Week 10: A Vision of Tegur Han

The group awoke the morning after the Viggen’s party and made their way back to the villa to see how things were going. At the villa, they noticed Shahtzee — the lizard trainer they’d met the night before — had a large sentry lizard out that was digging through the ground. The yard appeared to be in a bit of disarray, with goats tied up to statues and such.

Pellis Viggen’s impressive study (full of caged birds, including one enormous golden eagle) also had an acrid aroma, as he’d been burning all of the wooden sheds and boards outside to eliminate any grubs that might have escaped the basement the previous evening. He explained that the grubs come from wormwood which is harvested alive — normally only fallen wormwood is harvested, but someone screwed up. He’s got Shatzee’s lizard rooting out any remaining grubs. He thanked the party for saving his daughter, but explained that she was still recovering and too weak to meet with them at the moment.

The group caught a puppet show, learning that that some Bowok had been harvesting in Nawabe territory of the Sualantha Plains, in violation of the Sualantha treaty. The plains have long been a buffer between Saffa and the Bowok, with use rights granted exclusively to the Nawabe tribes (Bo-Wiri, the aspiring architect from Olli’s, is a Nawabe tribesman). They also discovered that open-sea fishing vessels were reporting strange phenomena outside of Kilpo Bay, including several accounts of a strong sulphurous smell and mass deaths of fish — and one sighting of ocean waters aboil! Prices on hake, sailfin, and sawnose are skyrocketing.

The group continued on to Maringa, the main Seta village of Tobias’ youth. His younger cousins swarmed him, he found that his teenage sweetheart had married one of his close friends, and his family were relieved to see him and to hear that his brother Culpokek was at least recently alive. They prepared for a great Seta feast, meeting with the elders Taqi (the oldest), Ajanna, and Weem, putting up with Weem’s pinpoint seed-spitting abilities and Ajanna’s prodigious gas production. They learned that a Seta had escaped from captivity — Ajanna’s grandson. And they met with the new Kailo healer, a young fellow named Lupo who wears a shark tooth necklace in honor of the old healer Iiri Hadawa (who was killed by a shark). 

They met with Virin, the escaped Seta boy, and learned that he’d escaped from an encampment somewhere well to the west of Typor Citadel (in Bowok territory), where a group of mainly teens were held captive. He believed that at least one of their guards was sympathetic to the kids, as escapes seemed more common than they should. But not all were: his roommate in prison was killed as the two of them fled. Virin had spent time gathering food for the kids under the guards’ eyes, and knew that at least one of the other children had had an eye removed at some point.

Lupo led them to a smoke lodge where they ingested some mushrooms. Lupo told them the Jade candle was given to Parok Chee, a Seta in charge of Empress Neewah’s treasury, by the empress shortly before her death and told the Seta that they must watch over Skandara, that the city “must soon sleep for a while, and the Seta must watch over her until the kolibris tell you it is time for her to awaken”.

Lupo explained that the candle was lit shortly after the Maelstrom opened. Lighting it invoked Ty-Abo’s protection to honor the Empress’s request of the Seta people: Ty-Abo has remained to protect Moru Kel, in Pashan’s service, and a group of watchers called the “Hidden Branches” constantly observe and protect the candle, and ensure that it remains lit and Ty-Abo guards the city.

Aiden was the first to have a vision:

You feel strange, like your brain is in your whole body and your whole body is hands and fingers stretching out to touch other hands and fingers that are not yours yet are somehow also a part of you. You can feel yourself reaching out across all of Moru Kel and around Kilpo Bay, then beyond, north, south, and west. You are vaguely aware of a shift in time, of the ancient Urek city of Skandara glistening and flourishing. Your mind is drawn southwest, past Tarima and even the Alba River, deep into the forest to a cluster of trees. A part of you suddenly thinks of them as a family of trees and then finds the concept of being human to be foreign and odd. The other part of you perceives the wooded grove as a human would. 

The forest floor is spongy and the sunlight is filtered through a rooftop of green leaves. Ground palms grow between the trees, clustered around a bright aqua circular pond. [a cenote] The trees are covered in climbing vines and moss. You recognize it as dusk moss. You begin to sense or see movement, not coming from any one direction but from everywhere. At first you can’t identify it but then you realize that worms are emerging from the trees all throughout the grove. You ‘hear’ some of the trees itching — but they know the worms keep them safe from stillsap; a little discomfort every now and then is a small price to pay. The worms are growing before your eyes, as they eat their way out and begin to consume the dusk moss on the trees. Then most of them stop growing and begin to pair off and mate, releasing an intoxicating floral smell before depositing fertilized eggs into the trees they emerged from only minutes before. They then curl up, drop to the ground, and die. Most of them . . . but not all.

