Lady Searshe’s House of Spells

[The Forgotten God]

“Your reward is to ask about an island that’s now annihilated?” Searshe asked. “I’m certain Leuwinmorgh trained you better than that. The facility predates my birth so I can’t promise I can answer all your questions on the subject.”

[Geoffrey Ravenhurst]

"I saw apes and bats transformed by the Mist and the bones of your kin, but nothing of the humans who ran the facility... they left and went out into the world... I already know there are other Mist facilities like it. I want to know about the people who damned this world to the Mist... and what happened to them afterwards... and if they're still around..."

[The Forgotten God]

Searshe let out a long breath. "You're all responsible," she told Herneiros. "My grandparents' days were filled with elves and giants and dwarves and centaur and lizardfolk and gnomes and little people with hairy feet. When my grandparents grew elder and laid eggs of their own, the first humans came. They were your natives," she said. "Banished from a faraway place in the stars by wizards of magic we cannot imagine. Their enchanted items failed here and the elves and dragons took them in.

As they do now, harmony lasted for centuries for the most part. Every race has its conflicts and wars, but...about three hundred years before my birth, my parents said new humans came in their portals. They had guns like no one had seen, and a great war came. It lasted a century and a half or more before a truce was finalized. Peace reigned, and then fifty years after that the Mist came. No human army or dragon or elf could stop it forever, and as the kingdoms fell the conquests went faster and faster. I've helped slay fifteen Mistlords," she said, "and it did nothing but stem the tide for a generation or so. The humans used temples such as those to create magic that could repel the Mist, but by the time they were finished there were few left to man them and fewer still with sanity remaining. The temples are all set to be hostile to native races, which is why your elf friends burned in places. If you're wondering why I stay out of the wars now, Master Herneiros, it is because seven thousand years have taught me that the Mist is a symptom. Humans are the original disease."

She finished then shrugged. "Or at least that's how my parents told it. I'm well aware there's parts that don't make complete sense in that. The Nedrassian Serpent has given you a tool to find the other temples. When you have a plan to crush a Mistlord..." she looked out to the south a long moment, "then come back to my store."

[Geoffrey Ravenhurst]

"But..." The normally verbose Herneiros went silent again as he tried to comprehend her version of events. Humans coming from the stars? Terrible machines? How did these tales connect to the world he lived in? What strange sins had his ancestors committed? And where did the gods fit into all this? Had the gods not also come from the stars?

"But that doesn't make sense... we know that the Kraken and other Mist Lords aren't human... and if it was just petty humans creating the Mist, then who or what transformed the Kraken? The only thing this explains is..."

He stopped. Herneiros had always questioned why only he of Leuwinmorgh's company had certain abilities, and why he had needed the Mist to use them. Why the Mist obeyed him when it consumed others...

But humans had been fleeing the Mist for generations. It couldn't be that simple. "Please, I have one final question..."

What was that name again? The ones Imperials would mention to him.

"Did a human named Elias Rosecroft ever visit you?"

[The Forgotten God]

“I don’t know what the Mist is,” Searshe confirmed, “just that your species is somehow responsible for creating it.” She listened to the name and shook her head. “No, that one never visited me. I haven’t talked to a human other than you all And Countess Chevalier in two centuries.”

[Geoffrey Ravenhurst]

Herneiros had gathered that last part from her eating habits.

"Well... I will ponder these myseries. Perhaps I can learn more in time from the books we took. I refuse to believe that we are all merely staving off the inevitable and waiting for the Mist to take us... I have seen too many impossible things to believe that anything is truly impossible... thank you, Lady Searshe."

[The Forgotten God]

The elder dragon nodded. "This wasn't a reward much worthy of your work for me. I'd imagined you had something more...tangible in mind." She shrugged. "Not that you humanoids make any sense to me anyway. Come back anytime, elven soul."

[Geoffrey Ravenhurst]

***

Herneiros stepped back into the waiting room, his face pale and tired from the conversation. When he saw Kjell, he smiled warmly. "She is very knowledgeable and I am confident she has the information you seek. I'll be right here for you."

[Kjell Ó Raghallaigh]

"They sell some weird shit here," Kjell said to Herneiros in passing and gave him a nod before stepping through the door.

[The Forgotten God]

Kjell finds herself on the alpine lake landscape with the seriously weird looking “elf” still watching the sunset as she fished. “Kjell,” she said with her slightly artificial smile, “welcome to my home. I assume you don’t eat whole fish either?”

[Kjell Ó Raghallaigh]

She greeted the woman with a small bow, unsure what the etiquette was for meeting a dragon. "I'm not hungry," she said, and then added as an afterthought, "Thank you." She looked around for a while, taking in the surroundings. This was surely not a dream, but kind of felt like it. "Where are we?" she asked.

[The Forgotten God]

Searshe pointed to the east. “About four hundred miles north of Lisandre,” she said. “The last haven of the dragon species. Well, the outskirts of it anyway.” She decided she didn’t know if Kjell had any clue where Lisandre was. “So about four thousand miles from Bastion, give or take.” The elf saw a huge whale-like creature breaching in the seas below. “Where the Wild still reigns supreme.” She brushed her hair from her eyes a few awkward times before getting it to stick behind her ear. “Now, how can I repay the favor I owe?”

[Kjell Ó Raghallaigh]

Kjell stared at the huge whale-like creature. "There's... no Mist in sight," she said, and completely forgot about the ancient dragon fussing about with her hair until she spoke up again. Sure, she'd heard there were islands and lands far away still untouched by the Mist, but seeing it with her own eyes was another thing. It took her a few more moments to turn around and look at Searshe. "I would request something I could use to kill a Mistlord with," she said.

[The Forgotten God]

The elf rubbed her chin in thought. “Don’t we all?” She said distantly. “There was a time long past killing Mistlords wasn’t so uncommon. They’ve grown stronger over the centuries but their victories have made them complacent. The alliance between the races that lasted for millennia slowly splintered as the wars ground on and more and more cities fell. Come with me,” she said, then she quickly expanded into a smaller version of her true form, four legged but with only two wings, perhaps forty feet long. “Climb on.”

[Kjell Ó Raghallaigh]

Yeah. Riding a dragon. Sure, no big deal. Kjell often did things she didn't entirely think through. This time, her body did remind her she was going to have a very bad time that high up in the sky as she was walking over to Searshe and her hands got clammy, but she wiped them on her pants and tried not to think about the heights.

"But you've killed them?" she asked as she scanned her scaly side for a foothold while definitely thinking about heights. This was so weird? Eventually, she settled on pulling herself up by her wing, accidentally kicking the dragon with her boot on her climb up. "Sorry," she said once she'd hoisted herself up. "Where are we going?"