H<\/span><\/p>\n ow 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\u2019ve just gotten started here. We travel farther and farther down this road and there\u2019s just\u2026more road.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019 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\u2019t really know how long ago that was. Hundreds of years? Thousands? Longer? I suppose we should have asked, though I guess it doesn\u2019t really matter. It was clearly a long time. Even with spells, all <\/span>this<\/span><\/i> could not have been done quickly.<\/span><\/p>\n Assuming, of course, that this was the work of the Five Storms. We don\u2019t really know for sure. A more troubling answer is that it was just Munasukaru. I mean, if boredom was a problem for the oni <\/span>before<\/span><\/i>, imagine what it must be like for just <\/span>one<\/span><\/i> of them <\/span>now<\/span><\/i>. Abandoned by her peers, left with only hobgoblins and hill giants for company. Trapped here, unable to leave. That can\u2019t be healthy, can it?<\/span><\/p>\n How long ago was their escape? Again, the Kami didn\u2019t say (and, again, should have asked\u2026) 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\u2019 plans for Minkai didn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The hall where we were ambushed was filled with images of\u2026disgusting 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 <\/span>carvings.<\/span><\/i> What they did with the bodies of the men and women they had captured\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n And what of the hobgoblins? I don\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The hobgoblins had enlisted the help of a pair of hill giants. That would normally be a problem but they succumbed to Qatana\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes I think I am kidding myself.<\/span><\/p>\n I<\/span><\/p>\n have two lives and two names and two histories but it\u2019s not clear which are from me now and me before. I came into the Forest with companions that I 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I remember growing up in Minkai and now I am returning there, a country I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I know it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t survive it. I didn\u2019t choose to be here but I came here with a purpose and now there is another though they are the same except for why.<\/span><\/p>\n Y<\/span><\/p>\n uka is still here. I can hear her at times, sometimes even see her. Or see myself as though I was her. I don\u2019t know how to explain it. It\u2019s like there are moments when I don\u2019t recognize myself, only sometimes it\u2019s me as me, and others it\u2019s me as her.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2026feel what she is feeling. I know what she wants and why. We can\u2026communicate in a way. It\u2019s not like talking, though sometimes I can hear her voice. It\u2019s mostly\u2026intent. And I can\u2019t exactly ask her\u2014myself?\u2014questions, but when I have a question about something she knows I have memories that answer them. Her memories. My memories?<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t mine.<\/span><\/p>\n She\u2019s not hostile. It\u2019s more like she\u2019s\u2026desperate, grieving, longing\u2026all of these things. I can hear her now as I write this because I\u2019ve opened myself up to her. She\u2019s trapped here, bound by the unfairness of her death and the hatred it was born of, much like a ghost only without the mindless, formless rage. (I want to say she\u2019s lucky in that respect but that would be a callous dismissal, as though one would be \u201clucky\u201d to lose only one arm instead of both.)<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t mind. I can feel her again as I write this out. It\u2019s not right that these spirits are tied to the material world. She needs <\/span>help<\/span><\/i> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n We are holing up in the hall of pillars for the night because we need the rest. It\u2019s possible we\u2019ll get interrupted again, but there\u2019s no <\/span>better<\/span><\/i> place so we\u2019ll just take our chances with the next change of the guard.<\/span><\/p>\n I said \u201cagain\u201d. I sent Nihali up to tell the prisoners we freed that we\u2019re spending the night. So they wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019d freed\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n So we raced after them. They were setting up a magical rope to clear the smooth walls of the shaft where the stairs ended.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019d slip and fall to their deaths.<\/span><\/p>\n I got really lucky.<\/span><\/p>\n Two of them slipped immediately and shattered on the ground below. 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I actually saved the third one by stopping his fall. It occurred to me it\u2019d be easier to interrogate him if he was still alive.<\/span><\/p>\n Don\u2019t judge me. It was one of my simplest spells and I could afford to splurge.<\/span><\/p>\n I<\/span><\/p>\n had strange dreams last night. They were fragments of our memories jumbled together into an incoherent, shifting narrative. That\u2019s not much different from dreams in general, of course, but it felt like we were\u2014I was\u2014trying to make sense of two conflicting histories.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s hard to explain.<\/span><\/p>\n As I sifted through these vignettes, though, it occurred to me that I still didn\u2019t know what Munasukaru looked like. That\u2019s when another of Yuka\u2019s memories came to me. An elderly Tian woman with wrinkled skin was looking down at me\u2014at her\u2014and smiling, only it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t seen before.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 fervent devotees than just the soldiers and guards we\u2019ve seen so far.<\/span><\/p>\n We\u2019re told there are lower levels to this dungeon, and if she holds to convention she\u2019s 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\u2019s war with the aranea left her with few options.)<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t undead. He\u2019d made a sort of construct, powered through alchemy.<\/span><\/p>\n Though it was still pretty creepy.<\/span><\/p>\n The Swine Shogun was kind of a let-down. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m ever going to see a hobgoblin riding a pig.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pharast 27 (House of Withered Blossoms, Afternoon) H ow 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\u2019ve just gotten started here. We travel farther and farther down this road and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-3569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-kali"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3569"}],"version-history":[{"count":36,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5709,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3569\/revisions\/5709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}(HouDarWhereABlossmwWhosThr)<\/del><\/h3>\nPharast 27 (House of Withered Blossoms, Evening)<\/h3>\n
Pharast 28 (House of Withered Blossoms, Morning)<\/h3>\n
(later)<\/h3>\n