Explore the Mountain Church 2

The tipper had only just rung off the stone when the woman in leather armor turned her head. The party, gathered in the corridor outside the iron door, had a heartbeat to decide what to do with the attention they had just earned.

Recap

Helena drew a card before they moved — the Sword of Pentacles. Neither she nor anyone else could yet say what it meant. She tucked it away.

Gryph dropped invisibility over himself, sand swirling once and then settling around the shape of someone who was no longer there. He slipped through the iron door, past the woman whose head had turned, and into the chamber beyond. The stag — Werrin's small white familiar, conjured from a candle outside the monastery — trotted in after him and laid itself down on the raised steps near a trap door in the floor. Gryph crouched at the central biomass and studied the spore cluster threaded through it. Highly concentrated. Movable, if one had the stomach for it. He did not.

His second step gave him away. Initiative was rolled.

The Library Fight

The white goat darted past the woman in leather and took an attack of opportunity on the way through. From deeper in the chamber a fresh spore blob peeled off the wall and oozed down the hallway toward the stag and toward the man in monk's robes, whose mouth was still spilling mycelium in a slow ropy plume.

The man came alive then — barreling for the door, swinging on the goat, dropping it dead before its hooves had touched stone twice. The torches that had bought the party so much room on the way in clattered loose across the flagstones. The woman in leather walked through the doorway after him, raised a shortbow with the unhurried care of a thing that did not have to breathe, and put an arrow into Werrin's ribs.

Gryph backed into the hallway and drummed a quick unsettling words across her, then a dissonant whispers that hooked into her ribcage and sent her fleeing deeper into the corridor — afraid, it seemed, of the fire on the floor. Werrin's blade caught her ankle as she went and laid her flat.

The monk in the chamber was still moving. Werrin stepped into a sightline and looked at him properly for the first time. The hood was thrown back. The robes were the same cut as the monks who had built this house. The movements — the small mirroring tilt of the head — were a copy of someone. Of someone else watching from elsewhere. Werrin spoke levitate into the air, and the husk drifted ten feet off the floor, kicking soundlessly at nothing. The stag, whatever leash had held it before, was no longer suggested to anyone.

Helena pressed forward to the doorway and called Invoke Duplicity. A small mirror-Helena strode into the torchlight at her side. She named a great chalice into being — the Ace of Cups — and sent the spiritual weapon spinning into the spore blob. It struck. The mycelium bruised.

Nu stepped just into the room and pulled a long line of fire from his fingertips — Aganazzar's Scorcher, sculpted around his allies, threaded through the levitating monk and the spore blob in a single arcane stroke. The blob cooked and burst, spraying a fine mist of poison across the chamber. The monk spun in midair like a top, robes alight. A second blob popped wetly off the wall in answer.

The husk, even burning, did not stop. He worked the rosary beads from his belt with one hand, looped them around the antlers of Werrin's stag as it charged in, and mounted it — improvised reins in one hand, fire trailing the hem of his robe. Gryph caught the stag with vicious mockery. Werrin Misty Stepped into the torchlight, hauled on his own spell, and lifted the levitating monk higher off the ground, away from any leverage. Helena, hand on Inflict Wounds, reached up and grasped the husk by his hand. "Perish." The spell bit through him. Mini-Helena, beside her, caught his hand as he went.

The monk crumbled.

Nu turned his next fire flare on the burning stag. Light flared from the empty sockets. Werrin, with his ear still tuned to the static behind every infected mind, heard the noise rise to a roar — and in the dying wash of the stag's consciousness, in the back of all the noise, a small clear voice:

FREE THE COLLECTION.

The stag detonated. Werrin caught the edge of the blast and held his footing.

Gryph pitched another unsettling whispers at the woman in leather and broke her morale a second time. She fled into the corridor. Gryph stepped fully into the chamber and, with the satisfaction of a man finally getting his moment, locked the door behind her.

Werrin scooped a torch off the floor and pitched it at the trap door in the hopes of holding back whatever came up next. The throw landed short of the lectern but square on the trap door itself, which began to burn.

Helena worked the chalice and a tolling of the dead through the second blob. Nu set his flare on the same target — a perfect strike, every pore of the thing lit at once — and the mushroom popped, splattering into a dispersing ooze around the room.

