73. Oleantis

* The party and their crew had picked up a few passengers: Mennick, the artificer Halcyon Cill, and Cill's friend and business partner, the changeling Lockjaw. They'd travelled from the Rumidian Western Margraviate to Lake Makuahine and wove their way through the many reefs and shoals of the great Coral Blue to reach the island of Oleantis, the island their old friend Cormorant MacTavish was so fond of. They arrived on Harvestide 6, leaving their ship and crew on the shore as an incongruous, lone cormorant bird led them to an old bamboo hut. Nearby, Wilfred dug up the chest Cormorant had left for him in his will. Inside the never-opened chest was a letter from Elise to Cormorant and a ring. 
* The group leave the shore and the old firbolg druid named Qing Shan, trying to head back to their ship. They get lost on the way and end up enjoying some of the company of the locals. 
** Aerendyl marked a palm tree on the shore near Cormorant's old hut.
** They see two firbolg couples spear fishing from rafts out at sea. Two children, a boy and a girl, both young but already taller than the gnomes and goblin, were hunting for good chunks of ice in the water - ice apparently made by the island birds. Some of the group join in and end up eating crushed ice drizzled with floral honey from a coconut bowl. It's quite delicious. 
** Eventually a super tall, shaggy drumming firbolg arrives. He wades out into the waters to give the parent firbolgs a couple of the pouches hanging at his belt. Through the help of a tongues spell from Wilfred, the group talk to the guy a bit, learning his name is Chan An. He says that the island is a good one for remembering and that he can show them so if they fancy it. Never ones to turn down a shady deal from a friendly seeming guy, they follow Chan An to a mud-walled smoke hut. Inside he sets some sea swallow guano sizzling in a hot skillet and they all breathe in the smoke. The high hits almost immediately, numbing their bodies, heightening their sense of smell, and sending them cascading back through their own memories. Chan An sets a slow heartbeat rhythm on his drum, da-dum, da-dum, and they ride the sounds further into the past, the memories coming faster and faster as they go now. All the way back to their earliest memories they go. And when at last they return to themselves, the midday sun they'd left behind had long since sunk, Chan An was nodding and smiling happily from his side of the hut, still drumming lightly, no longer understood by any of them, and Cill was hurriedly making sure Lockjaw was ok. The changeling was in the form of a small girl, tears streaming down their face, as they remembered a great fire in New Baronae that defined the earliest part of their life. 
** Pyt encourages them not to try and spin their drug high into anything more profound than it was. And then they return to the beach where they'd seen the fishers so that they might begin circling around to get back to their ship. Aerendyl had sent his quicklings out earlier so he knew the way they should go. They were in the last hours of the moon's phasing now, late into the night, but the sea breeze was pleasant and there was no threat upon them for a change. They just walked in the sand and foaming waves for a few hours. 
** On the way, they see a great throng of small red crabs, easily thousands of them, scurrying between the tree line and the shore. Pyt scoops a punch of them up in his upturned drum then watches as they keep pulling each other back down trying to get out. Aerendyl bundles up a tonne of them in his brimstone cloak. Crabs from breakfast then. 
** Another hour of walking and the six of them are treated to one of the most beautiful sunrises they've ever seen. Long streaming clouds were blazed in dawn's first light, perfectly mirrored in Lake Makuahine's beautiful coral waters. Cill had considered taking a sample of the island's sand for future log pins, but at this point, with a word from Lockjaw that perhaps people coming here wouldn't necessarily be for the better, he reconsidered, tipping the sand back out. 
* They make it back to their ship by mid-morning of Harvestide 7. All their crew were amusing themselves, and Qing Shan the druid was there, playing dragonchess (poorly) against Taylor. They set up a crab pot on the beach and enjoy breakfast together. 
** When the question of how the party will navigate their way to the other side of the Lake comes up, Qing Shan tells them she doesn't know much beyond these horizons, but that she can beseech the help of others that do. She casts a powerful spell and one of the sea swallows comes to land on one of her large fingers. She says that by this time, the Laupepa fleet should be the closest, and so instructs the bird to fly to the fleet kahuna and deliver this message: 'some friends of the island are hoping to sail to the end of your mother's grace, but they know not the way. Would you help them for me?' And with that, the bird flies off towards the horizon. 
