Session 35 -- Digging for a Solution

They had not come to Skellig Michael for sightseeing. The ruined monastery already lay bare to the wind when they reached its rim: clocháns and low walls stitched to the island’s backbone, a narrow stair of worn stone dropping toward a church whose altar still held the silence of devotional centuries. The party spread into the salt-bleached spaces with a practical, almost ritual patience.  A plan of exploration settled among them and followed in a slow, careful orbit around the ruins. They checked doors and windows, peered into cells, and listened for the small signs that separated dust from meaning.

Early returns were exactly the sort of things that made the place tick. In one cell a slot in the ceiling breathed a breeze not from outside but from somewhere above the stone. The thin wind felt wrong to Tiv when it struck; she exclaimed, “I’ve never been hurt by wind before,” and the blow left her unsteady. Ceangal, there with her, felt the same force at his shoulder. It was clear that not every sound came from nature alone.

They peered into narrow rooms and found only the essentials of austere lives: a cracked mug, a wooden bowl, a length of frayed cord. In the windy cell, a rusted dagger lay by a heap of torn robes; in another a bundle of herbs gave off a musty tang that told Vedica at once they were wrong to tarry. Those herbs had filled the enclosed room with a toxic aura; air that had stagnated there for generations carried poison enough that a careless step would cost them. They marked that cell with caution and moved on.

A key turned the day’s mood. They had looked into a small cell where a stone statue and a scrap of parchment rested on a rickety table; when Dwårfy stepped in and lifted the parchment he found an iron key lying on top. For a breath the place held itself.

Then, the table’s shadow slid loose and became something alive. The table moved independent of its legs and attacked; a living shadow revealed itself as guardian of the key. The party fought in the cramped alcove, darts of steel and bolts of light against something that should not have been. The tableau was almost comic at one moment — the mundane key on a mundane table and the table answering with menace, until the shadow was laid low.

That key had words attached. The parchment read like a clue: “this key unlocks the bell of the east; this statue steadies the west.” They read it aloud and filed the phrase into the growing map in their heads; scrap by scrap, the monastery’s choreography of objects and places began to emerge. The little findings began to feel like parts of a device: the bronze bell they later found in a chest guarded by a swarm of enchanted wasps. Ceangal detonated a fireball in the cell, allowing them to approach the chest with the key.  Inside, along with the bell, rosary beads threaded with old blessing. The chest that yielded the bell and beads was old oak; they opened it after examining for traps and found the objects inside, holy and simple, and the beads sat in the Tiv's hands, the private pleasure of a good find.

They entered one cell with an old, straw mat and cracked clay pot to retrieve the carved, wooden statue of a saint. Moving on, Dwårfy found one cell with a small flame flickering in a tin cup that with several holes punched into it. Nearby was a torn blanket that had been embroidered with a bone needle and thread lying nearby. Who had lit the flame? None of them had, and, as far as they knew, they were the only people on the island.  Dwårfy poked at the tin cup with his hammer, exposing a slot in a nearby stone. There was no time to examine it, however, as the flame leaped out of the cup, and the party soon found itself in combat with a flame spirit.

While they were fighting the flame spirit, Ceangal, who had remained outside the tiny cell, near the one with the clay pot, heard a rumbling sound. While the party had made quick work of the flame spirit, they did not have time to celebrate, as an earth elemental came out of the cell to attack Ceangal. The fight continued, but the party was victorious.

The blanket, it turned out, was embroidered with a short poem that translated: "the flame dagger reveals the ink's hiding place."  They went back to the windy cell and braved its buffeting to retrieve the rusty dagger which had a flame motif on the handle and a wavy blade.  When they stuck the blade into the slot like a key, the stone popped loose, and they found a vial of dried ink inside.

They learned early that the monastery responded to light. Convinced they had found the vessel for the sacred flame in the form of the tin cup, they retrieved the candle and mirror from the cell where they had awoken the gargoyle earlier. They put the candle in the cup and lit it, waving it around the altar in the chapel. Nothing happened, but they did see a square hole on the side of the altar, decorated with symbols of the seasons.

The candle was burning down, so they decided to move on.  

Not all guardians needed to be fought, however. In the western oratory, a spectre rose when they touched a lectern and held the book inside. Tiv, seizing the initiative, held out the blessed rosary she found in the chest and appealed to the old monk not to harm them. "We don't want to fight! We're here on a mission from the Archangel Michael!"  The spectre paused for a moment, and rather than attack, pointed to the stone statued of the Virgin Mary that Murchad was holding, and then pointed to the empty niche in the wall. When Murchad placed the statue in the niche, the spectre nodded and disappeared, leaving them in peace.

The tome in the oratory gave them details about the ceremony of flame. They needed two artifacts, a lantern (rather than the tin cup), and something else to turn the stone.   Murchad remembered that one of the gravestones had been marked "Brother Conor, Keeper of Flame, rests with the light."  He was pretty sure they needed to actually dig him up using the old shovel they found in one of the cells. Because the altar and the tombstones refused to budge when they tried to turn and twist them, he also assumed that the square hole meant that they needed another artifact to interact with it, and so they would probably also have to dig up "Brother Tomas, who turned the stone."  They remembered the pulse of necrotic energy that blasted them when they started poking around earlier, and they were not looking forward to conducting a lengthy excavation project.

