's properties by applying magic during the cooling process, and would like the assistance of..." he hesitates for a moment. "Lord Magister Johann in doing so."

You resist the urge to correct this accidental promotion, and instead ask "would spending a prolonged period in the Dreaming Wood be compatible with his Gilding?"

"Good question," Hatalath says after some thought. "Lord Turuquar can come here."

"Very well. Meanwhile, let's look to replicating what they do within our own paradigms. Based on my own observations," which you'd performed while Johann was visiting the Dwarfholds, "the capstone is not actually enchanted in any way, nor do any enchantments work through it. Some property of the metal means that when a Wind touches it, the entire metal becomes very conducive to that Wind, and thus is quickly suffused by it and therefore it repels any other Wind. Then the Wind is drawn down into the Waystone, and the metal reverts back to neutrality. In this way it is able to absorb all eight Winds by only ever absorbing one at a time. What is fortunate for the purposes of the Waystones, and unfortunate for any other purpose the material might be put to, is that the material is also very conducive to Dhar. That's the tricky point of replication - making something that absorbs all eight Winds as well as Dhar without the Winds or the mechanism being corrupted by exposure."

---

Several weeks later you reconvene and piled upon the table are several proofs of concept. Your own is a thin rod of iron flanked by two wooden rods holding identical enchantments in two different Winds. The form of the enchantments is a very simple mechanism to attract the Wind in question - Ulgu for one, Hysh for the other - into it, and it's been deliberately stretched out throughout the length of the rod without anything being done to reinforce or stabilize it. The attractive presence of Dhar or the repulsive presence of other Winds will, in sufficient quantities, press against the energies that make up the enchantment until they're distorted enough that the enchantment no longer functions. The iron rod is a stand-in - for a new Waystone that is attached to the existing Network this will be replaced with a material able to transmit the attractive force that the Great Vortex exerts on Dhar. You theorize that copper would work, but you currently have no way to test this. If all else fails, then smelting the Waystone Gold you currently have into wire and embedding it in some other metal to stabilize it would work, but you'd much prefer a method that didn't require either using up a finite and irreplaceable source of materials or cannibalizing the existing Waystones to build new ones.

You could make an enchantment that does the job of attracting Dhar itself instead of having to rely on the existing Network, but it would itself need to be made out of Dhar. If there was no other way you might consider seeking dispensation, and if there was no other way the Colleges might consider granting it, but it would be much better if you did find some other way.

"The enchantments themselves are simple," you say as you display the Collegiate prototype, "but needing eight separate enchantments is a bigger ask than I'd like, and it would depend on being plugged into the Waystone network to supply the attractant force for Dhar."

"First of all," says Hatalath, who had arrived with two prototypes, "I know this one is wildly impractical for deployment at any sort of scale, but Lords Mal and Turuquar wouldn't be dissuaded." He flicks a handful of magical energy at the intricately-carved golden dome, and a blinding radiance of magic lashes out, peels the energies apart, and swallows them into the dome one at a time. "Lords Elrithish and Seilph made this other one," he says, turning to the eight-petalled flower carved from stone and flicking more energies at it, which begin to flow towards and settle into the individual petals. "The shape is just a flourish, it would work with just about anything. The enchantment is extremely simple, though it does require at least a sliver of ability with High Magic." Which in practice means that they would need to be made by Laurelorn.

"This was one of the first Runes I ever recovered," Thorek says, tapping on a stone cube bearing a Rune on its top that looks uncomfortably like the Star of Chaos, only with the arrows pointing inwards. "It's very simple in itself. The tricky part is that it just attracts and absorbs energies, it doesn't do anything with them. Before the Time of Woes we used to use this to seal away malign energies to be buried in exhausted mineshafts." He turns the cube over, revealing another Rune on the bottom, this one of a line that loops three times. "This one's only slightly trickier and most of it's the chiselwork, any Apprentice worth the title should be able to manage it by their third decade. It discharges the energies back out again."

You nod in approval. "It's good we have multiple methods of providing this part of the mechanism, since we don't know what problems there might be when we try to put all of it together, or what the eventual logistical concerns could be when it comes time to actually start producing them in the hundreds." It's also good, you privately observe, that you have two solutions that can't be replicated by any other power on the continent. A purely mechanical solution could be duplicated by anyone, and one that relies on only Wind magic could be reverse-engineered by, say, the Damsels of Bretonnia. While they were allies of the Empire during the Great War Against Chaos, they've also been at war with the Empire twice since then. Needing Eonir or Dwarven assistance to erect new Waystones will make them stick to the terms of whatever deal ends up being struck between the two powers.

A concern that might not come to mind quite so readily, had they been more willing to contribute to the Project early on.



[Capstone Prototype created: Pancollegiate Fascis.]
[Capstone Prototype created: Stone Flower.]
[Capstone Prototype created: Runic Inductor.]

---

The matter of leylines is a difficult one, since the being, spirit, or enchantment that controls it seems to object to your experimenting with it. There is, you're sure, some way to communicate to it that you're acting for the betterment of the network as a whole, and hopefully to instruct it to incorporate new nodes, but the only ones who know that method are the Asur. The handful of instructions you do have came from Teclis, and even he only gave them to the Colleges because the Druids already had those capabilities. If he'd much rather that the Colleges never involve themselves in the network, then Ulthuan as a polity would likely be vociferously opposed to it. If they can be convinced, then a good start would be to demonstrate that you don't actually need them to, just as the Druids did to Teclis. If they can't, then you need a workaround. In either case, the next step forward is to figure out an alternate means of long-range transportation of magical energies.

You've settled on rivers as the first avenue of investigation. A flowing river naturally attracts Ghyran, but that doesn't mean it's impermeable to the other Winds any more than the sky's resonance with Azyr prevents the air from allowing the passage of other Winds. And just as the actual wind can move the Winds, so too can the flow of a river sweep along any Winds caught up in it. And you know for a fact that it doesn't jostle the Winds enough to mix them into Dhar because the magic-infused waters flow from the Tarn of Tears and eventually shatter onto the rocks of the Rainbow Falls without any taint of Dhar. Most of the magic that makes the enchantments of the Eonir and their forest possible have their origin in that stretch of water, and considering that almost all of the rivers in the Empire lead to Altdorf and thus the Colleges of Magic, using the rivers as leylines might allow for something similar to begin to be done for the Empire.

