We return to the Wide Sky Tavern sometime after the dinner rush and order what remains of the menu, eating silently as we wait for the time to tick by and the meeting to begin. Nyssa comes by several times over the course of the late evening to check in and we keep telling her we are waiting for someone. I have my suspicions who—I think we all do.
Slowly, patrons file out and the lighting gets lower and lower until Anthene locks up and begins cleaning.
When Nyssa pulls up a chair and sits at the table with us, we are all a little surprised. Why, I couldn’t tell you, but for some reason I expected our contact to be Anthene back from his mysterious travels with a new mission. I had dismissed the elven tavern owner as being too obvious, even if she's probably the only one who really makes sense.
“Nyssa…” Flynt says, slowly.
“I assume you all received a letter, then?” Her dark eyes survey us each carefully, her long hair falling in silky cascades over her shoulders.
We look at each other and carefully withdraw our letters from wherever we’d tucked them—inside a jacket pocket, bag, crumpled in a pouch, etc.
“What do you know about it?” Meg asks.
“I’m one of the agents for Z,” Nyssa replies with a soft sigh. “I have been for about a hundred years now, give or take a couple. Part of what that means is that I help identify potential new cohorts.”
“Cohorts?” Tyrus asks, looking between all of us.
“And you thought we might be a good fit?” Jonas sits back in the booth, folding his arms, a tentative wince across his features. His demeanor had slowly changed over the course of the day, that thoughtfulness becoming more introverted than I would previously have thought him capable of being. Once he’d gotten the whole joking about Flynt’s Da’s cold shoulder out of the way, he’d more or less grown quiet. I had noticed it, but his concern hadn’t fully registered. “I don’t know how I feel about this.”
“Why?” Nyssa raises an eyebrow. “This is what adventurers do. They strive to make a name for themselves, then they reap the rewards from that. You all have just been fast-tracked.”
“Is it because of us, or because we’re with him?” I nod my head over my shoulder to Flynt.
“It has nothing to do with Flynt,” Nyssa says. “If anything, it is in spite of Flynt. His father doesn’t love the idea of him being an adventurer, and I cannot say I do either.”
“Why not?” Jonas asks.
“That is a more personal conversation than I would like to have right now,” Flynt says in his lower, more formal register. “Nyssa, who or what is this Z?”
Nyssa stabs a finger toward him. “That is a very good question. And one that I cannot answer just yet.”
“Why not?” Meg asks. “You aren’t being especially helpful.”
“There is potential in each of you, and in you as a team. But you are far from proven and we’re not entirely sure, yet, of how close you should be to the rest of the organization. Call this your try-out period. We try you out, and vice versa. If it’s a good fit, excellent. If not, then we go our separate ways. You can haunt notice boards across Qeth, and we’ll continue our work behind the scenes.”
“What is that work?” Tyrus asks. “Or can you not tell us that either?” He glances at Jonas and pauses a moment. “Because we’re not sure how we feel working for a shadowy organization with shadowy goals.”
“Our primary mission is twofold. First, we are trying to locate and obtain various lost artifacts before they can fall into the wrong hands.”
“Whose hands are those?” Jonas’s voice remains soft and tentative, but his jaw is set forward and his eyes are serious if a little pained. “And how do we know that this Z’s hands are the right ones? Are we just supposed to trust you?”
“I’d really hope you would,” Nyssa says. “It’ll make selling this to you a lot easier.”
“Elves,” Tyrus scoffs, shaking his head. “Just because you’re ancient doesn’t mean you’re trustworthy. Standing beside your outcast kin makes you, personally, a little better in my esteem, but not by a lot.”
“If you trust me,” Flynt says with a sigh, “you can trust Nyssa.”
Silence settles at the table at that while Nyssa meets Tyrus’s gaze. The unease holds in the air for a long moment before she draws a slow breath and releases it just as gradually. Despite ourselves, I think we all follow suit, and I wonder if it’s magic or if it’s just her presence. Maybe a little of both.
