Operation Oasis 3

Six clay cats, a bone-card hag, and a name three parts long: the last expedition into the Sunken Pyramid would either break Auntie Dirtha Bonebender or be broken by her.

Recap

The long black cat opened amber eyes and yawned at them. "Oh, visitors? What is it this time? Archaeologists, treasure hunters looking for gold, lost souls?"

Helena knelt and asked if it would be their guide. The cat purred and rolled to one side — an itch on its back, it said, that needed scratching. She obliged. Under her fingers the fur lay soft over something that was decidedly not flesh; not stone either, but something between the two. Taxidermy. Or animation. The cat introduced itself as Anu, and admitted, somewhat ruefully, that it had been here far too long.

This place, Anu explained, was the Great Pyramid of Ramkheret, Lord of the Eternal Sands. Anu had served the king once. The king, however, had been undone by a vile woman whose original name was lost — everyone knew it then, and no one remembered it now. She went by another name in these later days. Auntie Dirtha Bonebender. Mummies passed through these halls at her behest, and no one Dirtha placed here ever left.

Jorath produced the half-burnt wedding contract they had pulled from the priest's chest and read it aloud. Anu listened politely and then confirmed what they already knew. No one leaves. Then he padded toward a special door at the north end of the chamber and walked through it — coming back when Aldric called, confused that the party would not simply follow him to the king. Kouzlo explained, with some delicacy, that the door was likely to kill them.

Dirtha appeared as if she had been in the room the whole time.

She was seven feet tall, hung with bags and bottles, fingers ending in long curving nails. Magic rolled off her in a way both Kouzlo and Jorath could feel as a kind of low pressure in the chest. She scolded Helena for petting her cat. She kicked Anu for not knowing his place. And she scolded the party for attempting to raid the king's coffers — though her eyes lingered on Helena as she said it. "It seems you've been raiding more than the king's coffers, wench."

"You all seem to like playing with cats," she said. "Allow me to provide a few more."

She flicked one wrist and the six clay cat statues along the walls came alive — bigger, fiercer versions of Anu, claws scraping flagstone as they stretched and turned their heads.

Helena drew. The Queen of Wands. The Five of Cups. The Five of Swords.

Dirtha looked delighted. "Five of Swords? We may have a fight! Well alright then!"

She blew apart into a wisp of sand and was gone among the cats.

The Hag and the Cats

Thalen put an arrow into the nearest cat to break its charge, brought his bow up, and pinned Dirtha — wherever she now wore her shape — with the steady focus of Hunter's Mark. He drove a thorned arrow at her chest. She turned aside its bite with a wave of ancient resistance, as if she had decided not to be hurt by it.

Dirtha raised a single finger at Kouzlo. A bead of fire bloomed at her fingertip and grew. Kouzlo shouted a counterspell. Dirtha countered the counter without so much as a glance, and the fireball detonated through the chamber. Jorath went down. Helena was a hairsbreadth from following him. Then Dirtha spoke a single word toward Aldric — begone — and Aldric, who had felt his bond with Tyr deepen through the season, felt the prayer simply slide off him and into the sand.

Aldric poured healing light into Jorath, hauled him back to his feet, and turned to the first clay cat with a flash of his blade — taking its head off in one stroke. He charged Dirtha and drove a javelin into her chest. It stuck there. She did not appear to notice.

Helena, watching one of the cats slink down a corridor toward her, set blessings on Aldric, Kouzlo, and Thalen. A great spectral mallet shimmered into being beside Dirtha and hammered at her shoulder. Two more cats blinked across the room in puffs of sand and tore into Thalen and Aldric — claws, teeth, the dry stink of pottery and old incense.

Dirtha glanced at Helena and made a small gesture. Helena was gone.

She fixed the same gesture on Aldric. The paladin shrank, his armor crumpling around him until a small, indignant penguin stood blinking in his place, sword still impossibly clenched in one flipper.

That was when Kouzlo cashed in the favor he had been owed since the Feywild — one question for one truthful answer, with consequences to follow.

