I stare at the painting of a dark and stormy sea on the wall.
Everything around me dulls, and the restless trembling is replaced by a comfortable buzz. This is the only thing that keeps me standing.
Now that I’m not cowering away from the world anymore, I can see it far more clearly. The shadows are empty. The deep darkness is nothing more than storm clouds obscuring the moon, and the darkness makes the world softer. There’s less everything all at once.
Except. When I place my cloak over a hanger on my door and pull a linen hoodie over my clothes, I am absolutely sure I see the cloak ripple. The arms reach up and toward me.
And I all but run back through the shadows to the living room, back to the game.
As your investigation brings you deeper into Yester Tower, you’ve narrowed your focus to Councilwoman Yester’s atelier, where she worked on all her inventions. More information about her various contacts might be found there.
The deeper you circle into the castle, the more you notice wards around this place that disobey council guidelines, to say the least. Trigger plates near her cabinets that are not merely warded with familiar defenses, but complemented by unreadable chalk markings and lore words. The door lights up with a soft crimson glow.
You find three more carvings—a boar, some kind of catlike creature on six legs, and a hound. All the carvings are crude, and they all seem magical. With how they’re placed throughout the tower, it’s almost as if they’re observing your every action. As if someone’s playing a game with you.
The air around the tower smells pungent and sweet, of magic and decay.
In a world where the council has worked hard to eradicate even the faintest trace of rogue magic, seeing it on the doorstep of one of the council’s finest is troubling. It’s hard to believe one of your own would betray you.
So when you reach the door you think must be the atelier, you steel yourself against what you may find inside. That is, if you manage to get inside. The floor in front of the door is covered with crimson markings that simmer with power. There is an icy cool air coming from the room itself. You keep your distance, at first. You all know from experience—and some, well, more unfortunate investigations—that a simple door or a simple ward might be an insurmountable challenge. Some locks, you’ve come to learn, are not destined to be picked. Some locks you can break your teeth on—and your keys on. Some wards can burrow beneath your skin and bite. You hope this isn’t one of those.
At the same time, you also know you are the council’s best. You have no option.
You have to try.
Eight
Liva
There’s a tension in the air. I wonder if anyone else can feel it. When Ever describes music boxes inside the councilwoman’s tower, I can’t help but imagine them here, like they were in all those stories, echoing in the distance.
“We should counterspell that ward,” Maddy suggests. After the panic attack, or whatever it was, she has thrown herself into the game completely. Or rather, she has thrown herself headfirst into her character, and I understand that. When she’s playing as Myrre, she doesn’t have to be afraid or broken. The game allows us to try on different people.
A sense of discomfort has fallen over the group. Something no one can shake. It was the same after Zac left, except I thought we were past that now.
I grit my teeth. “Unless it’s warded against sabotage. Remember that time in Kilspindle Fort?”
Next to me, Carter flinches. “Why do you have to bring that up?” Kilspindle Fort was one of our first quests together, a few weeks after we started our Rune and Lore club—then still known as the Gnomic Utterances Tabletop Society, after one of Ever’s favorite books and because they didn’t settle on a name for their system immediately.
In the quest, we were sent to the countryside to investigate the disappearance of two teen girls. We discovered the girls were part of a militant anti-magic group, part of an underground network that crawled its way through Gonfalon and its surrounding villages. The network hid their correspondence in a strongbox, half-buried underneath the roots of a tree. Carter spotted the strongbox first, but he never checked the weird collections of leaves and twigs around it. He simply tried to brush them away, and the next thing any of us knew, he was flying backwards, landing flat on his back. He barely survived.
I stare at him. “Because we’re trying to learn from our mistakes.”
“When have we ever?” he counters.
“There’s a first time for everything.”
“I can try to sneak in?” Maddy offers.
“Cor and I’ll investigate first.” On my other side, Finn grabs a piece of chocolate off a plate, though his hands are trembling. He’s still not meeting my eyes. “Lente is…not wrong.”
I’m very careful not to smile.
All our characters fall into their traditional roles. Corrin—that’s Carter—and Feather—Finn—are our prime explorers and magic users. Maddy, as Myrre, is our thief, the very best at sneaking around and not being noticed. She used to team up well with Zac, who played our assassin. And my character, Lente, is the reluctant healer, here to protect anyone from harm.
We’ve all found our way around the fireplace again—though I’ve shut its power off permanently, and we make do with lamps and candles for mood instead—and all we have in front of us are snacks and dice. After an afternoon and an evening of figuring out the various traps of the castle, it’s too dark now to try to unlock chests or solve puzzles. This last part is pure pen, paper, and dice role play. Outside of our circle of light, the world may as well have ceased to exist.
These have always
