Haudh-Gwenn curse-keep

One of the seven Mól curse-keeps, and the second the Valiant Few opened. It lies beneath Haudh-Gwenn, under the ruined Mól district in the middle of the town, and what is above it is a haven for vagrants and thieves while what is below it is a Mól works standing very nearly as it was left. The keep was built around crystals: cutting them, tuning them, and binding what they hold. Its curse took the city overhead.

The Way Down

The old Mól sewers under Haudh-Gwenn run with a luminous green sludge on the surface of the water. Followed upstream, the flow ends at a crack in the wall it once leaked from, long since hardened over and sealed by its own crust. Scrape the grime off the tunnel around it and the stone behind is Mól: the sludge sits behind Mól walls, and the sewers offer no door into them.

The door is in the house next to the ruins. In its wine cellar an eight-bottle rack stands a little wrong for the wall it is on, built of Darkwood with a Mól filigree catch, which means the house was raised on an ancient Mól foundation. Behind the rack a long hall runs thick with dust nobody has walked through in decades or centuries, and at the end of it a tall staircase turns in a double helix, a form that appears in Mól ruins and nowhere else. Step off it and it screws itself away, one flight rising into the ceiling and the other sinking into the floor. The house is Johanka Materai’s.

The Well

The stair lands in an octagonal chamber of thirty-foot sides, metal-veined Mól stone, its floor unnaturally free of dust. At the center stands an ornate well twelve feet across, full to the rim with the green goo.

The rim is cut in tall Mól script layered over a magic-writing dialect. It is a magic circle of the kind that wards a thing off, except that it is keyed to an elemental power rather than to an alignment, and it is written inside out, so that it holds what is inside from getting out. The inscription reads as a riddle: protect that which is without from what’s within, and that which is within from what’s without. Three of the trapezoidal rune-stones in the rim will move. Turned together, the circle flips, the runes go burgundy, and the well empties itself down a bottomless hole.

Below is a second octagonal room with two stone doors, two wheels of the sort worked on a ship, one plain and one filigreed in electrum, a bench and cubbies for whoever worked there, and the same warding runes overhead. That warding is why nothing in the room has rotted. The stone doors run on timers and close themselves, which is a safety measure from the keep’s own working life and a trap for anyone who walks through one without leaving a hand on it.

What It Was Built For

Crystals were cut here. The inscription in the corridor says so plainly, and says why the place was fortified in both directions: outsiders came for the power of the work rather than the knowledge of it. The workshop still holds its magnifiers, its bins of gem chips and dust of a dozen kinds, its small flawed crystals and its cutting tools.

The crystals float, and the reason is the ground. The keep stands where the boundary between the planes runs thin, and a crystal tuned for it is a key to that door. Electrum is woven through the stone throughout: it conducts magic, it is cored into the weapons of celebrated warriors, and in a wall it stops anyone melting through. Nothing passes those walls that does not use a door.

Behind one of them is a chamber of screaming wind, thrown from a single faceted crystal hanging some eight and a half feet up, with a faint blue-green light inside it the exact color of the goo. The ornate wheel outside hides an inner lever with three settings: blow, off, and suck. It was cut for this keep, to move the great water elemental that guarded the entrance, and with the outer door open the same mechanism will drive the goo down the tunnel and out towards the river.

The Rooms

Past the wind chamber the corridor is the corridor of the Valley of Doom keep, the same three doors and the same one at the end, and walking it a second time disoriented everyone who had walked the first.

The Elder’s chamber is the mountain keep’s room again and far better kept: the stone table with its relief map intact, shelves, chairs. To the right is the workshop. To the left a hall some seventy-five feet on a side, near empty, its desk-chairs stacked and its wall targets charred through, which reads as a place where fire-binding was taught.

The far door opens on a corridor of six pillars and eight braziers, some still holding an everlasting flame, one toppled, every one of them with an empty slot cut for a stone. Metal grows heavy along its length, two and a half times its own weight at the near end and up to ten times at the far, and no one carrying a weapon of it keeps hold. Carved into the pillars are eighteen hobgoblin figures, one for each of the planes.