A scented breeze ran the length of the corridor. Flowers sprouted from the marble at Kouzlo's feet. He spoke the question into the air. What is the hag's name?

The answer came in pieces, the way the puzzle of the sand had come — as if the world itself was trying to remember.

"I — met —"

Dirtha's eyes went huge. She stopped where she stood.

Anu looked up at Kouzlo with something like joy. "Two of the three pieces of her name! The trials that are before you were meant to unlock them. That's why they were so well-protected. Perhaps you—"

A bolt of lightning hit Anu and sent him skidding across the floor.

"The final piece lies within the heart of the king," the cat managed, smoke rising from his fur. "Ask him. Break the curse."

Jorath, on his feet again, ripped out a Shatter and dropped two more cats in a single thunderclap. Dirtha staggered — but she had not yet spent her worst.

Her eyes burned red. She turned them on Kouzlo. "You don't know what you've done. You would invoke the power of the Fey against me? They have—"

She did not finish. Her hand snapped up and she spoke a single killing word. Kouzlo's heart stopped on the syllable and started again only by the smallest margin — a thread of life he could feel humming between his ribs. A familiar voice whispered in his ear, gentle and amused: "Now you owe us twice."

Dirtha lowered her hand. Her brows furrowed. She walked through the wall.

Penguin Aldric, with the dignity of a much taller paladin, hopped after her and drove his beak true into her leg as she vanished.

Helena, Banished

Helena found herself in a small room she recognized — Dirtha's shack, cauldron bubbling with a brew uncomfortably like the one Grit had once served them. Her arms were bound to the chair. On the wall hung a family portrait.

Three sisters.

Dirtha in the middle, painted as she liked to imagine herself. To one side, a woman of impossible, ethereal beauty — skin a pale glacial blue, hair tumbling in frost, her dress and the chair beneath her rimed in cold. Granny IceTooth. To the other side, the most grotesque thing Helena had ever seen rendered in oil paint — a creature that looked as if a toad and a bag of garbage had produced a daughter. Mother Malice.

Footsteps approached the cabin door. The door swung open.

The hut peeled away, and Helena was sucked back across the desert and dropped into the pyramid beside the others.

Anu Saved

Anu was dying. Helena and Thalen knelt over the cat — goodberries pressed to his lips, the steady breath of spare the dying in his ear — and pulled him back from whatever edge he had nearly slipped over. Aldric, still a penguin, waddled to the remaining cat statues that had not animated and methodically shattered each one.

Then the polymorph wore off, and Aldric stood up in his armor, considerably taller, considerably angrier, javelin still gone.

They had two pieces of the hag's name. They needed the third. Anu, on the way to recovery, looked toward the doors that opened off this chamber and gave the smallest cat-nod he could manage.

The Tomb Meant for Anu

The first door opened on a small embalming chamber. Four bodies wrapped and still in the corners. A fifth body on the central table, arms at its sides, a small clay tablet on its chest pressed into the linen.

Jorath bent over the seal. The symbol stamped into the wrappings was the royal name-seal — Anew. Anu, leaning around the doorframe in his recovery, regarded the body fondly. "I much like my new form."

Thalen circled the sarcophagus at the back of the room. Locked, but lockable in a particular sequence — beginning with the table body. He bent close to read the inscriptions and triggered a wire he had not seen. From the corners, the four wrapped figures animated. Thalen rolled aside. Helena took the worst of it. Across the linens of each mummy was a word seared into the cloth.

Readiness. Worthiness. Honesty. Willingness.

The puzzle wanted them in that order. The party walked the symbols around the table body and laid them into the seal.

Anu padded up to the sarcophagus and laid a paw on it. "This was intended for me," he said. "I never had a burial."

He worked a single curving claw into the lock, and the lid rose. Inside was a censer of polished bronze and silver, hung from chains finer than any silversmith should have been able to draw. Anu set it on the floor and demonstrated its use — a slow swing, a curl of smoke — and the party's wounds dimmed. The Scales of Ma'at. Helena lifted it carefully into her hand.

