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Leng, Fabled Plateau of Converging Dimensions

Chapter 25: The Sunken Spiral Textbook

Notes:

possibly the wankiest chapter of the whole fic. there is a loredump-loving bitch within each and every Nasuverse fan

Chapter Text

Caster/Helena Blavatsky

The room grew uncomfortably cold the moment Abby had fallen still. She looked like a large doll now with her unmoving face and white ruffled dress, just another piece of the gothic eccentricity that Dr. Carter piled in his study. Her chest just barely rose and fell with her breathing.

Dr. Carter noticed Helena’s distraction. “She’s completely fine,” he assured. “She’s a very capable girl, more capable than I am, I suspect. She never ceases to surprise me and I’m sure she’ll recover your missing companion admirably.”

“Oh! Yes, I’m sure as well,” Helena said. “I just...I still feel bad about sending her off alone into who knows what...” She toyed with the edge of a worn book. “There’s a part of me that thinks she wouldn’t have to undertake this trip at all if I had been a better help.”

“Abigail sometimes chafes at authority. It’s no doubt an effect of her age, or her more unique circumstances.” Dr. Carter gazed with distant fondness at Abby’s prone form. “I’m sure it’s obvious to you, Madame Blavatsky, that I have little experience with children. I didn’t have so much as a little sister or niece, and certainly not a daughter. But even if I had, it would be utterly useless for understanding the soul of our Abigail. She is both a girl, and a goddess. She will always be twelve, and at the same time she is countless eons old. Who could give advice about rearing a child like that?”

“I can think of one person,” Helena murmured, thinking of Ritsuka’s natural affinity for the strange ‘children’ of Chaldea—Jack, Nursery Rhyme, the little false Jeanne.

“What a complicated age to be stuck at, too,” Carter said, crossing his arms, and Iseidako, a father himself, nodded sagely. “Sometimes I wonder if she has feelings she keeps from me—if she’s frustrated she will never grow older. It must be disheartening, in a way, to be on the edge of her teens but never quite tip over into them, to feel that she wants to come into her own but forever be under her uncle’s thumb. If she asked to be treated as an adult I’d never be able to give that to her. Because even with all the knowledge in the universe within her reach, she’ll never get wiser. I ’d never stop worrying about her...” He sighed and stopped the pretense of looking deeply into his bookshelf. “Come to think of it, who is this Servant friend she’s made, that she would abandon all of us to search for them? Has she made a friend her own age? Is it someone from her own era, or perhaps,” he said hopefully, “some great author or sage I’ve waxed poetic about before? I know there’s a lot to catch up on when it comes to your Chaldea, and you certainly can’t fill me in on everything at once, but I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned your other traveling companion.”
Helena cast a forlorn farewell glance to the book she had been perusing. Dr. Carter’s mystical library was expertly curated, and she had been looking forward to digging through its secrets; but she was surely about to get kicked out of the Dreamlands faster than she could say ‘Ascended Masters of the Sixth Initiation’.

“It’s the nice Gilles de Rais,” Astolfo chirped.

Carter nearly stumbled back into a shelf. “The black-magic-practicing French nobleman Gilles de Rais?!”

Helena cringed. “Well—yes, but—“

“Why, that’s wonderful! He’ll be a great help. I’m sure such a legendary black magician had dealings with Nyarlathotep of his own in his day, and his French and Latin will certainly be at least a little better than mine!”

Helena gazed wide-eyed at Astolfo, whose strange mad cheerfulness didn’t reflect her incredulity.

“You’re not concerned at all, Dr. Carter? Gilles de Rais is of course famous for...you know, the child murder,” Helena managed, though she hardly wanted to remind him.

“Madame Blavatsky, I appreciate your concern, but do you really think a human mage of any caliber could overcome Abigail?”

“I...guess you’re right,” Helena said, feeling still confused, but quite relieved.

“And besides, Duke Astolfo did say he was ‘nice’. And I think he’s an excellent judge of character.”

Helena shook her head. No matter what tradition or alternate world they hail from, I guess mages are always a stranger to common morality.

The two of them settled into companionable silence. The study was still, besides the occasional ambling of cats and the hands which turned pages. Helena found that this little library was very much to her taste.

