Bonnie Tyler

November 1st, Albanus 1

As the world around them grew dark, each of the party had a vision.  (ooc:  For sanity's sake, I'm putting each vision next to its interpretation.  Links:  Titus   Corvina   Severus   Gaius   Leyna   Marius)

Titus saw a scout, somewhere in high, alpine mountains.  Underneath his thick coats, the man wore a white shirt with a golden crown on it.  Running along on snowshoes, he followed a set of footprints up the mountainside.  Bipedal tracks, shod and almost human, but with a stride a touch too long to be a man's.  The path led him to the edge of a snow-covered valley -- filled, with a veritable sea of orcs.  In their midst, a great orc stood upon a boulder, surrounded by orcish bodyguards.  The creature screamed something unintelligible and raised a black spear above his head.  As he did, the sun above him began to darken... and the orcs were driven into fits of hysterical adoration.  Whispering a prayer, the scout backed away from the lip of the valley.  But as he turned to flee, an illythid (mind-flayer) appeared out of nowhere.  The scout froze... and never moved again, even when the creature glided forward and began feasting upon his brain.

Interpretation:  The golden crown is the symbol of the House of Aurelius, one of Viridia's great military families, whose holdings lie in the western mountains.  In Viridia, two barons are allowed to keep private standing armies:  Baron Milites, who guards Viridia's south-western flank from the Dus, and Baron Aurelius, who wards the west from orcs.  The party felt this was a straightforward vision.  An enormous army of orcs was building on Aurelius' borders, and they had one of the Sebetu -- the sword/spear that gives victory in battle.

Corvina heard a woman's voice say, "The last of the seven is free now."  She saw Eboricus building a table.  First, he set seven black stones on the floor:  two rows of three, with one extra in the middle.  Then he balanced a slab of black marble on top of them, and turned to get a veiled object.  But as he did, Corvina saw herself dart forward, snatch up one of the stones, and run over to hand it to the Queen of the Elves.  Eboricus tried to place his burden upon the table, but with one "leg" missing it wobbled too badly.  The magus glared at the Queen of the Elves, and the vision faded.

Interpretation:  The black stones are the Sebetu.  One was given to the Elves.  Eboricus knows that -- and plans to get it back.  When questioned, Ancilla said that the positioning of the Sebetu did matter:  "You cannot crush something without wrapping your tail around it."  The party marked a map, to show where they thought the Sebetu were located... but the pattern made no sense.  They sort of lined up into two lines of three.  However one piece, the Sebetu held by the liche-kings of the Valley of Ancients, was way off in right field by itself.  This puzzled the band -- until they remembered the positioning of the table legs in Corvina's vision.  If they moved the Liche Kings' Sebetu into the middle of the two lines, the images perfectly matched the table.  And that would put the Liche King's Sebetu in... the Dead City of Hakarim.

Marius gave a sending to Kalindariel, the elven princess, warning her about this and requesting a meeting.  Kalindariel thanked them for their courtesy and told them not to meet at the isle, as before.  Rather they should come directly to Damaskina.  Checking books at the Mages' Guild, they found that Damaskina was a lake deep in the Northwoods -- which was rumored to have a floating city soaring above it.

Severus saw two familiar figures walking down a hallway:  Eboricus and Pontifex Phinias.  Phinias was worried and distracted.  "He" was losing it, the priest fretted.  Everything was falling apart... he wouldn't be able to control the riots.  Eboricus assured him that this did not matter.  "Should he fail, we will simply move to Viridia."  This didn't reassure Phinias at all.  "Our plans will be set back 80 years if we have to shift to Viridia," he said.  "We can't spare that much time.  Not now that they know of us."  The magus dismissed his worries.  "We will not lose any time.  Viridia is ours.  I made sure of that, long ago."

Interpretation:  Someone important in Viridia is Eboricus' tool.  After speaking to Praetor Ferreus, Severus and Gaius believed that the tool was Empress Mara Gentillia Augusta.  And Praetor Ferreus is clearly under some unbreakable oath, which he cannot discuss and which binds him to defend her.  Ferreus was not surprised by this vision, when they told him of it.  He confirmed that he knew the tool, and knew that it (or rather, she) was missing part of her soul.  Severus and Gaius spoke to Magister Oshan and Ambassador Anat.  Anat had heard of such rights and said that there were two ways to defeat it.  If you cared about the tool, you needed to divine the location of the stolen soul fragment, summon the demon that held it, defeat the infernal, then re-unite the two halves of the soul.  If you didn't care about the tool, you could simply cast "Mordenkainen's Disjunction" upon them.  And if you were lucky, the spell would break.  The tool's soul would remain divided and damned, but... (shrug).  She agreed to get a copy of this scroll for the party -- price to be discussed later.  As they left, Severus said that the illythid were on the move... and then refused to say more.

To Severus' great annoyance, however, the Praetor turned reluctant.  They needed a piece of the tool (blood, hair, etc.) and a clean priest in order to scribe for the lost soul fragment.  But Ferreus would not help them unless they swore an oath that they would not kill the tool until her soul was reunited.  Severus refused, and when the Praetor proved intractible, stormed out.  Ferreus assured Gaius that he could act freely once the tool's soul was reunited, and that he could not agree to less than an oath.  The matter was out of his hands.  And no, he could not tell them the exact terms of the oath that bound him to protect the Empress -- though he tacitly admitted it existed.  Gaius guessed that it might be something that required him to protect her soul -- or die trying.  Which would require the Praetor to commit suicide should he fail.