But just because it's possible doesn't mean it's a good idea. Something that works fine for a short stretch of river heavily patrolled by Elves and watched over by some sort of vaguely-Draconic forest spirit called 'Niseag' might go very badly if rolled out to the Empire's thousands of miles of rivers. If those energies are easily accessible to Forest Goblins or Beastmen that control some stretches of the riverbanks, or if they have a negative influence upon the creatures or spirits that call the rivers home, then riverine leylines become worse than useless. There's also the question of Dhar - daydreams of magical renaissance aside, the purpose of this Project is to get rid of harmful magical energies, so the utility of this option plummets dramatically if it's unable to handle the worst of it. Dhar free-flowing downstream while sucking up all the other Winds as it goes and leaving a trail of corrupted beasts and poisoned fields would be...

...well, it would be Nehekhara.

That is, after all, the ultimate example of this technique, both that it's possible and of the inherent problem with it. Nehekhara was built atop the Great Vitae River and was incorporated into their version of the Waystone Network, which worked great for fueling about two and a half golden ages, but then stopped working great. Nagash's Great Ritual is blamed for the death of Nehekhara, but in truth most of its population were already dead or dying from the corruption of the river's headwaters, a great wave of Dhar oozing downstream and turning what was once the most fertile farmlands in the world into the barren landscape it remains to this day. It is now known as the Great Mortis River, the River of Death.

All in all, it's not the sort of thing you want to be emulating. But the argument can be made that if the Great Necromancer has unfettered access to your nation's water source and a grudge against you, you're going to have a bad time even if you haven't enchanted it. The Skaven used the same tactics to great effect against Karak Eight Peaks thousands of years ago, even though the Karak's aquifer was entirely mundane.

Sarvoi and Cadaeth are, of course, no strangers to the Tarn of Tears, but you bring them along with Elrisse, Aksel, Tochter, and Niedzwenka there to illustrate part of your goal. "To use a river as a leyline requires three things," you say to them over the gurgling of the river. "Getting it in, getting it out, and keeping it from causing problems along the way. Now as we can see, getting it in is trivial - once it's introduced to flowing water, it flows with the water. I can think of a handful of enchantments or devices to achieve this just off the top of my head. Getting it out is trickier - this river uses a waterfall to release the magic back into the air, which works fine here but wouldn't really be an option for most rivers without obstructing the traffic that flows along it."

"Why not?" Elrisse asks. "Just have a canal that bypasses it for river traffic."

"You're right," you say after a moment of thought. "Actually, if we did it just south of Altdorf, river traffic could use the existing Weissbruck Canal to bypass it. Okay, that's one possible means of discharge. The one I had in mind was just putting down a series of Waystones like channel markers along the run of the river, however many are required for the amount of magic flowing, and then feed it from there directly into a Nexus. Probably the one at Altdorf, though it could also be set up at Nuln and Talabecland if there's some sort of bottleneck."

"The Lynsk could feed into Erengrad, and the Tobol into Castle Alexandronov," Niedzwenka says musingly. "And, of course, the Urskoy flows past Kislev City and into the Talabec."

"We theorized that L'Anguille, Bordeleux, and Brionne were nexuses," Tochter says. "So that's maybe two thirds of Bretonnia's rivers. Oh, and Gisoreux is downstream of most of the Grismerie, so that only leaves a few hundred miles of river that this method wouldn't work for."

"Perhaps the rivers that flow past Barak Varr as well," you say. "This has a lot of potential, but there's also a lot of potential problems. The jaunt between the Tarn and the Falls is one thing, but we're talking about stretches of river up to a thousand miles long, some passing through Sylvania, past Mordheim, through the Drakwald. We're not doing this for the benefit of any Greenskin or Beastman Shaman or Black Magister that happens upon a stretch of unattended river. So our first matter will be to investigate how accessible the magics within this short stretch of river are. Sarvoi, can you supply students with a good distribution of skill levels?"

"I certainly can. It will make for an interesting challenge for them."

"Between them and us, we should be able to gauge exactly how vulnerable to interception riverborne Winds are."

---

While Sarvoi has been rounding up students, you've been communicating with the Priests of Vaul who labour under Rainbow Falls via House Miriel to find what days you can mess with the flow of magic to them without disrupting any ongoing projects. On the appointed day the banks are lined with young magic-users - well, young by Elven standards, you're probably younger than most of them - who one at a time reach into the stream with willpower and attempt to net the bounty of flowing magics. Most are able to grip on to a stream of energy, but actually pulling it in turns out to be a problem. Firstly, because water provides more resistance than air usually does, making the ingrained habits of experienced spellcasters counterproductive and meaning that it's actually the students with the least seniority that have the most success. Secondly, the river being thick with magical energies means that pulling on one stream interrupts an established equilibrium and the stream quickly dissolves into a rainbow of turbulent eddies. Thirdly, the Ghyran in those eddies causes the river itself to start roiling, which not only makes it even harder to reach into it with your will, it also provokes Niseag to make an appearance, a scaled and fanged head on a shockingly long neck rearing out of the water to glare perturbedly at the crowd as they shuffle their feet and mumble apologies. The residents of most of the Empire's rivers would be substantially harder to quell.

You finish taking notes on what you've seen as Sarvoi dismisses the students and explains what's about to happen to Niseag, and once the two of you are alone you nod to him. He concentrates and holds out his hands, and after a moment of concentration a pea-size blob of sickly-sweet energies forms between them, and he drops it into the river and into the path of the flowing Winds. At first some Winds that happen to flow right into it are drawn in, but once it grows large enough to have a significant pull, something more interesting happens: a vortex of Winds forms around it as streams are drawn in and then repulsed by the other Winds doing the same, and before any equilibrium can be reached they're swept safely past by the momentum of the flowing water. Some is drawn in still, but only a small fraction of the overall flow. Eventually Sarvoi releases his control over the Dhar and it washes away in the river, to where it will be shaken free by the Rainbow Falls and then absorbed by the Waystones at its base.

"Better than I feared," you observe.

Sarvoi nods. "Much better. If you were at it for hours at a time you might be able to accumulate more than you could manage to draw out of the ambient air, but you'd be plainly visible to any river traffic the whole time."

"And vulnerable to the Riverwardens. Thank you for performing the experiment."

He nods. "Of course."

---

"Okay," you say to the reconvened researchers, "the basic idea is surprisingly sturdy - the Winds keep to themselves and resist attempts by any interlopers to draw them out or corrupt them. But the main question left outstanding is that of Dhar, because pouring Dark Magic into all of the continent's major sources of drinking water and irrigation does not strike me as a good idea. Is there another way to move the Dhar in or alongside the river?"

"Would a rope on the riverbed be safe from Umgi predation?" Sarvoi asks with a cheeky grin.

"Maybe from Umgi hands, but not from Umgi anchors."

"What about an aqueduct?" Elrisse asks. "We've established that water is surprisingly good at moving Winds, would it work on Dhar?"

You have the answer immediately, but you pretend to give the matter the amount of thought someone with only salubrious sources would need. "I suspect Dhar would need more velocity than an aqueduct would provide to remain waterborne." Sarvoi nods in confirmation.

