Session 13 covered the rest of the Vigil of Remembrance, 1714 PSF. In Vault 20, one vault past Luma’s work order, the party found a painted night sky reversed east to west and holding a new moon, and below it a tomb of dwarven forgemasters whose dates ran later than the vaults were said to have been sealed. They followed the Tarnar Syndicate’s route deep beneath the Lantern Wards to the Fardrimm Gate, killed four phase spiders there, and came up into streets lit with candles for the Vigil.
Synopsis
Vault 20
With the cloaker and darkmantles dead, the dust settled.1 The darkmantles had filled the chamber with a field of light-destroying magic, and only Rhysaene had been able to see through it.2 With it gone, the party could see that the ceiling of the empty communal chamber was painted with a mural.3 They had seen other murals in the foundries and around the kitchen and shrine, faded and chipped, but this one was still fairly legible: a deep, rich, dark blue field scattered with countless specks of faded white, like an evening sky full of stars.45
Across from the entrance stood a large iron double door, shut.6 It occurred to Luma that the room would be the 20th vault, one beyond what her work order described.7 “Uh-oh, we broke a rule without realizing it,” she said, and decided that since they were there already they might as well look around.89
Temerity felt that something was wrong with the sky: the stars seemed thrown on haphazardly.10 Luma and Hazel, who spends a great deal of time looking at the sky, recognized no constellation at first.11 Then they found north and began to recognize constellations, backwards. The mural was an accurate rendering of the night sky over the region, flipped east to west.1213 Luma said it was as if the sky were seen from the other side of the constellations.14 Rhysaene thought it beautiful. “It’s backwards. I don’t like it,” said Luma.15 Apart from the flip, it was not sloppy work.16
Hazel butchered the cloaker. Its anatomy was alien, but she found its pitfalls quickly and took a good deal of hide and meat.1718 The hide was slimy to the touch but left no residue, and what it reflected looked refracted and off-kilter.19 Hazel knew the cloaker for a creature of the subterranean world, not of the Sorrow: not a natural beast, but part of the ecosystem below.20 She bundled the hide for tanning and rationed out the meat.21
The chamber held little but stone benches between the pillars. The party’s best guess was a gathering hall near the kitchen and shrine, a place to sit and talk.22
Looking for the moon, Hazel found a circle of black in the dark blue, as if for a new moon.23 The moon’s phases do not change. It is always a crescent, with fragments in its hollow.2425 Hecate had taught the coven that before the Starfall the moon had phases, as the sun’s light fell on it and the world cast its shadow, and that something about the impact gave it a permanent luminance. There has been no new moon since the Starfall.2627 The teaching is the coven’s, and not widely held.28
Rhysaene studied the mural as a piece of art. It was representational and mathematical, accurate but for the flip, but its layers of blue were deliberately uneven, cooler in places and more violet in others, in ways that served no purpose of representation.293031 Luma and Rhysaene considered the paint. In conditions like these a mural could last five, six or seven hundred years, but for one to be this clear after seventeen hundred years was remarkable.3233 Hazel wondered whether it was magic.34 “Or someone is lying about how long this thing has been down here,” said Rhysaene.35
Hazel cast enhance ability on Temerity with a string necklace from her component pouch, and Temerity’s arms grew bigger and hairier, like a bear’s.3637 Temerity climbed a pillar with Luma on her back and held on while Luma studied the ceiling.38 Luma found no runes, no arcane diagrams and no sign of magic in the painted stone.3940 She drew a chisel and cracked off a piece. It was good dwarven stone with no unnatural resilience, and she mended it.41 Putting out the lights changed nothing.42 Dating the mural properly would mean taking samples, and neither Temerity nor Luma wanted to deface it.4344
In one corner the party found an artist’s mark, a monogram in a lighter blue that none of them knew.4546
Hazel then harvested the darkmantles. Their hide was leathery and slimy like the cloaker’s, without its strange reflection, but each held a bladder of dark fluid that seemed to darken the air around it.4748 She removed a full ink sac from all three.49 Luma hovered and drew diagrams, and Hazel showed her the heart, the bladder and the stomach: most living things share the same general structure, and nature shows where to cut.50 If nothing else, Hazel said, the sacs might make a mesmerizing ink.51
Spellcasters are uncommon in Argentum, since they are arrested, and witches are further removed still. The Sisters are the only people anyone would call witches, and they do not wear big pointed hats, so Luma’s Hat of Witchery has drawn odd looks and nothing more.525354
