so much for that vacation

 the regent is too busy to enjoy an uninterrupted brunch  we were frequently interrupted by assistants and such with requests for their attention ... even for stuff that seemed easily handled without the regent's input  it feels like iliana puts m...

 before the debriefing i met my friend "surprise" in the castle – she's part of the kitchen staff now, specializing in baking!  i told her about some of the treats i've gotten to enjoy from other places and i could see the creativity bubbling in he...

 another gemini star secret – she had a teleport sigil to take us all to equestria  specifically to a room in the basement of yarrowfield castle  so once hellebore finally arrived we headed home in an instant  back home after most of a year ...

 i've mentioned the sending stones in the past as the way we keep in contact with one another  they work anywhere at any distance as far as i can tell  i even sent one to dad and the occasional contact via stone is how i've kept my homesickness fr...

 first the calm news  bell can fly now!  aaren helped her with the schema and she worked through most of the night to modify her wings  she's so happy! and i'm happy for her  i'm also happy because this saves me some work down the road when ...

 adding this before breakfast  crystal-sings-with-lightning is a very interesting person and they feel safe to be around  i get the sense that i can trust them implicitly to act ethically and with integrity  it's the same feeling i get from mel...

 we met young "kiran simadi"  kiran's home is in the somewhat nearby "humblewood" – a forest full of people who look like animals but bipedal  for example kiran looks like a white-furred fox  he and his brothers "orash" and "mala" had gotten ...

 mossmantle exists as a charming little patch of green in the middle of a lot of war-ruined land  it would normally have taken days to travel here from patrahk'n but hellebore used a forest-walk spell so it was more like a scant hour of travel  me...

 i was so shaken while writing yesterday's journal entry that i didn't even mention how jarring it was to hear my given name from hellebore when she first saw me  of course i wouldn't expect her to know – she'd disappeared not too long before i cha...

 hellebore's green coat and purple mane and tail are in fact the exact shades ekuruk used in "how i felt when i heard"  that is no coincidence  hellebore killed signal flare!  it wasn't completely an accident – she was lashing out at prim ros...

 we met young "kiran simadi"  kiran's home is in the somewhat nearby "humblewood" – a forest full of people who look like animals but bipedal  for example kiran looks like a white-furred fox  he and his brothers "orash" and "mala" had gotten ...

 mossmantle exists as a charming little patch of green in the middle of a lot of war-ruined land  it would normally have taken days to travel here from patrahk'n but hellebore used a forest-walk spell so it was more like a scant hour of travel  me...

 i was so shaken while writing yesterday's journal entry that i didn't even mention how jarring it was to hear my given name from hellebore when she first saw me  of course i wouldn't expect her to know – she'd disappeared not too long before i cha...

 hellebore's green coat and purple mane and tail are in fact the exact shades ekuruk used in "how i felt when i heard"  that is no coincidence  hellebore killed signal flare!  it wasn't completely an accident – she was lashing out at prim ros...

 it's nice having other ponies around to eat lunch with  there's nothing wrong with my surrogate herd from outside the everglow but eating is optional for them – bell and relic and spark are forged so food was never a necessity and zer' has some ki...

 thrakelorn is possibly the only brelish military base i will set hoof in and there are 4 reasons for that  it's mostly centered around healing wounded soldiers rather than wounding more soldiers  while it's technically active it hasn't been espec...

 i haven't talked much about d'tharashk xena being with us because she's been happy to keep to herself  or happy to keep her head down while and after we upended the power structure of a sizable port town three days ago  both are valid  she exp...

 biped furniture is surreal to begin with and seeing it 3 times its usual size is an experience  eating dinner at the same table as a giant is an experience  trying to look pleased while sitting through so many gruesome war stories ... tested my r...

 shortly after i woke up this morning i heard a very large voice right outside the inn boom "i heard there were ponies in town!"  that's how my day started  portmaster "gorodan ashlord" is a fire giant as tall as 6 ponies and he effectively runs t...