"Get the river spirit to handle it," Niedzwenka says. "They exist everywhere along it at once, so they can move things from one end to another without having to go through the points in between. Very useful for smuggling. They'd probably ask something that'd be expensive or annoying for an individual, but easy enough for a country."

"It would be easy enough to get the cooperation of the Cults of Grandfather Reik and Altaver," you muse, and Niedzwenka wrinkles her nose in distaste. There are a lot of lesser Gods in the Empire that would be considered merely very powerful spirits in Kislev. "Taal for the Talabec, too. I don't know about the Stir - the River Patrol venerates Manann, so it might be Him, but Manhorak might be making a claim too."

"Why don't you just have it go under the river?" Aksel asks.

"At that point we're not using the river at all, we're just building regular leylines in a squiggly way."

"No, use the rivers themselves. The..." He frowns, and says a few words in Was Jutonian. "World habit? These are old rivers, there's been constant movement of water along those paths for thousands of years. You sort of," he makes an indecipherable motion with his hands, "tie it onto that."

"Oh, yngra elthrai," Sarvoi says.

"Induced correspondence," you translate.

"Quite literally 'as above, so below'," Elrisse says with a little smile.

"That's an interesting idea, but we'd need the foundation mechanism to actually test it..." You trail off, frowning to yourself. "Actually, no, I can think of a way. Aksel, can you create a prototype of something that would perform that inducement?"

"Not personally, but I know someone who may be able to," he says with a nod.

"See to it. If you need resources to grease the wheels, let me know. Tochter, Elrisse, could Ghyran or Hysh manage the same?"

Elrisse is shaking her head, but Tochter looks thoughtful. "I'll look into it," she says.

"Sarvoi? Cadaeth?"

"I've a counterpart in House Nienna that might be able to put me on the right track," Sarvoi says thoughtfully.

You turn to the last person at the table, but she's already shaking her head. "Done with spirits, getting the spirit to move it for you in the first place would be easier."

"Very well. While those are dealt with, I'll see to getting a testing grounds set up."

---

In a tunnel excavated below the Blood River just downstream of Ulrikadrin, you, Aksel, and Sarvoi prepare to put the results to the test. All three of the requested prototypes came through, including Tochter's, but you told her she shouldn't be here for it and she seemed to immediately understand why. Testing this does require the creation and manipulation of Dhar, and though the location is outside the borders of the Empire and the one that will be doing it isn't subject to its laws, it's still a good deniability to maintain.

The Hedgewise contribution is a leather pouch full of river stones with various patterns of dots carved into them, to be piled up on the site and a salmon or trout killed atop the pile every week. Testing it is very simple: it is set up, and a sufficient amount of Dhar is created and allowed to settle into the end of the tunnel while you watch from a safe distance. Under normal circumstances, the Dhar would remain here indefinitely, possibly oozing a ways back out the tunnel, and would begin to noticeably fade away into the stone over the course of years to decades. But here and now, with slowness that certainly feels like years to decades but is no more than a couple of hours, the Dhar is pulled up against and eventually into one of the walls. If all has gone according to plan, it is destined to make an inexorably slow journey downstream until it reaches the stone below the Black Gulf, at which point it will... well, you're not sure. Hopefully fade away. It might seep back up and into the Gulf, adding one more drop to thousands of years of corruption the oceans have been called upon to absorb.

The Jade Order's showing, appropriately enough, is a man-sized menhir that seems like it took more effort to move down here than carving the pattern of flowing lines that covers it, though probably not more than the enchantment within it. When the menhir is planted into the mud at the bottom of the tunnel, the first indication that it's working is the mud drying out as the water from it tries to obey the flow of the river above and pools against the tunnel wall. Dhar, when released, obeys the same inexorable pull and disappears much faster into the wall than previously.

The contribution from the Eonir is one that came with the grudging admittance that it's not at all scalable, and in fact they'd like the prototype, a feather-patterned astrolabe, back when you were done testing it. It does the job about as well as the Hedgewise stones did, which is a poor showing from something ancient and valuable going up against a bag of rocks.

Having two seperate ways to make the correspondence idea work, on top of the possibilities of bargaining with river spirits or Gods to make it work, means you have no problem calling this avenue of investigation a success.



[Riverine Leyline possibility identified: free-flowing/spirit bargain.]
[Riverine Leyline possibility identified: free-flowing/Jade induced correspondence.]
[Riverine Leyline possibility identified: free-flowing/Hedgewise induced correspondence.]

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Unfinished business

[*] Attempt to codify Rite of Way so that others can learn it. (The Gambler)
[*] Tributary: Water Spirit (Stirland) (Baba Niedzwenka, Zlata, Max)
[*] KAU: Seek an exchange arrangement with another Library or a Karak's archives to be able to make copies of their corpus (Nuln; use KaK Metalsmithing Guild Boon)
[*] EIC: Attempt to establish a trade route with the Eonir (charcoal)
[*] SERENITY: The Black Orc Warboss' worship of Only Gork, and what you saw of the Rogue Idol ritual (FADED)
[*] Eike Actions: EIC action
[*] Eike Study: Study Petty spells

Aethyric Impluvium requires the presence, if not necessarily the cooperation, of a water-spirit, as well as a solid grasp of the magical vocabulary of the Scythian language. While Baba Niedzwenka is certainly more than capable, you're not going to get anywhere if you plan on having the Waystone's contributors personally erect every single tributary themselves. Your job here is to find, recruit, and equip the people who will spend many years building them. Considering that this will be a long-term project that will involve huge swathes of the province in question, it will almost certainly need to be done with the cooperation of the Elector Count in question. That makes Stirland the natural choice for the first place to start rolling out the tributaries - you have significant history and a good working relationship with the powers there, and more than most provinces it has a strong interest in keeping the levels of ambient magical energies in check. The wind blowing from Sylvania currently bodes ill for a lot of towns and villages in the more eastern parts of Central and Southern Stirland.

Sadly, deploying them within Sylvania is not going to be a possibility. They need to be within a few miles of a functioning Waystone to work, and between its own history and the destruction of Mordheim, the Waystone Network has very little presence within Sylvania.

"At this point we're not talking about modifying or adding on to the network of Waystones," you're currently explaining reassuringly to Roswita. "We're using tributaries to redirect magical energy to where they can be more reliably gathered by the existing ones. Unlike the Waystones themselves, there's no active magic occurring within them. It's akin to street gutters - they don't actually apply any force to make the movement happen, it's just supplying a place where it will move by itself."

"And the process of creation? My understanding is that there's no form of magic that cannot go wrong, no matter how benign the intended result."