The Work Order
Luma kept the mural out of her official report, since they were not supposed to be in the room.55 Temerity had planned to report the Syndicate’s tunnel, which the party had taken to calling the Tarnar Hole, once they were back.5657 Hazel and Luma objected, since the party should not have been in it.58 Temerity said she would only mention a suspicious side passage, and Luma said it was going in her report anyway.5960
Luma read her work order aloud. A surveyor who found an unmarked passage was to mark it and note its details, but not enter it, and was not authorized to enter any passage, chamber or vault segment beyond the survey area.6162 “So we have broken all of the rules that have currently been listed on the work order at least once,” she said.63 On reflection she decided they had not breached or tampered with any sealed door, since opening a door is not breaching it, and that she would report a secret door and leave it at that.6465 She offered to show Temerity the report first.66
From the Syndicate’s cache they had taken a copy of the coded note and the whole pouch of dragons, and left everything else.676869 Hazel thought an inquisitor who came down would work out that the cache was the Syndicate’s, especially with the note.70
The Forgemasters
The party chose the iron door. Temerity admitted she was curious, and would protect them if they went further.71 Iva took a moment to use her second wind, and Rhysaene spent a minute clutching her heart and stoking red flame to regain her magic through magical cunning.727374
The door was a double iron door about seven feet tall, very fine dwarven work, and locked. Its keyholes were not for the four-pronged key of the Guild of Sparks.7576 Reasoning that it lay outside the survey area anyway and that she could relock it, Luma picked the lock with her thieves’ tools.7778 Beyond it a stone staircase spiraled down.79
The stair was ten feet wide and circled solid stone.80 Further down, the inner wall fell away, and the stair wound round a big, perfectly circular shaft, fifteen feet wide with a railing.81 Alcoves in the wall held stone sarcophagi of dwarven size and shape. The first was dated with a name and its birth and death, and the death was 1489.8283 The dates ran further back the further down the party went.84 “These dates don’t make any sense. This place was supposed to be sealed 500 years ago,” said Luma.85
Each sarcophagus was about one dwarven generation older than the last.86 Near the bottom, the last four used a different dating system entirely.87 Before the change the count ran down to about 400, and neither set of dates carried a marker such as PSF.8889
Luma knew as a student of history that Argentum dates its years PSF, post-Starfall, though not when the system came into use.9091 What counts as the start of Argentum is a matter of scholarly debate. Bahamut arrived with the refugees ten years after the Starfall, after ten years of gathering and protecting people on the move, and stewarded the place for about two hundred years.929394 In 211 PSF he chose to sacrifice himself and become the Silver Flame.95 The city had been growing since he arrived, but it was officially recognized as operating under the name Argentum the following year, 212 PSF.96
At the bottom, on open ground about sixty feet across, stood a statue of a handsome, very dwarven figure, with a plaque at its base: “Here lie the forgemasters.”9798 Iva thought him cute.99 The tomb held nothing else, and no passage led on.100
Luma pointed out that the two rooms they had been specifically told not to enter held the details that disproved what they had been told.101 The reason to lie about when you took over a city, she said, was that you had taken it over against the will of its people.102 The Elder Exodus was about 150 years ago, in 1564.103104 Hazel reasoned that the long-lived peoples had left in the Exodus, and that it is easier to lie to people who live sixty to eighty years than to people who live for centuries.105 Temerity was very uncomfortable.106 Asked why magic would be banned, Temerity said it invites the Sorrow, Iva that people with magic are harder to control, and Hazel that magic can change how people think, while the Silver Flame, which is magic too, is controlled and handed out by the state.107108109110
Rhysaene sketched some of the markings and took a loose pebble.111 Luma said she did not need to map the tomb, and mapped it in a second notebook. Her wand of secrets found no secret doors or traps.112113
Covering Tracks
Luma relocked the iron door behind them.114 To explain the bodies, the party decided to make it look as though they had fought the creatures in the kitchen, and broke a few bottles there to suggest a struggle.115 Temerity, very uncomfortable at the rules she had broken without knowing, cut up the bodies so they could be dragged, and carried the cloaker into the kitchen herself.116117118 Rhysaene cleaned the trail of blood with prestidigitation, in the mural room too.119
