The Pact and the Stones

Everything on this page the party learned the hard way: off a wall, out of a locked chest, from a fey lady who enjoyed withholding it, and finally from the Duke himself with his guards sent out of the room. It is the truest account they have. It is still one frightened man's secret, passed down by word of mouth, and there is a great deal it does not cover.

What everyone is taught

Every child in Westmarch learns the same history. Three hundred years ago the Thornwood turned hostile and began to expand — awakened plants, fey powers, monsters out of the deep — and swallowed settlements. The kingdom fought back for two decades in the Green War, and won, and pushed the forest back. Then both sides made peace: the Greenwood Pact. The city would not expand, would not log past the Border Stones, would not hunt the deep forest; the forest would not encroach, and the Rangers would keep the line. For three centuries it has held.

That is the story. The party has now found the seams in it.

What the party found

The war was not won. A letter by Commander Edric Harrow, written in 941 and hidden in a chest at Harrow Keep, says the keep's forces never beat the forest at all. Facing destruction, they were forced into a secret treaty to survive — and Harrow buried the truth so the crown would believe in a victory that never happened.

The record was scrubbed. When Elara went looking, she found that for an event that reshaped the kingdom, no account of the treaty negotiations survives anywhere in the Archive. A hole that clean is made, not left.

The Pact is a prison. This is what the Duke told them, and it is the heart of it:

The forest is a living thing — ancient, hostile, and awake — that rose against humanity and made war, and could not be beaten by arms.
To survive, the city tricked the forest's own powers into a binding oath. The Greenwood Pact is the shape of that trick. It is not a peace between equals. It is a cage.
Seven ward stones hold the cage shut: six ringed around the city, and one beneath the Citadel that only the Duke can reach. They suppress the forest's magic, and they are bound by the oaths of both sides.
The Duke does not believe Westmarch could survive another war if the cage opens.

The stones

The party has seen one of the seven up close: the Warren Stone, under the poorest district. A great slab set in bedrock, carved over with script, cracked open with tool marks. Quill read the inscription — ZAN-TA KYDRA TESS AQUA MAGI, "Suppress it, Stone, Channel to the Water of Vision" — and took it to mean the stone's work is to blind the forest, to smother its sight and reach.

Mending a broken stone takes two things: Source Stone, drawn from the bottom of the Singing Pools, and the Tess-Kydra, an ancient vessel that stores magical power over time like a battery. The party retrieved both, the city's spellcasters charged the Tess-Kydra over days, and discharging it into the mended Warren Stone sealed it for good and lifted the fog.

Two more phrases hang over all of it, both from Kaelen's vision of the Duke at prayer before a greater stone: "the Great Vow," and "the South Stone is lost." Nobody has explained either yet.

What Celindara has taught so far

The Tess-Kydra was made with runes. Confirmed in the ruins. The bowl's inscription is Vethara, the language of magic, and the party now carries an apprentice's primer on writing it — The Basics of Rune-Smithing — which Quill says is where learning to make a second vessel begins, and a very long way from the end.

Vethara is a language of statements, and the statements hold. A Celindaran carver did not ask the stone to do a thing; he declared it so, and it stayed so until something contradicted it. The party has now walked through three instances: a waystation door and hearth that obey a request in Elvish; an arch that declares no false word passes this line; and two words over every door on the terraces, Here, rest, that keep the dead in their houses — until roots break the lintel, at which point the dead get up. A broken declaration can be repaired by completing the inscription. Quill did it in ice in twenty-four seconds. It cost him nothing and lasted until the ice melted.

The forest has a name. Laying out the Green War year by year, the DM said that by its second five years the defenders had worked out what they were fighting, and called it the Greenheart — whatever it was that controlled the forest. The party had never heard the word. It is a name from the history, not an explanation, and nobody has yet connected it to the thing the Duke described.

Westmarch and Celindara were friends. The Measure of the Westrun, the ledger of the people who ran Celindara's ford, records Westmarch four hundred years ago as a timber town that paid in silver — and in 928 records the road between the two cities open, twelve leagues of it under Westmarch's patrols, and the captain at Harrow Keep writing to ask for a copy of the mile-marks. Sent. Thirteen years later Harrow wrote that the war had ended in a bargain made under duress.

What is still dark

The stones are being broken on purpose. The Duke is certain of it, and the party has now seen the method — cloaked figures moving through the sewers for weeks before the fog, a route bought under the Warrens, two witnesses removed. Who is buying, and why, they do not know.
The forest is more than the Duke's words for it. He spoke of "the forest" as a hostile being. The party suspects there is a specific thing behind that word — something big and dangerous the stones are built to hold. They now have a name the war's defenders used for it, the Greenheart, and no more idea than before what it is.
Six stones stand unseen. Only the Warren Stone is known to the party. Where the other six are, which have already been tampered with, and how close any of them is to failing, is entirely open.
The Fey call the bargain unbalanced. They believe the Pact contains "an imbalance in the bargain." What that means, and what the fey would do about it, the party cannot say.

For the running list of what the party is still chasing, see Open Questions.