(Feb 16)
One Last Story
Underground Temple
Autumn 74
After many dead ends and painful mistakes, and a bath where Aureya accidentally blesses her bathwater (how’s that for a new business venture), they take a suggestion from their dwarf friend Fayne and find out they’re just supposed to sneak.
At the end, they find themselves in a mortuary, with tombs and sarcophagi everywhere and beautifully-carved murals of the story of Shepherd’s End. The puddings and the people who died are all depicted, including some people who didn’t die or go missing in this world, such as Seyfried, Yev, and Gwin. The centermost sarcophagi depicts Brunnhilde, goddess of Strength, Breaker of Walls, and encourages looting the dead. Aureya realizes the Shepherd’s End pictures and the rest of the relief carvings are newer than the original architecture.
Aureya and Ixtalan open Brunnhilde’s sarcophagus, revealing a number of items inside (a greathammer, a spear, a variety of potions, a gauntlet) and Peach realizes these were Salinger’s items. Aureya’s mind bends momentarily as she tries to reconcile her memories of finding Salouis’ spear and what Peach told her of Salinger finding it. When Fayne takes Brunnhilde’s hammer, a golden flare pulses out and their memories of Salinger slowly start to return, and Peach finally calls him her boyfriend.
As they exit the temple into the teeth of a howling blizzard, a Post& Parcel messenger finds them and delivers a message to Peach that they’ve been holding for 900 years. It’s from Salinger.
He says, when he disappeared, he fell through time and landed 1019 years ago. There, he lived through the founding of Lux, fought battles they’d learned about at the Teachers’, and warned of the disasters to come and hopefully helped prevent the worst of them. He grants the hammer to Kibeth, the spear to Ixtalan, the gauntlet to Esmund, the potions and ring to Aureya and Ava, the driftglobe to Peach, and tells Kaisi to find Xalati and give her the greatsword. He survived with a group of dwarves and established the settlement of Alinge’s Pass, then made his way to where Shepherd’s End would be and built statues to warn them of the coming dangers, which time wore down into the stones that they would later call the Fighting Stones.
He says he’s decided to go find the Queen of Lux to find answers, and hopes they remember who they are, where they came from, who they lost and who they saved.
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