The Coffer of Equivalent Exchange

The next door let into a chamber with two broad stone platforms flanking a great chest at the far wall. The platforms were not bare — each held an assortment of objects, weights and gems and oddments. The chest had no visible latch. Carved across its face:

"What is freely given weighs less than what is taken. Prove it."

Jorath spent a charge of his Wand of Secrets on it. The chest wanted offerings — and the value of what it returned would be set by the value of what was given. Jorath dropped the wand itself onto the platform. Aldric and Helena placed their blink acorns beside it. Kouzlo gave up his Oil of Slipperiness. Thalen, more reluctant than he liked to admit, surrendered a Scroll of Misty Step and the rest of his melee weapons. Jorath added his memento of Coralia — a fragment of reef. Aldric, after a steadying breath, set the Great Axe +1 onto the stone.

The chest considered the heap. The chest opened.

Jorath looked into it and saw a golden coil — two ornate cobras worked spring-tight, fitted to wrap an arm. The Bracelet of the Cobra. It curled around his wrist as he lifted it.

Thalen looked into the chest and saw a bow of deep, blood-dark wood, its string woven of fine linen. When he met its line of grain it seemed to look back. The Bow of the Horizon. It was made for a hand it had not yet held.

A third thing rested between them — a small ring set with a tiny brain in pewter. Ring of Mind Shielding. Jorath turned it over once, then handed it to Kouzlo. "I think you will need this."

Kouzlo slid it onto his finger. "I AM KAMWAZET THE—" A voice not his came roaring out of him, dropped flat, and dissolved into wheezy cat-laughter from across the room. Anu, sitting on a stone, looked very pleased with himself.

The coffer slammed shut.

The Obelisk

The next door let into a perfectly circular room, a granite obelisk at its center carved in tight ranks of script, a compass rose set into the floor beneath it. They had already paid the price of this room's puzzle in the corridor above. The name still came in pieces. I — met — They moved on.

Karumon, Unbound

The next chamber was a hall of four sleeper alcoves, two mummies still standing in their niches, a third collapsed onto the flagstones, the fourth empty. A fifth sarcophagus stood in the room's center. Thalen swept the chamber for Dirtha. She was not in it.

The central sarcophagus shuddered. Its lid leapt up and slammed back, and a tall, wrapped figure stepped out onto the floor. The party reached for weapons.

Jorath spoke first. "We're here to serve the king. We're here to finish the name."

The mummy's mouth cracked open. "You serve the one true king?"

Aldric, in his most courtly tone: "All hail Ramkheret, Lord of the Eternal Sands."

The mummy considered him a long moment, then bowed, fractionally, in something like recognition. Karumon the Bound — the king's brother, his grand vizier in life, his bound servant in death. The queen had taken his loyalty as easily as she had taken everything else, and he hated her for it. The king did not rest easy. Karumon would rest more easily once the king did.

"Shatter the clay king's heart," he told them. "Free him from his duty. That will allow him to be bested. I see you've found the treasures of this place — he will be pleased that it will help free him."

He raised one wrapped hand. Somewhere in the dark the giant scorpion that had hunted Helena clattered up to him as a horse comes to a rider. Together they slammed the door of the king's chamber off its hinges.

Helena, watching it crumble, exhaled. "Hell yeah, brother."

The King's Chamber

The room beyond was high-ceilinged and silent. Two anubis-headed statues flanked the path. At the center of the chamber, seated on a low dais and facing away from them, was a massive figure of fired clay — a king, sculpted and sat in state.

Kouzlo read the magic on it — a puzzle of necromancy and binding, but unmistakably the king himself. Aldric's divine sense reported back something rarer than he had expected: a faint celestial echo, a soul still tethered to whatever the king had been before the hag found him. Helena studied the anubis statues and concluded they could not move — except, perhaps, the mouths.

The king-golem was a vessel. The third piece of the name was sealed within its clay heart.

Dirtha was waiting for them.

