Callie’s Journal
We’ve determined that Oz’s short bow is mint in box. Maybe it’s worth more that way!
There’s no time to think about that, though, because each of the thousands of mirror shards beckon to us with the call of hidden knowledge. Ooh, sparkly! I feel that Vecna’s influence has tainted this place and artifact. I can offer it a secret, which I will lose my knowledge of, and it will give me some piece of hidden knowledge in exchange. Bec, Vondal, and others hear “Tell me a secret” and are tempted to answer it.
Some sort of vapor comes out of Vondal’s mouth and he hears, “What you seek is in the crypt.” He complains about the customer service and demands a refund.
Callie tries to warn Bec that she’ll lose any knowledge she offers here, like a sacrifice. But it’s too late, Bec offers up [[[[[[the knowledge of karach and its uses]]]]]] something?
Bec hears a voice say, “The time has come for you to accept your destiny. What you seek is here.” This is followed by a flurry of images of the crypts here, including a correct path and how to open the doors, leading to a pedestal with a hand on it. “The time has come for a new wielder.”
Callie’s warning gives Bec and Vondal another chance to resist Vecna’s temptation. Vondal fails. Bec is tempted. Meanwhile, Oz uses his portable firehose to spray the mirror shards away. Vondal is so entranced that he runs after them, trying to shout his secret (“Freki is a werewooooooooooolllllllfffff!”). Oz tries to spray Vondal, but it only ends up making him faster. Vondal disappears into the mist!
Vondal is lost. Vecna’s influence seems more…demanding…here.
Bec looks at the portal and realizes we manifested the plane with our energy. So we could reverse the process and eject this plane from here, putting us back in the original room. She thinks this would be the easiest way to get Vondal back. Freki wants to know whether Vondal might instead be lost, but Bec is pretty sure it would be fine.
Freki tries to track Vondal by scent. Callie uses guidance to give him a little extra oomph.
Meanwhile, Vondal has given up some piece of knowledge to discover that Freki is “A pawn of the Raven Queen. His bird companions are her servants.” Vondal knows this means Nerull, one of the gods of death.
When Freki returns with Vondal, we all exit as Bec suggested. It works! We’re all okay and not dead or lost!
Vondal informs everybody of what he heard about Nerull and Freki’s bird friends. He tries to interrogate them, but nobody knows if they can even talk out loud. They tell Freki, in his mind, that they could speak if he wants them to. Freki asks them to go ahead and speak to Vondal.
Vondal asks the birds what the Raven Queen wants with Freki. They say he has a great destiny. Vondal asks them why Freki is a piece on the game board. They say that there is no game board, just what is…and what was…and what will be….
Munin says, “He was born under the sign of death.”
Hugin says, “And death follows him.”
Both: “He is a bringer of death.”
The birds say this power may destroy him one day, or it may save everybody. The power to devour, y’all! Things move forward, and in a circle.
Everybody offers to buy Freki a beer for having to put up with this shit.
All Freki wants to know is whether he’s going to get another shot at killing Talos. The birds confirm that it’s within his destiny and they’re all about helping with murder.
Freki asked what part of what they’ve told him is the most important. “Not knowing held you back from your true potential. You must meet your true potential. The world depends on it.”
Freki tries to pin down the birds about the nature of his power, in an attempt to get at the truth of his lost memory. But Munin seems spooked (“…I can’t remember. I should remember…”) and the birds fly off and vanish. Huh.
Freki asks Hugin mentally if they need his help, and Hugin says they are OK, but implores Freki: “she is the power of memory. She should remember. Find the truth.”
Callie realizes that the forgetting effect (which is neither a blessing nor a curse, but some kind of anti-divination magic) is from Bec and Vondal offering secrets to Vecna. Dammit!
Freki is convinced that remembering whatever he forgot is the most important thing to do right now, but Bec wants to go down to the crypt and continue investigating down there. Callie agrees with Bec, but on the condition that no one partipate in any paranormal phenomena without the agreement of the rest of the group. YOU GOT THAT, YOU BUNCH OF MUPPETS?
Vondal checks in on his depressed friend Roger, from last time he was down here. Roger is the same as before, unsurprisingly.
They find a door with a hand on it. That’s the door that Roger said they couldn’t get through because they don’t possess the power of the goddess of secrets.
Vondal and Oz try to neg Freki into using his magic, which is his secret that he forgot, probably.
Bec is the one who opens the door, obviously. Inside is the Hand, surrounded by seven coffins with guardians that will either let us through or try to stop us.