In fact, she was absolutely delighted to be in it legitimately. She had awoken before the sun this morning, and had decided to go for a quiet walk among the arabesques and colonnades, and of course had stumbled upon the study as if it was fate. Curiosity had always been one of her greatest weaknesses, so she’d sworn to herself she’d poke around only the things with the weakest wards against tampering with them before she’d startled herself almost half to death by noticing Carter, who had apparently fallen asleep at his desk sometime the night before.

He had woken up, and she had been bracing herself for whatever repercussions might result from her damned curiosity, but as it turned out he was mostly just glad to see her—“I must have nodded off while communing with companions from other spheres. I’ve been looking for every possible resource to assist Abby, after all.”

So Helena, offering her services like the helpful teacher of the magical world she always was, had been given an impromptu tour of Carter’s collection, and had ended up up to her elbows in new texts before breakfast. The exact circumstances were a little hairy of course, but she was endlessly grateful to be able to explore a magical library in another world right on the heels of returning from a sinister abyss that had opened up under Chaldea. Now she was trying to memorize as much of what she read as she could, hoping that even after she and her companions succeeded in rescuing Master from the evil influence that she would never forget the oblique suppositions and half-hinted rituals that came from the pens of the Comte d’Erlette, of Barzok the Wise, of the long-lost mages of ancient Hyperborea.

“I do have to ask, though I’m sure I’ll meet him when Abigail returns. What kind of person is the famed Gilles de Rais?” Carter asked.

“Well…” Helena hedged. But Carter had the shyly sparkling eyes of a nerdy schoolboy, and she couldn’t deny a curiosity like that. “Our Gilles might be disappointing. As a Heroic Spirit, like the rest of us, he’s been split into different aspects. And we don’t have the one who’s best at black magic.”

“Different aspects, you say?” He steepled his long fingers. “How fascinating! It seems you and your companions truly are a great deal more complicated than pedestrian ghosts.”

“Absolutely! We aren’t ghosts at all—“ she suppressed her need to go on a tangent about the utter naivete and brazen foolishness of some 19th-century English spiritualists she could name, and their belief in such a childish concept as ghosts — “but manifestations of idealized versions of heroes, which have been forced into certain containers for convenience. And since we are all downloaded from a central source, it’s possible for multiple copies or altered versions of the same Heroic Spirit to exist at once! The Baron is one of those. We have the aspect which emphasizes his life before he became the person you likely think of, Dr. Carter. He’s hardly a master of dark magic.”

“And I suppose there’s no way to ‘down-load’ the sorcerer who would be most useful to our purposes.” Carter looked a little crestfallen.

“No, without Master and Mash, we…Hang on. There is—no, that would be awful.” Helena ran her hand through her hair, dislodging one of her ribbons. “Even as he is now, the Baron does have his grimoire! He just can’t use it. In fact, if he were to open his spellbook, that aspect would flood him, and we wouldn’t be able to change him back…and I couldn’t do that to him.”

“What if we were to open it?”

“I have no idea.” Helena pulled out the other ribbon and pulled her hair into a high ponytail. “Though the adventurous academic in me wants to find out…”

“As do I.”

Their eyes met for a second too long over the stacks of tomes.

“No, it would be too cruel to risk his sanity after he had just returned back from who-knows-where,” Helena said, opening another book with no intention of reading it.

“Yes, it sounds as if it would be akin to violating his very personhood, altering something not unlike his soul.”

“And well…if we’re being honest, there’s no complete guarantee Abby will be able to retrieve him, and it’s possible he may have already returned to the Throne.”

“And neither is there a guarantee the book will be at all useful or indeed novel. It might be little more than a bastardized mistranslation of Necronomicon fragments, forced into some kind of elemental or Christian framework that renders its spells rather ineffective. There’s no reason to believe it would be a useful piece to hold if we were to face a Mask of Nyarlathotep.”

They each nodded in academic self-satisfaction and turned back to their stacks.

From the other side of the little study, Iseidako spoke for the first time since they had set themselves to studying. “…You’re gonna try it, aren’t you?”

Neither of them could wholly deny it.


“Your mid-afternoon refreshment, Madame Blavatsky.” Carter’s pale and bony hand slid a delicate china teacup into the edge of Helena’s vision, barely nudging the edge of the ancient tome she had pulled down from a high shelf. It was a transcription of a record from the great Library of Yith, and while she had initially thought it would have something to do with the subject of their research, she had quickly found herself to be mistaken. Nevertheless, she’d been so engrossed in it she’d kept reading, hoping to store as much of it in her supernaturally-enhanced memory as possible. Carter, with his tea, made her guiltily tear her attention away at last.

