Fern had been missing since dawn. The others spent most of the morning crossing the desert in search of him, fighting through punishing heat until they finally discovered him unconscious beside a mound of freshly turned sand. When Fern came to, he stared at the disturbed earth and identified it for what it was: a mass grave.
Fable immediately noticed something wrong. Despite the number of bodies supposedly buried beneath them, she could smell no blood. She knelt, took a handful of sand, and found it unnaturally clumped despite being bone-dry. After studying the residue of magic left across the site, she determined that the Taimavar had used Create or Destroy Water to draw the blood from the surrounding soil, stripping the scene of the most obvious evidence of the massacre.
Behzad tore a section from his cloak and fashioned it into a makeshift flag, intending to plant it above the grave as a memorial. The shaft sank only two feet before striking solid stone. Whatever lay beneath the mound had been sealed beneath a magically conjured layer of rock, leaving the dead hidden and inaccessible.
Behzad declared that the Taimavar had to be stopped before they could do this again. Nys and Fable agreed, but first turned their anger toward Fern. By leaving alone and telling no one where he was going, he could easily have ended up beneath the sand with the refugees, his companions never knowing where to search for him.
Fern answered with an unfamiliar pragmatism. Their presence would not have changed what happened. The Taimavar were too powerful, and the party was not yet in any position to oppose them. Had the others accompanied him, someone would have said the wrong thing and Saedor might have killed them all. That was why Fern believed he had to go alone.
As they began the long journey back toward Dunedrift, Fern recounted his encounter with Saedor and the events leading to the refugees’ deaths. He explained how Saedor had revealed the depth of Taimavar knowledge concerning the rebellion, Alyviel’s infiltration, the Prophet, and the party’s movements across Rosenhall. He also disclosed the offer made to him: surrender the Prophet, and the Taimavar would remove the Emperor, bring the rebellion into power, and place Behzad in a position to unite Rosenhall and Vlorfa.
Behzad stopped in his tracks at the prospect of becoming Emperor. Intrigued by the scope of the Taimavar’s influence, he floated the idea of using the Prophet as “bait” to discover how deeply their agents had penetrated Rosenhall. Fable rejected the proposal immediately, refusing to entertain any plan that risked the Prophet.
Nys instead focused on the movements Fern described. Saedor and Fern had been traveling north toward Crown’s Edge and deeper into Rosenhall territory, while the wagon carrying the women and children had separated from them near Dunedrift and continued south. There was little south of Dunedrift beyond Little Ridge and the Charmed Cove, and Nys doubted the refugees had been bound for the former.
Behzad suggested that perhaps they were simply heading for Little Ridge’s excellent casino, briefly easing the weight hanging over the group.
Nys was less optimistic. During her years as a guard in Charmed Cove, the Taimavar had been considered persona non grata. The city did not recognize their authority and would not knowingly admit their agents. She theorized that the Taimavar intended to conceal themselves among the women and children, using the refugee caravan to gain entry into the city without drawing suspicion. What they hoped to accomplish there remained unclear.
By the time the party reached Dunedrift, they were too exhausted to continue. They found shelter in a long wooden house whose walls had been plastered with recent editions of The Dissonant Whispers, allowing them to catch up on events unfolding throughout the region.
Bradford had entered a month of mourning following the death of Duke Gregory Sarrasdrasford after a prolonged illness. Although his eldest son, Gregory Sarrasdrasford II, was expected to inherit the Dukedom once Rosenhall’s Keeper of the Crown validated the succession and received his signed Accession Proclamation, the late Duke’s younger son, Reginald, Lord of the Misty Cliffs, had petitioned to halt the coronation. Reginald was demanding that the Keeper abandon Absolute Primogeniture and instead recognize the Tanistry ratified by Bradford’s Townkeepers Council during the Duke’s final illness.
Another article reported that Charmed Cove’s Merchant Lords had declared a State of Emergency after the tenth killing attributed to the serial murderer known as The Mincer. With the killer continuing to target the city’s upper classes, the public had begun calling the year the “Reign of Terror.” Duke Nightfeather had been recalled from Rosenhall to personally adjudicate the crisis, while the city prepared to close its ports and borders for the first time in its history.