"The danger there is in the water spirit being used breaking free of the control of the caster. But since the ritual uses the nature of a water spirit as a metaphysical template, rather than using them as a power source, even the least of them will suffice. That keeps the danger to the caster manageable and eliminates any danger to the general area."

"I assume you intend for this to be performed by Jade Wizards?"

"That would be a likely candidate, but if you wish to make it, the decision is yours to make. Anyone capable of magic and familiar with water spirits could do the job. The Taalites and Rhyans come to mind, or the Cult of Altaver, or we could see about bringing in spirit-wranglers from Kislev. Or this might be within the wheelhouse of the Council of Manhorak."

She considers that for a while. "I suppose the least disruption would come from using the Jades. Especially since I presume the ritualists would tend to be less eccentric than the Battle Wizards."

"Significantly so. The Jade Wizard that is part of this Project was actually working in Sylvania until recently - Magister Tochter Grunfeld."

"She was working the Hunter's Hills, right? Something about clearing the worst of the taint out of the soil?" You nod. "If she's willing to vouch for the Jade candidates, I'll sign off on it. I want them to touch base with the Council, though, make sure none of the spirits they round up for it are significant to them. What would the timetable be?"

"It would take a full survey of the existing Waystone and tributary network to say for sure, but my best estimate right now would be about five Wizard-years of effort to really nail down the eastern edges of Central and Southern Stirland, and about the same to bolster the network throughout the rest of Stirland."

"Ten years, just to bolster the least part of a largely intact network in a single province?"

"Ten years for wholesome harvests and healthy children and restful corpses. Ten years to change the world that Stirlandians live in."

She smiles at that. "Very well. You have my authorisation."

---

[Rolling...]

Tochter confers with her College and then disappears up north to winkle out her quarry: a trio of Journeymen with a knack for rituals, currently employed by the swineherds of Grimmenhagen. After prying them loose she, Max, and Niedzwenka take them into Kislev for a crash course in Scythian, spirit-wrangling, and the ritual of Aethyric Impluvium, and then back south to Stirland to begin their work. Meanwhile, you, Zlata, and Cadaeth have been busy surveying the Waystone network of the Stirland-Sylvanian border, finding it in about as good a condition as you could reasonably have hoped. It seems to serve as an eye-opening experience for the two, as Zlata had thought that the hard-worn stubbornness of a people who only know a life under siege only existed in Kislev, and Cadaeth had required several patient evenings explaining to her that no, there really are no other defences beyond the scant few that are plainly visible. She'd been rather taken aback when you told her that if something came from the east that those defences could not handle, then in all likelihood any of the local population that couldn't or wouldn't flee would die. She'd been significantly more taken aback when she heard the same from a local, who then told her that it had happened twice in the past century, but not to worry, if it happened again the restless dead wouldn't have long to chew on their bones before the Hunter's Daughter would bring the army down upon them.

The Journeymen make tentative contact with the Council of Manhorak, confirm that the lesser naiads they were planning on cajoling into service bear no relation to the Swamp-Gods of Sylvania, and then begin their work with a gusto. A gusto that will undoubtedly fade as it sinks in that they'll be spending the next four years of their lives on this. But Roswita had had the local authorities thoroughly explain that the Wizards were taking away the bad magic and making sure it would stay away and that's all that they were doing, and then you'd had a word in a few ears to make it known that the lads could guarantee a good harvest or a bountiful lambing season in their off hours if they were made to feel welcome. A boring but important job somewhere that appreciates you with plenty of opportunities to make friends or shillings on the side is far from the worst of assignments a Wizard could be assigned.

[Stirland Tributaries underway. Estimated completion date: late 2493.]

---

"There is a wagon of charcoal in Middenheim," you say to Eike one morning. "I want there to be a wagon of charcoal in Tor Lithanel. Everything about how that happens is up to you."

Eike takes only a moment to adjust, and frowns in thought as she considers the idea. "Does it have to be that specific charcoal that gets there?"

"It does not."

She stays motionless for some time, her lips moving as she thinks. "Very well, Master," she remembers to say to you before she turns and walks out the room at a pace just under a jog, her fingers moving to a scroll pouch on her belt where she keeps maps. You smile and turn to other business.

When you try to check in a few days later, you find that she's sold the charcoal and is nowhere to be found. You raise an eyebrow at that, but decide against chasing her down immediately. If she's prone to slacking off in the absence of any direct supervision, it's best to learn that now.

---

You see Eike next in Tor Lithanel, where she nervously leads you into a room where she's drawn a large map of the northern Empire onto a chalkboard and festooned it with many paths in different colours of chalk. "As I'm sure you're aware, Master," she begins as soon as you take your seat, "the direct route from Middenheim through the Schadensumpf is possible, as the villagers of Kammendun should be able to navigate the route with some trial and error and already have established respect for the Eonir. But it would still be a difficult and miserable trip, and the conditions might be damaging to the cargo if the route is used for anything else.

"Another obvious route is along the Northern Road to Salzenmund and from there to Tor Lithanel, but the Eonir are currently against them being easily accessible from Nordland and the Nordlanders themselves seem likely to interfere with the route, or at the very least toll it ruinously. Salzenmund was, after all, the heart of extracting wealth from the Laurelorn, and it seems very unlikely that any route could involve it without them sticking their oars in.

"I considered a route from Westerland, going from Loenen to the Se-Athil path or even directly from Aarnau to the tower itself, but involving Marienburg's territory in this seemed potentially problematic, as did sourcing charcoal from somewhere where the easiest source would be the Laurelorn forest itself. A route up the Schaukel from the Sea of Claws would also be possible - I understand that is the planned route for imports of stone - but the Eonir vessels that will be making those trips aren't built yet, and they're still leery about foreign visitors to their city.

"So in the end, I settled on the village of Hargendorf, at the mouth of the Demst. I told them the Eonir could be pacified by sacrificing trees of the Empire to them, as it was the killing of the trees of Laurelorn that had angered them in the first place. That I'd have a cargo of 'sacrifices' delivered to them, and that they'd be paid to move it upriver and drop it off at a marked point, and if all goes well this could mean lasting safety for Hargendorf." She wraps up her presentation and looks to you for your evaluation, trying and failing to keep nervous expectation from her expression.

"It's a clever framing - almost true and playing to their biases," you muse. "It would be hard to convince Nordlanders so close to the lost villages to see the Eonir as trading partners, but a forest horror that needs propitiating is a lot easier to fit into their current mindset."