“Why thank you, Dr. Carter.” Helena wrapped her silken robe closer around her slim frame and hopped up on the edge of the desk to sit and drink the tea. It was spiced and mixed with milk like the chai of her beloved India, but there was an undertone of some heady and fragrant fruit she did not think existed on Earth. “Did you brew this yourself?”

“Indeed I did.”

“Tea from the ruler of Ilek-Vad, huh…what an honor!”

Carter laughed self-consciously for a second before maneuvering around the study to the less useful members of their scholarly party. Astolfo and Iseidako had sprawled out in a sunbeam among the omnipresent cats, reading from wide-leaved books that mostly seemed to be comprised of symbols and pictures. He deposited their teacups next to them carefully, as if overly aware of his own potential for clumsiness.

Randolph Carter had many silent servants, and was every inch a Dreamland king, but it was easy to forget that while spending time with him. He was as whimsically out of place in this phantasy of a tropical land as his stolidly New England study was in this elegant palace, and he had no pretensions to grandeur he did not earn. If anything, he was maybe a little humbler than he deserved. Helena liked that about him. Not that he needed to prove himself in her estimation at this point. After several hours of exploring the academic world alongside him, she was starting to come to a greater appreciation and understanding of his strengths, and how his centuries upon centuries of experience had cultivated him into more than he seemed. He chatted easily about some of his past lives which he had, over the long years, come to remember, and some of the future ones that he had learned had the potential to come to pass. He had gained access to the ancestral memories of his DNA, and had learned much of the sins and accomplishments of his forefathers.

Always he had tangled with Nyarlathotep. “I imagine he is a fated enemy of mine, if you believe in such things,” he said with a sigh, picking up the conversation’s thread where they had left it. “Or, if you don’t, perhaps it’s that he is the inevitable obstacle of all who tread in forbidden realms. Many inexperienced dreamers and foolhardy occultists indeed have been pulled into his service, and made to exist as only instruments of his inexorable will.”

Helena’s brow twitched, thinking that though Carter wasn’t aware of it, he was referring to her Master among those hapless explorers. “And what is his will, anyway? What is the concept at his core?” If they knew such a thing they could exploit it. Helena didn’t know to what extent the concepts of the magecraft she was familiar with applied to Carter’s practice, but in her world, the Authority of a god was one with their very essence.

Carter settled against the desk she sat on, sipping his own tea. “Chaos. But also, control. Many human and non-human sorceries; but also the natural forces which he embodies or twists to his own ends; and his, too, is the cold sterile world of modern science and its dangers for the unwise. He appears in some forms which are mindless menaces, and some forms which are perhaps more sapient than many humans. He is an evil with a thousand faces, and as many aspects as there are eyes to perceive him. All the constants which bind him are on a level too high to describe with words—and in a sense he may not even be an entity in his own right, but just an emanation from the monstrous, unfathomable mind of Azathoth, of whom some say we are all mere passing dreams.”

“An emanation from the mind of the demiurge, hmm…In that case, we’d all be the same type of creature as Nyarlathotep, then.”

“I chafe at the thought, for completely petty reasons.”

Helena shook her head with a snort. “You seem to speak of all these creatures and concepts with a certain reverence you don’t actually hold for them in practice.”

“Well, I’ve been rubbing shoulders with the unnamable for such a long time, we’re practically colleagues. Nyarlathotep, dread as he is, is a sort of occupational hazard of exploring the realms of space-time—there came a point in my explorations of the unfathomable star-gulfs that it almost struck me as comical how omnipresent he is. Most every incarnation of evil ever imagined by sapient beings either is Nyarlathotep or has been used as a mask by him for his sinister ends.”

“The Devil perhaps?”

“Quite certainly. The Black Man of the Salem Witch Trials is one of his favorite forms in my home of homes, my beloved New England. This is the form in which Abby thinks of him most as well…” He glanced over at Abby, framed by the high-backed chair and flanked by her sleeping cats. “And because of that, Abby has never been able to think of him flippantly. She is a devout girl. She always says her prayers, even in dream.”

“You don’t think of that as a failing, do you?”

