Hello, Everyone!
Last time our heroes made a little investigation on a poor person and his home who, as far as he was concerned, had had a break-in. However, Mary and her friends found out that he'd had a wife whom he'd forgotten, just like they'd forgotten about Lanurey Trost.
Morning came to Trim’s inn and found Mary reading in her chair and Bruno and Aurum just waking up after a restless sleep.
“Um…” the dwarf said, looking at his chest.
“What’s the matter, Bruno?”
He parted the folds of his shirt and there, scratched out with his own fingernails, was a message.
“All right, that’s freaky,” Aurum said.
“And useless,” Bruno added. “I’m opening them as hard as I can and nothing is happening.”
He shook his head and set out to do what yesterday’s fatigue hadn’t let him. He was silent for a few seconds and then said Tesaya said ‘hi’. He’d sent her a message asking to check for Lanurey Trost in Myth Adofhaer’s Archives. After all, she was supposed to have been from there. Еven if people didn’t remember her, there must have been a paper trail about her existence.
“Good thinking,” Aurum said with a yawn. “ By the way, I know what we forgot to do last night.”
“What?” Mary said, the word ‘forgot’ making her heart skip a beat.
“We forgot to check out Maheshvara’s bells.”
They took the satchel Bruno and Aurum had found on Pyron’s body and turned it over on the floor. Two bells fell out, as well as a big shiny emerald.
“Oh, this is pretty!” Mary said and took the latter for her growing gem collection.
It made her think of the emerald dragonborn who ruled Drakonia. Could the gem have been meant as a gift for her? Was that why Pyron had it? After all, Drakonia was where New Hope had been heading towards before it sank.
On the bottom of the satchel there was the remains of some papers. After being underwater for so many years, they were completely destroyed. Mary wondered if that was an official document that Pyron was carrying, or perhaps the manuscript of his next book.
Was that what her own journals would look like if she died on the bottom of the sea?
While she was looking at the paper, Bruno had been inspecting the bells. There were, as expected, two of them. The bigger one, Dyrum, had writing all over its surface. Mary could recognize Common, Infernal and Celestial, and Bruno said that there was Dwarvish and Undercommon as well. All of the words meant the same thing – ‘The Talkative’. That was, as far as Mary remembered, Dyrum’s nickname.
Bruno’s Identifying revealed that, if the conditions were right and its wielder skillful enough, Dyrum could modify someone’s memory or speak with the dead.
Saraneth, on the other hand, was so little! It was almost as big as Mary’s thumb, handle and all. It didn’t have any inscriptions but its magic was capable of making people stealthier, or casting the Silence spell on command.
Of course, both had downsides, just like Mosrael, which was able to heal but also, if the wielder wasn’t skilled enough, could unintentionally hurt. Dyrum, if rung incorrectly, would erase a memory--Mary shivered thinking of Lanurey Trost and all the other things that they’d been forgetting; and Saranet, if things went wrong, would give out a deafening sound instead of creating magical silence.
“I like those,” Aurum said. “Maybe not so useful as Mosrael in a fight but still pretty neat.” He stood up and looked at Mary and Bruno expectedly. “Sooo, are we going to the shore?”
The others nodded. They still remembered the cryptic “Go back in the water and look!” that the part of the bard which knew what was going on had written last night.
They had a quick breakfast and headed out.
The sea was just as calm and unmoving as the previous day. The mist started a hundred yards from the Red Quay and stood like a milky wall between the ships and the open sea.
Mary made the Waterbreathing spell from her Book of Shadows and Bruno and Aurum went into the sea. She stayed on the beach to watch for any suspicious activity while they were submerged.
“If you don’t come back in half an hour, I’ll come looking for you,” she said.
She waited, and waited, and tried to stay focused on her surroundings but it was difficult with Ekoba’s opressing atmosphere. She sat down on the ground and tried out another spell from her Book – Speak with Animals. There were a lot of seagulls around, they might have known something about… well, something.
They didn’t. And they were pretty annoying. Plus, the bigger ones straight out tried to attack Mary because they thought she had food for them. She managed to shoo them away and that was when Bruno and Aurum walked out of the water.
“There are giant worms!” Aurum exclaimed. “I cast a Clairvoyance like the last time and there were worms as big as columns over the city! Or…” He hesitated. “I mean, at least I thought there were. There might not have been. Yeah, no, that sounds stupid. Giant worms? It doesn’t make any sense.”
He rubbed his forehead in a gesture Mary knew well by now.
“Aurum?” she said. “Are you having a headache?”
“Yeah, and what are you talking about?” Bruno said. “You were absolutely sure about the worms while we were in the water. You even told me how many they were, how they looked like…”
“Are you… forgetting?”
“I don’t know,” Aurum said. “I don’t think so? There can’t be worms over the city, we’d have seen them if there were. Right?”
“Maybe seeing isn’t what makes them appear,” Mary said.
She blinked into her Eldritch Sight and examined the bard. There was no magic currently acting upon him but there was… something weird. She looked around and it was everywhere - a very faint glow in the air, like a magical aura. Purple, which meant Enchantment.
“Keep my stuff safe, please,” she said and went into the sea.
The glow wasn’t there, but there was something else missing, too. It was quiet and the lack of sound helped her think clearly. She realized that there had been something out on the surface, something that they weren’t consciously perceiving.
Like a constant noise in the air, impossible to actually hear.
Sometimes D&D is a constant string of trial-and-error until you learn what's going on. Or at least you think you do. Let's hope we'll see what actually is happening! Until next time!
Take care and be well!
(Also, here's a link to the Chapter Guide, the Glossary and the Map for the series. You're welcome!)
An important disclaimer: These are my notes from a D&D game turned into a narrative. All the worldbuilding and NPC encounters belong to our DM, and all the actions of the other main characters (Aurum and Bruno) belong to my co-players. My contribution to the story is only everything Mary-related (actions, reactions, inner thoughts), as well as the writing itself.