They moved the cupboard again and squeezed back through the tunnel to the Syndicate’s closet, an incredibly unpleasant squeeze for Rhysaene.120 Luma’s string marker was untouched until she broke it herself.121
The Whistle Trap
The closet’s door out was locked: a sturdy but mundane dwarven stone door with an iron lock for a big two-pronged key.122 Luma looked through the keyhole and teleported through, into a narrow, pitch-black corridor of dust, collapsed at one end.123124 Picking the lock, she felt tension where no tumbler should be and stopped, and found a nearly invisible filament stretched across the keyhole.125126 It ran to a brass cylinder inside the door, tapering toward the top, with a mechanism and a glint of glass at its base.127128 She cut the filament and disarmed it.129
The brass cylinder was a whistle, set above the latch where a hole in the door met a copper pipe that ran up and down inside the wall, all shoddy makeshift work.130131 Set off, the chemicals in the glass would release a gas and blow the whistle up the pipe to wherever the Syndicate was listening.132133 Luma took longer over it than she told the others, writing down how it worked.134 Compared with her alarm spell it was crude, but it was permanent, and she found that impressive.135136 She reasoned that the door had no real key, and that Syndicate members picked it knowing where the trap was.137 It was probably not the last trap on the route.138
“We are dealing with criminals now,” Luma told the others, and said she would understand if they did not want to go on, since this was outside the job she had hired them for.139140 Hazel said she was helping because she was paid, and because Luma was her friend.141 Temerity said she would not let her friends throw themselves into harm’s way without protecting them.142 Luma counted that as progress, and Temerity pointed out that they had shared friendship bread.143144 Rhysaene said she would follow Luma.145
The Mineshaft
The route led from the closet into a narrow maintenance tunnel of dwarven work, then along a hand-chiseled tunnel into the back of a collapsed apartment, through a barely concealed trapdoor, and on until it opened into a long-abandoned mineshaft.146147148 Hazel counted her steps to keep track of where they were. The directions zigzagged them across most of the Lantern Wards without ever taking them past the moat, and by the mineshaft they had wrapped back near the foundries, where it was warmer.149150 The mineshaft was narrow and claustrophobic, held up by old wooden beams that looked shoddy.150151
Hazel, leading, spotted a thin dark wire across the passage three inches off the ground, between two support beams that had been filed down. Tripping it would bring the ceiling down.152153 “They take us for simple game. A tripwire trick?” she said.154155 Luma found nothing else rigged to it, and the party stepped over it rather than disarm it, so the Syndicate would not know they had passed.156157
The Pressure
Far down the mineshaft, the walls seemed to close in. Everyone felt pressure behind the eyes, a metallic taste and the feeling of being watched. Rhysaene’s heart pounded and Temerity broke out in goosebumps, and Luma’s sparrow went quiet.158159160161 Their masks changed nothing.162 Sage showed strong discomfort.163 Temerity and Rhysaene thought it wrong, and the party turned back. Ten or twenty feet up the shaft the feeling faded at once.164165166
The party tested the effect. Hazel thought it was magical, since a natural reaction would not stop at so hard an edge.167 Rhysaene stepped back in and cast prestidigitation, and her magic came as it always did.168 The effect built over about twenty feet and then held steady, and it felt like nothing any of them had met before, the Sorrow included.169170 Luma walked thirty feet in and cast identify as a ritual, with Hazel waiting at the edge. The feeling grew no worse, and everything sounded far away, but the spell found no magic on her.171172173174 “Yeah, that sucked,” she said.175
Hazel had been counting her steps. She was eighty percent sure that they stood at the very center of the Lantern Wards, and of Argentum and the Silver Vale, directly beneath the Chapel of the Silver Flame, about a mile down.176177178 Temerity said that if something like that was under the chapel, it needed to be seen and dealt with.179 “I cannot wait to find Bahamut’s corpse down here,” said Luma.180
They went on, and the field lasted only about forty feet before they were past it.181 They were at least a few thousand feet down. None of them had heard of the Silver Flame causing anything like it, and they had been much closer to the Silver Flame in the Silver Archives.182183184 The mineshaft ran straight through the field with no way round.185
The Pit