"The other pieces of the route were easy, it's only twenty miles along an established path from the drop-off point to Tor Lithanel, which is doable in a single day so Cityborn can fetch it. It was trivial to find ships sailing from Erengrad willing to drop off charcoal in Hargendorf - most of them hug the coast anyway, and a number of them anchor overnight in the shelter of the nearby islands of Lugren and Odner just a few miles along the coast from Hargendorf. The prices at Erengrad for charcoal are fairly competitive, sourced from the nearby Grovod Wood, so the route is profitable as-is. If better river-boats were supplied to Hargendorf, or if the Forestborn can be convinced to allow a towpath along the river, then the route can be scaled up massively without problem. If this is to be a long-term concern, then a deal with the Boyar of Chebokov or the establishment of charcoaling and shipping infrastructure in Ostland would be viable ways to increase the route's efficiency, but the overall return on investment would likely be less than other opportunities currently available to the EIC."

You run your eye over the figures in question and nod. "Couldn't have done better myself," you say honestly. You'd expected the trade route to run at a loss since it's more of a convenience than a need, meaning there's only so much you could charge for it before buyers decide they don't really want it that much. For her to have delivered a result that is not only profitable, but also scalable and helping ease some of the anti-Eonir sentiment in Nordland, is not only a better result than you expected from her, but also a better job than you expected at all. You suppose that shouldn't have been quite so unexpected - you might have a great deal more life experience than her in general, but she did spend many years completely dedicated to learning the workings of the EIC. You'll need to make visits to Hargendorf and Erengrad to establish a recurring supply and make sure that everyone knows better than to try anything clever, but that still leaves you with a few extra weeks that you didn't expect to have available to you.

[New EIC Operation: Charcoal from Erengrad to Tor Lithanel via Hargendorf.]

Stat discovered: Stewardship: 6+3+1+1=11
Trait discovered:
Keep The Wagons Rolling: Eike believes implicitly that logistical efficiency is absolutely essential for the continued survival of the Empire and its allies. +2 Learning, +3 Stewardship.

With your and Eike's time freed up, you reward her by personally supervising and tutoring her through her expanding of her magical capabilities.

[Studying Spells: Learning, 73+13+20(Grey Tower)+5(Library: Ulgu)+10(Tutoring)=121.]

Sleep and Drop prove to come easily to Eike. Both of them rely on the same basic principle of bypassing someone's mind to nudge their body into performing a specific action, so everything she grasps about one is mostly transferrable to grappling with the other, so she boasts a grasp of them in less than a week.

[Studying Spells: Learning, 31+13+20(Grey Tower)+5(Library: Ulgu)+10(Tutoring)=79.]

Magic Dart proves trickier for Eike to grasp, but as it is her very first offensive spell, you do not discourage her from taking every step carefully in wrapping her mind around how to turn one's will into an offensive weapon. Several times as you patiently walk her through it you have to refuse to reminisce about the time you accidentally knocked a knight unconscious with the spell. In time, it, too, falls under Eike's control.

[Studying Spells: Learning, 10+13+20(Grey Tower)+5(Library: Ulgu)+10(Tutoring)=58.]

Sounds proves most difficult of all, and you spend some time watching her grapple with the magical fundamentals of the spell before her voice growing fainter as the days go on clues you in to something deeper going on here. With gentle effort you manage to draw out of her just enough to learn that being the bastard daughter of a professional concubine has left its mark on the girl, and as you go over your interactions with her you can see how a deep instinct for not drawing unnecessary attention has influenced her behaviour in the past. She's having trouble with a spell to create sounds because part of her believes fundamentally that she needs to avoid making noise. You allow the subject to be dropped, much to Eike's relief, and move on to something more psychologically compatible with her.

Trait discovered:
Seen, Not Heard: Eike learned at a very young age not to draw attention to herself, an instinct that serves her very well in some ways but holds her back in others. +3 Intrigue, +1 Piety, -2 Diplomacy

[Studying Spells: Learning, 75+13+20(Grey Tower)+5(Library: Ulgu)+10(Tutoring)=123.]

Aethyric Armour is a very basic but very powerful spell, as the effect it has grows with the caster's grasp of Ulgu. There were times during your first fumbling steps as a Journeywoman where it probably saved your life, and at the very least reduced the number of scars you accumulated over the years. As Eike's grasp of Ulgu is bolstered by it having left its mark upon her, you judge it within her capability to safely and reliably cast the spell, so you set about teaching it to her. Not the textbook version of the spell - you'd need to get the textbook to remember what that actually was - but your own, personal understanding of it that you've developed and refined over many adventures. Most would be unable to grasp the concepts and ideas that have never before needed to venture outside of your own head, but Eike's understanding of Ulgu has already been shaped enough by your tutelage for her to follow along without even realizing that she's having to do so. When she first performs the spell successfully and magic spreads not just over her skin but through the muscles underneath, the rush of pride you feel buoys you for days.

Updated Eike spell list:
Drop, Glowing Light, Magic Dart, Marsh Lights, Sleep
Aethyric Armour (Mastery - Indefatigable)

---

After travelling to Nuln, you find Grand Count Konstantin von Liebwitz where he can usually be found in recent months: shouting instructions over the din of construction and excavation in the sinkhole where the Imperial Gunnery School used to be. One of his attendants sees you approach and shouts something in his ear, and he tromps over to you immediately. "This is what victory looks like, apparently," he yells as he leads you towards a quieter corner of the work area. "I'd rather have lost my bloody palace. If the amount of cannon this was costing the Empire were lost on a battlefield instead, the world would be aghast."

"How long until you can resume production?" you half-shout.

"The other forges in the city are retooling to pick up the slack, but they'll be worse guns for it. We haven't even got the foundations down here yet, we have to work around the excavations still underway, which can't be hurried because most of what we're looking for are books and documents. My grandchildren's grandchildren are going to be dealing with people trying to make claims about records lost down here. Thankfully we won't have lost any actual capabilities, everything we did in the Gunnery School, we had someone who knows how to do it over in Karak Eight Peaks."

"That rather neatly illustrates the purpose of a project I'm working on. I've been building a library in Karak Eight Peaks to preserve the sorts of records and knowledge that are too often lost in disasters like this, and the Universität District is one of the greatest centres of learning on the continent. I want your help in convincing the colleges and universities of Nuln of the wisdom of allowing my scribes access to their libraries. In exchange, I can offer you the resources and expertise of the Karaz-a-Karak Metalsmiths Guild in restoring the foundries of the Gunnery School - all to the latest human designs, and to the highest Dwarven standards."

He considers that. "You're phrasing this like you're doing these librarians a favour, but they'd squeal like stuck pigs if they were forced into that sort of deal, wouldn't they?"

"Many probably will, yes."

"You get me those Dwarves and Verena'll need earplugs, you have my word."

[Rolling...]

