Questions and Alliances

This is before the recordings, and is set down from the notes.

Nobody wanted to march three more days into the Thornwood to fight a dragon's kobolds if there was another way, so the party spent a few days in the city looking for one.

What Quill found on an old map

Quill went back into the Archive and turned up where the Tess-Kydra came from in the first place: a city called Celindara, an elven seat of learning that the Thornwood swallowed whole during the Green War. Old Archive maps still place it — a week or two deep in the forest, far past Harrow Keep. It was not a shortcut. But it was a second door, and Quill made a note of it, because the party has learned to keep second doors.

Lyrique carried what they had found to Lord Brennan — the vision, the fey lady, Elara's research. Brennan said he did not recognise the stone from Kaelen's vision, and warned her off trusting the Fey at all.

Kaelen took the same questions to Archdruid Theron, and got a name and a warning. The lady of the Pools was Lady Oona, and she was dangerous. Theron admitted, when pressed, that he knew about the ward stones — and then refused to say more. He did not trust everyone the party answered to, and he would not put the truth where it might travel.

Lady Sera

They gathered at the Archive to plan the road to Harrow Keep, and the Duke's daughter walked into the middle of it.

Lady Sera Westmarch studies magic and history, and she is quicker than she looks. The party tried to feel out, carefully, whether her father knew anything about the stones. She saw straight through it inside a sentence — and instead of taking offence, she made an offer. She would get them a private audience with the Duke himself. In exchange, they would take her with them into the Thornwood, to Harrow Keep.

It was a bad trade and a good one. They were about to walk the heir to Westmarch into a kobold-held ruin. They were also, for the first time, being handed a road to the one man in the city who might simply know the answer. They took it.

While they outfitted, Sera let one more thing slip: her father wears a small vial on a cord around his neck, and has told her it is one day meant for her. She does not know what is in it. Neither does anyone else.

The Greenmark market

The forest did not wait for them to leave. In the Greenmark — the craftsmen's district by the southern wall, where the Rangers are based — plants tore themselves out of a warded park and fell on a farmers' market: shrubs first, moving wrong, and then a tree, big enough to throw people.

Kaelen, Lyrique and Sera were in it before the Watch could form up, and Sera proved she had not just come along to be guarded — she put arcane bolts into the thing while it came apart the market. Kaelen tore thirty-three points of it away in a single pass. What finished it was a stranger: Wynn Copper, a Delver's Guild fighter, who stepped between the tree and Kaelen, took the blow meant for him, and then killed it.

Afterward Sera examined the park's ward. It was still lit — but weakened, and inside the mist she found the same thing the party had seen in the Warrens: motes of light, drifting in, waking the greenery and turning it hostile. Whatever was failing under the city was not staying under the city. It had come over the wall.

Lyrique hired Wynn on the spot for the road ahead. Kaelen, who has fought kobolds, told the others what to expect: weak enough one at a time, deadly in numbers, and never to be underestimated — they field their own spellcasters and their own poisoners. The party went to bed with a bigger company and a worse problem than they had started the week with.