26 Pharast, 4725 AR — continued
Someone was already in there.
Four figures in plain gear, each marked with the Pale Flame insignia, positioned between the pillars with weapons out. At the center, closest to the basin on the dais: the same commander from Ironmane’s forge that morning, in ashen grey with ember-orange trim. She watched the corridor entrance with no surprise on her face. She had been expecting them.
The room was octagonal, fifty feet across, with eight stone pillars and a floor that was one massive mosaic: a stylized sun whose eight rays each pointed at a pillar. The pillars were carved with a face. Eight faces. The same face, eight different expressions, running from serene to something that is not serene at all. I did not recognize the face. I do not think anyone did.
The party cleared the room. The commander did not go easily. She kept her soldiers standing longer than they had any right to be. The last of the four still standing broke and ran when she went down. Azazle dropped him at the corridor entrance.
Afterward, the basin on the central dais activated when someone drew close. Still black water. It spoke a riddle — I will not reproduce it here, as the answer matters more than the question — and it was not charitable with those who answered wrong. Three of the four gave wrong answers in sequence. All three found they could not read for a time: every written character appeared to them as meaningless symbols. I will note that I was not the one who answered the riddle, and I was not among the three.
Eventually one of them answered correctly. Memory. The water glowed and showed ten seconds of the wizard lowering something into the shaft in the room below. A stone door slid open.
Beyond the door was a study — wide, with the feel of a space someone had lived in as much as worked in. Large desk, high-backed chair, mostly empty bookshelves. And against the far wall, flanking a locked iron cabinet: two humanoid constructs, partially dismantled, slumped and still.
They were not still for long.
The constructs activated after Klause successfully picked the cabinet open and very nearly killed three people. The party retreated. They regrouped. They came back. On the second approach, Klause went in invisible and retrieved the cabinet’s contents while the constructs found nothing to track.
The letter inside was addressed to whoever came after.
Verath (I will call him Verath, which is what the documents call the wizard) wrote that the Donor had guided him toward a specific kind of vessel. Not for storing elemental fire, which had been his life’s work, but for extracting a soul intact and holding it in suspension. He did not know whose soul. He did not know what it was meant to be removed from. He built it anyway. He put it at the bottom of the shaft. The letter ends: “Do not let anyone use it. I am very sorry.”
In smaller script near the bottom of the page: “I tested it on myself. Only a fragment — a sliver of elemental fire, nothing divine. I felt it take root. Three years later I still feel the warmth. Whatever you put in the Vessel does not leave the person it writes into. I am telling you this so you understand what you are considering.”
There was also a brass compass with two needles on the desk. One always points toward the shaft. The other always points at Klause, regardless of who is holding it. No one knows why.
Eli identified the symbol scratched around the shaft entrance, the same one throughout the Workshops and carved at the Contrivance. He placed it as older than any living tradition. Something like a notation meaning: point of no return. Someone has been marking both locations for a very long time.
The shaft descends sixty feet. Iron rungs. The same symbol around the rim in at least four different handwriting styles, left by different visitors across different centuries.
The chamber below had no business being there. Too large. Too old. The walls and floor and ceiling covered in statuary and frescoes from no civilization I recognized, depicting events I could almost parse. Near the shaft entrance, three wall panels were legible: a figure, not quite humanoid, attempting to write its own essence into a device. Failing. The shimmering rift that drifted through the room at head height, dropping the temperature wherever it passed, was what remained of that failure.
The Donor built this place. The Donor tried to complete the soul-writing process here and failed. Then, centuries later, the Donor found Verath and guided him to rebuild the mechanism.
At the center of the room, on a low stone plinth: the portable anchor. The party took it.
Paul Festa Leeroy was waiting in the cavern on the way out.
He had a lantern propped against a stalagmite and the remains of a meal, with the unhurried air of a man who just happened to be in a cave system beneath Firebell at the end of the day. He seemed very pleased to see them. He made clear he wants the anchor.
The party declined.
That is where I ended my notes.