 this morning gem warned me that there were a lot of stories about my great-grand-aunt hellebore and most of them weren't good  this became relevant almost immediately when we dropped anchor at vralkek  the oddly heavily armed port authority repre...

 today i learned that i've misunderstood gonghura's name and i've been using the wrong half – kelpblossom is her family's name  i found this out when i happened across a conversation between her and shenaak and featherstep who had really turned up ...

 today's excitement started with cyre calling down from the crow's nest that he saw a shipwreck – a small boat with broken sails stranded on a sandbar  relic recognized their flags from rokugan – the land of his origin!  as we neared to help t...

 earlier today the boat got mired in a huge mass of sargasso  the good news is that a large harvest of kelp will fetch decent coin for the crew  the bad news is that it held us in place long enough for a giant squid to take notice  we fought it...

 all the crew of the "just leaving" joined to get away from something  for example  shipswright "gunnar toranak" is related to but very different from – and opposed to – the other toranaks we've met  ship's cook "mace marjoram" is the secon...

 krayg has asked us to escort his niece xena to a city in droaam called "great crag"  he wants her to stay safe with her grandmother there because breland's new king seems a little too comfortable with conflict and reidra and both are bad news  we...

 medya's new forearms are beautiful  she is beautiful  light gleams off of her copper filigree and glimmers through her othelyan crystals  her inner light shines through with every motion  with her first partial harmonization she is the happ...

 the alta is destroyed now but it was briefly active  its mind control effect reached everyone in shaarat including medya and i so we both had troubling dreams  she circled a cluster of beautiful and opulent towers in the clouds but every time she...

 it seems spark found some kinship with the chasers we met in the mournland so bell is helping her with some similarly feline face-plate modifications and i feel it will be a good look for her  also bell is making a pair of dragon-like wings for hers...

 i know we didn't visit every pub in fairhaven but we had a proper go at it  listening to musical performers that ander described as some of the finest in aundair  eating foods my mother would disapprove of and drinking wine and ale worth writing ...

 bell and i made some adjustments at the last minute but the spellwork went smoothly and i can now announce that assisted partial harmonization is finally possible!  my front legs are much improved over my previous pair and my back legs are ... perfe...

 medya and i already planned to visit home after her harmonization to show off our work and stock up on porcelain clay  also not being around any other folks from home for 8 months can make a pony worry for their own sanity  conveniently 3 ponies ...

 it's like the world is apologizing for everything we've been dragged through  after the mournland the only interruptions have been brelish soldiers stopping travellers to look for anything amiss – which includes us! – but as the expedition's off...

 we were on our way around "saerun wood" when the joined hardbacks went dark and still  shortly after that the back lit up with a greenish-white glow  "æther" may have had a solid body once but all that remained was a few bits of detritus swirlin...

 usually only the outside of my current front legs can be seen usually but i have an internal structure – a simple skeleton with sliding plate mounts  i wanted my new legs to be just the plates linked to each other but the "unknown unknowns" stoppe...

 we finally found the cause of those weird grinding sounds and heavy thumps  ... actually it found us  the cyran military was fond of shipping soldiers and materiel around in convoys of crawlers like the hardbacks but more of them linked in a chai...

 i don't blame the skylift cable for breaking  but it did  in the moment i panicked but we all made it out safely thanks to teleports and flight and feather fall tokens  the gondola had an emergency spell like feather fall which stopped it abou...

 big news for me: we now have several intact copies of the whitehearth manuals – "forged design and manufacture" – and they have what i need to complete my generalized partial harmonization spell!  bigger news for bell: she wrote them  more ac...

 to get to whitehearth one follows the path into saerun wood  some time back the government of cyre granted house cannith all of saerun wood and everything within so they reshaped it for their purposes  that's why a third of the city's area is one...

 i spent the last few days sculpting mind-shielding jewelry and playing board games and learning more dhakaani from kaba  that was mostly to quiet my growing panic about how our compass was acting strangely and nothing we saw matched zer's maps and m...