Beyond that the keep opens into a chamber of two levels, eighty-five or ninety feet across, ringed by dozens of narrow doors onto quarters, with a plain fountain of running water at the center. About fifty of the quarters have been searched: fragile papers of ordinary Mól life, a scatter of coins, a handful of gems.

Last is the temple, and it is the strangest room in the keep. A pool, an oak growing in true daylight thrown down by a domed radiance crystal, waxy needled plants nobody has been able to name, and a circle of runes cut into the floor that locks a living chosen one in place and hauls him towards the center. Dryads are Fay who bind themselves to one particular oak, and the room looks built to house one. The tree is alive. Whether a dryad is still in it was never discovered.

The Curse

A thriving city of tens of thousands stood over this keep. When the curse came, every person in it was broken down to core elements, mind and body and soul together, and caught; and their essence mixed with the great water elemental set to guard the entrance below. That mixture is the ooze, and the party had been harvesting it out of the sewers before anyone told them what it was. The curse took only those who were present when it fell. It did not convert anyone who came afterwards, and breaking it was the only thing that would let the souls held in it pass on.

What the city was called was never written down.

The Elder is clearer of mind here than in the mountain, and it was in this keep that he walked out of his own chamber for the first time and laid a hand on a living shoulder, growing more solid as he did and weaker the further he went from the room.

Campaign Updates

The delve left the keep close to how it was found. The ooze was drawn back up the central tube and locked behind the priming runes; the wind crystal was left hanging where it hung; one fire crystal cracked, burst into an elemental and was shattered. An ooze that had been lying under a bed in the quarters went for Aldo’s face, forced itself down his throat and stayed, editing what he could remember of it, and it is the same creature that later walked out as Rheem. His sight of the Elder began the day it went in.

Later the party came back for the tunnel. The iron of the river grate was corroded enough that a wire saw took the bars in an afternoon, and the cut bars were wedged back so the grate reads intact from the bank. A sealed one-way exit became a private door, and it is the door they have used since.

Reasoning from the alchemy the place is built around, the party put it to themselves that this might be the clan home of Saytar, the Emperor’s own, since laboratories would belong where alchemical work was done. They took the keep apart a second time on that thought and found nothing to support it. Of the keeps that have been located this one stands furthest east, and sunrise reaches it first.

Since then it has been a base and a laboratory rather than a ruin. Professor Ashanti al-Hassan was put in through the wine-cellar window at midnight with three barrels of oil and left to work out how to destroy the ooze; five fire crystals were pulled from the braziers for her heat, one of them chipped past mending. Electrum and alchemy together are the answer she was given, and electrum is far too scarce to gather in the time available, so that thread was set down. The Elder’s counsel was to destroy only a conservative share of the ooze in advance, because past some threshold the curse triggers early and may even repair itself, and to make the attempt at dawn expecting the keep to send everything it has.

The lieutenant Zarif was held here. Hinta was moved here, and an innkeeper’s family with her. During the riot the party went in and out through the grate, and by the last of it there were dozens of refugees camped on the riverbank beside their door. Materai’s estate has since burned. What that did to the wine cellar and the rack in it was never discovered, and nobody has used that way in since.

The burn came off at dawn, and it was the first of the three. Ashanti was up before it, unable to sleep, calling the sequence for a Mikhail who after an extra week of drilling no longer needed the calls; his own hands were acid-burned and one nail gone from a week of work he had never been trained for. Three seasons of her research came down to one attempt, and the preparation behind it had cut what could go wrong to almost nothing. The ooze boiled, popped and stank, and then it came apart in front of them into the two things it had been made of. The souls of the city that stood here left the material plane for the outer planes; the bound water-elemental essence went back to the inner planes. They had been one substance for hundreds of years and were separate again. Mikhail would not leave until it had burned out, and Aldo dragged him through the door. He said only that he felt sick.

The curse over this keep broke with it, and the property overhead had been condemned and cleared long before, which is the only reason the burn killed nobody. Two things were left behind. There is more ooze under and beside the river at the ruins, never touched, and Mikhail wants it next. And the thing the Mól imprisoned beneath these ruins, the sleeper that feeds on dreams, was drawn to this ground by the stored ooze in the first place. What kept it dormant was the Slumbering Queen’s work and a second presence the Elder could never perceive clearly, and both are gone. It is starving now, and no longer really imprisoned at all.