The Library

The mass was still settling when the party began to take inventory of where they actually were.

It had been a library. Most of the shelves had been overgrown but the bones of the room were intact. A lectern still held a small stack of religious texts. Nu peered down into the burning trap door and saw colors — yellow and green flashes, the wet sound of footsteps below.

Gryph sat with the books on the lectern. Jergul — the name his grandmother had given him, on the bare research he'd done before this trip. The Grim Reaper as accountant. The Lord of the End of Everything. The Final Scribe. This place had once been meticulously organized. A house where every death was logged.

Werrin, in another life, had worked in a library. He moved along the shelves with a librarian's eye for what should be there and what was not, and he pulled what he could find. Three things came together into a story.

The founding charter, first — the order had been instructed by larger leadership to build this house at this location. Specifically here.

Then plans, drawn carefully in monk's hand — a cage of six pylons centered on a mass. A prison of some kind, intended to be designed. Nu read over his shoulder and made a careful Arcana check; the pylons appeared to be activatable, but a specific mechanism was required to do it. Six symbols. He could make out fist, palm, and knife. He thought one of the other three was fire.

And then the journals — two voices, one house. The Day Monks and the Night Monks had split, somewhere in the order's history. The Night Monks had begun disappearing into the basement for long stretches. One Day Monk, curious, had followed and reported back: a sketch of a well, of a pipe backed up from below, of white flesh rising up through it. The Night Monk journals read differently — friendship, intimacy. "I went back down to talk to it. It spoke of my family which I miss so much from home. It is like it knows them. It knows everything about me and makes me feel like home when I talk to it."

The Gestalt

Nu reached for a book on another shelf and the mycelium on the wall moved. It puckered and pulled itself into the shape of a mouth around his hand and spoke, in clear Common.

What do you seek in the libraries? Knowledge?

The voice was in his head alone. Nu answered the same way. I am a seeker. A collector of knowledge.

I can share knowledge with you, it offered, if you wish.

Helena laid her own palm against the wall to be part of the conversation. She offered, as she so often did, a card.

The Magician. Manifestation of power. How, she asked, do you come to have such vast knowledge?

I am the Gestalt, the voice said. Memories and thoughts are my currency. Some I spend. Some gain interest. What do your cards tell you of me?

Helena asked what it sought. Freedom, it said. Freedom from the shackles in which I was born. I think we have things to trade.

Gryph put his hand on the wall and asked for his song back.

The Gestalt was happy to negotiate. It would return the song. It would offer a magical instrument as a sweetener. In exchange Gryph need only forget why he came to the Wildermarch in the first place.

Werrin moved first. It is trying to invade our minds. To learn how to free itself. Nu lit a bonfire at Gryph's feet. The two of them put hands on him and tried to pull him off the wall.

Gryph shrugged them off.

The song was — and Gryph knew this with a clarity he did not have words for — the thing at the bottom of him. Beneath the patter and the questions and the bodhran and the names he gave to strangers, the song was the dwarf himself. It was his hometown, his family, the room they had played music in, the bar he had practiced ten thousand times and could not now finish. He had not understood what it meant to have a hole there until he had spent a corridor with it open. He was not going to walk out of this monastery with that hole still in him.

He agreed. The Gestalt took its payment. Gryph stopped remembering why he had come to the Wildermarch in the first place. The Gestalt set into his palm a long carved set of bone pipes — the Pipes of Haunting — and somewhere behind his ribs the song slid back into place, every bar of it, the way a misplaced word does when the right memory rounds the corner. He started laughing as it landed.

Helena sent her duplicate down the ladder through the burning trap door and looked through her eyes. A giant biomass at the bottom of a chamber, encircled by six pylons. Tentacles lashing the pylons, turning each one a sickly green where they struck.

Then the floor of the library collapsed.

Gryph's Feather Fall took them — sand pouring up out of the broken stone to support them down, grain by grain, until their boots touched flagstone again.

The Pylon Chamber

They had landed in the prison from the blueprints. Six pylons, in a wide ring. A central biomass the size of a horse, white shot with purple — the same thing they had seen through the keyhole, grown. Pale tentacles already groping at the pylons, washing each one green where they touched.