 the border city of "lyrenton" is twice dead  the abandoned darguun half silently decays with none to tend it  the cyre half lies untouched in grey stasis  unlike last time it's noisier in the mournland than out – thumps and grinding and crea...

 this morning my stomach was still a sour and smoldering disaster from last night's cactus juice  but the sound of rain overnight helped me sleep so i was rell-rested when zer' informed us all that a large number of bandit riders were quickly approac...

 the heart of sand invited me to drink the fermented juice of a cactus and dance in the desert and call to the spirits until the visions came  smoky and sour and sweet then chanting and prancing and laughing and sharing stories and water with other g...

 rhukaan draal...

 the "seawall mountains" are lovely  in a way this includes "matshuc zaal" – the site of a brelish mobile fortress overcome and wrecked by raiders some time back and now covered in writing and emblems from people and groups passing through  bell...

 medya explained that the magic zer' used didn't just grab random animals to take on that dinosaur  it found the nearest ones who were in the right mood  they really did enjoy the challenge the same way spark enjoys a mahtabareth fight  i've ap...

 there exists a dinosaur called a "swordtooth titan" that's exactly what it sounds like  in fact there are at least a pair of them and i know this because they were trying to catch and eat our hardbacks just now  i managed to discourage one but th...

 there's been no response to the letter i sent to queen iliana around 5 months ago  i know dad delivered it to a guard at the castle so it should have arrived but it could have gotten lost or perhaps her response did ... or she didn't want to respond...

 i was worried that house cannith would rely on us to get to the whitehearth manuals then prevent us from accessing them  but cannith south and cannith east couldn't agree on who to send so they pushed the decision onto the most recent head of cannit...

 i haven't spent all my time at the library  but the "trolanport civic archives" have basically every research paper ever published in khorvaire so i spent a couple days trying not to make excited noises while collecting schematics to study while we ...

 leandre met me after work and we talked shop for hours  part of this was a tour through their variety of swappable arms  wood and stone and crystal and dinosaur hide and rainbow-colored glass and polished metal and even some sort of startlingly c...

 it isn't often one sees a person reach a limb directly into a furnace to handle a piece of glowing-hot steel as casually as fetching a dish from a cupboard  this is how i met leandre  they pulled their left arm from the furnace – an expertly ca...

 the "tower of three" in trolanport is translucent and beautiful and welcoming and misleading in its size  the rest of the city is built by gnomes and other eye-level folk who are just fine with low ceilings and cramped places which are uncomfortable...

 when i woke up this morning my mind was still spinning around everything that went on with the dragon  medya suggested i talk to either ploughshare for help working through it or dad for a bit of emotional re-centering  i was tired of looping on ...

 the svesti couldn't go all the way up the mountain so it took a couple of hours of hoofing it – hard work even with my gravity shoes  by time we reached the cave opening the air was the coldest i've ever breathed  the cave seemed to resist ever...

 zorlan couldn't wait to show us his passion project  he thought we'd be impressed at how he misappropriated my work and twisted it so he could graft a forged arm onto a zombie  he tried to fix house cannith's money trouble by signing an illegal g...

 leali contacted us just now – the next mournland expedition is approved!  we'll be required to bring a yet-unnamed h.cannith representative along and that makes me a little nervous but i can cope with nearly anything as long as we can bring back a...

 the waters and sands of lake dark are midnight with stars pushed to shore  all light disappears an acorn's width below the still surface  zer'atesh declined for his own reasons but the rest of us had to know  medya dove beneath the surface wit...

 the wheat here is the color of hyacinth flowers because farmers draw from lake dark to water the crops  vedim describes lake dark as placid and purifying and and black as night because it's sitting on top of a manifest zone to the realm of the dead ...

 negatives:  banal design  guards who are skeletons  guards who aren't skeletons yet  undead svesti  cartload of ash – enough to poison every existing forged  huge reservoir of pure negative energy  deep underground storage for im...

 it's taken a week to recover from my self-inflicted exhaustion  time to make good on the promise of journaling about the 14 students who attended my class 3 months ago  here are the abridged notes ordered by my estimation of their magecrafting sk...

 every so often i get so focused on one project that i lose sight of all else  for 2 weeks now i've examined that spell from every angle and picked it apart to understand why it did what it did when it did and how  with help from my friends i now ...

 despite the protective shield zer'atesh cast  despite the shifts of no fewer than 3 people to watch the camp overnight  the snow showed the tracks of a svest' following a biped into the woods  none of us could explain it and the other svesti s...

