Day 424
We enter the ancient city with the help of Kaide's ingenious water globe lights. They give the entire enormous hall an eerie underwater feeling as we find ourselves surrounded by debris and bones that have accumulated over the last several millennia. The hall was occasionally filled with warriors, wyrmling riders, and ceremonial drummers. More often though it was a marketplace where even Osyr from the sea would come to trade.
Deeper in, the caverns open up into enormous dark nothingness towering over stout houses and buildings. Here, too, are signs of battle, skirmishes long gone by. Even with the endless shadows, it's not a place I can imagine living. The stone is so firm and unyielding around us even with plenty of space.
Kaide wanders ahead of us, clearly still remembering the paths she walked thousands of years ago. Beside me, Lyssa casts me a curious glance. When I remind her of the person whose fragmented soul I carry she pales. I try to reassure her that Kaide isn't the same as our Empress - she's her own person. And I ask her not to tell Thalien, of course. Being able to stump him is such a rare pleasure.
Eventually we find ourselves standing in the centre of an enormous magic circle. The runes are not familiar to me, being ancient dwarvish. When Kaide activates the runes the entire stone platform begins to slowly rotate and descend along grooves that I now see carved into the stones. It takes us deeper into the mountain to a level where the residents of the city lived (the upper level was for visitors and trade).
Here it feels better, perhaps because the streets are cleaner. There have clearly still been looters and disturbances here but it is less destroyed than the upper level. The streets themselves are lined with simple lamp posts covered in a layer of dust and grime that nearly obscures the runes engraved on them. Kaide activates these too and a small segment of the city lights up with cool white light from tiny gems suspended in each lamp. I'm enthralled and make a mental note to send this concept to Amytri. I can almost see strings of lights connecting Whitewater, Solace, Dreamfall, Drognar. Well-cobbled roads along which elves would find shade and humans wouldn't be afraid to travel at night.
The architecture is not what I would find comfortable or familiar but Lyssa nods as she takes it in - certainly dwarvish. Every so often there is a structure that feels homey and Kaide tells us these are elvish. A few elves lived here as well, she shows us.
First, a home whose piles of dirt feel more intentional than any of dust and grime outside. Rusted tools sit on sturdy workbenches and long-empty pots are carefully arranged around the space. This home, once of the Adyri family, was full of plants and gardens. A delicate notebook I find details the variety of plants they had learned to cultivate underground, and several terracotta pots have remnants of magic that would provide water and light to their charges. We set all of these aside to collect on the way out - there is much more to discover here.
Another house is one that Kaide tells us once belonged to an elvish wine-making family. The interior shows more signs of dwarvish brewing than anything elvish but a bilingual ledger with the family name explains it - someone made a family out of both dwarves and elves here.
Still further in the city Kaide shows us the Stargazing hall. It is a humble building built into the cliffside and surrounded by lights that have been screened and worked to produce starlight images from their gems. Inside is another corkscrewing stone platform that takes us far, far upwards to another room where it is clear no looters have made it. It is a stopover room before still another elevator that brings us to a large room of stone desks and maps of the night sky spanning the entire domed ceiling. While Lyssa and Kaide busy themselves with tearing down wards around the vault here, I let my memory extend across the space and paint the room for Andstella.
The vault contains four enormous telescopes, one of which accompanies us to a final stone platform that will take us even higher. Kaide directs me with my motion magic and we ascend yet again. Through the summit of the mountain and beyond, 1500 feet into the sky, above the clouds so high that the horizon spins out into nothingness around us. Here, Kaide positions the telescope at the red moon and offers it to me. Through this perfectly clear lens I see the face of the moon as though it is cradled in my palm.
Craters, faults, cliffs and valleys. It is a naked face devoid of rivers, oceans, forests or plains. Nothing but bloodmoon jade fills the lens and I almost laugh at the absurdity that something so precious here might exist in such plenty just out of reach. I lose myself in the fault lines and endlessly smaller craters until I come back to myself and find Lyssa's arms wrapped around me, warm against the frigid air. I fix the image of the moon in my mind perfectly before passing the telescope to Lyssa. It's an image I want to send to Mystery for Belle. I hope those two are together by now.
Here at what seems like the top of the world I paint another image for Andstella until I feel Lyssa against me again. One day we'll come back here and spend proper time - a table and some cushions...she could cook dinner for us. The air is so cold that an Osyr-sized blanket wouldn't be amiss.
But for now, still more work to be done. We return deep into the ground again after securing the telescope. Deeper and deeper until Kaide stops in her tracks and turns back to us.
This is something I'll do alone. If I'm not back in ten minutes come after me.
Lyssa and I stand quietly for those ten minutes, waiting. The dull gleam in Kaide's eyes as she turned away is familiar to me. Not the determination of facing a danger too great for your companions but the anxiety of something painful that you face alone. She emerges holding a small box carved with Osyr runes and passes it to me to carry.
I left this here a long time ago. I had to leave in a hurry; you know how teacher is.