Gaius' vision was the most unusual.  A reed-thin dryad, like the shadow of a tree, appeared before him and said, "The roads are not gone.  They have been closed to the Bright Eyes, however.  And the pride of the Bright Eyes leads them to believe that anything they cannot see does not exist.  You are a dullard;  such paths are not barred to you.  All the roads are still here:  Dearthwood.  Elsenwood.  Northwood.  Hallowood.  Even the roads to the lost woods remain:  Tarshwood.  Deadwood.  Alarwood."

Interpretation:  This vision clearly required much more research.  Some of the names were clear.  Dearthwood lay near Rostilla;  Elsenwood by Viridistan;  Northwood was the home of the elves.  But none of the other names were familiar (though, I neglected to mention, Tarsh is the name of a city in eastern Dulsanius).  "Bright Eyes" probably referred to the Elves.  And so the party's guess was that there were mystical roads linking the world's great forests.  Roads that were, for some reason, closed to the Elves.  Perhaps these were the oddities Gaius' mother, Danita, was investigating.  And if one road led into the heart of the Fallen Lands, it might give them a way to assault Theodosius, and free Lucellus from his oath.

Leyna saw a man and a woman, speaking in some unknown tongue that she (somehow) understood.  They stood in the temple of an unknown goddess:  a woman who sat upon a throne, left hand raised as if to call a halt, right hand holding a sword across her lap.  The man was a magus, dressed in long, flowing robes.  The woman wore plate mail, and a white tabard emblazoned with a pentagram and roses.  The magus teetered of the verge of hysteria.  "It was all for nothing," he wailed.  "They're all dead, and the sky is broken."  The woman shook her head and replied, "Despair is forbidden to us.  Calm yourself."  She drew a greatsword, and the spectral image of a lillendi shimmered behind her;  clearly this was a "council blade" of sorts, though it looked nothing like Ancilla.  As the paladin held the blade before her, a portal appeared in mid-air -- an extra-dimensional vault, much like the ones in Viridistan.  She then pulled a cloaked object from a bag of holding and placed it inside.  "It will be safe here," she said, "until we can find Queen Loviatar."

Interpretation:  Loviator was the Altanian witch-queen who helped destroy the Sleeping God's form, when Vesterix fell into ruin.  She bound her soul to guard the Sebetu, eternally, and became the Watcher.  If people were referring to her as "Queen", she must still be alive -- and thus this was a vision from the past.  The vision seemed to imply that there were secret vaults, accessible only by lillendi, in some ancient temple.  In the Holy City of the Dus, perhaps?  No one recognized the seated goddess.  However Corvina remembered that one of the enormous statues at Queen's Gate wore a tabard with the rose and pentagram image.

Marius had a vision of a tiny, wizened crone, no more than 3' 4" or so, sitting inside a tent.  She wore a white buckskin dress decorated with tiny sea-shells, and had hundreds of bones, feathers and tiny skulls braided into her hair.  This woman muttered to herself.  "Five is the number of safety.  Five upon five will keep us safe."  She sketched a pentagon in the dirt floor, then added more pentagram to each edge, creating a mandala of sorts.  Marius' view drifted upwards as the mandala continued to expand.  To a pentagon-shaped tent, encampment, village, and finally a great five-sided city that faded into ruins even as he watched.  "Five is the number of safety.  Five upon five will keep us safe."

Yet even as the vision faded, Marius heard a hissing, inhuman voice whisper, "Yes, bring them to safety.  You have a game, no?  Pawn to rook eight."

Interpretation:  Some parts were clear.  The five-side city must be the Holy City of the Dus-lands, an enormous ruin built by a forgotten people.  The crone looked like a dus-kennr, one of the prophetess of the horse-tribes.  And Marius noted that the second speaker seemed to have no teeth -- he could not pronounce letters like "t" properly.  Listening to him, Corvina realized that the thing sounded like an illythid (a mind-flayer).  The chess reference was obscure, however.  A pawn in the eighth row could become any piece you wished.  And was there any significance to the fact that it was in the rook's row?

On a whim, Marius tried to give a sending to the women of his vision.  Perhaps she was real, and still alive.  He said hello in every language the band knew, then asked, in Dus (thanks to Severus) what the power of five was and how he could learn it.  And oh, could she reply in a non-Dus language?  The good news was, she responded.  The bad news was, she responded in Dus and proved ignorant of all other languages -- even Altanian.  "Why you getting in my dreams, grass-eater?" she said.  "You know about five.  I am there, telling you."

Nothing further happened... until that night, when Marius dreamed that a white falcon flew into his room and pecked his toe.  "Wake up, grass-eater," the falcon said.  Marius did so, and found that the tiny woman of his vision was indeed there.  He roused the family at once, and international relationships got off to a rocky start when Leyna courteously offered the crone some tea.  "Stewed grass!" the hag screeched, swatting at the cup.  Cookies and biscuits were spurned as "grass balls."  Severus quickly explained that the Dus eat only meat and cheese, and drink nothing except milk and water.  (Human souls, the Dus believe, mirror their food.  If you eat plants, as the civilized nations do, you become weak and stupid.)  

So what was the power of five, and how did they learn it?  "You come to city.  You come to heart of city.  I show you ghosts.  Ghosts talk to you about Sebetu.  You know five," the old woman said.  As if everything had already come to pass.  Then she and Severus exchanged a few insults (a traditional form of banter amongst the barbarians, a part of any gathering), and she returned from whence she came.