Pharast 27, 4713 (afternoon, below the House of Withered Blossoms)

How long has this dungeon been here? What was its purpose? How long did it take to build it? Those questions are on my mind for some reason. Probably because it feels like we’ve just gotten started here. We travel farther and farther down this road and there’s just … more road.

All the excavation suggests a level of boredom that I can only begin to imagine. When you are held prisoner for eternity, though, I suppose the biggest challenge is occupying your time. The Five Storms’ solution was, apparently, to dig a big hole in the floor and just keep going. The Kami said they swore an oath to hold the oni prisoner here, but we don’t really know how long ago that was. Hundreds of years? Thousands? Longer? I suppose we should have asked, though I guess it doesn’t really matter. It was clearly a long time. Even with spells, all this could not have been done quickly.

Assuming, of course, that this was the work of the Five Storms. We don’t really know for sure. A more troubling answer is that it was just Munasukaru. I mean, if boredom was a problem for the oni before, imagine what it must be like for just one of them now. Abandoned by her peers, left with only hobgoblins and hill giants for company. Trapped here, unable to leave. That can’t be healthy, can it?

How long ago was their escape? Again, the Kami didn’t say (and, again, should have asked…) but we can do some math. The letter from Rokuro was written over 25 years ago; he and his family fled Minkai 30-some years before that. The Five Storms’ plans for Minkai didn’t unfold over night, so figure two or three generations as a starting point. That means Munasukaru has been a placeholder here for at least a century. Maybe even longer.

The hall where we were ambushed was filled with images of … disgusting acts. The oni chose a life of flesh and blood so that they could indulge in the pleasures of the former while spilling the latter. The carvings in that hall suggested a depravity and imagination in both that goes far beyond the worst of humanity. And those were just the carvings. What they did with the bodies of the men and women they had captured…

And what of the hobgoblins? I don’t know how or why they fit in, but they are here and they are a part of it. I just want to make that clear. All of this is on them, too.

We turned the tables on that ambush. Obviously. And I think we did it without spreading the alarm any further. So we have a reprieve for now.

The hobgoblins had enlisted the help of a pair of hill giants. That would normally be a problem but they succumbed to Qatana’s aura and turned on each other. I trapped them behind an invisible wall of force, and there they raged, beating on it and each other until one of their heads bloomed in crimson. We dropped the survivor when I dropped the wall.

Sometimes I think I am kidding myself.

(HouDarWhereABlossmwWhosThr)

I have two lives and two names and two histories but it’s not clear which are from me now and me before. I came into the Forest with companions that have never met yet we were all traveling together so that seems wrong somehow because we were always together and we spent a long and bitter cold winter crossing the ice in darkness where there were just plains, tundra and forest.

I remember growing up in Minkai and now I am returning there, a country I’ve never seen and only know from stories and memories. We traveled when I was a child growing up here and in Avistan so that makes sense but I haven’t spoken to my parents in so long that they must be worried I am lost or have died and I know they are worried because just last week they said so but that was not me it was me.

I know it wasn’t me because I remember dying here I felt my bones breaking and the darkness swallow me and I saw my body hung on a wall along the balcony where I was standing with my friends the ones that didn’t come with me before I died but came with me after. It is an odd thing to see yourself alive and dead and that too seems wrong because how can I be both? I cried out in anguish through her or was that through me? I helped take myself down from the wall and wrap myself in burial robes and that’s how I know I died and I know who killed me I know her name and I know what I have to do even if I don’t survive it. I didn’t choose to be here but I came here with a purpose and now there is another though they are the same except for why.

(evening, House of Withered Blossoms)

Yuka is still here. I can hear her at times, sometimes even see her. Or see myself as though I was her. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like there are moments when I don’t recognize myself, only sometimes it’s me as me, and others it’s me as her.

I … feel what she is feeling. I know what she wants and why. We can … communicate in a way. It’s not like talking, though sometimes I can hear her voice. It’s mostly … intent. And I can’t exactly ask her—myself?—questions, but when I have a question about something she knows I have memories that answer them. Her memories. My memories?

She wants us to kill Munasukaru. There is a burning intensity behind that. We were already on board with this plan, of course, and that seems to have satisfied her for now, and I no longer have the relentless whispering, begging, pleading. But she is still there, still speaking to me without speaking in a voice that isn’t mine.

