26 Pharast, 4725 AR — continued
Klause dreamed. In the dream, Eli and Grizzle dispatched a pair of Pale Flame cultists. He told us about it afterward with the flat affect of someone reporting a weather forecast.
Seraphine’s full reply arrived: Ben has no ties to the Pale Flame and appears to be working against the same interests. Whatever guides him is genuinely opposed to what the Order and Chiezzem are doing. The letter made the situation clearer without making it simpler.
Klause and Grizzle suspected they were being followed on the way to the Point Archives. They went anyway. They found what they needed.
Pale Flame operatives were at Ironmane’s forge when the party arrived, trying to take custody of the three people in stasis. Ironmane was holding the door. Klause lifted the commander’s written orders in the collision as they left.
They entered the Fractured Workshops through the cave system below Firebell.
The Workshops were built three hundred years ago, for purposes that the documents inside illuminate only partially. The antechamber was cleared. The guard room had two bodies, neither recent. The archive had three things: a dark journal whose final entry read “It is not a what. It is a who. And it has been here the whole time.”; an alchemical purchase ledger; and a scroll tube containing a partial map of a lower level.
The crystallization lab had a gas vent that the party triggered, which is also how they found the fire crystals. The research notes pinned above one of the workstations, partially burned but legible, described the binding process and referenced someone called the Donor with increasing agitation. The final legible line: “The Donor wants something in return. I have agreed. I do not know yet what I have agreed to.” A separate note, pinned nearby in a different hand: “The Donor was explicit on one point: the vessel is not the purpose. The binding is the purpose. The vessel stabilizes the mechanism so that what it holds can be written, permanently, into a willing soul. That is what Nethum built this for. Everything else was scaffolding.”
They grabbed the crystals and the notes.
That is where I ended my notes: the entrance to the Conjuring Chamber, a gun pointed at the party.
Someone is already in there.