“To answer your question, the wrong hands are certainly the Four Families. They have too much power as it is, and the last thing Qeth needs is for the Stormbringers or Terravins to get more of it. That’s precisely what these legendary artifacts do. Grant power. And they’re rarely wielded responsibly.”
“Particularly by the Families,” Meg mutters. “Okay, I can agree with you on that. What is the second goal?”
“We want to better understand what is happening to the magic in Qeth and if we can… get it back to where it used to be.”
“Oh, great.” Jonas buries his head in his arms on the table. Meg pats him on the back.
“That’s elvish superstition,” Tyrus says. “It’s not real. Magic is magic.”
“Is it? There are fewer and fewer capable adventurers every generation,” Nyssa replies. “Fewer and fewer are training at the magical academies. Those able to wield Essence at all are growing rather scarce. When I was your friend’s age,” and she raises a hand delicately toward me, “my academy had hundreds of students. Not all of them any good, mind you, but they could at least throw around a little energy. The citadel at Gerai had eighteen students enrolled this year. Flynt, how many did your class have?”
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“Twenty-two.”
“So, not very many. There is, undoubtedly, something happening to the magic in Qeth. The other cultures are just hesitant to hear it because the warning comes from the elves.”
“There’s good reason behind that lack of trust,” Tyrus says.
“Is there, though?” Nyssa raises an eyebrow again and cocks her head to one side. “I only hear about a lot of superstition driven by Stormbringer propaganda and Hearthstone fear mongering. And simply because the Terravin family has a complicated, to put it mildly, history with the rest of Qeth doesn’t mean that all elves are of the same ilk.”
She looks at me with that and my cheeks warm. It doesn’t feel right to be pulled into the complicated history as I am not and never have been part of it. Hell, I’ve been an elf for barely four days.
“I’m not from Qeth,” I say, shaking my head, “I don’t know about any of this.”
Meg sits back, chewing on the inside of her cheek as she inspects Nyssa closely. “If we agree to this, what will it look like? What kinds of things are you going to ask us to do?”
“We’ll start small,” Nyssa says. “Check ins on other members of the Network. Investigating some leads. Then we’ll ease into tracing the journey of some of these artifacts.”
“Dungeon diving?” Tyrus asks. His eyes light up at that, though he tries hard not to let that show too much as he looks around at us. “There can be some good loot in that. Keira. Think about what we just did, but on a bigger scale.”
“With fewer cultists, I hope.”
He shrugs. “Eh, probably not, if we’re being honest.”
Nyssa nods. “Potentially. There are a few different parties working toward similar goals. Various cults want to collect artifacts, some for rituals, others for worship. The Families, of course, want much the same. I saw the Stormbringer scion approach you the other day, Keira. There’s no doubt in my mind he’ll try again.”
“What should we do if he does?” Flynt asks.
“That’s for you to decide how you want to play it. I wouldn’t trust him.”
“Obviously,” Meg scoffs. “We could play him though.”
“That’s one option.”
We all fall quiet for a moment. It’s an uneasy silence, interrupted only by the soft patter of rain on the skylights in the vaulted ceiling. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns into sleet or frozen rain in not too long here, given how chilly it feels even inside and seated next to the furnace that is Flynt Stoutbrooke.
I’m the one to break the quiet, looking over to Nyssa. “What do you know about the Stone of Ylaura?”
She blinks. “What do you know about the Stone of Ylaura?”
“We encountered a couple of tapestries featuring it,” Flynt says, giving me the side eye.
“And a book that had a marker on an entry about it,” I add.
“What did this book say?” Nyssa’s voice is low and tentative. Her energy toward me has shifted considerably in a short amount of time, and it’s a little disconcerting.
“Not a lot. Just that it’s an ancient artifact of great power. That it’s believed to have been destroyed in the final battle of the Dragon Wars, after the Dragonslayer used it against Zel’Rosh.”
“It’s said that it was turned into the arrowhead that defeated the dragon,” Meg says to me. “No one believes it actually existed. Except, apparently, some crazy cultists. And your book.”
Nyssa nods. “If it does exist, it’s likely deep in Zel’Rosh’s remains.”