It is a box of letters from home when she was last here. In the next building - her Hall, she finds her name inscribed still on the roster and marked with a symbol of a travelling master. It indicates someone who has left but continues to be welcome and return here. She remembers leaving but not returning...she worries that perhaps she'll find letters in her box that she doesn't remember receiving.
It's clearly a place she felt at home - the tools, the books, even the vault opens for her. It surprises her to be recognized even as a remnant in a new body but it doesn't surprise me. Well-constructed magic ought to recognize her regardless of her body or how 'whole' she is. If she remembers being here, it should remember her.
With tools in hand, she directs Lyssa to sit down so her measurements can be taken (Kaide wants to make jewellery for her). For just a minute we are properly senior and junior apprentice as I lean against a workbench and record her measurements in my notebook. Then I zone out and think about whether I could construct an illusory mannequin in Lyssa's exact shape. When I come back into focus I have to ask for several measurements again but in my defence, a perfect illusion would be a better way to do this.
I can't help but feel warmed by the sight of Kaide here. She looks at ease surrounded by these tools and gem fragments. She seems confident in her ownership of this place, even showing us her own book of mastery. It is full of her designs of jewellery, intended for students to practice imitating. The last half is of intricate designs that she says are meant to be aspirational.
By the time a student could make something like this, they really shouldn't.
Eventually all of these books could be passed on to a suitable Hall with Lyssa's help. The two of them discuss how they might bring other masters here so that they could see what they are receiving in proper. This, too, warms me.
Finally we leave the Hall and go still deeper. An opulent stone platform with decorative carvings takes us even further to a well-preserved residential area where people lived separately from their craft. Small wyrmlings clearly still live here but we shadow-step around the entire area without attracting their attention and find ourselves before the palace itself - impeccably preserved and unlooted. Before we can approach, a voice rumbles out above us:
It has been a very, very long time. Give me your names, visitors. By what right do you come here?
Lyssa begins to answer but Kaide speaks first: A humble master jeweller and friend to the Crown.
For a moment there is silence and then the shadow above us glide downwards and lands before us, bowing his dark, scaled head before Kaide.
Empress. By your command I have kept it safe.
I reach for her hand and we grip each other like stone as she answers. She doesn't remember him, of course, and tells him this openly. Like me in my first interactions with elves on this side, she speaks of the gaps in her memory and treats him kindly. She alludes to friendship between them and he shakes his head a little - not quite friends.
He coalesces into a sturdy dwarf with glossy black hair and dark eyes - the second dragon to have transformed like this before me. Considering what Kaide has said he supposes that she must not know anything of his grandfather, after whom he has wondered for many years.
I step forwards at this and introduce myself as the fifth Hand of the Empress ("Fifth?" he asks curiously) and ask for the name of his grandfather. I'm pleased to tell him that I last heard of Darkness only a few months ago, when he freed Magdalena from her swamp.
The dragon, Onyx, tells us that he was left here to protect the home of the Empress' friends. The crown we seek is long gone but the rest of the palace is untouched - we are free to visit what remains of her friend.
In the crypt beneath the palace we find the resting place of several kings and of Yulé herself. Her ancestors, her son, and her grandson who was the last king. He served the Empire faithfully until his death and when he fell, the Empress ordered the palace to be sealed. Onyx gently tells Kaide that she was there when Yulé passed - she and all of her family. She passed peacefully from old age. It is as good an ending as we could have hoped to find. I hope the Empress has kept these memories safe; I wonder if she might be able to return some of them to Kaide like she returned mine. Or if Kaide locked hers away in a place she could access them again.
Before we rest he shows us around the palace a little, particularly a grand library clearly mid-use. He says he has stayed here for millennia but spends a few years on the surface at a time, always returning to continue his duties and his work. When Kaide remarks (somewhat sadly) that it seems like such a long time to have asked him to stay here just to keep the palace safe he chuckles. It is not such a long time for people like them. People like us, I remind myself.
He has been working on magic to pull veins of material out of the walls like vines. It is something that could use some motion magic, I think!
Even here in the undermountain I can feel night falling around us, though the small injection of energy I find in myself at dusk is duller from the exhaustion of the day. Onyx leads us into the palace and helps us settle in for the evening. Kaide, of course, retires. When he sees this, he notes to me that he would not have hatched if it were not for her - I ought to keep her safe. Of course...it's not something I need to be reminded of.
But Onyx...his presence is something so promising. I have so many question for Magdalena about this time in the Empire but I'm cautious to ask and she has her agenda...the answers won't always be simple or clear coming from her. I had thought to ask Hue or Ipthina some questions as well but held back for the same reasons.
Onyx - a friend to the Empress and the Empire, grandson to Darkness, someone trusted enough to be posted here and trusting enough to accept the task and harbour no ill will for being left here for thousands of years. I cannot wait to pester this ancient colleague with questions. I cannot wait to send Haze and Lyssa here. Haze must learn to shift like this - he'll be delighted.
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