** After the old druid takes her leave, the group talks shop a bit more. 
** Cill and Lockjaw swap information with the party and figure out the truth behind the shapeshifting goblin attack: following Madog's infernal deal, anyone with knowledge of guns and gunpowder, his so-called 'goblin tech,' is a loose end to a complete goblin monopoly on that knowledge. Cill explained that his older notes pertaining to those things had become incomprehensible in recent months, even though the information in his head remained untampered, and that the goblins that attacked him had wanted to make sure he was indeed a gunsmith. Put simply, Cill might be the only non-goblin left on Terca Mahres with any understanding of gun craft and Madog had sent the Four and Forty to kill him because of it.
** Due to his deep gnome magics, Cill was pretty difficult to track by magical means, he explained. And due to Lockjaw's changeling nature, he was quite difficult to trace in person. The party mention their old bracelets of nondetection, one of which Wilfred still wears, and it gets the duo's attention. 
** They strike a deal! Cill and Lockjaw will receive the bracelet for Lockjaw and also the party's 5000gp in uncut rubies - a gem that Cill is apparently very fond of - and in exchange, Cill will cut the remainder of their gems, doubling their value, and they'll trade the party some of their illicit magic items they had finished and ready in their underground workshop when it came time for their flight: two Dispelling Stones, a Chime of Opening, a set of Dimensional Shackles, and a Driftglobe. 
** That night, Cill talks to Wilfred in gnomish. The old gnome encourages the young one not to think of the Hells as 'down there.' That's not right, he explained. For 'down there,' the World Below, was Terca Oscura, Cill's birthplace and old home. He spoke fondly of the place, saying he came from a city called Vermillion, a great place once lit by shining rubies in the cavern walls. But a place where the lights eventually went out, and so a place that is no more. Cill had left Terca Oscura then, so long ago now, and had lived up here on Terca Mahres for around two centuries! But he said that perhaps Wilfred might like it if he ever made it to the World Below one day. 
* Qing Shan had told them it would take some time for the help she'd asked for to appear on the horizon, but encouraged the group not to be hasty. They ended up spending 30 days about the island, with their ship pulled up on the shore. During this time, Cill finished cutting their gems and his own rubies, as well as finishing the alterations necessary to turn the magic horseshoes into a set of wide bracelets and anklets that Aerendyl could clip on and maintain when he wildshapes into quadrupedal form for a magically augmented boost of speed. 
* On the night of Harvestide 37, the first night of the full moon week, Aerendyl was sat alone on the shore when the River King appeared next to him. 
** The fey said he thought the island a good place, with its many rivers. He made some inquiry into how Aerendyl was feeling and then slinked over in smoothly to drape his arms over the elf's shoulders. Playing with one of the loose braids in Aerendyl's hair, the River King asked if he might take it as a token, for Aerendyl's own benefit. The elf gave his patron his leave to take the lock of hair, declaring it a freely given gift. As he returned to his place beside Aerendyl, the River King looked shocked for a moment, but was never one to turn away a gift gained without cost. 
** And then the knife. For the River King told Aerendyl that he planned on giving it to a witch, to the last witch in the Coven of Covens in fact. With his strength so bolstered these days, and with those sunken sisters living about so much water, the River King said it was an easy thing to appear to them, to begin whispering in the receptive ear of their youngest member. He taught her an ancient skill, something the relatively weak sea witches had been known for in the Times of Madness: how to kill their coven sisters and steal their power, eventually, when only one of the coven remained, becoming a creature known as a sea fury. And it was to this new sea fury that the River King would be giving Aerendyl's hair, so that she might find her way to the group, and so that Aerendyl could kill her, grow stronger, and be the one to watch as the seal on the Underdeep was broken. This was not a job for Rangrim or Luciana, the River King had decided. 
** Aerendyl started to protest that this didn't sound like it was to his own benefit at all, but the River King assured him it was. And soon after, he was gone, leaving the elf alone on the shore. He doesn't rest that night.
** Pyt is first out in the morning. He sees Aerendyl sat on the shore and senses that something is wrong, that maybe it has been for a while. After a bit of inquiry, even with the elf being sheepish and avoiding direct answers where he can, Pyt learns that there's only one witch left now, but that she'll be coming for the party. 
** This soon grows into the whole party grilling Aerendyl in the Drunken Dragon's deck cabin and him showing some reluctance to give more than a roundabout answer. 
