I left Iskaryn to her temper tantrum and focused on lunch. I\u2019d been turning events over in my head, trying to make sense of them. I laid out for the others what we knew.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cVoz learns about the Ring at some point in the past\u2014it doesn’t matter when, but it’s before the Cinderclaws arrive\u2014and starts exploring the citadel. She makes a couple of trips over time. She learns about, or already knew about, the tunnel. She pays Roxie off so she can use it without drawing suspicion.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Cinderclaws, meantime, arrive roughly a week ago, coming through the Ring itself, and take over the castle. They chase the Bumblebrashers up to the ramparts. The grauladons follow, and the stairs collapse, taking them out along with parts of the walls, leaving the stairwell choked with rubble. The Cinderclaws are now divided, and cut off. One of the two grauladons survives up above, and keeps the Bumblebrashers trapped.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSometime before the Call for Heroes, Calmont learns about the Ring, and where it is, from Voz\u2019s notes. He hatches his plan to get the Bumblebrashers to show him.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA few days before the Call for Heroes, Helba goes to the citadel, sees red smoke, and fears the worst. She starts telling people her concerns, and her plan to bring this up at the Call of Heroes. Word spreads, and Calmont hears about it.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cCalmont doesn’t want investigators, so he hatches this risky and brazen plan to burn down the Town Hall with everyone inside to stop the investigation before it starts. He needs a lot of help, because he\u2019s an idiot, so he steals scrolls of summoning from Voz, and turns the creatures loose on the hall. He doesn’t wait around to see if it’s successful, because he’s an idiot, and then he’s seen running away, too, because he’s an idiot.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe get tasked with the investigation, and visit Voz that afternoon. She is <\/span>not <\/span><\/i>an idiot, and deduces that Calmont is racing off to find Alseta’s Ring. She panics because he might actually beat her to it, and because her name was mentioned. That sends her scrambling back to the citadel with a plan of her own: get information from the Hellknights that are buried there. She trips some safeguard, the dead rise up against her, and she retreats in a panic, emerging from the tunnel in a frightened state. Roxie sees her.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cVoz is desperate now to get to the Ring, and she\u2019s learned of <\/span>another <\/span><\/i>way in. One that <\/span>doesn\u2019t<\/span><\/i> involve clearing debris out of the stairwell. She closes up her shop, and takes off for Guardian\u2019s Way.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe have two actors, now that Calmont is out of the picture, both working independently: Voz and the Cinderclaws. The arrival of the latter started a chain reaction that spooked the former into action.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n While no one disagreed with this version of events, there was not much enthusiasm among the group for what we had learned from Voz. Some of them were concerned that we were becoming distracted by the bookseller\u2019s ancillary role in events, and that the immediate goals were what we had promised to the Bumblebrashers and to the council: give the goblins their home back, and deal with the Cinderclaws.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPromises were made to help the Bramblebrashers,\u201d Trip said. \u201cThere remain skeletons, goblin dogs, and the Cinderclaws beneath the rubble to attend to. A witch does not wish to be an oath breaker when so few grains have passed through the hourglass of her life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Tarsius agreed. \u201cA witch makes a good point with the vow to help the Bumblebrashers. While they might live there more safely now, they are not yet safe. I believe a case can be made for chasing Voz, but it still would not release us from our previous promises. I believe a witch is correct that our tasks here are not yet done.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n My argument was that Voz, the Cinderclaws, and Alseta\u2019s Ring were, in fact, all the same problem. We weren\u2019t after Voz so much as we were after <\/span>what she found<\/span><\/i>. If she <\/span>did <\/span><\/i>discover a way into Alseta\u2019s Ring that <\/span>didn\u2019t<\/span><\/i> require digging out two floors of stairwell choked with rubble, then maybe we should consider that.<\/span><\/p>\n “A Witch proposes, then, a compromise,\u201d Trip said. \u201cThis day is half spent. The remainder could be afforded to securing the first floor, so that the Bramblebrashers can start clearing things. We would spend the night in safety rather than in the unknown wilds, then set out for this Guardian\u2019s Way fresh in the morning. We fulfill our oath and lose little time in pursuit of this new objective.”<\/span><\/p>\n I felt like that was as good as I was going to get, so I agreed. And, honestly, Trip is right. I needed answers, yes, but we can\u2019t just drop our agreement to the Bumblebrashers because the timing was inconvenient.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And Iskaryn is already upset with me. She\u2019s not fey, but she\u2019s from a fey forest. Going back on a promise, or even appearing to, would only make things worse.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Arodus 3, 4719 Breachill Early Afternoon I left Iskaryn to her temper tantrum and focused on lunch. I\u2019d been turning events over in my head, trying to make sense of them. I laid out for the others what we knew. \u201cVoz learns about the Ring at some point in the past\u2014it doesn’t matter when, but […]<\/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":[95],"tags":[88],"class_list":["post-5513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aoa-journal","tag-aemi"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513","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=5513"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5515,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513\/revisions\/5515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}