Nys realized with growing alarm that the Mincer was still active. The murders had been the final investigation of her life as a Charmed Cove guard, and whatever she had uncovered before her death had done nothing to stop the killer.
The paper also reported that a dragon attack had devastated portions of Dunedrift and that Taimavar forces had been dispatched to restore order. The article framed their arrival as a heroic foreign intervention, offering no indication of what the party had just discovered beyond the city.
Finally, a brief notice celebrated the appointment of “Lord Bernard Alltassal” of the Three Eyes of Bahamut as Regent of Wolford following the diamond crisis. Behzad was incensed that the paper had misspelled his name, and even more offended that his successful regency had received the shortest article in the entire edition.
After resting through the night, the party set out again the following morning. Deeper within Dunedrift, they discovered a great sandstone temple emerging unevenly from the dunes, much of its structure still buried beneath the sand. At its entrance stood Ned Snakeskin alongside another Shadar-kai dressed in brilliant purple robes and leaning upon a cane topped with a carved skull. The two scholars were studying an obelisk covered in ancient elven runes.
The purple-robed Shadar-kai abandoned the obelisk the moment he noticed Fable. He hurried toward her, began taking notes, and praised her as a wonderful specimen before asking how a vampire could stand unharmed beneath the desert sun.
Fable denied being a vampire and demanded that he stop writing about her. The scholar explained that he hoped to quote her in his newest academic work, The Curse of Immortality, though Fable refused permission and continued denying his conclusions.
With his first subject unwilling to cooperate, the scholar turned eagerly toward Nys, delighted by the opportunity to interview another Shadar-kai for what he called his seventeenth academic novel, stating that “surely this one will finally be a hit.”
He introduced himself as Dr. Alabyran Presberos, S.T.D., Chair of Necromancy at the College of Ioun. Archmage Wilbur Wregi, Headmaster of the College, had ordered the excavation after detecting an unusually powerful magical aura emanating from beneath the ruins. Presberos had already failed to investigate similar ruins once, only to encounter a mummy and die. That unfortunate expedition had resulted in his becoming Shadar-kai, and he had no intention of repeating the experience. He had therefore summoned Ned to clear the route into the library before scholarly work continued.
Upon learning that the party had rescued Ned from Crackjaw, Presberos asked whether they would be willing to assist him. Fable agreed on the condition that he erase everything he had written about her. The necromancer begrudgingly complied, though he asked her to confirm, strictly for his personal curiosity, that she was, in fact, a vampire.
Fable denied it once again.
Presberos returned to studying the obelisk while the party became reacquainted with Ned. During their conversation, Behzad casually recounted an occasion when Fable had crawled along a wall. From several feet away, Presberos lifted his head and shouted, “I KNEW IT!”
Nys hastily insisted that Fable had merely cast the Spider Climb spell. Ned rolled his eyes at the entire performance and began descending into the ruins.
Beyond the entrance, the buried archive curled inward through a broad spiral, with every curve opening into another preserved section of the general library. The outermost collection introduced the principles of elven Circle Magic, explaining how multiple spellcasters could combine their power into rituals far beyond the abilities of any single mage.
The next section chronicled the Crown Wars and the rise of Velatha, recounting how elven magical supremacy had turned inward and shattered the civilization that had created it.
Deeper in the spiral, the collection traced Eldamar’s political transformation following the wars. The old magocracy had been dismantled and replaced by a democracy, but the reform also accelerated the empire’s decline. Eldamar’s foreign vassals declared independence one after another, reducing the former global power until it withdrew from the wider world and hardened into an isolated hermit kingdom.
The religious archive contained a preserved poem concerning Lolth, presenting her not merely as the enemy remembered by modern faiths, but as a figure of loss woven into elven cultural memory.
At the innermost curve, the party discovered a Moonblade training scroll preserving an ancient defensive discipline. By studying its movements together, each member of the party learned the technique known as Parry.
With the spiral archive behind them, the party finally reached the sealed door leading into the library’s inner depths.