Cal feels that the hand is no longer undead, somehow. There are no undead here, in fact. He decides to go look in the coffins. Nothing in there but dust!
The hand is covered in symbols, many of which are written on the map upstairs. The central ring symbol, however, is not.
The Celestial Hand -- for illustration only, actual symbols may differ
Observing the hand, Bec feels the presence of Sartus Morningdew. She realizes the hand has been cleansed, like the Necronomicon. In fact, when the book was cleansed, it also cleansed the hand! Bec thinks back in her mind palace. She thinks the Necronomicon may have been Invictus’s phylactery, in which case his soul was likely pushed out, and may once again reside in a living body. Vecna wanted Bec to know about the hand, but this part was a surprise. Did Vecna not know, then?
Cal grabs the hand with his whip. It has a golden chain around its wrist. Nothing happens when Cal takes it. He sticks it in his backpack.
There is a dark-skinned elf standing next to Bec. No one can see her but Bec. She’s dressed in leathers and is of the night. She whispers, “Put it on.” Then she melts back into the forest. Bec is pretty sure the hand will help them recover their lost memories, but Cal isn’t convinced that it’s entirely un-evil. Oz uses panache on Cal to convince him to give Bec the hand. He also wants to cut off Bec’s hand and replace it with this magical one, so maybe we aren’t going to take all his suggestions.
Under Oz’s persuasion, Cal reconsiders his position. While he’s pondering, he notices that his sword is glowing like an ember, like there is fiery energy. It gets brighter when he moves it closer to the hand and dims when he moves it away. He asks Callie what she thinks. She tells him that the hand has the same kind of energy as the sword, and that’s why they light up when they’re together.
Cal allows Bec to take the hand out of his bag (with mage hand, because the other thing in his bag is a severed angel head). Divine energy washes over her. It does not try to kill her, for now. She thinks she can use the hand to manifest something like divination. She asks the hand, “What steps should be taken to restore the memory of Munin?”
This knowledge does not want to be known. Bec has to push through it. But she does get the tip, “He must lose control.” She would have gotten a better answer if the knowledge wasn’t so protected, but she tells Freki that he has to lose control.
Bec opens the door that Roger said we’d never get through. He says, “You found it” but not excitedly, then goes back into the servant’s quarters.
Inside is a mystical chamber. Invictus likes weird-shaped rooms, it seems. There are 16 walls in here, which have either a tapestry, a door, or a shelf on it. The shelves hold all sorts of books, potions, and items for performing ritual magic. Including some real strange and forbidden stuff. Bec wants to close the door and leave, but Vondal has his foot in it and Oz is also pushing to get in. They bust in like Larry and Curly.
Then Freki and Bec close the door behind them, the perfidious bastards! They are super creeped out by this room. I’ll forgive them someday.
Inside, Cal notices that one of the tapestries seems un-tapestry-like. Oz whips out his blade and slashes it. It was enchanted to conceal what was behind it, but that’s all. There’s an archway behind it and a dismal, reddish glow across the threshold. This is the glow of the manor suffused in the air.
Vondal opens the door for Callie and they all (minus Freki and Bec) go to investigate the door. Walking through, there’s a gross metallic taste in the air. There’s an angel of some kind with bloody wings. There are glowing tendrils connecting him to parts of the room. He seems to be suffering.
Also, there’s some creep in the corner of the room! It’s Malachai! This seems like it might be the real one, not the fake one we killed earlier. He complains that he’s alive again and his whole setup with the crystalline heart is all messed up.
Invictus says, “You must destroy this place,” referring to all of Arallu. “You must burn it all down. It should never have existed.”
Malachai says, “I dunno, I think it’s pretty great!”
Invictus says, “Shut up. You were never my servant. You belonged to something that should never be. Undead are abominations. They act like humans, but they are not humans. They must all be destroyed. If they come here, this power could destroy them, but they are too cunning for that.”
Invictus tries to expose his heart so we can kill him. “No one deserves to suffer like I am!”
Malachai is like, “You did do some pretty horrible stuff, yeah.”
Oz tries to shoot Malachai with his mint-condition short bow. It is ineffective, and I’m starting to think Oz has Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
Cal asks Callie to go check the ritual room and see what it’s for. I think it’s where Invictus ate the souls he needed to fuel his unlife. Yrrrghghhh.
