Al Sāmiyah Aid
Three starving chicks and no eagle in the eyrie, fire in the night sky spelling out orders in a language none of them speaks, and a waypoint worked from one side with nobody holding the other
TL;DR
The eyrie held three starving chicks, days-old blood and no Al-Sāmiyah, and a wyvern had very nearly clawed its way in. The party fed the chicks, argued over butchering a dead gnoll to do it, and then read fire in the night sky: gnolls and wyverns talking to each other, the party reported, and something authoritative answering. So they worked the waypoint table themselves for the first time and paid for it out of their own essence. A week later she came home torn up, and led Aldo to two plain iron rings hidden in a forge wall she should never have known.
First seen
- Al-Sāmiyah’s chicks: three hatchlings, grown from cat-sized to spaniel-sized and nowhere near flying.
- A nine-foot gnoll: in scale mail, with a chain mace and a longbow, kit no gnoll has ever been seen carrying.
- Fire-ring signalling: two burning rings raised in the night sky, carrying moving Kutā characters across a valley.
- The rings in the forge wall: two plain iron bands, one sized for a talon and one for a hand.
What changed
- Al-Sāmiyah is injured, her wings folding unevenly and her shoulder feathers broken, and she no longer cuts the air the way she did.
- The chicks live at Wraithblade Keep now, fed and nested, behind a gate she cannot work.
- Aldo is tied to her by ring, and knows her distance, direction and condition whenever he asks for it.
- The party can work the waypoint table without anyone at the far end, at a price paid out of themselves.
- The gnolls and the wyverns are working together, and the party has been reported up a chain that answers with orders.
- Ridh is gone, burned flat, with no people in it and nothing visible around it.
Left open
Synopsis
The door at the top of the Valley of Doom keep opened on the wrong nest: not the deep comfortable one Aldo had once slept in, but a heap of debris thrown together in a hurry, with three chicks in it and no Al-Sāmiyah. They had grown from cat-sized to spaniel-sized and were still hatchlings, nowhere near flight, with too few feathers for that growth and those they had mangled. Their begging came out thin. Blood a few days old stained the floor.
Koa forced the balcony door. She had jammed hunks of metal into the frame herself to hold it shut, and on the far side were deep claw marks and puncture holes with venom dried into the wood. A wyvern had worked on it a long time and come close. One hung in the sky at distance while they watched, and Mikhail asked why it was up here when there were gnolls camped in the valley below.
They soaked the salt out of their rations to feed the chicks. Koa stopped at the three sealed doors and felt something cold and hungry behind them, and knew he could open them, and that a broken seal stays broken. He refused, with birds in the next room depending on him being right. The map room was empty in the corner where the Elder had always stood. Koa laid a hand on the stone table and felt a small steady pull, neither sapient nor malicious, that wanted a portion of him. Nancáro had powered it himself every time, so they could power it too, and that was a way out.
They gave her a day. The camp below had emptied, and the gnoll they had killed was the only meat to hand. Koa carried it up the stairs and then could not cut it. Aldo would not hold a knife but had no trouble watching. Mikhail butchered it, and said aloud that he thought it was gross. Worse was a story both he and Koa knew, that a gnoll is born out of a hyena which has eaten too much sapient flesh, and Koa’s fear that feeding sapient flesh to something eternal is how a curse starts.
That night two rings of flame stood in the sky over the valley, one upright and one flat, with shapes moving inside them, and Koa recognized them as characters. Bhaasha, which he speaks, and Kutā, which he does not, share an alphabet and a family, so he sounded out what he could not understand while Mikhail wrote it down. The half coming back carried orders. Gnolls and wyverns were cooperating, the gnolls had reported the party, and wyverns were being sent up because gnolls could not climb. The authority behind the replies was very possibly Orsugo. Nobody wanted to wait for morning.
Then they stood on the stone table. Koa lifted the first stone and his hand came away while a spectral hand stayed on it. Mikhail lifted the second, and the pull started ripping out a good half of whatever it takes. Nobody asked Aldo for anything. He put a hand on each of their shoulders and closed the circuit, and for one second he was reminded of the nowhere he had come back from.
They came out into the anvil room smelling gnolls before they saw them. One would have stood nine feet upright, long-armed and broad-snouted, in battered scale mail with a longbow and quiver on its back and a chain mace in its hands. None of them had ever seen a gnoll in real armor. Koa killed it in one swing. Two survivors ran for the outer door, which would have sealed everyone into the passage between the keeps. He cut one down.
A week passed. Koa hunted, and found low broken ruins beyond the gate and up the far bank: the keep had never stood alone. She came back on the seventh day, too big for the door to take her, and waited while Aldo carried the chicks out. She groomed them a long while, then shoved two off the wall to make them glide. Her wings did not fold evenly, her shoulder feathers were broken, and patches of her were matted with blood.
She knew the keep, placing herself in it again rather than exploring it, the way someone walks through a house they lived in years ago. She took Aldo to the forge and pecked at one spot until he found two of the iron bands holding the timbers did not match the rest and pulled free: one large, one sized for a hand, plain and identical. The large one seated into a worn groove at the base of her talon. She held the leg out for him to fit it, then waited until he put the small one on himself.
Nobody could identify the rings. Mikhail got as far as naming who could and stopped, because the name was Gwen. A day later the small ring woke: a tug wanting a piece of him, exactly like the stone table’s, and a tether that slackened as he walked toward her. He paid it, knowing from the crossing that it comes back, and his mind lit up with her heartbeat, her hunger, her distance and her direction. Then she looked at her own ringed talon and up at him, and he understood it was not one way. Two days on he flew scout on her, and found Ridh burned off the map: char, burnt beams, no people, and nothing moving around it. Then the road south, toward her.