Root of the Curse I

Synopsis

The doors had beaten them, so they went looking for a window. Koa took a careful circuit of the keep, keeping clear of the razorleaf, and came back with the back wall: stained glass in places, and better than that, an old open-air balcony since walled in, twenty feet up and thick with growth. He also came back with something he could not account for. A sickly, half-rotted tree grows out from inside the building, and it is the same species as the enormous healthy one outside, and within a year or two of the same age. Both are near enough seven hundred years old.

Aldo put a grappling bolt into the balcony and Koa climbed. The growth on it was an assassin vine (which the party took for more razorleaf, and it is not; they are two plants that share a ruin), and it had his leg before he was over the rail. He hacked one anchor root through and nicked a second; the vine slammed him and held him; Aldo’s bolt finished the second root, and several hundred pounds of dying plant came off the wall directly above Mikhail. Koa went off the ledge with it, caught the window frame one-handed, caught the vine with the other, and held both until it stopped moving. Mikhail was hauled up afterwards, unhurt. Assassin vines, the party established between them, do not think; they lie in wait, they lure with sweet flowers in the warm months, points do little against them, and the roots are where they are weak.

Through the rotted door off the balcony lay a wide room open to the sky, with a second and larger vine draped from the ceiling. Its flowers were budding, which means luring rather than hunting, so it hung inert while the party argued about leaving it. They did not leave it. It went down under a charge, but its roots were never cut, and neither were the first one’s, so both will come back.

Past a third exit, Koa found a slab of stone set where a tapestry used to hang. The room behind it had been a vault, and had been emptied a long time ago. What saved it was one brick sitting slightly proud of its neighbors, and behind the brick a Mól keyhole that carried a charge in it. Their own electrum key was no use (each keep is cut to its own), so Aldo prepared the mechanism with oil and picked it, his ring taking the shock as it had at the mountain keep.

Inside, wrapped, was an electrum crown set with two white stones and a pink one at its center. Mikhail read the room with a borrowed seeing and the crown came back strongest of everything they carry: a transmutation, and a considerable one. It is a headband that lifts two faculties of the mind at once, and being that strong it leaves its wearer tender to abjuration, one of the reasons the Arcane Congress prefers such things locked away where nobody has to think about them. The same seeing found two faint auras in the electrum circlet they already carried, a weak one in Aldo’s ring, and a faint one in Aldo’s pocket that nobody chose to explain.

Then it got unpleasant. Aldo argued that the crown belonged on his head because it would help break the curse, which was not true, and Koa knew it was not true. Mikhail said out loud that this is how parties end. It was settled at half and half once the keep is done with, and each of the three put it on in turn to feel what it did, and each of the three took it off with a headache that lasted. They agreed on one thing without discussion: Dwayne does not learn about it.

Two hours of daylight left. The last door opened onto a walkway over the hall they had spent a day trying to reach: the barred room, with the dead tree growing up through the middle of it and out through the roof. Something was climbing that trunk: a third of the twig-things and far larger than any of the others, grown to the size of a man, its attention on Mikhail’s dancing lights. Aldo took the first shot, and it went high and wide into the railing on the far side.