Riloth the19th the 339th-344th

The demon grew more angry and frustrated with each reset. Every morning I summoned Tilavo, and every morning he sent the demon Back to Fauell. His taunts became more vile and grotesque, and each assault grew different. Some todays he would start his attack by throwing burning trees over the walls, others he set the tent city on fire directly. Those were the darkest, for few refugees survived when that occurred. All the while, he taunted me. He was afraid of Tilavo, but he could not outrun the dragon in human form.

After six days of assaults, the demon took the hint and stopped returning. That didn’t stop him from setting the forest on fire, though. When he finally stopped showing up in person, we were woken around five in the morning to the Landing soldiers' alarms that a fire was on its way. The warning always came with enough notice for a firebreak to be dug, protecting the tent city, but it made leaving the town impossible until late in the night when the ground had cooled sufficiently for us to walk on.

The pack rats, which had gone dormant at the demon's presence, returned to their campaign of chaos once he stopped showing up, but in the chaos of the fire fighting efforts, they were easy to overlook.

Riloth the 19th the 345th

On the second demon free today, Dagmar and I found ourselves hiding in an alley discussing our plans. The fire had all hands on deck, and sitting at ease in plain sight drew unwanted looks of derision.

I suppose fame is fleeting.

“So, what do you think we should do?” Dagmar asked as we ate some pilfered loafs of bread for breakfast.

Our leisurely mornings of breakfast buffets had been short-lived

“Why are you asking me?”

“Don’t give me that. I know you got some sort of plan.”

I did, but I was a little too used to our friendly-but-hostile dynamic.

“Fair point. I do. I’ve been thinking—” Dagmar let out a laugh at that.

“I’ve been thinking,” I started over, glaring at her, “about what you said. We can’t search for the Primordial until the demon grows bored with these fires, but we can still search for more means to power. Magic is not as tightly controlled as the Tower wants others to believe. There is a good chance we can find something of use in this town. Whether it's another wand, spellbook, or magic item, we can probably find something to be of use. Simon doesn’t think the fires warrant summoning Tilavo, so we have until nine to explore without fear of magical interrogation. And if I get caught, I can just blow myself up.”

And so we embarked on a life of crime. We began our search in the wealthy district, for obvious reasons. If this were a story, we likely would have found some magic artifact in an unassuming shop, but a quick walkthrough of all the shops with Willsight active put that notion to rest.

Aside from some very nice bottles of wine, and other luxuries, most of the manor’s turned up little of value. The pattern we fell into involved walking in the front door and Mind Spiking anyone who had a problem with that. Thankfully, most of the staff had been sent out to help assist in the construction of the firebreak, leaving only the homeowners to put up a fuss. Many of those wealthy individuals were quite adept swordsmen—or axwoman in one notable example. The ax of which was enchanted to cut deeper and come free without effort. No matter their skill with a blade, Mind Spike was the perfect spell for the startled and confused mind. I’d found that the more prepared a combatant was, the less the spell seemed to affect them. The same individual would fall with a single casting when I got the jump on them, while it took two in the instance where they ambushed us from behind a hidden bookshelf on our first home invasion.

We found in total two enchanted daggers with general sharpness spells, the ax, a ring of jumping, a ring of mind shielding—something I very much wanted if I had to deal with Tilavo once more—some boots that protected the wearer from the elements, and lastly, a jug that poured out mayonnaise. Weird, right? It also produced other liquids, but it was not immediately useful.

Ren’s house was a different matter. We tackled hers after collecting the ax to give Dagmar a suitable weapon.

“I’ve been meaning to ask, why do dwarves carry axs when you guys live underground? Shouldn’t you wield hammers and picks into battle?”

Dagmar spit onto the ground in irritation at my question, narrowly missing the unconscious ax woman.

“That’s just a silly stereotype born out of ignorance. You’ve seen two Hardune armories now, what do you remember from them?”

I thought back to the rows of weapons, and realized I had only seen a handful of axes, most of the weapons being swords and war picks with the occasional war hammer and maul.

“Huh, you’re right. Is it true you guys hate the elves?” I asked, hoping to clear up another false assumption.

“Aye, that one's true. The dandies don’t do anything but sit in their forests making art while their efforts could be better used elsewhere,“ she said art in much the same derisive way Tilavo had said ‘friend’ while referring to Dagmar. “Art is the antithesis of duty, and no dwarf would be caught dead devoting their life to such a pursuit.”