“Where are those?” I ask.
She frowns at me again, and I can see her trying to decide whether or not to believe my lack of knowledge. Nyssa looks at Meg, our resident Lore Master, and motions with a hand. Meg sighs.
“The story goes that when Zel’Rosh was fatally wounded, he went to ground the way any creature would in such a circumstance, retreating into the cave system below the Dragon’s Pass. The Hearthstones had the system buried so the dragon could never again emerge. It created quite a rift between the Families in the direct aftermath as no one could get access to it to confirm Zel’Rosh’s demise.”
“That doesn’t sound great,” I mutter. “Off-screen deaths without a body are highly suspect.”
“I’m not sure I get the reference, but I think I get your point,” Nyssa says. “And I agree. Though we can all likely be assured that Zel’Rosh is no more after all this time.”
Meg shakes her head. “I don’t know. Dragons can survive in hibernation mode for hundreds of years. He may just be biding his time. One of the ice dragon cultists we fought referred to The Undying One.”
“Just to quickly interrupt, sorry,” I say, raising a finger, “but what is it with all the ice creatures? Ice spiders, ice dragons, ice giants?”
Nyssa chuckles. “It is a bit of a theme, isn’t it? This particular mountain range tends to be quite cold year-round. The magic that settles here, that imbues many of the monsters and other creatures around this area, tends to reflect that. The mountains around Gerai are different, as are those to the north or east. You’ll find ice creatures at the peaks of any range, but they’re more concentrated and at lower elevations here.” She looks to Flynt. “When did you encounter a frost giant?”
“When we were goblin hunting,” he says.
“So, it’s true?” She cocks her head to one side. “They’ve come down from the peaks?”
“Seems that way.”
“I get that it’s significant, but what does that mean?” Meg asks.
“It means that there are, indeed, some powerful mechanisms at play.” Nyssa tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. Her ears are shorter than mine, much more like Flynt’s Da. She seems thoughtful. “And you said the cultist mentioned the Stone, specifically?”
Meg nods. “You think it’s linked?”
“Unclear. But if there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that there are rarely coincidences in this world. People have searched for the Stone of Ylaura for centuries, but not to any result worth mentioning. But if that search is now uncovering lost magics of any kind, that could be enough to entice the giants down. They’re Ancient Ones and fairly rare anymore.”
Flynt frowns. “Giants are naturally magical, aren’t they? Like dragons, they have their own unique type?”
Nyssa nods. “Very much like dragons. Some of the elven mages believe that it’s only because the giants continue to exist that magic remains in Qeth at all. If we destroyed them, too, then we may see the end of the world as we know it.”
“That’s a horrifying thought,” Jonas murmurs. “But I don’t know that I want to get involved. It sounds… important, but also way bigger than me. I just want to help people, earn a little bit of coin... I don't want to change the world.”
“We’d need you,” Tyrus says. “Can’t go fighting cultists for legendary artifacts without a healer. But he’s right. This is some big, heavy stuff to think about. I could use another drink.”
Nyssa stands. “I’ll bring some over. Talk amongst yourselves, let me know if you have any questions. No pressure to make a decision tonight.”
She retreats to the bar, the five of us sitting in the heavy silence she leaves in her path. Flynt draws a deep breath and lets it out slowly, closing his eyes. I understand that particular type of anxiety response—though weirdly, I’m not having it myself—and I clasp his forearm, giving it a quiet squeeze. His cheeks color slightly, but he doesn’t say anything. Jonas has dropped his head back into his arms on the table, unmoving while both Tyrus and Meg pat him comfortingly—Tyrus has his back while Meg his shoulder.
I don’t know how long we stay like this. Long enough for Nyssa to return with a pitcher of ale before retreating again.
Flynt moves to refill everyone’s mugs, which is enough to at least get Jonas to lift his head. Wordlessly, Flynt toasts his in toward the center of the table. Each of us hesitates, having a good sense of what we’re toasting toward, but, one by one, we each do the same. Jonas is last, and by far the most reluctant—but in the end, he’s with us.
We drink.
> [SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT: HAND OF Z]