July 16th, 761, 4:14 AM; Day 121 of the Menetnashte Expedition
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Up ahead, on the path, the small, iron-bound doors of the Monastery of Stilled Nightmares opened, their hinges creaking loudly in the pre-dawn gloom. They were surprisingly small, actually, given the imposing bulk of the Monastery building, more a postern gate through which a few sneaking skulkers could escape through than the huge, intimidating gates that marked public buildings in Dementlieu.
"Come. The Abbot waits." Ianthe whispered into the silence, motioning for her fellow monks to come along and gesturing towards the fight somewhat behind the group. It seemed that the Devourer and its pet Smiler were winning. "I do not wish to be here when they are done."
That wasn't really a sentiment you could argue with.
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The Monastery of Stilled Nightmares itself was a rather unusual building. It was a huge, ramshackle pile of wood and stone, composed largely, as near you could tell, from chunks of ship wreckage that had been dragged to the rocky outcropping and piled atop one another. This gave the entire Monastery a wierdly organic look to it, as the smooth walls bulged with lengths of ship's hull, and occasionalls spars and masts poked out of the building at peculiar angles.
Originally, it seemed, the building had been a pair of large ships, galleons of some sort, which had fallen onto the side of the rocky hill in a kind of V-shape. Since then, they had been expanded upon and built over and in a few cases, cannibalized for building material. For all that, though, there was a kind of pleasing style to the Monastery, a vaguely comfortable feeling that made you want to run your hand along the wall and marvel at the close-planked wooden walls, and how well they stood the test of time.
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Sadly, there wasn't time for much more sight-seeing, as the small group was bustled up the carved stone steps and into the first antechamber of the Monastery of Stilled Nightmares. Jervis brought up the rear, looking vaguely annoyed with the world at having only managed to secure a single, reasonably undamaged Bodak-skin out of this entire endeavor.
Ianthe spoke to her fellow monks in quick bursts of Vechorite, and it occurred to you that many of the other Monks also had the small, delicate epsilon tattooed on their foreheads. Others looked to be Vaasi or Darkonian, but even they understood Ianthe.
A pair of younger monks, a tall Vechorite man and a Darkonian woman, came up, and a brief exchange followed. The rest of the still confused and anemic monks were led off by the two monks, somewhere into the depths of the Monastery.
This left the ten of you, and Ianthe, alone in the antechamber of the Monastery. The room was fairly small, but pleasantly decorated with numerous swirling patterns carved into the walls and various sea-creatures hung in frames, seashells and molluscs of different sorts.
Our foreign guests have arrived. The dry, rustling voice seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, a shifting of dried leaves in an autumn wind that sounded somewhere in your middle ear. And Acolyte Ianthe. We are ever in your debts, travelers.
The old, dark-varnished door to a side-room opened, and the Abbot entered the antechamber. He did not look like the traditional images of a hermit-abbot.
To begin with, the Abbot was well past six feet in height, a slim, slender figure that was of a height with Edmund, easily, and overtopped any of you by several inches. He was clad in flowing black robes and a grey mantle inscribed with a simple geometric design, but even this didn't quite attract the eye as much as his face did. Or rather, his lack of a face.
For the Abbot wore a burnished bronze mask, polished brightly to cover a strangely malformed face, all forehead and with almost no chin. Two crystalline lenses of dark glass covered the eye-slots of the mask, and a hood of black cloth was pulled up over the rest of the Abbot's head. A high collar ringed the back of his neck, spined and curled and with material between the spikes almost like a cobweb.
I admit, I had begun to despair over the last few weeks. But it seems that Dame Fortuna has smiled upon us once more. There was no movement from the bronze mask or the glittering black lenses as the Abbot spoke, though there was a small shifting under the grey mantle, roughly in the area of the Abbot's throat. Please, if there is anything you require, you have but ask. Our home is yours. It's really the least we can do.