They went out to the graveyard to assess the situation, and the candle, now lit, revealed faint ink and runes not visible in ordinary daylight. Jack noticed runes on Brother Conner’s tombstone when they carried a lit candle through the little graveyard; the rune’s glow was protective and it allowed other actions that would have been dangerous otherwise. Tiv activated the rune, and Murchad felt more comfortable starting to dig. The ineffectiveness of the candle and tin cup back in the chapel made the logic plain: the “ceremony of flame” had to be set up as much as performed, and the monks were buried with artifacts that were part of the rites.

The ground returned its own relics. When Dwårfy dug where a tombstone had suggested a give in the earth, the coffin yielded a skeletal brother — Brother Thomas — clutching between his bones an ornate crank etched with the seasons. The crank’s face was a cipher: carved images of spring, summer, autumn, winter. That crank would matter in the way the rest of the island’s pieces fit together; the whole tenor of their work had shifted to careful choreography of objects.  Of course, the hard work left Dwårfy exhausted, just as it left Murchad exhausted when he dug up Brother Conor's grave. In both cases, the party was attacked by phantoms but prevailed in the combats. They retrieved a gilt lantern from the bony fingers of Brother Conor and an ornate crank from Brother Tomas.  Tiv turned one phantom, and the party fought and defeated the second.

They returned to the main chapel, ready to employ their newfound treasures. They knew they needed to light the lantern and turn the crank in the square hole in the side of the altar. Tiv held the lantern aloft before the altar while Murchad turned the crank in the direction of the change of the seasons, but a shower of sparks flew from the altar, blinding Tiv and Jack, who was standing behind her. Murchad managed to turn his face away in time. Tiv suggested Murchad turn the crank the other way while she held the lantern aloft again, but they only got the same reaction. The party huddled together outside the chapel to discuss a different course of action.

After some debate, and with Jack and Tiv's sight returning over time, they decided that they were on the right track, but they had been misunderstanding the instructions in the tome. Tiv took the lantern into the chapel herself.

She placed it on the altar and turned the crank in the direction of the turn of the seasons herself. She shut her eyes tightly and turned her head away as she did so.

This time, there were no sparks. Instead, there was just a heavy pop sound. Tiv cautiously opened her eyes to see that the altar stone had lifted, allowing access to its contents. Excitedly, she turned and looked over her shoulder to call the success out to her teammates, but she saw with horror a large divine being armed with two imposing swords standing in the corner where she had previously perceived a presence watching them.

It was an Archon: a guardian more like an angel or a demon bound to watch a relic with the uncompromising fidelity of a golem. The Archon would not parley; it stood for the object they came for and answered with force.

Vedica, Dwårfy, and Jack each opened fire through the two doors but missed. Ceangal loosed a stream of magic missiles. Murchad rushed in and landed a solid blow.  The Archon was giving a good as it got to Tiv and Murchad with its giant swords. Tiv downed the potion she had from Lily. Vedica missed again, while Jack bounded into the room and jumped up on the altar. This gave him a clear line to avoid friendly fire as he blew into his Horn of Blasting. Ceangal again loosed his magic missiles. The party began withdrawing. The Archon continued his attack on Tiv and now Jack. Vedica loosed another arrow, and each member of the party used their attacks as a way to break off and clear the chapel. When the space was clear, Ceangal let off a fireball in the small space. Jack and Tiv dove out of the way of the jets of flame that ejected through the two doorways. A great, searing ball of flame smashed into the guardian’s form and finished it; the party’s tense, careful work had been answered with a single, hot punctuation. The Archon’s threat ended in that blast, which removed the last obstacle between them and the altar’s relic.

With the altar’s flagstone shifted and a shallow cove opened, the object they had hunted across cairn and storm was revealed. The pommel lay within — the worn, ornate cap of a hilt, small and heavy and older than any of their guesses. It had two empty recesses for what the party assumed were stones of some kind. The whole item had been made into a large pendant with magical properties. Tiv cradled it without any ritual flourish, as a thing meant to be handled carefully. She would wear it until the time came to incorporate it into the sword as the other pieces were collected. The room was quiet then but for the wind and the low clank of gear settling into its place.

They gathered the items, along with the gems that were inside the altar with the pommel (none seemed to fit the recesses) and reckoned the ways they might heal before departing once again for the mainland with their prize.

The pommel answered one question only to pose another: where was the rest of the blade and why had the object been hidden under an altar for so long? They leave the same sense the players met in the room: triumph, a few bruises, the knowledge that some doors had opened and others remained closed. Little things mattered still: the rosary beads had lent them quiet authority before the spectral guardian, a flame dagger had shown where hidden script lay. Each success had been careful work, often involving blunt force and often something far subtler than a sweep of steel.

They left the ruin changed by what they had done, material proof of the ceremony’s effect in a palm-sized bit of metal and the knowledge that the island’s rites and defenses had not been idle. The day closed on the party packing what they had learned and what they had claimed: a bell, rosary beads, the vial of ink, and the flame dagger’s echo in memory, and, finally, the pommel of light itself. The island watched them go in its mute way; the monks’ stones kept their riddles like a watchful memory.