---

The Grand Count proves as good as his word, and then even more so to an extent that might be considered concerning. As soon as the Dwarves arrive in Nuln and set to work, he begins having words with the various institutions within his city, which you hear later turned very stern every time he hit the slightest hint of resistance. The Elementalists, who the Grand Count had apparently included in the deal, apparently became very cooperative the moment they were told that the Grand Count would happily 'trade the lot of you for a spiked culverin', and that they should be rather thankful that he'd been given better terms than that - which might have rather soured things with them if their leader had not spun it to the rest of the organization as a chance to clear out their stacks for free without actually losing access to any of the books within, which is quite a coup since space is at a premium within the Universität. The other institutions settle into a more neutral state about the circumstances once it's firmly established that they won't have to bear the expense of copying the books. While they're not happy about being strongarmed, that they will have access in perpetuity to the copies kept safe in a Karak does appeal to them, as Waaagh Grom still lives vividly in their institutional memories. Another factor is that they're unlikely to see a library all the way over in Karak Eight Peaks as a serious competitor to their own libraries.

The cloud to all these silver linings is that the local Verenans apparently got their noses quite out of joint when they learn about all this after the deed was already done, with nobody so much as checking in with those that considered themselves the divinely-appointed authority over libraries. They raised objections with the various Colleges, who had no desire to rehash the entire business and told them to butt out. They raised them with the Elector Count, and then had no real counterargument for when he asked how many cannon foundries they were going to build for him. So their ire turns, inevitably, to you. They aren't quite denouncing you from the pulpit, but this is likely to have an influence on any future dealings with the Cult of Verena.

Still, if not an unalloyed success, it is very much a success. Having unfettered access to the libraries of the Grand University of Nuln, the Imperial School of Engineers, the Imperial Gunnery School, and the Nuln branch of the Aquila Academy is quite impressive even before you begin to count up the seemingly endless number of lesser institutions that Nuln seems to be absolutely swarming with. And there's a few interesting surprises among the more expected volumes you now have possession of from the Elementalists.

Spoiler: Books acquired

Humorism +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Hydrology +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Meteorology +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Mineralogy +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Physics +2 - Extensive Imperial

Chaos Dwarves +9 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial / Extensive and Esoteric Dwarven / Skaven (Only Esoteric) (from +8)
Ogre Kingdoms +8 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Extensive and Obscure Dwarven (from +6)

Architecture +7 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Extensive Dwarven (from +4)
Medicine +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial

Ghyran - Life Magic +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial (from +2)
Aqshy - Fire Magic +6 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Indic (from +2)
Azyr - Celestial Magic +5 -Extensive and Esoteric Imperial (from +2)
Elementalism +6 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Asur
Potions +5 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial / Extensive Kislevite
Elementals +6 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Kislevite
Gut Magic +2 - Extensive Imperial

Manann, Lord of the Seas +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Rhya, Earth Mother +2 - Extensive Imperial
Taal, King of the Wild +2 - Extensive Imperial
Dazh, God of Fire and Sun +2 - Extensive Kislevite
Addaioth, Bringer of Wrath and Fire +2 - Asrai, Asur
Hukon, the Sunderer +2 - Obscure Asur
Great Maw +1 - Imperial
Hashut +3 - Extensive Imperial / Dwarven

---

Codifying Rite of Way is in some ways easier than it would be for other spells, and in some ways much harder. The core of the spell is a heavily modified Skywalk, and those modifications were ones you made entirely 'by the book' instead of based in some entirely personal conception of Ulgu that needs to be translated, so that part is very easy to get down on parchment. The difficult part is instructing the spell where Skywalk needs to go, and in doing so simultaneously over a wide stretch of track and continuously as you advance across the terrain, while also maintaining the outflow of those Skywalks and of the underlying delivery mechanism. It's a mindset somewhere between multitasking and meditation, and a difficult one to communicate by written word alone. But that's what you have to do - if you need to be around to explain and clarify, then the spell dies with you. For this spell to become part of the Grey Order's corpus, it needs to still be learnable from parchment alone, long after you're dead and gone.

[Codifying Rite of Way: Learning, 68+29+5(Library: Ulgu)=102.]

There is no moment of inspiration, nor any moment of great struggle. It is just day after day turning into week after week of grappling with your personal conception of Ulgu to try to warp it into something that there are words to describe. Several times you find yourself prodding at the Coin you wear around your neck, wondering if your prayer for assistance has gone unheard, or if some greatly distracting event you'll now never hear about has been diverted away from you. At long, long last you turn a small stack of drafts into a single scroll - tradition dictates that spells are always written on scrolls - and send it away to the Grey College for evaluation.

Instead of the expected response from the Library of the Grey College, the first response you get is sealed with a coat of arms you don't recognize, and find within a missive describing a battle in the Furdienst, a wetland of some sort just downstream of Altdorf, where an attempted colonization of it by Fimir was detected and destroyed by the Knights of Judgement with the assistance of a Grey Wizard attaché, without which it would have been impossible as the terrain there is apparently notoriously variable. The only time you've heard of such an order is in the context of the Night of a Thousand Arcane Duels, where it rode through the streets of Altdorf to assist the Grey Order. Learning that they still exist answers one question and raises many more, none of which are answered by the brief missive. Following soon after is a much more prosaic note from the Library confirming that the spell has been judged learnable and useful, and has been added to the corpus of the Grey Order's Battle Magic.

[Rite of Way codified, proved in battle, and adopted. +8 College Favour.]

Your other academic endeavour is an attempt to extract useful intelligence from the Only Gork business without disclosing the part where you may have technically, briefly, and inadvertantly become an Avatar of Mork. This proves easier said than done, as your conclusions about the nature of that shrine largely come from the words spoken through you, and it's hard to justify reaching the conclusions you have if you invent a fictional scenario where you simply stabbed your way through the Black Orc attendants without anything unexpected happening. Leaning heavily on your reputation for insight into the Greenskin, you draw from attestations in human and Dwarven writings of historical Waaaghs to gather evidence for the overall point you are trying to make, and as you do so the paper stops being about a single encounter and starts being a hypothesis where the Shrine of Only Gork is merely one point among many. You draw a continuum where on one side can be found Night, Forest, and Swamp Goblins, and on the other are Black and Savage Orcs, with the 'normal' Waaaghs containing the 'regular' examples of Orcs and Goblins falling in the middle.