The mineshaft gave way to another dwarven maintenance tunnel, strewn along its length with boards and pallets.186187 Luma noticed a crack of darkness in the floor, and Hazel lifted a panel and found a thirty-foot pit under a thin sheet of wood, dropping into a natural cavern.188189 Chisel marks showed that the floor had been made to collapse.190 The whistle had been fairly sophisticated, but every trap on the route was basic.191 The party wondered whether they were being hazed, or whether the traps were meant for them.192193 Luma said the Syndicate’s work at the Everfire Lamp had been incredibly good, only she had been better.194
Thirty more minutes of winding tunnels brought them to the end of the directions, and to the note’s last line: “The locks don’t turn, but stone does.”195196 A chiseled passage led on, and Hazel judged that they were well past the chapel, near the edge of the Lantern Wards and perhaps under the moat.197198 The passage curved and opened into a massive cavern, natural but for a carved stone pillar fifty feet high.199200
The Fardrimm Gate
Smooth stone ramps led up to a large platform, with a brass statue of an armored dwarf standing before it. Beyond rose a great wall of carved stone with pillars set into it.201202 The natural floor gave way to inlaid brick with gold filigree, and unlit braziers stood about the platform.203204 At its top the wall met a massive double door of a dark metal, less polished than their hand axes but the same metal: adamantine. It was twenty feet across, and its trim added ten more.205206207 An inscription ran across its top, seventy feet up.208
Rhysaene laid a glowing hand on Luma and cast fly on her.209 Luma flew straight at the door, and two inches from it a ripple of silver light ran over sigils across its face and bounced her back.210211 “Okay, I just found out the world’s coolest trampoline,” she said.212
The inscription was in Dwarvish: “Here lies the farad-dûm. May the Everfire light the way through the long dark.”213214 Luma worked out that farad-dûm is the root of the name Fardrimm, and that it means the deep road.215216217 The runes of the ward were arcane runes in Draconic, silver, and probably the most complex spell Luma had ever encountered.218219220 “I knocked on it with my face. It bounced me,” she told Iva, who suggested knocking.221
Set into the great doors were smaller five-foot doors, with keyholes for a four-pronged key of a different layout from the Guild’s, original to the adamantine rather than grafted on.222223 In the nearest pillar on each side was a massive four-pronged slot for a key the size of a mace.224225 Luma poked the barrier to show the others, and was thrown ten feet back and slid forty.226227
Hazel wondered whether the church or Bahamut had set the ward. The church had shown no magic like it that Luma knew of: its doctrine is about community rather than faith or magic, apart from the acts of Bahamut, and there has been no miracle since his death beyond people being blessed by the Silver Flame.228229230231 Hazel reasoned that a dwarven ward would use dwarven runes, and that cutting off the Underdark would be wise if the Silver Flame’s protection did not reach it.232233 She reckoned they were about three miles down. As with much magic, enough rock in the way could dilute the Silver Flame’s light before it reached so deep.234235 She could have tried dispel magic, but however much she distrusted the church, if Bahamut had put the ward there she would trust him.236237
Hazel wondered whether the Elder Exodus had gone through the door and closed it behind them. There are firsthand accounts against it, and Luma knew one: Mathas Drace had watched his father simply walk out.238239240 “Why the fuck do the Tarnar Syndicate have a map to this place?” asked Luma.241 Searching the wall, she found shards of brass scattered in a radiating pattern around a circle of scorch marks. A Tarnar Turnstone explodes when it is used up, and someone had used one up there.242243244
The Phase Spiders
Hazel found the tail and back left leg of a giant rat, and webbing running from the pillars that was hard to see even with darkvision. Up close it gave off a faint, pale blue-green glow and had a wispy translucence.245246247 Then large blue-green spiders popped into existence out of thin air.248249
Temerity darted to the largest group and struck one with her maul, then threw a hand axe at another. “Pay attention to me! Don’t hurt my friends, please,” she shouted, and knocked the first down.250251252253254 The spiders bit and vanished, and reappeared beside new targets.255256 Luma teleported to Rhysaene’s side, wrote “to whom it may concern” on a bullet and fired it in a blast of golden radiance, and Rhysaene’s eldritch blast killed the wounded spider.257258259
The biggest spider, a huge one, appeared beside Rhysaene.260261 Hazel had readied call lightning, and it took the form of a misty moon overhead that struck the spider with localized moonbeams.262263264 The spider tore into Rhysaene.265 Luma loaded two bullets into her pistol and blasted a hole all the way through it, and healed Rhysaene with a scribbled bandage.266267268 Terrified, Rhysaene swung her greatsword in desperate, get-off-me blows, each leaving a deep crimson cut burning in the air, until nothing was left of its head.269270271 Iva’s dwarven hand axe, made by the dwarves who had once lived in these chambers, killed another, and Temerity drove her javelin up through the head of the last.272273 “I don’t like the big spiders,” said Iva.274
