Arodus 12, 4712 (Kalsgard, Evening)
T
his is the second time in my life that I’ve watched someone destroy a shrine to Shelyn.
I was barely 12 years old when the Cathedral in Sandpoint burned to the ground. My bedroom faced the cluster of chapels and I remember being woken in the middle of the night by the glow of the flames and shadows flickering on the walls. I just sat there in bed, paralyzed with equal parts fascination and fear, watching as the fire spread and engulfed the entire complex. It was maybe a hundred feet away, but I could feel the heat of it through the open window. Then dad burst into my room and pulled me out.
The rest is a jumble of memories, but I do recall quite vividly the stables catching fire, followed by the White Deer. The flames encircled the homes along our block, raining hot embers into the sea as it spread. Dad said it was pure luck that so few buildings burned (and that our house was one of those spared), though I supposed those more directly impacted, like Ana, would have a different opinion.
At the time, the entire town thought it some terrible accident. Years later we learned the truth, and it was far uglier than most could imagine: Nualia had burned the cathedral and murdered the man who had raised her.
I still remember the words she spoke to me on the cliffs that evening. It gets worse.
There were reasons for what Nualia became. Her father. Sandpoint. Delek. Lamashtu. She was far from blameless, but they were all part of how she got there.
You can at least look at that fire and trace it back to her anger, no matter how distorted or misguided her thinking had become. This business in Kalsgard, though, was just a callous decision of convenience. What was the best way to slow us down, and preoccupy Uksahkka’s protectors? Destroy the shrine that sheltered her, of course. What a fine distraction.
It was also very personal. I wasn’t much of a devotee at twelve. Back then, I was still struggling with the teachings of Irori. Today was much different.
This hurt.
Two enormous earth elementals stood in the rubble and were pounding on what remained of the temple. I didn’t even stop to think: I just acted. Before the others could move, I had conjured a sphere of water ten feet across and engulfed the nearest of the two. While my friends moved in to attack the second, I rolled the ball with its prize out into the street and as far away from the shrine as the spell would allow.
I heard a strange bird call and saw the remaining earth elemental turn its attention to us, abandoning its demolition. Radella pointed out that the large raven with the red feathers was there, and that it dissolved into smoke before her eyes (but not before she put an arrow into it). Etayne and I exchanged a silent conversation, and then we both said “druid” at the same time.
Soon after, I saw the priest, Lin-Po, lying in the street, unconscious. I summoned a lantern archon to assist, first to aid him, and then to help us with the fight.
It took nearly all of us to bring the elemental down.
A thought occurred to me then: What if I hadn’t been able to stop the first one? What if we had to fight both at the same time? It makes me shudder thinking about it, but fortunately we didn’t have to find out.
We barely had to do anything with the second. The summons that was keeping it here expired shortly after my own spell did. Good enough. The point was to save Yin-Po and what was left of Shelyn’s shrine, not to have some epic battle to the death in the streets of Kalsgard. Besides, none of us wanted to be here long enough to face questions from the city guard.
I guess I wasn’t shocked when Uksahkka turned up missing. Remember that part about destroying Shelyn’s shrine as a convenient distraction? The door to the cellar that served as her safe house had been forced open. Inside, Radella found a dart laced with poison, and a black feather much like the ones we saw all over Brinewall. Much like the ones from Kikonu. We had a brief exchange about this with Yin-Po, and he suggested we may be dealing with something called a Yamabushi Tengu. They are a type of Oni; apparently the Tian demons take many forms, much as they do here. What that told me was that we have some research to do. All we’re missing is the time to do it.
And because apparently we hadn’t had enough surprises, the helmet we took from the funeral ship revealed itself to be an angel named Helgarval. Because, sure, why not?
He is a servant of Desna who had been investigating the Frozen Shadows, a criminal organization that has been infiltrating Kalsgard for years. Snorri Stone-Eye was involved with them, and the Rimerunners Guild is almost certainly one of their fronts.
Which is more or less a hint that we should be careful.
I’ll be honest here: I almost wasn’t.
Qatana and I loitered just up the block from the Rimerunners Guild building, located in the Jade Quarter along the riverfront, as Radella and Ivan broke in under the cover of invisibility. It was a long, long wait, and I kept thinking of ideas that could help distract the guards inside should something go awry. The longer I waited, the more aggressive my planning became, morphing from a distraction in case of trouble to just a way to wreck part of the building for good measure. At the top of the list was earth elementals since that seemed like poetic justice. Though mine would be considerably smaller and weaker than what we faced earlier, two or three of them could still make fast work of the masonry. Another idea was letting air elementals inside to play whirlwind, just to mess up the place. And the list went on.
See what I mean? I was letting what happened at Shelyn’s temple get the better of me, and the waiting and doing nothing was not helping.