Invictus promises to tell us stuff in exchange for us euthanizing him. Cal promises that if the information is good, he will return and kill him. Invictus says the Brucolac was once a god but is now corrupted. That’s why Cal’s father hates him so much, because they were brothers.
When the world was young, the gods overthrew the titans. Hyperion’s titan brother Iapetus created the Book of the Dead in an effort to save the mortally wounded Cronus. But something went wrong and Cronus became the Brucolac. For a time the book was lost, but it was ultimately rediscovered by Invictus, who took the opportunity to bind his soul to it to make himself immortal. As for the ghost, he is an enigma. Something happened fifty years ago that no one understands and Invictus can’t remember. But the vial of divine essence, which Invictus wanted to use to free himself from lichdom, had to come from somewhere. All of us now contain some of that power, which he theorizes came from a dead god. Oz and Cal wield great power of destruction. He wants them to use it on him. He’s been alive far too long and done too many horrible things.
Malachai would like to continue doing bad things, thanks!
Callie asks Invictus whether we need to do something special to kill him. It has to be an amount of power equal to that which did this to him, so, the power of a god.
The chart upstairs was an attempt to understand what happened when the manor exploded and where the power went. We all gravitated toward certain elements based on our souls, except for Invictus, because he had no soul; he was inverted in some way.
Malachai, Callie, Cal, and Oz head out to the ritual chamber to destroy the really evil stuff. Also, Callie grabs as much of the non-evil magical components as she can and stuffs it into Cal’s backpack.
Meanwhile, Malachai silently casts a spell on Callie, but she resists. She can tell he was trying to bind her physically. He complains that he could really use a Ring of Mind Shielding. Ha ha, bet you could! Oz stabs him for his betrayal. The wounds don’t heal. Malachai says, “I just wanted to have the ring, so when I die my soul could go in there and maybe I could come back!”
Upstairs, Freki hears the whispering in the paintings. Oh, so THAT’S why they call it the Gallery of Whispers! All the paintings are portraits of individual people. Freki is looking for anyone or anything he recognizes, but he doesn’t see anything. A woman’s portrait beckons him. “Come to me so I can be free!” Freki is like, “Nah, mang.” He asks if any of them know about Munin. One of them says he might know something if Freki just comes in the painting. Freki asks about assurances. The guy is like, “You have my fine word, sir.” Sounds legit!
Bec is waiting in the foyer and hears the noise we’re making downstairs. She comes in just in time to see Oz stab Malachai in the back.
Bec goes in to talk to Invictus. She asks him whether Vecna is still the master of the hand. He is surprised that Bec is able to wear it and thinks even Vecna’s power apparently has limits. Bec asks if he can help, and he says no amount of help would make up for the bad things he’s done. But he’ll try anyway. He mentions the dead god again, and Bec asks if that is the power of the nine elements she saw inscribed on the hand. Invictus is shocked. There were never nine! But if there were… that changes everything! It explains the hole in the world. The gods bound the world with the elements. If one of them has really been destroyed, then the world would be unraveling.
“You don’t know what the Flux is? It is everything that is not the world. It is unreality. The gods bound Aecus so the Flux would be kept out.” Then he roasts Vondal for thinking he had mastery over such a primordial power.
Bec asks Invictus whether it’s possible to restore a memory lost to Vecna. He says yes, it’s possible to learn something again, but Vecna will exact some kind of toll.
Freki shoots him with some sort of acid arrow. He’s in pain, but doesn’t die. He says one of the relics or divine magic beyond that could kill him.
Oz uses his divine-powered blade. Even though it doesn’t kill Invictus, Oz keeps right on stabbing him.
This is obviously not working, so Callie prays to Erathis for guidance. “The vengeance must be complete. Both she and her shadow must be of one mind.” The vengeance must be against Invictus specifically. I know this is a specific “she,” someone ancient and powerful, and there’s some reason Erathis can’t tell me, perhaps a gap in her knowledge. If there’s a “she” and a “shadow” then it seems they need to be reunited in some way.
Oz’s stabbing is getting to be…compulsive? He can hear the ghost in his mind possessing him and enjoying this stabbing a LOT. Cal pulls Oz away.
Callie relates what Erathis said to her companions. We can’t kill Invictus, but we should definitely take care of Malachai. Cal and Vondal decide to escort him outside. His feet drag and he eventually passes out. Cal tosses him out the front door and he dies.
As they all walk to the door, Callie thinks over what she heard and tells Cal and Oz that they could have killed Invictus, but they both have to go into it wholeheartedly. It seems Cal’s heart is not quite in it now, though.