“Perhaps if I were a younger and more foolish man I would. But I am very, very old, and I’ve seen a great many things more condemnable than a girl who values the faith of her forefathers. I certainly place a great deal of value on my own storied heritage. Why, Abby and I no doubt are related in some oblique sort of way, as my own ancestor Edmund Carter was himself a—“

Helena coughed pointedly, a technique she had had to master after falling in with the two inventors. “Do you think Nyarlathotep takes on the weaknesses of the form he assumes? Would he be repelled by holy water, for instance?” As a Heroic Spirit, she had been granted mastery over so many fields of magecraft she would be willing to try blessing water just to see if it worked.

“There’s no set rules about it—he doesn’t hail from tales so concerned with mastery and battle. My guess, however, is that he would merely laugh it off. His existence itself is a mockery of all the prayers and safeguards of man, and he revels in hope’s destruction.” Carter traced a shape on the cover of one of his books. “We could try one of the variations on the Elder Sign, but my guess is that it holds very little actual potency against a true Outer God. Such a thing is more superstition than surefire.”

Helena knew the Elder Sign, in both its two most prominent interpretations and in the sundry regional variations of each, but only because she had covered the subject over the course of the morning in Carter’s library. She had come to realize since arriving here that the eldritch knowledge that had been implanted in her brain as a result of the dimensions mixing over Chaldea had quietly taken its leave when they had entered the Dreamlands. It was frustrating, and she wondered what it meant—if this realm, under Carter’s command, would not invade her mind the way the effects of Raum’s ritual had. Now that she was outside the effects of the dimensional shift she wished she had the time to theorize about the nature of the reality distortion that had affected them, the relation between the Dreamlands and the Earth of Raum’s fiction. I ’m not about to distract him with it now, but I must remember to ask Carter about the mind he sprung from.

Astolfo, his legs kicking carelessly in the air as he paged through a book written in an incomprehensible script, suddenly chimed in. Helena hadn’t realized he was listening.

“What about the shoggy things? We can just put Nyarko away for later if we don’t have an answer now, but whenever we come back, we’re going to have to deal with more of them!”

“Ah! Excellent idea, Duke Astolfo. Shoggoths are dread beings of preternatural toughness and unsettlingly profound intelligence, but they are mere creatures in the end, not gods. The Mad Arab himself may have hidden in his prose some wards against them, though of course he would never admit a need for such a ward, so great was his denial of their presence on Earth’s sphere—“ And Carter was off, flipping though bibliographies and cross-referencing tomes in several different languages with a speed that made Helena proud of the whole race of scholars. Iseidako let out a low whistle.

“Have you ever met a Shoggoth yourself?” Helena asked.

“Of course! Across my various lives and incarnations, I’ve tangled with just about everything. Still, it’s not wise to go picking fights. I’m no Conan the Barbarian.” He seemed like he was prepared to be offended but Helena waved him down with a laugh.

“We’re not going to make you fight anything, Dr. Carter.”

“That’s what I’m here for!” Astolfo flexed a slim arm, grinning toothily. “I may be weak, but you’ll never keep me down! That’s why me and an army of slimy slippery tentacles are a match made in heaven! Oh, but don’t go thinking anything dirty about it! They have to take me out for dinner first!”

Iseidako took in a low breath and muttered something that sounded like “series of prints” too low for anyone to object to it. Then, speaking up, he added, “So this is a fight you’re plannin’ for? You’re gonna, if I’m understandin’ the situation right, storm back into your hometown and kick this evil god out? Whew.”

Helena grimaced and looked at Carter. “I’m sure it’ll have to have more finesse than a ‘fight’…”

“’Struggle’ or ‘attempt’ might be a better term, for my sanity’s sake,” Carter insisted.

“But the bottom line is that we need to get Nyarlathotep away from Master and back where he came from.”

“He’s not compatible with your reality,” Carter agreed. “He is no doubt already stretching the distortion around the Plateau of Leng, conforming it into a place suitable for him. A similar thing happened when Abby was made into what she is now. Your reality is fundamentally different from…well, not only from his, but from mine, as well. I sensed it when I stepped into your version of Earth. Ordinarily even I would not have been able to walk there. The one version of Providence I had to pass up on…” He sighed wistfully. “I have a stamp book!”

“Well, I’m no magician. Far from it,” Iseidako said. “But I guess I’m a little curious about how these things work. Dr. Carter, Madame Blavatsky, how do you get an evil god to go home?”