Kouzlo opened the engagement with a Chromatic Orb pitched in thunder — the orb screamed across the chamber and slammed into Dirtha hard enough to rock her. She tried to counter. Kouzlo countered her counter. The orb landed.

Dirtha levelled a finger and unleashed a lightning bolt. Jorath stepped sideways through misty space and took none of it. The rest of the party took half each and stayed standing.

Aldric closed the distance to the king-golem. "Great King," he said, low, "I'm so sorry. Know that I do this with the greatest respect." He spoke the words of his Vow of Enmity and brought Brine Justice down into the king's chest. The blow rang true. He struck a second time.

Thalen settled the Oathbow on his shoulder and spoke its name to it. "Your trail ends here."

The first arrow caught the king-golem in the chest and cracked the inside of him — the jar in the king's heart split, and the hag's voice came pouring out of the breach. The third piece of the name rolled into the air.

"Imetka."

The name escaped the king and slammed into Dirtha's ears. She wailed. The shape of her began to come apart at the seams. Thalen, who had spent his life waiting for shots like this, put two more arrows into her without mercy.

Helena said the name aloud. "Imetka." Dirtha flinched at the sound of it. "What would your sisters say," Helena asked her, voice mild, "to see you like this?"

She loosed Inflict Wounds into the hag's chest. The spell tore through Dirtha — and Helena, channeling that much necromancy through herself, dropped to the floor with her own life flickering. She set the Five of Swords face-up on the stone before her as she fell. "This was over," she murmured, "before it even began."

The flesh of Dirtha's face crumbled to ash. Bone showed beneath.

Jorath sent magic missiles into the bare skull. Then he unrolled one of the scrolls from earlier — the one whose words began We who… — and read it aloud. A column of moonlight burst from the parchment and from his hands and lashed Dirtha twice. Not moons this time. Sand. Sand spraying from her, returning her grain by grain to the desert she had stolen from.

The hag sank into a heap of sand up to her neck. Her skull rolled in the drift, jaw working. She forced one last rattle of words out of it.

"THE TOWER. RUIN THAT WAS UNINVITED. THE HANGED MAN. THE DROWNED KING. EVERYTHING WAS TAKEN. JUDGMENT…"

The skull tipped. The voice softened.

"The empty throne… They weren't your fortunes… they were mine…"

The skull settled into the sand and did not move again.

Karumon stood quietly by the far wall, his work done. The king on the dais slumped. Both finally at rest. Anu peeked around the doorway, took in the scene, and gave the smallest of nods.

"Well," he said. "It had to go one way or the other."

The Aftermath

Aldric laid his hands on Helena and the warmth came back into her face.

Helena gathered Dirtha's bone deck off the sand and tucked it into her own. As the cards left the floor, the chamber chilled. Sand squelched underfoot, as if the desert had grown wet. Two figures stepped through the wall.

Granny IceTooth and Mother Malice did not so much as glance at the party. They walked across the chamber to the heap of sand where their sister lay. Mother Malice bent over the bones, opened a mouth that was nothing of any honest creature, and swallowed Dirtha whole. The sisters straightened. They vanished.

Aldric, with a paladin's particular care, gathered up the body of Ramkheret from where it had fallen and returned it to its sarcophagus.

Kouzlo found a book among the king's effects, its pages bound in copper, sealed with a wax scarab. The Alchemical Compendium.

Helena scooped up Anu, who allowed it with the resigned air of a cat who had been waiting for the right person to find him for a very long time.

Above them, the pyramid had begun to soften. Stone bled into sand. Walls slumped. The cavern that contained it shook gently as the structure itself returned to the desert that had buried it. The shack on the apex was already gone.

The waterfall, silent for so long, started up again with a roar.

Thalen produced a small wooden box from his belt and grinned. "Boat mode."

The folding boat snapped open. The party climbed aboard, the cat draped across Helena's shoulders, and rode the rising water up out of the cavern and into the long, slow daylight of the desert above.

The expedition was complete.