Then Uksahkka emerged from the rear entrance, and I came to my senses. As we suspected, she had been shot with a poison dart to render her unconscious and then kidnapped. She woke up shackled in chains in a locked room in the Rimerunners Guild. Ivan and Radella had tended to her and engineered her escape without being detected, which is part of why their little foray was taking so long. I had Nihali send word to the others that we would be delayed. (As it turns out, they were dealing with their own problems: someone had implicated us in the poisoning death of a hunting dog, and that led to a very drunken confrontation with the dog’s owner in the pub where they were waiting for us. I got the short version of that story, and it was enough to convince me that the less I know about it, the better.)
Some time later, Radella and Ivan made their exit and in their hands was an impossible prize: the complete contents of the Rimerunners Guild’s secret vault. All of it liberated without raising a single guard’s suspicion that anyone had even entered the building, much less spent an hour inside looting it.
I was, and still am, stunned. I’ll admit that the bouillon is nice (I like to think of it as partial compensation for the grief these people have caused us), but the real treasure is a ledger and other business documents detailing the Guild’s affairs.
We are now looking for a place named Ravenscraeg. It’s a castle or keep of some sort, purchased from Snorri Stone-Eye three years ago, presumably while he was still living. The ledger details very large sums of money being transferred to Ravenscraeg on an ongoing basis, marked as “development expenses”. Kelda volunteered to discreetly dig around for information on Ravenscraeg (we warned her to be careful, though I think she has figured that out already), which should help since she knows the city and we don’t.
I am tired. It took hours to comb through those documents, even with Radella’s help. But I am writing because I can’t sleep. My thoughts keep returning to the shrine today. Was there something we could have done to prevent it?
I think there was. We deliberately took time to rest. We could have gone there directly after leaving the ship, but we were tired. Very, very tired. I understand the argument, and I didn’t disagree with it, but still…would that attack have happened if we had been there hours earlier? Even minutes earlier?
Part of me says that it wouldn’t have made a difference. Maybe they didn’t know where Uksahkka was, and they were following us (though that wouldn’t make me feel any better, as it would mean that we led them to her). Maybe they were going to raid the shrine anyway, and we just happened to have good timing (though not good enough). Or maybe they were just keeping an eye on her, and were forced to move because we did.
Those are all logical arguments, but they may also just be rationalizations. It’s hard to shake the feeling that we screwed up.
Arodus 13, 4712 (Kalsgard, Evening)
N
o one tried to kill us today.
The morning did not start particularly well. On our first full day in Kalsgard, Etayne spent most of her time in the Bone Quarter, keeping an eye on the caravan while also providing her services to the community. One of the people she befriended was a young Tian boy who she eventually learned was being paid to spy on us. She offered him some money to find out who was doing the asking, but he never returned. I made an offhand remark that night that our clumsy probing around had probably gotten him killed.
It turns out I was prescient. His body was found lying in the street by the river in the Jade Quarter just after sunrise. Someone had cut his throat.
On a lighter note, Kelda returned with some solid information on Ravenscrag. It is located in the cliffs bordering the Grungir Forest, a day’s ride south of Kalsgard. It’s named Ravenscrag because “only the ravens and crazy people can get to it”. I suggested we head there for some surveillance by air—specifically, by raven, which seemed apropos—but we all agreed to take a day to prepare first. We’ve been going too long without any breaks.
This meant I got to spend some time with Ameiko, which we hadn’t had much of together since Losthome. We borrowed Radella’s ring so she could move about the city without being an obvious target (which was weird because it was almost like sharing intimate details of your life with a complete stranger) and spent the day shopping with Koya for everything from art paper to clothing to some magic gear. Clothes shopping with Koya is a whole experience. Just ask Ivan.
We made three stops on the way back. The first was at a wizard academy so I could pick up a new spell we might need. The second was at what remained of the Shrine of Shelyn, where the rebuilding effort was already underway. Yin-Po was pleased to hear that we had found Uksahkka more or less unharmed and freed her from her captors, but less so to learn that the Rimerunners Guild was where she was being held. I suggested he not make this detail known.
The third stop was at the inn where we were supposedly still staying, despite having spent the last two nights with the caravan. I should have quit while we were ahead. Despite the lousy start, the day was actually going quite well, but I ruined it by insisting that we check on the rooms. To make sure the innkeeper hadn’t, say, assumed we had abandoned them and decided to sell off our stuff.
Sometime in the last 24 hours, based on when the rooms were last cleaned, intruders had forced their way into each one and searched them front to back, leaving a huge mess in their wake. Fortunately, none of us were stupid enough to leave anything valuable behind, so it was basically just our clothes that got tossed. But still. It soured my mood.
With the money raised by liquidating Snorri’s funerary treasure, three of the others and I were able to purchase rings that magically sustain us on minimal sleep and without food. They will take a week to attune, but once they do they should be a boon for our trip over the Crown by reducing the provisions we’ll need to carry. I am also learning to craft magic items of my own, and this will let me work at night, essentially giving me more hours in the day.
Speaking of food, even with the rings we were still short of our goal. Then Ivan suggested “Why not have multiple cooks?”
It was such an obvious idea that I can’t believe I had overlooked it.
1This is Kali spending a Hero Point.↵