Hazel knew them for phase spiders, sometimes called wraith spiders, which leave the Material Plane for the Ethereal on a whim. Their venom can paralyze a victim for up to an hour, but only one already nearly unconscious.275276277 Passing the spider Temerity had reduced to a puddle, she told her, “A little grace would do you well.”278 Hazel harvested one dose of venom. Her second attempt sprayed pale teal venom in her face, and Temerity told her, “It was your grace that did this.”279280281282
Iva wanted the venom. Hazel kept it for her, saying they needed to build more trust first.283284 Luma collected goop from the biggest spider.285 Hazel gathered the Turnstone shards into Luma’s bag of holding.286287 She ground a numbing paste with her herbalism kit for Rhysaene, who apologized for what they had seen. “You’re all formidable beasts, one and all. You should be proud,” Hazel told them.288289290 The gate was the end of the Syndicate’s route.291 Luma cast locate object for a Turnstone and found none.292293
The Way Up
After a short rest in a long-abandoned closet, the party climbed for hours back through the vaults, relocking them behind them.294295 Temerity cleaned Hazel, who was messiest at the hands and mouth, with her waterskin and a cloth.296297298 At the Silver Archives a different Order of the Lantern sentinel was on the door.299 “Ah, the surveyors. You’re not supposed to be down here, head up quickly,” said the sentinel. When Luma said she had a work order, the sentinel asked whether their work was completed, and told them to get out.300301302303 “Man. Nobody appreciates our work,” said Luma.304
The Vigil
They came out into the streets in the late evening. The lava lamps were dark, and small pale wax candles lined the street edges, two or three in every window.305306 It was the Vigil of Remembrance, a holy day of the Silver Flame honoring the dead and the sacrifices they made to build Argentum.307 Luma realized she had worked on a holiday.308 Hazel was the only one to whom the Vigil was new, and Temerity explained it: a day to remember the dead and their sacrifices, with candles left out by tradition.309310311
Hazel suggested leaving out candles for the dwarves of the Fardrimm, for sacrifices most people will never know about, and Temerity smiled and agreed.312313 Hazel thought the dwarves might prefer a drink shared in their name.314 Luma wanted a bath. “I think I need more like a bath of the soul at this point,” she said.315316
Hazel wanted to find the dwarf they had met at the Festival of Bells and seen again at the Hall of the Anvil, apologize, and talk to him.317318 Luma said his question about how old his coin was, and his calling them fools, made much more sense now.319 The first of Nightdeep, the next day, was when Temerity’s training began and Hazel had her job interview.320 “And I’m supposed to avoid crime,” said Iva.321 The five walked off into the candlelit streets for a drink. With the lava lamps shut down the air was colder than usual, the sky was clear, and the ever-crescent moon watched them.322323324
Featured Characters
Player Characters
Returning
Mentioned
Quotations
- “Uh-oh, we broke a rule without realizing it.” Luma.8
- “It’s backwards. I don’t like it.” Luma, on the mural.15
- “Or someone is lying about how long this thing has been down here.” Rhysaene.35
- “So we have broken all of the rules that have currently been listed on the work order at least once.” Luma.63
- “These dates don’t make any sense. This place was supposed to be sealed 500 years ago.” Luma.85
- “They take us for simple game. A tripwire trick?” Hazel.154
- “Okay, I just found out the world’s coolest trampoline.” Luma, on the ward.212
- “I knocked on it with my face. It bounced me.” Luma.221
- “Why the fuck do the Tarnar Syndicate have a map to this place?” Luma.241
- “Pay attention to me! Don’t hurt my friends, please.” Temerity.253
- “I don’t like the big spiders.” Iva.274
- “A little grace would do you well.” Hazel to Temerity.278
- “It was your grace that did this.” Temerity to Hazel.281
- “You’re all formidable beasts, one and all. You should be proud.” Hazel.290
- “And I’m supposed to avoid crime.” Iva.321
Inventory
- Cloaker hide and meat, harvested by Hazel.
- Three darkmantle ink sacs, taken by Hazel.
- A pebble from the forgemasters’ tomb, taken by Rhysaene.
- One dose of phase spider venom, harvested by Hazel and kept for Iva.
- Goop from the largest phase spider, collected by Luma.
- The shards of a spent Tarnar Turnstone, in Luma’s bag of holding.
Trivia
- Rhysaene cast fly for the first time this session.209
Speaking Time
| Speaker | Time | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Dungeon Master | 2:07:55 | 35% |
| Luma | 1:09:33 | 19% |
| Hazel | 1:04:35 | 18% |
| Iva | 40:43 | 11% |
| Temerity | 40:04 | 11% |
| Rhysaene | 19:45 | 5% |