You use Grom the Paunch and his slaying of all the Orcish Big Bosses of the Gutstabba Tribe as an example of an eruption of 'Morkish' sentiment, and Morglum Necksnappa and his claim that 'da east belongs to da Orcs' as a 'Gorkish' counterexample. Bax Deadtoof of the Bloody Sun Boyz and his 'Six Goblin Suit' joins the fray, as does Drilla Gitsmash, self-proclaimed King of the Dark Lands, and his regular assaults on Night Goblin strongholds. Against them emerges Snitgit, the legendary Black Gobbo, hated by Dwarves for his many thefts of their treasures, as does Great Grillzer-Griff Makiki da Cunning, leader of the Wolf Rider nomads who travel freely throughout the Badlands in defiance of all territorial claims made by other tribes. But you feel in your bones the absence of a centrepiece, twin exemplars of Cunning and Brutality to cap off the paper and hammer the point truly home, but they fail to make themselves known no matter how many records you delve into - no cunningest of all Goblins, no mightiest of all Orcs. You frown to yourself and search for the origin of that sentiment within you, but you can find nothing to logically explain why you're so sure that something should be here, but isn't. You swallow your misgivings and put the finishing touches on the paper.

[Writing about Only Gork: Learning, 41+29+4(Library: Waaagh Magic)=74.]
[Making a larger point: Learning, 54+29+12(Library: Greenskins)=85.]

[Faultlines in the Greenskin Continuum, 2490. Subject: Uncommon, +0. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Compelling, +1. Varied, +1. Alien, +1. Tactically Relevant, +1. Speculative, -2. Total: +4.]



Thus concludes the work Mathilde performed these past months, but not every waking moment was filled with work. With whom did she spend her free time? The five with the most votes will be chosen, not counting those locked in.

[+] Social interaction initiated by someone else (locked in)

Laurelorn
[ ] House Filuan
House Filuan seems to be pursuing the import of large amounts of marble, much more than might be needed for small goods or maintenance. See if you can find out what sort of construction project might be in the works.
[ ] Swordplay
Test your newly-completed swordfighting style against the swordsmen of Tor Lithanel.

Karak Eight Peaks
[ ] Sofia
Meet and learn a bit about Panoramia's new Apprentice, Sofia de Siernos.
[ ] Gretel
She's apparently getting involved in the Karaz Ankor's ambitions in the Border Princes.
[ ] Okri
You've met Loremaster Okri of Karak Eight Peaks once before. Pay him a visit and see how his great ambitions for heavily-armed Ironbreakers delivered by Gyrocarriage are going.

Foreign Relations
[ ] Middenland
See how the Ulricans are going with their new Eonir coreligionists.
[ ] Nordland
See what's going on with the Ulrican schismatics that Nordland is backing.
[ ] Wissenland
Though the Elector Count is his usual self, some of their actions recently have hinted at the hand of someone a great deal defter. Investigate who took the job of his Spymaster after you turned it down.
[ ] The Black Water Canal
Pay another visit to the canal project, and see if there's any further signs of sabotage.
[ ] Druchii Diplomats
Check in on these unexpected visitors to Tor Lithanel.

Friends Abroad

Following Up
[ ] Amber College
Check in on the salamanders.
[ ] Gold College
See what's become of their research into Skaven technology.
[ ] Skull River Ambush
Look into the investigation of the mining of the Skull River, and any consequences of it.
[ ] Elementalism
Now that you're sitting on a massive stockpile of magical texts, explore what 'Elementalism' actually is from an inside perspective.



- There will be a six hour moratorium to allow for people to suggest social actions.
- The thread was invited to brainstorm ideas for Eike's charcoal assignment here, which ended up giving Eike enough ideas that she came up with something quite suitable.
- If there's a book topic that you think the Elementalists should have had - not that you wanted them to have had, something that it's so self-evident that they would have it that you think the lack of it is an oversight on my part - let me know.
- No, I did not forget the Coin was applied to the Rite of Way codification. As it happened, Ranald didn't have anywhere he could make a significant difference in a matter of Mathilde quietly sitting in a room and writing, so he intervened elsewhere to get it a better reception. Sometimes things just don't have that much random chance (or dice rolls) for Ranald to stick his oar into.

 

[Boney]

Spoiler: Voting results

[*] Elementalism
[*] Sofia
[*] Gretel
[*] Gold College
[*] House Filuan

Tally

With your unexpected bounty of Elementalist texts at your disposal, you dedicate a portion of your limited free time over the next few weeks to going through them - not enough to develop a true understanding of its intricacies, but enough to satisfy your own curiosity on the matter.

The Eight Winds of Magic are, at least in the eyes of the Colleges, the 'natural' state of magic. When they stagnate or are forced to intermix, they become Dhar, the noxious, corruptive energy of Dark Magic. But when they diffuse thinly enough into natural matter the Eight Winds become a single variety of energy known as Earthbound magic. According to Teclisean doctrine, this is the energy drawn on by all practitioners of magic that use neither Winds nor Dark Magic. Also according to Teclisean doctrine, this means that these other magical practices can only ever be lesser to magic that uses the Winds, because where the Winds constantly blow in from the poles, Earthbound magic can only be created gradually and in small amounts, and most of it ends up being drawn into the Waystone Network. It would take an exhausting amount of effort or infrastructure to bring together enough Earthbound energy for a single spell of any real significance, whereas multiple Battle Magic spells can be performed under almost all circumstances using ambient Winds. The upside is that this Earthbound magic can be shaped into just about any theoretical framework the caster can imagine.

The problem with this theory is that the Elementalists do not seem to obey it. Under this theoretical framework, there should be hard limitations on what their magic should be capable of, limitations that they breach with frustrating regularity. The Colleges have sought many, many times to find out how they're doing this, because if they're doing it by lacing Fire Elementals with Aqshy they're infringing on an Imperially-mandated Guild monopoly, and if they're doing it with the only other energy source within Teclisean framework then they're on a fast and ugly road to damnation and in dire need of being put to fire and sword.

Of course, you're not the first College Wizard to get your hands on Elementalist texts. Probably not even the hundredth. But what you do have is an extraordinarily wide cross-section of their literature, covering not just the flashy spellbooks and the bombastic philosophy but also the dry theory and meandering debates that underpin it all. It is in these that you expect to find the beginnings of an understanding.

---

Earthbound magic, it is widely known to the Wizards of the Colleges, has no inherent nature.

Earthbound magic, it is widely known to the Elementalists, inherits a nature from the material it resides within.

You spend a frustrating amount of time bouncing between these two seemingly irreconcilable facts. Earthbound magic is everywhere, and to your senses it is plain as day that it retains the same neutrality of nature wherever it resides. You skim through volume after volume searching for some explanation for why the Elementalists would pin their whole profession on something so plainly untrue, and you overlook the key to it all time and time again because of institutional ego. Time and time again you find it repeated within the books that Elementalists should avoid magical clashes with wielders of the Winds, and time and time again you react to it with only a smile. It's only in a treatise of an exceptionally boring Elementalist that you find the usually unwritten assumption actually written: that while Earthbound magic resonates within the material elements, it resonates much more strongly with the Winds that it originally was.

