Warden Christin Vaillant's Quarters, Ste. Mere des Larmes, Quartier Publique, Port-a-Lucine; Afternoon of March 24th, 770
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Rock wrote:"Not a word to the Bastion yet, please," she says, placing her hands on the Blackwoods' shoulders. "Not until we have examined this book and made certain. I have a ... feeling. An unpleasant feeling. But we need to correlate our findings with those of the others, and we need to study this book in greater detail."
"A, a, a feeling, professor?" Richard asked, looking stiff and uncomfortable at the sudden familiarity. "You, you believe the Bastion would, would hinder us?"
"Any chance you might share this feeling with us?" Alice asked, joining Lia at the wardrobe.
The wardrobe itself was not the stuff of epics. It contained three neatly pressed Warden's robes. The robes looked much like every other Warden's robe, having no distinct markings, bloodstains, traps, magical auras, interesting stains, misplaced stitches, notes in the pockets, or pockets at all.
"No belt cord, but I assume he must have been wearing it," Alice noted.
Richard refrained from comment on the wardrobe, folding his arms and glancing at the book Lia held from time to time.
Warden Martin Grenier's Quarters, Ste. Mere des Larmes, Quartier Publique, Port-a-Lucine; Afternoon of March 24th, 770
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"Forbi!" Darius says, as the glass comes away in his hands.
The mirror came out of the frame easily enough, sufficiently loose in its moorings to convince you that this was hardly the first time someone had removed the glass. The glass wasn't heavy, just large and clumsy, and in the Isfahani's capable hands it was without trouble.
As they lifted the mirror aside, they could make out the dark discoloration beneath the glass. It was a stack of papers, bound with a grey string, and hanging from a stub of a nail in the mirror. A decent little hiding place, one had to say. The Isfahanis moved the mirror aside to lean it against the wall, and as they did so, the afternoon light flashed across the surface of the lead-backed glass.
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- It's just a glimpse, a way the eyes slid into the mirror that let them see beyond. It was very brief, a heartbeat, no more, but marvelously detailed, with every single fragment etched into your memory... as though carved there with a shard of glass.
You see a plain, a featureless expanse of dead-grey, without sun, without moon, without stars or cloud or sky, only grey. In the center of this infinite field, a field of cold and jagged rock, stands a single tree. It is without leaves, this tree, and ever branch is crooked and gnarled, twisted at angles that hurt your eyes even as you look at them. Even when you tried to remember them, the byzantine arrangement of the branches causes your head to hurt.
One thick branch seems to stretch almost into the foreground, disappearing somewhere directly above the mirror. There is a rope tied around this branch, and from it hangs a noose. This noose is slipped around the two feet of Warden Martin Grenier, Darkonian and anchorite of Nevuchar Springs. He hangs there, in this featureless and infinite field, from a tree that is not a tree. He is dead.
You know this for a fact. Warden Grenier hangs from the tree without moving, upside down and tied by his feet. His face and hands are covered with scratches, though blood has long since ceased to flow. More gruesomely, Grenier's eyes have been carved out as though with a jagged blade or shard, leaving only gaping, bloody sockets in his head. Martin Grenier is dead.
For a moment, his lips begin to move, and you cannot shake the feeling that he sees you as well, but no sound can carry through the mirror. All this took a bare second to see. Then the light shifts once more, and the glass shatters into a thousand pieces.
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A heartbeat after the dim sunlight met the glass, there came a sudden, strange twisting as the glass nearly jumped from the Isfahani's hands. It fell to the floor with a resounding
CRASH, shattering into a thousand little pieces, shards of glass scattering all over the floor of Warden Grenier's little room.
Main Library, Ste. Mere des Larmes, Quartier Publique, Port-a-Lucine; Afternoon of March 24th, 770
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Mr. Agale wrote:"I shouldn't imagine it will matter much which we begin with as we cannot be certain what exactly we are looking for."
Agale's eyes dart across the pages quickly, his hand jotting down notes to be consulted later. He appears very much the accountant, tallying sums and looking for inconsistencies. He keeps a careful watch out for dog-eared pages and sections that have seen particular use.
The poet and accountant spent a near half-hour paging through random texts - Holy Books and poetry, theological diatribes, scholarly musings, maps and primers on language, history books of varying quality, and one rather cheesy pulp novella - and found a good deal of nothing. Neither man could find any significant clues in the text, nor any theme in the texts themselves, and it seemed the good warden had not been so good enough to wreck the library's books by folding the corners of the pages.
The pair were nowhere near through the huge stack of books at the end of the half-hour, but something beyond pages and pages of words attracted attention. A woman, middle aged with blond hair, approached the table where the two men sat. She was a tall woman, with blond hair and dark brown eyes, her skin dry and brittle looking like aged parchment. Her robes were trimmed with far more white than those of the average acolyte, marking her out as someone of importance.
"Those who look only for that which they seek, cannot see the journey that takes them there," the woman offered sagely. "Those who look only forward cannot see the answers that lie to their side."
"Good day, travelers," she greeted. "I can see that you are seeking something."
