35. Little Talks

* The party awake in the waters near Agnor and decide to make way for Crab Claw Cove, to see if there's any sign of survivors from Driscoll's crews, log pins they might take, or other such loot.
	+ This takes a day's sailing.
	+ On the way, Aerendyl mentions that he might have killed two members of the Scars of Mir after the party left him on Bisquay - so the Strait might not necessarily be a safe place for them. In his defence, he said, they were under vampiric charm at the time and coming for him.
	+ Cormorant questions Clwyd about what the voices in the mist had said. The goblin told him that devils seem to like collecting tieflings is all, but that she and the party don't have to necessarily go trying to recruit Skyburn if Cormorant doesn't want them to.
	+ Wilfred questions Aerendyl on what the whispers said regarding him. The elf is forthright, explaining that there were many who thought him to be the reincarnation of the king of his city - the Autumn City, a place in the realm of Faerie. And so, many thought Aerendyl was himself destined to be a king - but his life didn't turn out that way. He fell ill near his hundredth birthday and was rendered cripplingly infirmed for centuries afterwards. The River King eventually presented himself and blocked the illness, on the condition that Aerendyl does his bidding to return the fey to his strength. Aerendyl isn't too concerned about this, long term, since he tracks the machinations of a grudge-holding former archfey in terms of eons, and thinks that he'll be long dead before the River King's plans are fully realised.
	+ Clwyd isn't sure if the group have good enough questions to bother doing all this stuff for the Siblings of Agnor anyway.
	+ Wilfred explains that he wants to know what happened to his parents and the thirty or so Rumidian mages who disappeared with them when he was an infant, and he wants to know what the truth about what the dragon scale around his neck is, which they'd given him before they vanished. Plus now Lyra - his old mentor and guardian - was missing and mixed up in all this, so he wanted answers about that too.
	+ The only surviving cat from the five Aerendyl gathered on Tortuga, the tortoiseshell female, gets named 'Zaratan'.
	+ At night, Wilfred and Cormorant take a watch shift together and talk about Rumidia.
		- The old human explains that he was born a colonial Rumidian - his father was very high ranked, in fact, for his father was Northern Margrave August McTavish. But Cormorant had been rebellious and impulsive in his youth, and, spurred on by Skyburn - herself a year younger than he and the daughter of a pirate August had hung - they stole a ship and became pirates themselves. They were still in their teens at the time.
		- Wilfred tries to reassure Cormorant that he was just young and foolish. The old man goes on to talk about being much older than a kid and killing a woman known as Joan the Goat, from whom he got the knowledge to start building his guns.
		- Wilfred tells him that he'd like to think Cormorant isn't like that any more.
		- When asked, the gnome said that he misses the safety of Rumidia, and the knowledge in the library known as the Grand Arcanum, but he doesn't miss the secrets and the restrictions of the empire. He doesn't know if he'd be able to go back to it now that he's experienced this freedom, even though it's come at the cost of him constantly having to look over his shoulder.
	+ Aerendyl has a short trance dream of an elf climbing a mountain and meeting a fey creature at the top, but gleams no more information from it than that.
	+ The night is uneventful in terms of these usually hostile and undead-riddled waters.
* They arrive at Crab Claw early the next morning.
	+ The island is uninhabited, and most of the buildings had been cleared out. There's no sign of a fight anywhere.
	+ At the end of the beachhead filled with effigies, a little shrine has been erected to serve as a praying spot for the many who fell in the fight against Shandy. Wilfred surmises that building it would mean no more effigies would be added to the site. It was a way of marking the end.
	+ The group reason that the inhabitants left the island long before any fight came to them.
	+ Wilfred announces that his owl familiar is called Huninn.
	+ The gnome also suggests they might use the island as a base and/or meeting place if ever they get separated.
	+ The party remember that before they departed for the Hells, Driscoll's lot had been planning to move non-combatants to Hideno Island, since it didn't have an associated log pin like Crab Claw does. The group decide to swing by the island, though Clwyd is hesitant on the grounds that if there are survivors there they will be people she and the party willingly abandoned. The goblin thinks they don't have much of a right to show themselves now and demand information from them. All the same, on the slim chance that Quinn is there, they decide to go look.
	+ It's another day's sail to get there.
	+ Aerendyl's trance dream continues that night, with the elf following the fey into a building at the top of the mountain.
	+ The night is again a peaceful one without interruption, undead or otherwise.
* The group arrive at Hideno Island at midday.
	+ They find the beginnings of a settlement that was being constructed, but it too has been abandoned.