“Dwarves don’t have art?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

“Not in how you are thinking. We have some who create art in their spare time, using their skills to pass the time making novelties, but elven society as a whole has been grown around the pursuit of beauty, while dwarven society has been built around a pursuit of function. Our art is forging a blade, building a grand tunnel that holds up beneath the weight of the ocean and cutting a gem perfectly to prevent Will leakage. Those are our arts. What is more beautiful than using one's skills in the pursuit of perfect function?”

“What about Trish? You know she's a half elf, and you two seemed to get along well.”

“I’ll look past her for that small accident of her birth. She seems to have taken after her human half and pursued a life of worth. I’ll hand it to you humans, some of you get the idea of duty like your friend Daulf, and loyalty like Trish. I don't care for Roland."

"Me either," I agreed.

We broke it to Ren's from the back. In experimenting with my new teleportationactive, spell—which I'd creatively named Teleport—I found that I could teleport up to five hundred feet, swap places with someone, and even bring someone along. We got into Ren's using this last method. The reset before I'd broken in late at night, Wind Jumping through a second story window and running upstairs to her study before teleporting back to the street. The day of the actual break in, I Teleported us straight into her study.

The moment we appeared, we began to ransack the library. With Willsight active we pulled all the books from the shelves, pulled out drawers and rummaged through the closet. Dagmar threw anything potentially magical onto the floor while I flipped through books for the tell-tale sign of spellforms, occasionally glancing at the growing pile in the center of the room. Nothing appeared magical, but some books caught my eye for later study.

Two minutes into the destruction the door flew open with a burst of magic revealing the mess.

Ren walked in with her sword pointed at us.

"Get out of my house!"

She didn't give us the opportunity to comply before launching a spike or ice at my chest. I deflected the spell in the bookshelf behind me with Buckler and a flick of the wrist. I’d gotten the hang of using the cantrip to redirected attacks instead of blocking them.

Dagmar charged at the veteran adventurer as I began to cast Mind Spike. She met Dagmar's charge with her ensouled blade, which shared the same two-tone sunset aura of its bearer. The two women exchanged a flurry of blows, Dagmar moving to position Ren closer to the window.

I completed my Mind Spike and sent it through my bridge, but before the spell could take effect, I felt the familiar barrier arise between me and the magic I'd just called.

"Counter Spell?" I screamed in frustration.

What in Tin Lan's name does that have to do with entertainment?

As if reading my mind, Ren smiled and said, "Mischief."

I followed the stymied Mind Spike with a quick Gust. The spell took her by surprise and threw her back towards the window before she recovered. She brought her hand forwards in a familiar gesture, but we'd expected that. We closed and shielded our eyes the instant before, a brilliant myriad of colors filled the room. Heedless of her safety, Dagmar charged Ren blindly and tackled her through the window with a crash and subsequent clinking of breaking glass.

With Ren dealt with, if possibly only momentarily, I ran through the next rooms of the house. Her bedroom had some small amount of magical jewelry, but it was primarily illusion magic for disguising or enhancing one's appearance. She had a spell scroll, an object I'd only heard of but never seen, but whatever it did was far behind my current capabilities.

I was occupied turning over her dresser drawers when I heard the repeated tapping of wood on wood.

The door burst open once more, and a blood covered Ren stood with a sword in one hand and Dagmar's head in the other.

She threw the head on the floor and said, "I warned you."

I cast Shield as soon as I saw her move, but the spell she cast had no effect for my barrier to impede. A luminescent pattern appeared in the air, and drew my eyes to it. It was so beautiful. If given the chance, I would stare at it for hours, writing pages about its—

Flood, sorry, it's the harpy all over again. She cast some sort of hypnosis spell which I will not describe further unless I get lost in it.

While I studied the... light, she ran up and stabbed me repeatedly in the chest. At the first pierce I broke free of the spell, but it was too late.

Riloth the 19th the 346th

"I think we can both agree that could have gone better," I said on our way to our new hideout. We'd discovered an abandoned house in our search and begun to meet there for planning or resting while the rest of the town fought for their lives. We'd long since gotten over any lingering guilt over that.

"Aye, what did you find?"

"Before she busted into the room and threw your severed head at my feet?"

"Oh, I thought she had style. You surround yourself with interesting women, Tal."

"Moving past that, I found nothing useful. Illusion magic mostly. Her sword is magic but ensouled, so that's of no use. There was a spell scroll, but I couldn't make any sense of it, which means it was at least tier five. I expect I'd get some sense from a tier four spell by now."

"What does that leave us with? The hotel?" she asked.

"The hotel," I said with a nod.

