Into the Thornwood

This is before the recordings, and is set down from the notes.

The city could not read its own stone. Chief Archivist Elara Moonwhisper pulled the temples together to ward the break in the Warrens — a patch, not a cure — and sent the party to the one man in Westmarch who might know what the carving meant. Archdruid Theron Mossbark of the Circle of the Thornwood is old enough to have been alive for the Green War. He looked at the inscription, told them where to take it, and told them very little else: go to the Singing Pools, deep in the forest, and mind who they spoke to on the way.

Three days in

The Thornwood is not a walk. It took three days to reach the Pools, and the forest watched them the whole way.

Something small and iridescent came down out of the canopy and introduced itself: a faerie dragon the party came to know as Percival, curious about them, delighted by them, and — under the delight — warning them that they were walking toward danger. He did not stop them. He is not that sort of creature. He simply wanted to see what they would do.

At the Pools their way was barred by a redcap who called himself Riven-Vow, a sentinel of the fey with a cap the wrong colour and a single question. "Do you understand the purpose of the stones?" It was a test, and a trap for anyone who bluffed. The party answered it truly, and Riven let them pass.

The lady of the Pools

The Singing Pools are fey water, and they have a keeper. A lady came to the bank — cold, beautiful, amused — and named her price before she would let them drink or take what they had come for. Kaelen paid it. He took onto himself a thing she called the Sorrow of the Forest, an old grief that now rides him: those who serve Westmarch's order find they distrust his word without knowing why.

Then Kaelen drank, and the water showed him something.

A round chamber, deep underground. Duke Aldric Westmarch on his knees before a great stone carved with glyphs — larger than the one under the Warrens, and cracked, and flickering. He is speaking to it. He is afraid. He says the South Stone is lost. He speaks of the Great Vow and what it costs. He is trying to hold something together, and he is failing.

Kaelen could not say whether he had seen the past, the present, or what was coming.

The lady knew things she would not give up. She knew who Quill was, and why he is cursed — and she would not tell him, because she found the not-telling entertaining, and because, she said, he deserved his fate. She let slip only that the party was right to be frightened: whatever the stones held back was slipping, and they were not the only people in Westmarch who knew it. The others simply were not talking to each other.

The party took Source Stone from the bottom of the Pools and started the long walk home.

What the city needed

Back in Westmarch they scattered to the people they answered to — Kaelen to High Ranger Mira Thornweaver, who heard the vision out and told him to keep it to himself; Lyrique to Lord Brennan; Quill to Elara and the Archive.

Elara went into the old records and came back with the rest of the recipe. Source Stone alone would not mend the break. It needed a second thing: the Tess-Kydra, an ancient vessel that can hold magical power over years like a battery holds a charge. The Tess-Kydra had been lost during the Green War, when a fortress called Harrow Keep fell to kobolds — kobolds who serve a dragon named Verdanthis. If it still existed, it was in the ruin of Harrow Keep, three days back into the forest they had just walked out of, guarded by the Poison Scale and their god.