A few worms that emerged from trees without much dusk moss on them have continued to grow as they eat the wood of their host trees. You sense their barbed mouths digging and chewing. But soon enough they encounter and devour enough dusk moss that they, too, stop growing. They attempt to mate but have become aggressive and are as likely to kill a potential partner as a competitor . . . and just as likely to attack an insect, lizard, or small mammal. The more dusk moss they eat, though, the more they calm down, until two pairs successfully mate, releasing the intoxicating floral smell in great amounts. They are able to nudge their overlarge eggs into some of the tree holes, but many wind up falling to the ground, where they are soon joined by the carcasses of their spent parents. 

As the intoxicating smell begins to attract bees, wasps, and kolibri — even bats awakened from their slumber by the seductive scent — you see a boy emerge from the trees, carrying a large sack with very little in it. He deposits several of the large eggs into the sack before hacking out chunks of wood containing smaller eggs. It takes him a while with his machete; he’s awkward with it, like he doesn’t use one often. He then collects carcasses of the worms, both large and small, putting each in a separate smaller sack, of which he has a stack. The insects are beginning to swarm and the boy quickly packs up and disappears from view. With the part of you that isn’t human, you can feel him travelling through the forest, heading west. You feel your finger brain stretching out to follow him to another, larger circular pool and the great city in the jungle that you know is close, but at the same time you feel time stretching and shifting again . . . 

You are near the city wall, on the roof of a large 3-story building, full of earthenware pots with lush flowering plants. There is a courtyard below you, where 6 people are clustered together, gesturing and muttering, with their backs to you. They are all wearing short woven capes, striped with a rainbow of bright colors. But you can’t help being captivated by the sight beyond them, a city surrounding an enormous cenote! Most of the buildings are 2-story log structures but some are stone, reminiscent of style of the old stone villas in Moru Kel but more ornate and smaller . . . except for one big pyramid looming on the edge of the cenote. This is where the caped figures are gesturing and looking, and you notice a man mounting the large platform in front of it. He’s wearing a full-length cape, golden yellow, and holding a sack. The crowd that is following him is armed and looks angry; most of them wear yellow loincloths, hair wraps, or arm bands. A second crowd of unarmed townspeople is beginning to gather around them, curious, having trailed the angry parade to the pyramid. The man steps to the front of the platform and speaks. His voice is carried by the water and reaches you clearly:

“You all know who I am. I am Iduma! I am the one the Oracle warned about the destruction of our great city. I am the one who must protect it. You all know what I was told: “Tegur Han will be destroyed when one of the Profane arrives.” And you all know I have spent my life preparing to save us from such a fate. That I have spoken against anyone who would dabble in any magic that might open a portal for the Profane. Yet there are those among us who claim to work for Pashan, to — in fact — be his most trusted servants, who have been deliberately trying to open such a portal! I speak of the Kolibri!”

One of the caped figures in the courtyard exclaims, “What!?”

Another says, “Did he just say we’re trying to conjure demons?”

Another says, “This must be what he meant!”

And a fourth says, “He’s got an army with him! We’ve got to get to the chamber now!”

The Kolibri huddle, muttering intensely. From your vantage point on the roof, you can see a group of armed people approaching an outer wall of the courtyard from an alley, carrying a ladder; they’re wearing yellow. Two of the Kolibri separate from the rest and enter a building to your right, through an arched doorway(DM note: three ‘walls’ of the courtyard are buildings; the fourth is the wall Iduma’s people are about to to come over - they’re on the building that’s opposite that wall), as a new smell starts to dominate, an intoxicating fragrance that is both intense and subtle — like jasmine one second and honey the next. It doesn’t seem to be coming from the plants in the garden; it moved in like fog or a fart — if farts smelled like roses. The caped figures smell it too; you can see a couple of them raising their heads and sniffing the air. One of them spots you.

The group found themselves fighting to hold off first the mob, and then the wairu’s servants, which they managed as the Kolibri retrieved the Irix candelbrum — missing its heart stone — from beneath the ground. They were unable to retrieve the Irix Tagul, four powerful and important blades, from beneath a partially collapsed wall.

Iduma battled the wairu itself, exclaiming that he hadn’t known his actions had allowed it to return. Eventually he sent some giant wasps to carry the party away before shattering the heartstone in a massive explosion that leveled the city, killing Iduma and destroying the wairu for now.

The party awoke back in the smoke lodge, wandering outside to meet Lupo and then headed up to see the Jade Candle. After seeing the Candle, they went outside and met with Lupo and Taqui, who said they’d better get back to the Maturo place and get some sleep — it was after 3:00am in the morning.