The hotel was difficult and had been last for a reason. While the rest of the town sent all hands to aid in fighting the fires, the Dragon's Den Hotel guests sent only some of their servants and none of their guards. That meant the full contingent of the Dabian house guard along with the Dabian family occupied the building. It would take more than a few Mind Spikes to get in.

We'd tried a frontal assault just to see how it would go, but the guard captain and his lieutenant were each a match for Dagmar and the rest outclassed me. My magic went a long way to even the odds, but the commotion drew the attention of the Parlor's security, and they were very good. We fled and hid out the rest of that reset.

After that, we'd moved on to the softer targets that were the wealthy houses around the town perimeter. With all those options exhausted, we came back to the hotel.

To help in our attempt, I introduced Dagmar to my secret weapon: urchin children. Rail and Gil were easy to find first thing in the morning before the full chaos of the fire broke out. I'd discovered the alley they slept in a long time ago, but had never been awake early enough to make use of the information. They were more interested in talking to an actual dwarf than the basket of food I'd stolen from the kitchen—though they took it without hesitation.

"We need you to stand on a rooftop for a few hours or so, and keep track of what happens when the commotion breaks out. Particularly, look for any boxes or packages people seem protective of," I explained to the children as they devoured a frosted ring pastry.

We led them to the building opposite the Dragon's Den, the same roof I'd tasked Gil to watch nearly a year prior—though I had long since lost my sense of time. I'd tried keeping track of when I'd met Dagmar, but I found she had tried as well, and our respective counts were off by twenty.

Once settled, Rail asked, with a chocolate-covered mouth full of dough, "How will we know what the commotion is?"

"It will be very obvious," I assured them. "Do you want to see some magic?"

The children's eyes lit up with interest, though their bodies betrayed a wariness typical to children of their lot.

I put my hand on Dagmar's shoulder and Teleported us into the hotel. From the roof we had a clear view into a room on the fourth floor that had left their curtains drawn. The rest were closed to help keep out the smokey haze that had filled the town.

We'd stolen Dagmar an ax before embarking on this break in, but we hoped to not need it, and appeared in the room ready for battle. We found the large sleeping room to be vacant and filled with trunks and locked chests. Quietly, we searched through the hoarded goods. The trunks locked with padlocks were opened with a quick Conjuring away of the locks. For the chests I tried Teleporting with only the chest, leaving the contents behind, but that didn’t work as I could not differentiate between contents and container without looking inside. We were unmolested for the half hour of our search, so we resolved to bring Trish with us tomorrow to open the more secure containers. The trunks mainly contained valuables of monetary but not magical value: fine linens, silver-worked dining ware, decorations, and family portraits. The few magical trinkets were the kind common to wealthy households, though staggeringly rare everywhere else. Globes of illumination, glasses enchanted for cold and heat, and other useful yet financially impractical items.

“Someone, it seems, had a suspiciously large amount of time to pack and prepare before their city was attacked by a dragon and its cult.” I mused, holding up a bronzed pair of an infant's first booties. “We should be on guard, Barion may be involved in all this cult nonsense.”

Outside the locked chests, nothing of use was found, so we moved on to the next room. The fourth floor had six rooms and was occupied by the house guard. From our prior raid, we knew all the guards to be either on duty elsewhere or drinking in the bar. While casing the establishment, I’d seen the two highest ranking guards equipped with magical swords and a magical shield. In our prior failed raid, we tested them out—or more accurately allowed them to use them on ourselves—and found them to not be of any use against the golems.

The second and third floors were occupied by servants and were likely not worth searching, but we planned to come back the following day to access Barion's personal quarters after gathering our intelligence. The top floor was reserved for the Barion family. Instead of six rooms, it was all one ‘suite’ with common areas and three separate sleeping quarters. The suite was accessible via a private stairway that went straight up from the lobby on the ground floor, and via a door on the rooftop garden.

The second floor housed the house staff, crammed four to a room furnished for two. The third held the staff that had no purpose in their current predicament, but had fled with them nonetheless. Stable boys, gardeners, tailors, and more crammed into the third floor wherever they could fit, or so I'd heard them grumble the times I struck up a conversation with them. These made the bulk of the workers Barion sent to assist with the firebreak, and they were very open to complaining about their employer who'd sent them to toil in the heat when offered a cool drink.

There was no plan to sort through any of that. Barion seemed as likely to give these servants powerful artifacts as he was likely to stand up to the dragon cult he'd 'fled.'