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 teryk is even less of a town than bedem was  it's about 200 each guards and support staff for the nearby work camp holding 2000 (!) prisoners  most of the non-prisoners wear emerald claw pendants like the one kraal had ... including the enchantme...

 everyone presently in the lodge in order of appetite:  1 rattled unicorn (semi-active but hungrier since new legs!)  1 wolfy human (active but trim)  1 clever kalashtar (semi-active)  6 elderly humans (active)  1 brave gryphon (active bu...

 vedim did not join us for our morning run  last night he asked us to meet him at the lucky sable inn once we were ready to leave  he was there as promised but he barely waited for the svestjarb' to stop before he jumped in  we weren't far when...

 the coffee-and-prayer session was a calm and affirming way to start the day  afterward availah was curious about my connection to the silver flame  i didn't tell her that i'd stood next to a paladin of the flame while we battled and banished a fi...

 vedim enjoys a morning run same as us so we've been going together  he prefers to run just before dawn which is a touch early for us but it's worth it to have him along in case we encounter any more oversized murderbeasts or the like  after the r...

 in the forests of karrnath the military has set free large numbers of massive "fellwolves" magebred specifically as survival and combat training for soldiers  they roam in packs and they hunger for fresh meat and their favorite word is "hunt"  i ...

 atur has plenty to offer for those devoted volites who come from all over the country to visit the crimson monestary and add their blood to a communal fountain then drink from same  there's not much here for the rest of us but that doesn't mean it's...

 to d'cannith zorlan's credit: he recognized me by my brand of destiny  he's read my paper and he complimented my willingness to publish it even though it would horrify some people?  the important thing is that morran asked him to try and get merr...

 i have seen the dead walking  karrnath survived heavy war losses by reanimating soldiers' corpses to keep on fighting but now those "undead" remains are directed to sweep streets and the like  everyone acts like this is fine and not a gut-twistin...

 i hadn't realized just how much the heart & hammer has become my home away from home and it hurt a lot to have to leave so quickly without knowing when we'll be able to return  i spent most of last night and today repacking saddlebags both literal a...

 they call it a "brokensword writ"  it's the king's order saying the named people are to be arrested on sight  in this case for the deaths of several reidrans and the fall of the temple in dar san  there are bounties on each of us large enough ...

 in middle tavick's there is a jail where the watch is holding "pilic bekker" – knifey the kid's actual name – and this morning i went there to speak with him  he'll be there for 3 months which seems cruel but he says it'll give him time to think...

 ir'wynarn wrugar is now king of breland and that scares aejar  wrugar declared aejar "prince of sharn" and that also scares him  he feels there's no time to grieve for his father because the city's administration needs urgent attention  today ...

 gryphons and pegasi have a unique word for the feeling of the air around clouds that are charged with lightning  medya used that word to describe the city streets  king boranel is theoretically returning from a diplomatic visit to flamekeep ... b...

 now that we're headed back to sharn i feel like journaling  we stopped emmer sykes from hurting anyone ever again  we did a good thing and i no longer feel conflicted about my part in it  but it's still hard to let go of just how out of contro...

 i really don't feel like it but i'm journaling this while it's fresh in my mind  we accomplished our mission  but first i rode a platform down a rope at an angle over rocks that would have looked sharp if they weren't entirely obscured by shadow ...

 when i was just a filly i had trouble moderating my emotional reactions and as an early bloomer for magical strength i could accidentally become a bit dangerous sometimes  my elderly and patient physic "amber spark" taught me to meditate by molding ...