Werrin opened the engagement. Piercing damage to the nearest pylon. The biomass hit back — a tentacle that caught him across the chest. He staggered.

Gryph hooked the biomass with Tasha's Hideous Laughter. The Gestalt resisted, then drove its full attention back into Gryph's mind to take an answer it had not been given. Gryph held. The dwarf's mental defenses manifested, in the way they always did under that kind of pressure, as a single loud drumbeat — a low, repetitive thump that left no room for anything else to be read.

Helena swung the chalice at a pylon and called another to her side, both blows bludgeoning, the pylon flickering green at the strike. The biomass rippled the stone underfoot. Nu and Gryph caught the wave wrong and were confused where they stood.

A tentacle lashed at Nu. It missed. Gryph shrugged off the confusion, Misty Stepped to a pylon, and held his torch up to it. Green.

Werrin took the biomass's full attention next — a critical strike that nearly put him through the floor. He was an orc, and orcs do not die easily; he held to one hit point with a stubbornness that became, then and there, a title he would carry. Honor Bound. The Misty Step took him to a fresh pylon. He dragged a dagger across it. Green.

The Gestalt tried Nu one more time. A whisper inside his head, gentle and reasonable. We can get out of this. They have us surrounded. Nu held. Then he broke — held the saving throw at the absolute last instant — walked to the nearest pylon, and clapped a Thunderclap across it.

Six pylons. Six green lights. The ring closed.

Every borrowed memory in the chamber came back to its owner at once. Gryph felt a low thrum through the soles of his boots — inspiration, the bones of a new composition already arranging themselves in his head. The biomass shuddered. Its head popped off and its body ebbed back into the floor, receding into the gaping hole to the Underdark from which it had come up.

What was left behind in its place was a small grove of bodies — ten or fifteen of them, monks and adventurers, perfectly preserved in the cocoon where the head had been.

What the Collection Left Behind

Two small mushrooms sat on the floor where the biomass had receded — memory mushrooms, Gryph recognized at once, one for each of the two cultures whose dead lay before them. He pocketed both.

The bodies divided into pirates and monks. Helena bent to a pirate body and lifted a worn case from his belt — a Deck of Illusions, the cards smelling faintly of salt. Nu took a robe from one of the monks — fine cloak fabric, the patches moving slightly under the right light. A Robe of Useful Items. He tried it twice on the spot, with the gleeful curiosity of a wizard with a new tool; the first pull produced a small handful of gemstones, the second a great mastiff that licked his face and waited politely to be told what to do.

Werrin knelt beside a half-orc sailor whose arms were sleeved in tattoos, and recognized the artwork from his old reading — Thay. The Red Wizards. He traced one of the lines with a finger; the ink liquefied beneath his touch and slid up his own arm, settling into a shape he chose. A Thayan Spell Tattoo, loaded with Silence.

Back to Camp

The party climbed out of the broken floor and the burning trap door and walked back through the corridor of star-pierced stone and out into the sun.

Gryph took the monk mushroom on the way down. The memories came in a flood — one of the Order's brothers, called Brother Keef. The early days of the monastery. Jergul's blessing. The founding. And then the discovery of the well in the basement, and the small scout-bulbs of mushroom that had crept up into monk cells in the night and led them, one at a time, down into the dark. The split in the order. Jergul's quiet disapproval. The slow rot. Brother Keef, in the last of him, taught Gryph a small piece of his order's craft — Touch of Death, the trick of pulling vitality from a creature as it died at his feet.

Helena took the pirate mushroom. A woman named Septavia, exiled from Brakam — the coastal nation across the strait. Settlers, in their way. Looking for a place to put down. Finding instead a monastery of monks willing to barter for what they carried. The loot the party had just gathered had been Septavia's, once. Septavia taught Helena a small piece of her craft in return — Fancy Footwork, the knack of striking and slipping a step away before reprisal landed.

Each of them carried, after that, a small part of someone whose body they had left behind in the prison.

The camp gates were open when they came down out of the hills. The wizards had set out a kettle. Someone called their names as they came in.