After clearing the fourth floor, I went to the curtains of each room, and set them on fire with a quick drawing upon the Font of Fire. We watched the flames take hold of the room, and once we were satisfied that it would spread without further aid, I Teleported us to the alley behind the hotel.

Once safe outside, I took another potion of clarity. I had about half my Will left after the Teleportation. We waited until we heard the raised alarm before running in. The servants poured out past us fleeing the fire as we ran in, through the kitchen and a hallway that led to the cellar, dining room, and bar. We ran down it to the office.

We chose the office first and found the host scrambling to unlock a safe hidden behind a tapestry on the rear wall. We waited silently as he did, and once the safe was opened. I knocked him unconscious with Mind Spike. Inside the safe sat sacks of coins—mostly gold—a few gold bars, bundles of paper, and a ledger. I shoved the paper into my satchel for later perusal and assisted Dagmar in the destruction of the room.

I started with the bookshelf, opening each book just long enough to check for the tell-tale Will signature of a spellform before throwing it down. Dagmar dug through cabinets, spreading the contents out across the floor in a well rehearsed coordination. Nothing of magical worth was found, but the bookshelf did reveal a secret. Behind one book lay a small circle, invisible to the naked eye, but a pale green in my magically enhanced vision. I touched it tentatively, and activated it as if it were a magic item.

The bookshelf swung inwards smoothly and silently. The commotion outside was growing, and we could hear the building falling apart around us. I summoned a small ball of light in my hand and gave the tunnel a cursory glance, sufficient for a later Teleport, and ran towards the woman I'd knocked out.

"Run out the front," I told Dagmar before disappearing.

I Teleported the unconscious woman and myself to the rooftop where Gil and Rail watched with rapt attention. Forming the construct for Teleport in my mind, I watched the entrance to the hotel. As soon as Dagmar came into view, I released the spell, and the dwarf appeared beside me, still attempting to run despite appearing a foot in the air. Teleport took nearly five seconds to cast, by far the longest sorcerous casting I had, but the power and versatility of the spell made it worth the investment in time, even in combat.

The Dragon's Den Hotel went up in flames as we watched. The servants, guards, and staff all staring on in helpless horror as the building burned. Crews were already at work dousing the neighboring buildings with water, and horses were being gathered to tear the surrounding buildings down should the fire spread. I thought I saw Ian amongst them.

"What did you see?" I asked my pair of helpers.

"You flooding burned the building down!" Rail shouted while Gil continued to stare in awe.

"Don't swear," I admonished the girl. "What did you see?"

"Sorry sir," she said, looking away. "We saw the guards running out with chests, some of which looked very heavy. There was also a mage!"

At the mention of the mage, her face grew animated, and she looked back at me.

"He stood near a window and sent a magical disk full of stuff down to the ground."

"Stuff?"

"Yeah! Books, boxes, a cat. He loaded his magic disk and sent it out the window, where it fell safely to the ground. After that, he sent down two women and a man, I think they were his family."

I thanked the pair for their work and sent them away with a few silver each. Anymore would have greatly increased the risk of some other beggar taking them by force.

Once they'd gone, we relocated to our abandoned hideout and looked through the pilfered documents.

"Ha!" Dagmar exclaimed when I'd summarized the lot of it. "I knew he was racist!"

"You were probably right," I conceded.

Dagmar had been convinced the host had been racially motivated in denying her service. I'd argued that it had more to do with her appearance, but it seemed she was right.

Among the regular ledgers and receipts of a hotel, was a special ledger written in a simple substitution cipher that was easy to decrypt. The ledger recorded a long series of transactions dating back fifteen years. Each transaction listed a date, purchaser or supplier, the amount of money changed hands, and the race, age, and physical description of the "product."

The hotel has a side business in facilitating the trafficking of non-humans. The list was not exclusive to the races of men though. They had magical beasts as well. Most of those it seemed were sold to the arena in Orinqth.

"This is horrible," I told Dagmar after I'd gotten the general sense of the contents.

"Aye."

"Do you think Tilavo is complacent in this? I'm not the biggest fan of the dr—man, but I think he would take exception to forced imprisonment from what we know of him."

"I agree," Dagmar answered. "But I don't think the proprietor's awareness of his town is as omniscient as we feared."

"This is something we should sort out before ending the resets," I commented as I decoded the ledger. “But we have more pressing issu—”

My voice trailed off mid-sentence as I wrote out the last line.

Riloth 11th 720AF | Jakos’ Gang | (17 gold) | Male giantling (?), age unknown, covered in black tattoos. Very dangerous, keep sedated at all times.

“We need to go back now.”