Of course you cannot see the elemental resonance within Earthbound magic - just by being in the same room as it, you have reverted it to its original nature. No experiment performed by a College Wizard, or performed within a College laboratory, will ever see anything but the neutral state of Earthbound magic. Come to think of it, anywhere in Altdorf would be subject to the same disruption, as for almost two centuries it has been constantly awash with the Wind of the current Supreme Patriarch. It is something like if you concluded that snow was a myth because you performed all your studies of it in the summer.

Having been slowly and agonizingly drawn to the conclusion that maybe the fundamental basis of Elementalism does exist, you return to the beginning and reread it with a slightly more open mind: Earthbound magic drawn from one of the four elements retains a resonance with that element, so it is more easily able to manipulate it. Earthbound magic drawn from water resonates with water, and thus can manipulate it more easily. Doing so to water that is itself also awash with Earthbound magic allows for the creation of Elementals, mobile accretions of that element able to perform simple tasks. By exploiting this resonance, and offloading some of the magical burden to energies already present within the manipulated element, the Elementalists are capable of magical feats far beyond what the raw power of the magic they're channelling would suggest.

It all makes sense. It is a very basic form, possibly the most basic form, of the conceptual resonance that Hedge Magic seems to rely upon. It explains why they are sometimes seen within the Elven quarter of Marienburg - because Elves do not transform themselves or their environment with a chosen Wind in the same way that College Wizards do, so they are able to identify and exploit the resonance for simple tasks when using Aqshy or Ghyran or Azyr would be overkill. Put that way, it slots neatly into the Cardinal understanding of the Winds that Elves prefer over the Elemental and Mystical understandings. Elemental in the Wind sense, that is - is even Reikspiel itself conspiring to confound the Colleges in this matter? Those two concepts have different words in Eltharin.

Might this, you cannot help but wonder, be part of the nature of Ice Magic? Ice in the Empire might be a transitory thing, but in Kislev it never entirely disappears, only withdraws to the mountains and glaciers. Could this permanence allow it to acquire a nature of its own for Earthbound magic to resonate with? If not on its own, then with the attentions of a God and the scavenged infrastructure of the Waystone network bent to this end?

With curiosity sated and institutional ego bruised, you return the books to the clutches of the Librarian-We and turn your attention back to your duties.

---

Is a boatyard still a boatyard if it has not been used as such for four thousand years? If you put enough effort into it, yes. Internal walls older than the Empire that had turned the vast emptiness into living spaces are knocked down and ancient schematics are consulted to restore the framework that will support the weight of the ship as it is constructed. The ship would look like a narrower and more streamlined version of the Wargalleys of the Empire's navy if it weren't for the addition of an 'outrigger', a smaller, secondary hull parallel to the main one. This, you are told, allows it to maintain stability despite the narrowness of the hulls, making them faster and nimbler than the single-hulled ships of the Empire without being any more susceptible to capsizing. If there is a downside to this design, it's that it can't cope with quite as narrow a river as a single-hulled ship can, and that it can't be portaged by the brute strength of the crew alone.

All very interesting - especially so to Eike, apparently, who explained all that to you and finds every opportunity to slip away and bombard the shipwrights with further questions over the next few weeks - but you're less interested in the how than you are the why. The quantities of marble involved here are far in excess of any conventional need, so there must be some sort of grand-scale construction project in the works. Are they building a road? Rebuilding Kor Immarmor or the Path of Stone? Expanding the Tower of Se-Athil? Adding a fourth tower to Tor Lithanel's undercrowded skyline? Every possibility has knock-on effects on the internal politics of Laurelorn, and possibly the external politics with the provinces neighbouring it.

The answer, as it turns out, is both simpler and more complicated than you expected: Tor Lithanel will, at some point in the near future when the time is right and sufficient political capital is brought to bear, expand its walls for the first time in its history.

Your immediate response: doesn't the balance of power among the classes of the city depend on the Great Houses holding a near-monopoly on living space?

The answer: Yes, which means that any Great House that hasn't found a novel means of shoring up their influence is going to find themselves outflanked by those that have. Novel means, like House Teleri shipping marble from Karak Vlag via Praag, or House Filuan erecting the new city blocks, or House Mardil importing Runic luxury goods, or House Yavanna bringing in novel new spices by the saddlebagful. From a neutral point of view they could be seen as only breaking even, but in the zero-sum internal politics of Tor Lithanel, others losing is just as good as you winning. In a stroke it will turn isolationism into a handicap, and it will do so in a way that it will be difficult to argue against without undermining the isolationists even further.

It's somehow pragmatic and idealistic at the same time, a ruthlessly populist move by the Queen and her supporters. It might entrench the most dedicated of the isolationists and intensify their rhetoric and tactics, but you'd be surprised if it didn't also peel away at least Miriel and Yavanna, which would secure the currently razor-thin margins in the High Council. It does, however, rely on the queen's loyalists among the Great Houses actually having novel means of shoring up their support, and though it's entirely possible, verging on likely, that there's elements of the political situation that you're currently unaware of, it does seem as if at least three of those in favour of contact with humans have yet to secure those means - Orodreth, Maeglin, and Nienna. While that's not your problem to solve, you do make a mental note to keep an eye out for opportunities to work them into future dealings.

Skills discovered:
Naval Tactics: Eike has a fascination with the many historical sea battles in the Sea of Claws. +1 Martial
Naval Tactics - The Empire (1/3)

---

When an Apprentice whose future in the Colleges of Magic seems to be in doubt meets a Lord Magister of the Grey Order, there is always going to be fear. But the exact nature of that fear can tell you a lot about that person. Fear, to Sofia de Siernos, is as inescapable and constant a part of the world as the sun and the stars. When her affinity for magic became known to the villagers of Siernos, the sanctuary of the Colleges of Magic was a very long way away. The exact details of the journey she took are unknown, the intentions she took it with are questioned, and the lessons that it taught her have knapped all the soft edges from her soul.

So when you meet her, her first instinct is to evaluate whether to attack or flee, and her first conscious action is to quash that instinct with ease born of a great deal of practice. The quaver to her voice is one she has deliberately chosen not to conceal, and she knows that you know this. Her life has been an unnecessary tragedy, and her death may be a necessary one. What do you say to someone like that?



That's not a rhetorical question. What do you say? Pep talks, threats, commiserations, specific lines of questions, and silence are all valid options, as is whatever else you might think of. You're not going to fix all her problems with a single motivational speech, but you might lay the foundation of a relationship that could help.

[ ] Write in



- There will be a eighteen hour moratorium.
- This vote is because I genuinely do not know what Mathilde could, would, or should say to Sofia in this situation.
- I might use the option with the most votes, or I might synthesize the two or three highest results, depending on the results and how well they might work together.
- The exact circumstances of this meeting have been left deliberately vague, and will be decided by me based on what makes the most sense for the results of the vote.