“We’re still working on it, but we’re building on a framework,” Helena said. She took a well-oiled fountain pen from Carter’s desk and unrolled a scroll of parchment. “Dr. Carter has confirmed that both he and Abby can leave from these Dreamlands to anywhere in space-time that they choose.”

“Though in my case, more preparation is needed,” Carter added.

“So he and Abby will take Astolfo and I—and hopefully the Baron—to the specific Chaldea we need to go to.” Helena was scrawling on the parchment as if planning a battle.

“Abby has informed me previously that she has an especial link to the Miss Ritsuka in question, a personal object of hers from the heretical garden of Salem. It’s been imbued with spiritual significance from the looping time, and since Miss Ritsuka has it on her person, Abby is able to use it as a homing beacon to find her. I in turn can follow Abby—as per our next point.”

“Since we have two bearers of the Silver Key with us, we could theoretically arrive in two groups. We might be able to gain an advantage that way.”

“Nyarlathotep may be truly close to omnipresent, but he is far from omnipotent. He may believe that the first group to arrive is the only one he can expect, and we need every advantage we can get in such a terrifyingly mismatch.” Carter smiled slightly, without showing his teeth. “I also believe I will call in some favors and reach out to a few acquaintances before we cross the star-gulfs. I believe, Iseidako, you have spent some time with my friend Robert Upton Pickman?”

Iseidako nodded readily. “The dog guy! Great artist. Terrible breath. Loved to pick his brain when he dropped by, a real kindred spirit.”

Carter reached down and petted one of the many cats wandering the study. “And then of course there are these delightful children of Bubastis, who I have a long-standing friendship with! We have many potential allies, as Nyarlathotep no doubt will have his. He has many cults on Earth, and on the unmoored amorphous plane of Leng.”

Astolfo leapt to his feet from a laying position. “And I can summon the Hippogriff! It’ll be a whole animal party! I’m getting kinda excited now, y'know.”

“I kinda wanna see this. I’d be a hell of a show…but a real bummer if you lose,” Iseidako muttered.

Helena sighed. “We Servants of Chaldea haven’t gotten this far by wondering what would happen if we lose. Master’s taught us that much.”

“Let’s focus on preparing the spellwork that may serve us best,” Carter agreed. “Perhaps an invocation of Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss beneath these Dreamlands, might ward us…”

“I also believe I saw something in the writings of your friend Klarkash-Ton that hinted obliquely at an application against a crawling chaos too great to be named,” Helena said, eagerly flipping through the tome. The momentary spell of chilliness was over again.

It was easy to get into this work, Helena thought. It felt so familiar. It reminded her of her living days, her time in that New York apartment, poring over the enigmatic writings of the Mahatmas with Colonel Olcott. A wave of nostalgia flooded her chest and she smiled secretly to herself.

It ’s nice to not have to worry about being taken seriously anymore. I do miss the naivete of those days…though that makes me feel like I’m getting old!

Unfolding the book onto her lap and already starting to scrawl her notes, she delved back into the world of arcane spellwork, feeling very much like she was at home.


Evening came, bringing with it the gentle drone of distant singing from many monks far down the river, from their monasteries hidden within the perfumed and fruited jungles. Helena wondered what they practiced here, and what manner of gods they used to personify the aspects of the great creative force.

They hadn’t left the study even for dinner, and lunch had passed with little more than a thought. Instead they were eating flatbreads stuffed with chopped vegetables and a savory sauce that Helena had to be careful not to drip onto their careful diagrams.

Iseidako looked at the result of the last few hours’ careful work with an unimpressed eye. “What is it, anyway? Some of that newfangled ‘non-representational’ stuff? Not the kinda thing my patron would commission.”

“It’s the rough draft of our sigil. We’ll do a more formal version after we’ve prepared ourselves.” Helena crossed her arms, finally looking at it from a distance after all this time with her nose to the paper. “It’s a truly New-Age fusion of magic from Atlantis, Lemuria, and civilizations human eyes have never seen, passed down through hints in the treatises of Solomon and the Book of Dzyan. In fact, this might be Theosophy’s greatest work yet! Even if it is fated to go uncelebrated.”