** Clwyd mentions she could consult Phigalia, whose spirit she has trapped in the fox skull hanging at her waist. Pyt says that sounds like it would be useful right now, but that it doesn't venerate the reckless act of sealing a witch in a fox skull in the first place. But that yes, he thinks Clwyd should do that. 
*** The goblin draws a wide ring in the sand, sets the skull in its centre, sits herself outside it, and conducts her weird seance. None of the others can see or hear as the incorporeal spectre of Phigalia manifests, anchored to the skull by a wispy, ethereal thread. 
*** Phigalia immediately snarls and tries to attack Clwyd, but the thread holds her tighter than any irons could have in life and her efforts are fruitless. 
*** The following conversation is unpleasant. The old mountain witch is still quite angry about the whole being killed thing, and she takes every opportunity to belittle Clwyd's accomplishments, call her shortsighted and foolish, or laugh at her feeble attempts to barter with a fey. 
*** Clwyd tells Phigalia that if she cares about the world, then Phigalia will help her. The witch spectre laughs, saying their world can drown and burn beneath the lightning strikes for all she cares. She only served the queen. 
*** Next Clwyd says that if Phigalia helps then she'll release her. The witch again rasps her laugh, saying Clwyd's words are air, that oblivion suits her even less than this current situation, all the while playing a clawed finger across the air of the seance's ring at the very edge of where she could move. 
*** Clwyd asks Phigalia what's behind the seal. She only answers 'your end.' Then she presses Clwyd, asking her to examine the irony of having killed the keepers of the seals and then trying to get one of them to help her stop the breaking of the seals now. 
*** Clwyd says that she may have been shortsighted, but her efforts were enough to have slain Phigalia at least. The witch denies that, saying Clwyd was merely the instrument of a scheming, treacherous witch within her own coven. Phigalia insisted that Clwyd was not herself a witch yet, and that she'd do well to remember that. 
*** But when Clwyd tells Phigalia that the coven of seven had turned on themselves, that now only one remains, Phigalia can't help but betray some shock on her face, near imperceptible though it is. 'A fury,' she whispers, true shock in her voice. 'The likes of which have not been seen since the seals were put in place.'
** Clwyd ends her seance, tells the group that it wasn't very fruitful but does fill them in on all the scraps of information she did gleam, and then the group panics and argues some more. 
* The next morning, tensions still high among the party, they see one hell of a sight on the horizon. A miles-long fleet of outrigger ships of many different sizes was making it way across the reefs. The largest, central ships were full floating houses, their walls painted vibrant blues, yellows, and greens, and easily numbered in their thousands as the convoy stretched out of view. Around the central ships zipped tonnes of smaller, agile canoes with beautiful painted sails. This was the Laupepa Reefbeard fleet. 
** The Reefbeards wouldn't come ashore, so the Drunken Dragon sailed out towards them. 
** A few of the smaller canoes broke off from the convoy to meet the party, bouncing over the reef waves. One of them alighted close to the party's ship, piloted by a lone man, a dark-skinned Reefbeard with a mop of frizzy, mustard blonde hair on his head. He called out to ask if the party were cool, then introduced himself as Laupepa-Nau'natia-Po'nape-Arihi-Uwe-Fui'fui, but that they should just call him Fui'fui. He told them the kahuna was excited to meet people that had the respect of 'that old forest druid, eh.' 
** The Drunken Dragon was guides through the convoy to be lashed up to some of the larger house-ships in its heart. As they went, they caught glimpses of the migratory Reefbeard lifestyle all around them. Mothers combing out the frizzy hair of children as they sat on the edges of boats, people repairing nets or casting fishing lines, children jumping in the water and being scooped up by ships much further down the line than the ones they left, woodcarving and whittling, song and dance, and of course, so many sets of eyes on them as they arrived. 
** They were helped across the decks of various outrigger ships until they got to the Nau'natia, the kahuna's ship. The woman that was waiting for them looked to be in her late 60s by human standards, which meant her mid-130s to a Reefbeard. She had the same dark skin and frizzy hair that Fui'fui sported, though her hair had long ago darkened in her middle age and was now greying in her twilight years. The family resemblance between the two of them was clear. She introduced herself as the Laupepa fleet kahuna, and with a smile says her name is Laupepa-Nau'natia-Kanuni-Noa-Kakahiaka-Arihi, though she encourages them to call her simply Arihi.
Category:Part Five