	+ In one of the few wooden buildings that had been finished and were being used for storage, they find a lot of the furniture that was missing from Crab Claw, including Driscoll's desk from his room in the High House.
	+ In one of the desk's draws, they find a large amount of coded Rumidian scout reports.
	+ The other draw is locked. Wilfred triggers a poisonous gas trap when he tries to pry it open. The thick, choking gas burns all their throats, blinds them for a time, and sends them scurrying. It takes the rest of the day for the heavy gas to disperse enough for them to get back into the room.
	+ Together they drag the desk out the building.
	+ Clwyd then sets fire to it without consulting the others. Wilfred puts it out with the sudden downpour of *Create Water*.
	+ The desk is now charred and wet.
	+ They try a couple times to pry the drawer open but they're all too weak.
	+ Aerendyl spends the rest of the daylight breaking into the drawer by freezing water around it. It's a painstaking process.
	+ Inside the locked drawer, they find:
		- Another set of log pins for the pinnable islands in these waters: Agnor, Crab Claw, Yeddow, and Bisquay.
		- Log pins for places called Mother's Reach, Mother's Nest, Mother's Heart, Mother's Love, New Rumidia, and New Baronae.
		- A velvet pouch filled with 20 pretty gems of various sorts and 18 platinum pieces.
		- A canvas picture, in the style of Clay's paintings, showing many happy, people aboard the Matricide - younger than the party knew them: Driscoll, Laylin, Wick, King, Rhythm, and others the party recogised from the crew, as well as many unfamiliar faces too - including the man Driscoll had his arm around the shoulder of and another who stood beside them, at the very front and centre of the group painting.
	+ The party sleep on the island.
* The next day, they opt to try their luck and check out the island of Hamlin - though they don't know it, they have a fair amount of confidence in its relative safety, since it bears a name on their map.
	+ They arrive at noon.
	+ Their initial familiar-aided scouting reveals the island to be sheer rock cliffs all around, with a cheerful house, complete with a green grass lawn, picket fence, and smoking chimney, sat in the middle of the little caldera the island formed.
	+ They all decide they should check it out, and so they fly up to the edge of the lawn using a combination *polymorphy*, wild shape, and the *fly* spell.
	+ They're greeted by a human man in humble clothes. He welcomes them inside his cosy house, serves them tea, and saying his name is Liriel.
* The party sit in Liriel's home and he welcomes them to ask him about what they've come to find out, though he's unsure that he'll be able to answer in a way that pleases them.
	+ The man speaks slowly and softly, but often in riddles, almost always giving unsatisfactory answers.
	+ He alludes to being far older than he might appear - even calling Cormorant 'child' reflexively at one point.
	+ He also apparently once had an important and significant job that he's now given up, though he says he isn't retired.
	+ He stresses the importance of names and speaking truths aloud when Clwyd withholds from saying her name to him by acting coy and saying 'I'm sure you already know it'.
	+ But he does tell them something of the fate of Driscoll's forces at the end of their war:
		- He explains that some few genasi are able to invoke a 'dying wish' at then end of their lives, and that King did this to make Loudwater, a storm that still rages with his unbending will to protect his friends from Shandy.
		- They ask if Quinn might have survived then, and he's sad to tell them that she died in the fight, as did many others. But she died so that her crew might live - that was her own dying wish, in a way.
		- However, Liriel is unable to tell them about Quinn's crew, saying that their choice now is to be hidden.
	+ Liriel stresses that it is not his place to force the group's choices, and he fears that in telling them some of the things they ask him, he may end up doing just that.
	+ All the same, Clwyd presses him to tell her where Madog is, and presses again when he says that she herself might think she's unready to do anything about that situation. Her choices made, Liriel tells them that 'the person Clwyd seeks is in one of the seats of the Council of Nine.'
	+ The cryptic conversation wends and winds a little further, until Liriel can answer no more without revealing a great truth about himself. He decides that it is not for him to deny the group the choice of knowing, if that is what they want. But he would not do this unless all the group agree, for telling one is the same as telling them all. Even as he warns that knowledge is a burden, they all decide they want to know, and so he shows them.
* Liriel stands up and changes form, growing to twice his size and bulk, his skin fading to a shade of grey-blue, his eyes clouding white and then silver, and a pair of enormous, beautiful wings sprouting from his back. An angel stands before them.
	+ He explains that there exists a book most foul, in which every wicked deed, every sinful ritual, and each and every wrongness are written - whether it's their origin or their chronicle, even he does not know. But wherever the book appears, it corrupts and destroys.