“Madame Blavatsky’s spiritual ability to connect to the libraries of her mentors proved a great boon, ideal to serve as the glue to fit these disparate elements together. I was amazed to see the kind of automatic writing you could produce!” Carter had smudges of ink on his face.

“It wasn’t automatic writing, it was direct transcription of what Master Kuthumi was telling me. And it also absolutely wasn’t something I made up!”

“Don’t worry, Granny Helena, I believe you,” Astolfo said, which only made Helena want to get more defensive.

“Absolutely. This is a triumph. The fact that you alone hold the secrets of the Mahatmas will render it even more potent than I can imagine.” Carter sounded so genuine that Helena couldn’t help but beam, and had to restrain herself from tackling his spindly form in a hug.

“It’s just as the Mahatmas instructed me. And then there’s Carter’s notes, of course. But the most important part is the many interwoven fragments directly from my own ideal Secret Doctrine. The unabridged, unedited, complete version of my dream text, which is part and parcel of my Spirit Origin!”

“It is a true doorstop,” Carter said.

Iseidako rested his chin on an ink-stained hand. “But how do you use it? I understand the power of drawin’, but if putting your heart and soul into art was all it took to make some magic happen I’d be a regular Abe-no-Seimei. We gonna sacrifice the Duke?”

Astolfo squawked indignantly.

Carter had noticed his smudged visage and was attempting to remedy it, only managing in making it worse. “The power isn’t in the act of drawing. The art is a mere focus. When saying the proper words, after meditating properly on the designs, the power to repel the dread Nyarlathotep should emerge.”

“Emerge from where?” Iseidako said.

Helena gritted her teeth.

“A mana furnace,” she said simply.

Iseidako nodded as if he knew what it meant. He didn’t, and Helena feared that was the only reason he didn’t laugh at her, point a finger and call her an overambitious fraudster like the rest of the world had.

It had been in the lull of the warm afternoon, when Carter had left only briefly to attend to his kingly business and Astolfo and Iseidako had given up even the pretense of helping to climb out the narrow window and scale the roof. Helena’s head had been drooping, though her mind and her hand were both utterly absorbed in the work of writing, and Master Kuthumi’s fatherly reading voice filled her head as he provided her with helpful supplemental passages from long-lost Tibetan texts.

And then, like a bolt from the blue, it had hit her. The purpose of that Sunken Spiral Textbook that Gilles held, which she and Carter had momentarily salivated over like a couple of Miskatonic undergraduates.

That ’s right. Despite his later reputation in some black magic circles, the Baron was never truly a mage at all. I’ve tried talking to him in Chaldea and he doesn’t know a whit of theory. His mind’s as closed as a soldered-shut reliquary. All the mana he’s got comes from that spellbook!

And, if we take the mana of that spellbook into consideration, the boundaries of what we can do expands that much more, and that means …!

Helena stood up so fast that Master Kuthumi stopped talking, his aura emanating endless patience.

“Thank you so much, Master! That’s what I need to make this work! If we just had a mana furnace like that, and then, with your teachings—“ She pushed her transcription to the side, looking already for something blank to scribble on. “Because magic is the art of imposing your will on the world! And belief is self-hypnosis! The first person you cast a spell upon when you work magic is yourself, so—if I just expand the field of that initial spell—“

That was where the germ of the idea had started. Now that she was looking back on it, she wasn’t sure she could explain it to the old man who sat curled up in the folds of his kimono, watching her with narrowed, uncomprehending eyes.

“Well, the long and short of it is that now we’ve just got the final draft to work on, and it’s a waiting game to proceed until Abby comes home.”

Abby’s empty body had stayed in the same still position the whole day, and after a time, no one had paused in their scholarly work to look at her. But now, all eyes turned to her, and they all feared for her again at once. She looked so still. Even her gentle breaths were hardly perceptible.

“It’s only been a little more than twelve hours,” Carter said. “Not too unusual a time for a girl her age to sleep.”

Iseidako nodded. “Little Ago’s got an awful sleep schedule, so this body’s not conkin’ out for a while yet,” he said. “I figure I could go for a walk in the gardens if anyone cares to join me.”

Helena appreciated the gesture to preoccupy the party, and it seemed they all did. Reluctantly, they finally left their pens and parchment behind, and trailed out the study and down the many alabaster stairs to walk the contemplative gardens of Thran, like the unseen ranks of still-chanting monks, along the verdant banks of the River Skai.