Well, I met a dragon again today. That is not a good sign.
Ah, I have gotten ahead of myself.
I rejoined the party at first light. Osbert saw me off from the doorway of the shop. The Aasimar paladin and the Orc ranger were nowhere to be seen, though I suspect they were simply still abed.
The rest of the party filled me in on what had happened while I was away. Sephek Kaltro, the carriage driver who brought us to Caer-Dineval, turned out to be a murderer. The party was somehow implicated and resolved it themselves. We now have a caravan. I did not ask for the full story and I am not certain I wanted it.
Osbert had heard a rumour. It seems there was a reason the Red Wizard killed those Ten-Towners he had hired. They had helped him locate a buried tower, and he killed them to keep the location secret. One of them had talked before dying, and the location had made its way through the grapevine to Osbert. He asked if I would be comfortable exploring it, on the chance there were books worth reading. I told him I would see what I could do, though I could not promise what was not mine to promise. Corren, as it turned out, had similar interests.
It was reason enough to look.
. . . We found the dragon before we found the tower.We chanced upon what appeared to be someone seated in the snow. Before anyone could make sense of it, the ground shook. The dragon rose. The force of it knocked us down. She looked at us, then she was gone.
We met someone on the road after who told us her name and what she was. Arveiaturace. An ancient white dragon. The figure on her back, rumour has it, was once her companion. She has carried him ever since.
Looking back, she reminds me of Vergos, the Dragonsire of Arborea, first of his kind, as powerful as any god. Vergos was something older and more terrible, but Arveiaturace is not far behind. I think dragons may not sit as close to godhood in this world as they do in Arborea. That is, on balance, good news.
. . .The tower was not difficult to find with the directions provided. We descended floor by floor. The library had been largely ransacked, though several books remained. I noted what was left: texts on Netherese archmages and the creation of mythallars, a history of a city called Ventatost that disintegrated mid-flight over a forest, treatises on illusion magic, and a speculative work on existing as a disembodied brain preserved in magical suspension fluid. That last one I intend to return to.
On the third floor we met him. He introduced himself as a simulacrum of his creator Dzaan, the Red Wizard who had burned in Easthaven, a creation of snow and shadow. The undead beside him was his bodyguard, Krintaas. It took some effort to restrain my instinct to purge undead, but as “Dzaan” requested we not harm his bodyguard, I obliged.
He told us about the tower, that it is a fragment of the Netherese city of Ythryn and nearly two thousand years old. That is really impressive workmanship. I wonder if these Netherese people are still around.
In exchange for accompanying him to the rune chamber below, he offered us an amulet he had found somewhere in the tower. He did not know what it did and neither did we at the time. We accepted.
“Dzaan” told us of his wish to be real. There was apparently a rune chamber on the lowest level that could perform that exact miracle, turning illusions into reality, and we went down to inspect it. The cracks in the walls and the damaged runes told the story clearly enough. A machine that should have worked cleanly but did not, because something in it was broken that none of us had the knowledge to repair. I wanted to try. The party was ready to move.
It required a spark of life to activate, which was provided by the Tortle wizard. The chamber did not work perfectly. Dzaan had hours, not permanence.
. . .Six bugbears came not long after. We attempted to resolve it with words, but Dzaan decided to handle them himself with magic, likely out of grief. We did not intervene.
Before we left, he gave us what he had on the remaining members of the Arcane Brotherhood.
“Avarice is a tiefling evoker who delights in destruction. Her weakness is her paranoia. She cannot bring herself to trust anyone except maybe her two gargoyle companions, and even they are suspect.”
“Nass Lantomir is a human diviner. She likes to pry knowledge from others by reading their thoughts. Her weakness is that she is always looking ahead, never behind her.”
“Vellynne Harpell is a human necromancer, as cold and uncaring as the corpses she animates. She is a withered old fool whose greatest asset, her family name, does her no good in Icewind Dale.”
It was, I think, all he had left to give.
We left him there with his remaining hours and his undead bodyguard, who seemed, if anything, ecstatic.
. . .I can return the dead to the living. I have done it more times than I can count. I could do nothing for a man who was never quite alive to begin with.