Session Log 2024-06-10
Split party: Ekkels and Klaitos present.
Klaitos succumbed to exhaustion on the floor of the arcanic laboratory. The obsidian rings he had been transcribing nearly slipped from his grasp. He slept deeply on the cold floor, and the remaining laboratory mages worked around his unshiftable bulk for the remainder of the night.
In his sleep, he was haunted by another strange dream - a roaring, vast, and wrathful storm, driven by a profound rage. Klaitos waded through the storm, and spied an obscured, partially indistinct figure at its heart - a crooked and steeped man, his claws lashing the wind into storm. Klaitos awoke in the middle of the laboratory floor, and belatedly registered that the galestorm's winds were familiar to his wind-tuned senses.
Disturbed to have had two such encounters in two subsequent rests, Klaitos went to see Millie, the druid, in the Keep's infirmary. There he found Ekkels, stretching awake from his own night of falling asleep on the job. He was confused when Klaitos asked after uneasy dreams in which lived strange presences, so Klaitos reasoned that whatever curse he had was exclusive to him.
Millie didn't have any immediate diagnosis or cure for him, but suggested he return to the infirmary to sleep that night. As a druid of the Petalbearer, she knew some of the magic of dreams, and she was sure she had a ritual that could help. Klaitos accepted the offer, and the two of them headed out into the Keep.
They headed to the Queen's Councilroom in the upper Keep, to ask after her decision regarding Fireheart's moot. They found the room still abuzz with scouting reports, supply logistics, and muttered strategic minutiae. A Councillor asked if their message or inquiry could be handled by someone less busy, but the Queen heard their request and brought them to a side chamber for a private conversation.
She expressed serious distrust, but confirmed that even a portion of Lord Fireheart's armies and assets, lent to the Keep's cause, could multiply their military capabilities. She mostly trusted him to grant her a safe meeting - or she trusted her protective guard, at any rate - but held no faith that he was interested in an arrangement on equal terms.
The Gale Queen requested Klaitos and Ekkels' help in finding some sort of leverage against Lord Fireheart, from any vector. The Keep's spy network knew some of his comings and goings, but knew nothing of his weaknesses. She assured them that she did not necessarily expect any more success from them on such a short timeline. She only brought this to Klaitos and Ekkels because they had achieved many things and discovered many secrets that no other Keep agent could have done.
They took the task seriously, but struggled for inspiration. Most of their ideas involved flying too far away to achieve without flaking on Millie's dream ritual. They decided to look for Fireheart's scandals and secrets through means unavailable to the Keep's spies: they borrowed Wilga's Wisdoms from Robin's hoards and tried to trick the book into thinking that Lord Ragnus Fireheart was before it.
Ekkels attempted to disguise himself as Ignis's father, starting with the face. Ekkels, struggling to carry Lord Fireheart's characteristic disdain, kept adjusting the face, eventually mushing his malleable form into an eerily perfect replication. Passerby in the hall were startled by the Councillor of Flame's face atop his normal robed, lumpy body.
Klaitos presented Wilga's Wisdoms with this shortened doppleganger. The purple book shook like never before, its pages fluttering back and forth. After a few moments, it gently opened to a mostly-empty page with a single line on it: "I can't improve on this. Well done." Belatedly, it flipped the page to a scatological illustration.
Lacking any other leads or ideas by which to improve the Keep's leverage against Lord Fireheart, Klaitos returned to the arcanic laboratory to spend his time more productively. Ekkels, left to his own devices, decided to find Hitchit the kobold. He still bore Lord Fireheart's face, and drew some alarmed attention for it, but his stature, robes, and Little Dudes were enough to prove his identity, and his reputation for chaos was sufficient for onlookers to shrug off the new look.
In the hangar, he was told by a Gale Knight that Hitchit, and his attendant knight Vott, were no longer living in the Keep. The erratic, bomb-making kobold had been removed from the fortress for everyone's peace of mind. Instead, he had been granted a workshop on the side of the volcano above which the Keep was stationed. The Keep kept in contact, sending periodic resupply flights through the volcanic smoke and incidentally verifying that the pair were still alive down there. Ekkels considered flying to meet his friend, but decided it was too much trouble, and had the knight pass along his greetings with the next supply run.
Up in the laboratory, Klaitos's task had shifted to transcribing marginal details of the already miniscule runework along the necromantic artifacts. The tedium, building upon that which he did not fully rest off from the night before, quickly eroded his focus, and he decided to call it an early night before he started making mistakes.
On his way to the infirmary for the dream ritual, he encountered Ekkels, still Fireheart-faced, heading in to request treatment. Millie reacted with alarm, worrying that both of them had been cursed at the same time, but was assured that Ekkels's condition was simply the result of a mishap.
She took Klaitos to an infirmary closet that she had turned into a separated bedroom. Klaitos and Ekkels settled in, and she lit a strange incense over their heads. She took a comfortable seat, and the three rested and waited for sleep. The incense smoke billowed over them, weighing like a blanket. Eventually they felt themselves submerge beneath its weight into a shared lucid dream.
The world around them was a indistinct and shifting, but not hostile. Klaitos registered it to be the same realm he had dreamed the other night, its natural inconsistency only apparent to his conscious attention. The storm was absent, however, and the dream quiet and calm. Klaitos extended his wind sense into the alien landscape, and found the echoes of its rage somewhere distant.
He considered why the curse was randomly diminished, and considered that he was sleeping somewhere different each time he sensed it - first the hangar barracks in beseiged Golarth, then the laboratory floor, then the infirmary. Millie suggested that it was the first night he wasn't sleeping in the presence of powerful necromancy.
Ekkels, meanwhile, was pleased to bear his own face in the dream realm, as opposed to Lord Fireheart's. This was undermined, however, by his unstable form beginning to unravel. He drew himself back together with effort, and Klaitos asked Millie if they could exit the dream early - without the storm close enough to investigate, their continued stay only posed risks for Ekkels. Millie claimed to know a ritual to help, but that it would take a while.
The druid sat on the inconsistent ground and closed her eyes in concentration. Ekkels, meanwhile, taped himself up to retain cohesion. This seemed sufficient, so he went for a walk through the dreamscape. He found its formless strangeness oddly familiar, but was unable to tell if that was due to a lost memory of some affinity with the chaos magic that saturated his soul.
The group suddenly awoke to Millie's shriek of alarm. While asleep, she had reached up and knocked down the incense. The Tireless Knight rushed over to snuff the flame and tidy up the mess. Millie apologized for startling Klaitos and Ekkels - tipping an overhead burning candle with her eyes closed always made her jump.
Klaitos and Ekkels thanked her, and thanked the Knight for cleaning up. Klaitos hurried back to the laboratory; Ekkels followed after verifying that his face bore no remnant resemblance to Ignis' father. They found the lab manned by a single researcher, as the rest were out for a meal.
He told them that progress had been good, in part thanks to the secrets gleaned from the partially-translated Tome of Arcanic Artifice. While the complexities of the rings and eye were still being deciphered, it seemed undeniable that their dread necromancy was the sort that worked with souls. Moreover, they had discovered another name in the runes on the eye, matching Lord Arva's on the ring - Inheritor Ulyunne.
The rings and eye were now stored in warded glass boxes, and the researcher advised Klaitos to use a pair of kitchen tongs to handle them. Under the Lantern Eye, Klaitos observed writhing necromancy on all three artifacts, though far fainter on the obsidian eye, but could not tell its workings or purpose. Ekkels felt a strange sense hatred echoing forth as the rings were returned to their box.