	+ It touched the ground in these parts but once before, and it cracked the earth where it did so, right in Aguilla. A gateway exists there now, and these waters all around it have been foul ever since - as the party well know with their experience of its unchained magics, deadly islands, and many undead.
	+ He and his brethren are charged to ever look for the book, and destroy it when they find it. However, the book inevitably reforms again somewhere in the cosmos, and so their searching is endless.
	+ The archangel Zariel once thought to buy them a greater period of peace. Rather than rip the book to shreds and gain them decades of freedom, she sought to carry it for a single year, at the end of which she would be able to banish it for centuries or millennia. It corrupted her within a single month of her carrying it, and she is now the archdevil that they know presides over the Second Hell.
	+ Liriel himself is actually one of three. He split himself when he gave up his Grace to contain the corruption of the book's arrival in Aguilla.
		- Some of the party had already met one of the others - Ezekiel, who reached out to them immediately after their first trip to the Hells and Clwyd's baptism into House Telphousila. At the time then, as Liriel keeps stressing now, Ezekiel had said that her choices remain her own, regardless of what devils would have her believe.
		- The third stands watch over the gateway.
	+ He explains that mortal belief shapes the outer planes, creates and moulds very realms of existence. This, he says, is why mortals are held to a higher standard.
	+ And as devils punish, and demons indulge, angels exist maintain balance. Their existence does not contradict any belief system that does not include them (such as Wilfred's - the beliefs of the Rumidian Church), for theirs is not a charge of faith. They are neither the champions of good nor the bastions against evil that some would think them to be. Rather, they strive only to maintain balance.
	+ Ultimately, Liriel says he mourns for the party's losses, but also remarks that they are small in the grand scheme - as he had warned the perspective he gave them might showcase. He bids them leave before Liriel himself overstays his welcome in their lives.
	+ Clwyd hangs back enough to say to him that she's not going to promise she isn't going to act on the things he's told her, but that she will promise to think about it. He smiles warmly and tells her to remember that the choices are always hers to make.
* They leave the island, spend an uneventful night drifting atop the waters, then sail for Bisquay in the morning.
	+ This is a two day journey.
	+ On the night before their arrival, the first night of the new full moon, Aerendyl is alone on watch when he's summoned by the River King. His reflection has him jump into a shimmering moon reflecting on the ocean's surface. Doing so brings him to a crystalline cave where the fey is waiting.
	+ The River King starts the conversation asking Aerendyl to go over the things that he had done recently, like a teacher coaching a student towards an answer. But he quickly grows impatient and brings up the Siblings of Agnor and the protection they've been giving the group - something the elf hadn't reasoned was happening, but now explained the peaceful nights they'd been enjoying in the usually hostile waters.
	+ The River King starts shouting at Aerendyl, saying one in the group agreed to the task the Siblings gave them, didn't they?! And since then, they've been sailing about with their protection as proof of the covenant, but Aerendyl hadn't even noticed!
	+ The angry fey scolds him, saying he'd thought Aerendyl better. His dancing mask evidently needs a lot of work.
	+ Then he dismisses the elf with a flick of the wrist and a suck of his teeth.
	+ Aerendyl returns to the deck of *the Drunken Dragon* - which has not moved at all since his departure - and doesn't share any of this encounter with the group the following morning.
* The party arrive in Bisquay.
	+ It's busy with its spring trade.
	+ They're charged just to dock their ship in the deep bay - a first for the crew of *the Drunken Dragon*.
	+ Wilfred buys a desert outfit that comes from the Six Sultanates and covers much of his face and body.
	+ Clwyd gets her many gems appraised. She gives the one remaining jade chip - worth 25gp - to the jewellers so they might grind up one of her black pearls - worth 500gp each - into powder. The other pearl she keeps as is. The bag of 20 assorted gems they found in Driscoll's drawer are valued at about 50gp each on a good day.
	+ Wilfred buys the incense necessary to recast his *Find Familiar* spell, turning the owl into a lion cub he calls Muninn - a cat for the ship, though they still have Zaratan for the time being as well.
	+ They find a trader with a spare log pin to the Pirate Republic. He wants 1200gp for it, but he's willing to throw in a map of the place to sweeten the deal. The party offer the bag of gems from Driscoll's drawer (worth 1000gp on a good day, don't forget) and he wants 400gp on top, since they aren't liquid currency. The group throw this together and pay the man.
	+ They receive a map of the Pirate Republic and a log pin for an island called Freetown.