 i've been leading a course of 6 weekly lessons in magecraft for a dozen and a half students and the final session was earlier today  i'm proud of them all – even the ones who weren't quite getting it and dropped out after a couple weeks  some m...

 the 6 of us spent most of the day watching for a chick to hatch from an egg  except the "waiting" was hiding on the rooftops of a pair of rickety warehouses and the "egg" was another warehouse nearby and the "chick" was a massive whorl of screaming ...

 the "king's citadel" are the topmost authority in breland and they deal with threats to king and country  they have 4 inner divisions:  the "king's shields" protect the royals and those close to them  the "king's swords" handle especially diff...

 i can't say how but today we received information on exactly what lies "between drum and vanguard"  the blackcaps have many small portals to khyber! – but the treaty that ended the war also declared the areas around those strictly off-limits  o...

 i didn't bother to journal it then but 2 days ago someone shot an arrow at spark and narrowly missed  she says it was likely just a "message" to intimidate her but without anything written or any idea who "sent" it all we can do is guess from contex...

 the good news: leali and aejar convinced house cannith to approve the next expedition into the mournland!  the bad news: it won't be for a couple months yet because first they have to build something to get us out there safely?  the could-go-eith...

 the other day aejar said "we cannot rule if we cannot lead and leading sometimes means getting out of the way"  but he also recognized that because he was getting reports that things were good he took his eyes off of sharn for a little too long so h...

 chromatic saw the windowpapers then immediately said she was going to take her art back  the 6 of us volunteered to join her in solidarity and soon we had several others along including aejar and nine so we teleported to wroat as a large group  t...

 medya and relic visited several folks from the list of those injured at the tower but only one would say anything of substance  "hjalta bartell" told them about strange activity at the construction site and rumors of indistinct shadowy figures who d...

 yesterday was good  spark and meledri found the evidence we needed to show that bishop egen knew the nature of the murders all along  and when they questioned the priest tara she turned out to be fiendish but they managed to contain her  hjalt...

 it was an ugly morning  that recognition ceremony the archbishop wanted us to be part of?  as ponies say "the grass ate the rabbits" – it went unexpectedly badly  the ceremony was also to recognize a devoted flamist "arclight" who we knew to...

 shamukaar holds a strict policy of neutrality – cazha used it to threaten us from behind a shield  the red inn also holds a strict policy of neutrality – technically raelvan held to that and meledri did not  i like the red inn's coffee more t...

 early this morning meledri came by the h&h and together we all teleported to the temple of the silver flame in sigilstar  teleportation is somewhat surreal because there's little sense of having travelled at all ... except for medya who still doesn'...

 today fortune metrol came by to ask our help with a list written by d'cannith merrix 2  all the items seem to be valid spell reagents but the amounts don't make sense  we're specifically mentioned as being able to help find the stuff so it's prob...

 it took some dedicated relax time to recover enough to journal about the forged march for representation  i'm glad i was there but it wasn't easy because when there's too much noise i struggle not to panic  there is a deep power in the rhythm of ...

 some mornings start with sunbeams through the window  some mornings start with gentle nudges from my favorite gryphon  yesterday morning started with a psychic shriek from zer and a warning from atesh that the reidrans' new tower will let them in...

 i wondered when i'd hear back from the king's son aejar – and he visited today!  there's a lot to like about him but i'll start with his business cards because he gave me two  the obligatory one is a decorated mess of royal titles that don't in...

 medya helped me understand at least a little more about why bell and zer' put so much effort into toying with those peeping reidrans yesterday  the reidrans represent rigid state power attempting to intimidate us  actively confusing them wastes t...

 the newspapers here all have a lot more bad news in them than the one i usually read back home  then again they have a lot more news to report because there are so many more people here than back home  but in good news this morning's breland ledg...

 i held my first class on magecraft this afternoon – 14 learners showed up!  i started by asking everyone to introduce themselves and to be honest about their skills and goals so we'd all know what we could learn from each other  apparently this...