Operation Oasis 2

With Auntie Dirtha gone on the wind and the sand peeling back to reveal the apex of a buried pyramid, the expedition turned to face what she had left behind: a giant scorpion mounted by a mummy, and the dread of her unspoken third card still cold in their bones.

Recap

The cavern hummed with the after-echo of Dirtha's departure. Aldric, Helena, Kouzlo, Thalen "Quick" Quickburrow, and Jorath stood between a subterranian lake and the apex of a pyramid that should not have existed an hour earlier. Across the sand, the mummy clambered onto the scorpion's rotting carapace and rode it like a steed — its wrappings, cracked exoskeleton, and curling tail moving as one creature against the party.

The Bound and the Iron Claw

Thalen opened the dance with three arrows in rapid succession, two of them shimmering with confusion magic. The first slid off the scorpion's will entirely; the second took hold, and its mind broke for a moment under arcane suggestion. The third buried itself in chitin. Hunter's Mark settled over the mummy like a brand.

The mummy answered with silence — a true, magical silence that swallowed every word and footfall in a wide ring around it — and spurred its mount forward toward Thalen. Kouzlo, calling on the cold, hurled an ice knife at the wrapped figure. The shard glanced wide and lodged in a hole in the scorpion's back, then burst outward in a spray of frost that sent the mummy reeling. Jorath stepped to Kouzlo's flank and unfurled a cloud of daggers above both creatures, raining steel down on rider and steed alike.

The confused scorpion lashed out at the nearest target in its haze — and that target was the mummy on its own back. Its tail whipped up and around and slammed into its rider hard enough to fracture wrappings. Then its mind cleared, it submerged into the sand, and it surfaced a heartbeat later beside Kouzlo, pincers reaching.

Helena raised her holy symbol and turned divine judgment on the undead. The scorpion's will broke first, recoiling from her presence; the mummy weathered the burst with the cold resistance of older magic. Helena pressed the advantage, reaching out with a thought-shaped hand and shoving the mummy clear of its mount. It tumbled into the sand. Aldric closed and swung Brine Justice in twin arcs — both turned aside by ancient wards. Thalen scrambled up a nearby outcrop for elevation.

The mummy, on its feet now, came up fighting. Rotted fists struck at Kouzlo and Aldric and missed both. Then it fixed its hollow gaze on Helena and pulled at something darker than fear. Helena's mind slipped sideways — for a long moment she was no longer entirely her own. The silence collapsed. Kouzlo, sensing curse and poison knitting through the mummy's substance, abandoned subtlety: a firebolt streaked toward it, missed wide, and Kouzlo stepped through space in a misty stride toward the pyramid's entrance.

Thalen — half-watching Helena over his bowsight — saw the charm settle on her face and fired a blunted shaft past her ear with a theatrical thwack. The shock of it broke the spell, and Helena blinked back into herself.

Then Jorath did something Aldric had not seen done to Brine Justice before. He raised a hand toward the flail and spoke a word, and the chain shivered into something incandescent. Brine Retribution. For the first time, the mummy's hollow gaze flickered with what looked very much like fear. The scorpion took one look at Aldric's newly-blessed weapon and scuttled east, away from Helena and away from the paladin.

Helena tolled the mummy with a death-knell that it shook off, then closed beside Aldric. Aldric raised a hand and a beam of divine fire poured from his palm — eldritch in shape, but radiant at its heart, and clearly the gift of something deepened between him and Tyr. The first lash returned on itself and scorched him; the second slammed into the mummy. Thalen put a crowning arrow into the wrapped figure with such precision that it staggered, dropped, and was driven the rest of the way down by Aldric's blow. The mummy turned and fled into the pyramid, dragging its broken form into the dark. The scorpion, watching its companion fall, did not stay to test the rest.

Out of breath and out of combat, Aldric quietly answered the questions about the new shape of his power. His connection with Tyr had deepened in the pause between expeditions. He had stopped asking why. He and Helena wove a mutual warding over each other against fey and fiend alike, and the party crossed the threshold of Dirtha's shack and into the pyramid below.

The Pyramid

The corridor was narrow sandstone, cool and dry. No door slammed behind them; no obvious mechanism barred their return. Torches flickered into life as they passed, as though waking from long sleep — and the shadows the torches cast did not behave as shadows should. They moved against the flame. Black scarabs, Kouzlo realized — countless of them clinging to the ceiling and walls, scuttling against the light. Nothing alive had walked these halls in a very long time. The air smelled, incongruously, sweet. Like an old auntie's house.

Thalen's Hunter's Mark still pulsed faintly. The mummy had gone this way.

Aldric took point through a winding passage and rounded a corner just in time to see the next chamber boiling with scarabs, the floor a living carpet of them rising fast. He grabbed Quick by the long ears and flung him bodily over the swarm, shouted the rest of the party forward, and they ran. Quick stumbled, half-buried; Jorath swam through the bugs with elven grace; Kouzlo cleared a circle around himself with a burst of sword-magic. They tumbled into the next room and slammed the swarm behind them.

The Circle

A great stone disc dominated the chamber, inscribed in a single ring:

Weigh what was given. Weigh what was taken. Weigh what was promised. Weigh what was broken.

Six alcoves opened in the walls around it. In each rested an offering: a golden feather, a clay heart, a vial of dark liquid, a bronze coin, a linen scroll, a broken obsidian mirror. A door stood unlocked at the far side, and an instinct shared between all five of them said that to place the wrong items on the disc was to invite something the chamber kept hungry. Kouzlo studied the coin and the scroll long enough to date the room to thousands of years past — and the scroll, he was sure, was a contract of some kind. They left the alcoves untouched and pressed on, marking the puzzle for later.