She’s not hostile. It’s more like she’s … desperate, grieving, longing … all of these things. I can hear her now as I write this because I’ve opened myself up to her. She’s trapped here, bound by the unfairness of her death and the hatred it was borne from, much like a ghost only without the mindless, formless rage. (I want to say she’s lucky in that respect but that would be a callous dismissal, as though one would be “lucky” to lose only one arm instead of both.)

I don’t mind. Truth be told, I was curious. And maybe a little jealous. I remember Sandru around the fire and I guess I wanted that experience, too. It’s childish of me, and selfish, and … probably wrong because of why. I thought we made a mistake by expelling that spirit, but now I am less certain. I can feel her again as I write this out. It’s not right that these spirits are tied to the material world. They need to move on.

But, it also wouldn’t be right to forcibly expel Yuka, either. She needs help moving on, and that means doing this the right way: seeing it through to the end. If I am the vessel for that, then so be it.

We are holing up in the hall of pillars for the night because we need the rest. It’s possible we’ll get interrupted again, but there’s no better place so we’ll just take our chances with the next change of the guard.

I said “again”. I sent Nihali up to tell the prisoners we freed that we’re spending the night. So they wouldn’t panic and do something stupid. She returned almost immediately because a small group of hobgoblins had come down the flue, seen the battle scene we’d staged, then turned around and left they way they came. We were worried they might take their chances exploring the pagoda. If they found the prisoners we’d freed …

So we raced after them. They were setting up a magical rope to clear the smooth walls of the shaft where the stairs ended.

This answered the question of how the hobgoblins managed to come and go so easily. It also gave me an idea, and I conjured a storm of sleet and ice where they stood, extending it up to the top of the bore. I figured this would at least slow them down. If I got really lucky they’d slip and fall to their deaths.

I got really lucky. Two of the four did exactly that as soon as the ice enveloped them. The third needed a little encouragement from Zosimus, but then he, too, plummeted off the ledge. The fourth stubbornly refused to cooperate, however, and Olmas had to deal with him personally.

I actually saved the third one by stopping his fall. It occurred to me it’d be easier to interrogate him if he was still alive. Don’t judge me. It was one of my simplest spells. I could afford to splurge.

Pharast 28, 4713 (morning, beneath the House of Withered Blossoms)

I had strange dreams last night. They were fragments of our memories jumbled together into an incoherent, shifting narrative. That’s not much different from dreams in general, of course, but it felt like we were I was trying to make sense of two, conflicting histories.

There were moments of clarity; scenes from our lives that stood out in sharp focus. These are the only parts of my dreams that I remember well, though even they were incomplete. I know, for example, that Yuka was a monk and I saw the dojo where she was trained, but I don’t have a sense for when or where she lived. Similarly, there were memories of me in Niswan as a young girl, an older me studying in Magnimar, and so on, but they were all disconnected from my past somehow, like ships adrift at sea. It’s hard to explain.

As I sifted through these vignettes, though, it occurred to me that I still didn’t know what Munasukaru looked like. That’s when another of Yuka’s memories came to me. An elderly Tian woman with wrinkled skin was looking down at me—at her—and smiling, only it wasn’t out of kindness: it was the satisfaction that comes from toying with your prey. Her form shifted then, stretching and elongating, her skin reddening, as monstrous features emerged. When it stopped, she resembled the hobgoblins that served her. I was looking at a kind of oni we hadn’t seen before.

This explains a lot. The prisoners we rescued said the hobgoblins both worshipped and feared her, and this is almost certainly why: to them she must look like some sort of god, and from what we know of the oni I doubt Munasukaru would correct the error (much like Kikonu and his corbies, only I am having trouble picturing her as a budding playwright). It suggests we may encounter more fervant devotees than just the soldiers and guards we’ve seen so far.

We’re told there are lower levels to this dungeon, and if she holds to convention she’s probably at the very bottom. Why does everyone do that? What is this fascination with burying yourself underground? Kikonu may have been unhinged, but at least he chose to live on the top floor. (Though maybe Munasukaru’s war with the aranea left her with few options.)

Zosi spent the morning fiddling with his alchemy equipment. It was fascinating to watch, though more than a little unnerving when he stuck a giant needle in one of the hill giant corpses and it stood up. Animating the dead is a sure-fire way to get our collective attention. Both Qatana and I watched with trepidation, but there was no necromancy involved and what he created wasn’t undead. He’d made a sort of construct, powered through alchemy.

Though it was still pretty creepy.

(later)

The Swine Shogun was kind of a let-down. I don’t think I’m ever going to see a hobgoblin riding a pig.