Map Room with ROOM!!

The Elder spends nearly everything he has to join two map rooms across the ethereal, and Mikhail walks down alone to where the death-tree's roots leave the world

TL;DR

The Elder emptied himself to raise two pieces off a map table and join Wraithblade Keep to the Twisted Grove through the ethereal, and the company walked between keeps through a doorway. Aldo dropped the Grove’s lone sentinel; Mikhail went down alone to where the death-tree’s roots leave the world, called a crystal out of the boundary and shook it loose with a lute, and outran the blights into daylight. Four days later Loshev met them with its bridge half-mended and its guard cut to pieces.

First seen

Merrigan Fox: sixteen or near it, of the Fox house, minding the bridge-repair measurements

What changed

The map rooms can be joined. The Elder can bridge two keeps, at a cost he cannot pay often.
The company holds a crystal of the death plane, uncut.
The operation has a shape: three teams, three keeps, timed off sunrise.
Loshev has been raided. Kurvroc’s estate was stripped and its guard maimed with care.

Left open

Who the hobgoblin raiders are, and what they will take next.
Whether a radiance stone can be got and cut in time.
The sedated captive, who wakes in a few days.

Synopsis

Two days of rest in Wraithblade Keep turned up one last thing: behind a mismatched wall, a stair down to a submerged platform and a grate mechanism (a hidden dock, built so a small boat could carry people or goods in and out of a keep with its gates shut). Aldo cooked the spider; Koa ate it out of spite, having been bitten by it. Mikhail told him privately that he is close to finishing a spell of his own, learned off the Chantry’s dream-catchers, to guard Gwen while she sleeps, and in time the sleepers being haunted in their beds at home. He still needs materials for it.

They chose the Twisted Grove for its crystal and then Loshev, in and out quickly enough that nothing in the Grove need wake, and rather than lose days returning their unconscious captive to Ridh they kept him sedated and brought him. The Elder agreed to attempt the crossing from the map room, where he is strongest, and warned it would drain him badly.

Everyone went into that room: three men, three horses, the mule, the sleeping halfling. The pressure of it drew life out of all of them as it built. The map table lit, brightest around the two keeps concerned, and Mikhail and Koa found that those two pieces could be lifted and clicked upright, burning brighter as they went; the floor seemed to fall away for one heartbeat. Nothing in the room looked different afterwards, but the Elder could feel them standing in both keeps at once, and the door opened onto the Grove’s map room instead of the hallway they had come down. They led everything across, shut it, reset the pieces to a low bass click, and the Elder, spent to transparency, rested for the first time. The keeps had been joined, he said, through the ethereal.

He blanketed their presence and took them out to the tree chamber. The veil held, but Koa spotted the one blight left as a sentinel in the branches, and the Elder judged it could still perceive them. Aldo used Dwayne’s blunt bolts, the only thing that damages the vine-creatures, stunning it with the first and destroying it with the second as it wound up to throw Koa’s javelin back at him. Then Mikhail went down alone, with the last of the Elder’s cover and instructions to run if it went wrong. The root chamber is the boundary itself: roots quivering with hundreds of dormant blights, and past them the plane of negative energy. The Crown held the death-aura off him. He sensed past the small flecks to one stone grown at the boundary for centuries, imposed his will until it presented itself a fifth of the way out of the root, and then, rather than hammer at it and wake the chamber, played his lute at it until it worked free, and lifted it out by hand. The blights half-stirred. He froze, picked his way out, and as he crossed the tree chamber the death-tree cracked open and poured them after him. He shouldered the door shut and ran five hundred feet into sunlight, which they would not follow him into.

The ride back took four days and produced the plan. Aldo and Mikhail go to Haudh-Gwenn with Ashanti and break the ooze by alchemy; Koa goes to Wraithblade to break the sword on the anvil; all converge at the Grove, timed off sunrise, moved by the Elder’s map rooms, with barrels of oil hauled in and the crystal in a lead-lined box so the tree cannot feel it coming. A radiance stone alone will not kill the death-tree (radiance is only half the opposite of negative energy), but it strips away what makes the tree undead, after which ordinary fire finishes it.

Loshev met them at its bridge, where a well-spoken sixteen-year-old named Merrigan Fox was overseeing the repair measurements and gave them the news. Hobgoblin raiders had come through, sacked Kurvroc’s estate for what they called their own property, fought the town guard with unnerving precision, and gone south; rumor puts their home in the Vala mountains. Wyverns have been seen near the town again. At the guard house Tariq was on his feet with a scar across one eye and the tendon of his sword hand cut through (an injury chosen, not dealt at random), and agreed to arrest the spy among the bridge builders that night. Hinta had held one of the raiders off at her own forge. Tony will not walk properly again. Aldo got a promise of his confiscated dagger and ring back, and the company set off for Gemsmith’s to have the crystal cut.