The Hourglass Room

The next chamber narrowed into a corridor that fell away into stone steps descending into darkness, while a level path led on to a side room. The stairs would not move; something had to be triggered. The side door was unlocked.

Beyond it: a plinth, and on the plinth a wide bowl of obsidian glass filled with the smoothest white sand any of them had ever seen. Beside it lay a feather quill with its tip snapped clean off, a series of runes etched into the plinth itself, and the broken blade of a sword — wide, flat, mirror-polished. Kouzlo whispered comprehension over the runes; they were names, words for things, divorced from the puzzle. Jorath ran a finger along the quill and confirmed it had been made broken, intentionally. Aldric held the blade to the light and found it as pure and reflective as a looking glass.

Kouzlo set the blade to a groove on the plinth and felt it lock home. In the mirrored shine of the sword, the runes appeared inverted. Kouzlo took the quill and traced the runes as they appeared in the reflection. The door behind them sealed; runes flared along the walls. Jorath, standing opposite Kouzlo with the plinth between them noted a similar groove and repeated the process from his perspective. The dull grind of a stone door releasing echoed around them and the obsidian bowl began to drain like an hourglass, the sand trickling away. And on the breeze that stirred through the room, Thalen heard a voice — the same kind of voice he had once heard inside the Great Tree, but older, dryer, sand-throated.

"The immortal woman was not always so..." "She stole time like sand from a glass..." "Mortal to god but the sands don't forget..."

The desert remembered. And now Thalen could hear it remembering.

The Priest and the Soldier

Across the corridor, the door that had unlocked at the blade's turning opened on a tomb-chamber. Two figures lay where they had been left at the end: a priest, robed and bedecked in religious symbols, clutching a bundle of papers to his chest; and a soldier, armored, with an empty gift box at his side. Aldric's divine sense brushed against the chamber and confirmed both were undead, though neither stirred.

Thalen, with the gentleness of a thief and the grandiosity of an adventurer, executed two flawless swap maneuvers. He produced a blink-acorn and a duplicate bundle, and exchanged each item with the dead so cleanly that not a wrapping shifted.

The priest's papers were a marriage contract, half in a tongue they could read and half in something older. The readable half declared a binding:

"Let it be known that on the forty-third day of the season of Flood, in the thirty-first year of the reign of Ramkheret, Lord of the Eternal Sand — His Majesty takes as his bound consort a woman of no noble house, born of the merchant quarter of the eastern reaches, known to the court only as She Who Speaks to Empty Places. She brings no lands. No armies. No gold. She brings only her voice, and what answers when she uses it. The king finds this sufficient. Witnessed by the high priests of this hall, bound here until these words are spoken aloud by living tongues."

Kouzlo whispered comprehension over the second half, and Aldric recognized the script the moment it shimmered into legibility — Fey. The desert had answered her in a voice from somewhere else entirely.

"I who was nobody, who walked into the desert with nothing and came back with everything, make this promise: I will stand beside this king. I will give him years. But I will not give him forever. Forever is mine. I spoke my name into the deep sand and the deep sand answered. Let whoever reads these words know — I still walk. And I remember everything."

The soldier's gift box bore a tag in the same older hand — a riddle in place of a present:

"I'm not a circle, and not a ring, I don't play music, but I can sing. Gifted by gods, I shine so bright, heavy as stone, but can take flight. What am I? Open to see."

As the second swap completed, a stone door at the far end of the chamber rolled open.

The Sphinxes

Two golden sphinxes waited in the next room — magnificent, life-sized, the last of their line by every sign Kouzlo could read. They named themselves: Sekahnu, amber-eyed, and Vetherek, blue-eyed. One always lied; one always told the truth. Through carefully chosen questions and a great deal of cross-talk, the party untangled the knot — Vetherek was the liar. Sekahnu inclined his head, and the next door rolled aside.

The King's Tomb

A few stone steps led down into a chamber kept immaculately, almost lovingly, clean. A sarcophagus stood open at the center of the room, its lid set carefully aside as if by someone who had taken her time. Aldric peered into it — and found it empty save for an old journal, the inside of the coffin oddly streaked with dried clay.

The journal was the king's. Aldric felt the Fey script under his fingers again. The entries reached back to a meeting in the desert, to a woman who could speak to the wind — a woman who had charmed a Lord of the Eternal Sand and married him and then made him wait. The last entry was hers, written in his book in the language he could never quite learn:

"He waited for me for three hundred years before I finally released him from the binding. He was still furious. Men. Even dead ones. Breaking free was cathartic… maybe not as much for him."

Thalen's Hunter's Mark, still threaded through the mummy, pulsed somewhere far below them. Karumon the Bound — the name had drifted to them earlier on the air — had retreated to a deeper level of the pyramid.

The Weighing

Carrying what they had learned, the party returned to the great stone disc and the four-line inscription. Given. Taken. Promised. Broken. They placed the six items in the order the rooms had taught them — the gifts and the betrayals, the contract and the broken mirror — and the disc accepted their reading. With a long stone shudder, the staircase at the far end of the corridor released and opened.

The Cats

The stairs delivered them into a long, low chamber. Six clay cats sat along the walls in poses of perfect stillness. At the room's center, a single long black cat stretched languorously across a sunless flagstone, as though waking from a nap that had lasted an age.

It opened amber eyes.

"Visitors?"

The word arrived in every one of their languages at once.

Helena, drawing her tarot deck to ready herself, sliced a finger on the edge of a card. A drop of blood spread across the topmost face — and a new card lifted itself from her deck that she had never owned. Bone-pale. Inscribed. The High Priestess, inverted.

The desert had remembered her, too.