The Deluge
A body in the grass, a storm that drives the company into a mountain cave, and behind the cave a door that was never meant to be found; then the valley itself, and a red door at the foot of its cliff
TL;DR
Harveen was gone by morning and Jaden rode east on Daisy, and the company went up into the mountains with only its guides. In the tall grass lay a Peren a month dead in something close to Arcane Congress colors. Rakhzan’s hobgoblins marked the road and broke off after a giant eagle. Then the sky opened for two days, and the cave they sheltered in had a crevice at the back of it, and behind the crevice a trapped Mól passage holding oversized arms, seven silver coins and one tarnished ring. Ten days out they came down into the valley and found a red door at the foot of the cliff.
First seen
- The dead Peren traveler: a month in the grass, in near-Congress colors
- Bugbears: goblin-kin to the hobgoblins, read off the gear they left
- The hidden Mól ruin: a trapped passage behind a cave crevice
What changed
- Jaden rides for Forven on Daisy; the party travels alone but for the guides.
- The company holds Mól work: a ring, seven coins, a sword.
- The valley is reached, and the keep’s sealed red door found at the cliff’s foot.
- Aldo’s key fits the left of its two locks.
Left open
- What a lone Congress-robed Peren was doing dead that far out.
- What the ring says, written inside it in G’lin.
- What kills in the valley, given no tale about it names a beast.
Synopsis
Harveen was gone by first light and nobody went after him. Jaden, who grieves by rising early and training, slept hard instead; when they woke her it was to say she could not walk fifty miles east and would have to ride. She argued, and then took Daisy and went alone.
Hunting the tall grass before the climb, Aldo dropped a fawn and Mikhail walked into a matted clearing and smelled rot. A middle-aged Peren lay in it, a month dead, opened up by a plains cat, in robes washed out close enough to Arcane Congress colors to be worth remarking on. His parchments were ruined and his ink well was not; deep in the pack lay a sheet of good vellum too brittle to unroll. They set two coins on his eyes for the Wyrd Twins, to buy him luck in the afterlife, and did not linger in cat country. Rakhzan was frankly surprised: Congress-trained Peren do not come out this far, and certainly not alone.
Three days on, the guides stopped for a farewell luncheon and shared a wineskin they had been saving. What Rakhzan gave in return was Draazstone, plainly: martial law, the finest smiths in Idir and perhaps in all Erôth, outsiders tolerated by law and unwelcome by custom; and the ones to be careful of are the ones holding authority, or friendly with it. One of his band let slip a private grudge against a Draazstone smith now working in Loshev, and would not name her. Then they marked the onward road, west and then north, and broke off after a bird circling high on the hunt. Koa got a proper look at it: person-sized at least, a giant eagle. Mikhail’s book had the rest. Giant eagles once held the wyverns in check; poaching has collapsed the eagles and the wyverns have swelled into the gap. The guides had gone to raid the nest.
On the fourth night the sky opened without warning while Aldo was on watch, drunk and soaked, and it very nearly killed him. Koa went out into the storm and found a cave half an hour off; Mikhail dried and warmed his clothes; they walked him over shielded between the horses and got every animal inside. The rain ran two days, and they spent it staring at a four-foot crevice at the back of the cave that looked as though it opened out beyond.
Mikhail could not leave it. Koa hammered it wider and Mikhail squeezed through, and discovered in the squeezing that he does not care at all for tight stone. On the other side was a passage worked to look unworked: eighty feet of low, subtly cut rock running to a dead-end wall veined with Mól metal, and holes in the walls where darts had once come from, shaken half-loose by some old quake. Aldo wedged pebbles under the pressure plates and found a second plate that was not a trap at all; pressed, and then kicked, it swivelled a stone door open onto a small chamber. The chest inside held rotted leather and rusted arms, every one cut long in the arm and broad across the shoulder: bugbear proportions, Mikhail said. Goblin-kin to the hobgoblins, rare and secretive, and speaking the same tongue. With them a pockmarked short sword still holding its edge, and a spilled pouch of seven Mól silver coins, oversized and near pure. Beneath the chest a stone nook, emptied long ago of everything but one tarnished ring, which cleaned up to exactly the sheen of the metal in the walls and carried etchings on its inner face only, in G’lin, that nobody there could read.
Ten days out of Loshev they came down into the valley: a bowl of meadow ringed by cliff, strewn with collapsed gray buildings that are not Mól work. Hundreds of feet up the sheer face, visible only from certain angles, a Mól balcony juts out with an ornate panelled door carved above it and no stair left leading near it. They talked over the bodies torn to shreds and, since no tale about the place names a beast, decided the valley probably kills by mechanism rather than by tooth. Then Mikhail caught a glint at the cliff’s base: one door of rusted red Mól metal at ground level, sealed, handleless, two keyholes, furred with spikes so fine that Aldo nearly lost his hands to them. The key that came with his Mól parchment fit the left lock. They cleared both keyholes and made camp to open it at first light.