12 - The Hypnotist of Yellowmoor
The Nightmare of the Honey Locust
The stones of The Road sink like soft turf under your sabatons. Each one recedes slowly into the mortar, each stone squelches. Why? Where is this tract of the epitaphs, and how did you come to it? Where have you left your Blue Lady? Un-Timely is the gas in the air. Un-Timely: something of the ancient rot of vegetables sewn before the necromancer-gods. Like grease the air seems to paint your throat. Focus. You must find your Lady. But how? The Road looks empty ahead, behind. To the left and right there are only these two dense walls of forest trunks. Such trunks as well… Like sea urchins with their knots of black thorns. So hard it seems to ask the right questions - ‘Where is this?’ ‘How came you here?’ - with this gnawing hurt in your stomach. This is hunger you cannot remember. Those thorns, those honey locust trees- Louse, stop your mind. Thoughtless lunacy; to drool over the tines on a tree. Your steps, however, carry you to The Road’s flank. This feels almost against your will. Have you ever let your will crumble so? The peat smell is stronger here, near the trunks, under the shade of the boughs. What bides in nature that could produce such an odor? And that sound: like continuous, deep gulping. But the trees are too densely packed to see. There. You can touch the spines now. You see that they are inedible. Has your visor been raised all this time? Your stomach. The thorns. Don’t. Don’t!- Pain. Pain. Pain. Why man did you bite that cluster? But- what is this? Your mouth doesn’t bleed. It was only the maiden acupuncture of your face and throat that stung. The bite seems to have left no wound. And your hunger is gone. Wait. What is this other feeling? Pain. Like a pressure. Building under your skin. PAIN. …Was that a voice? Your- ah, your face. Bulging. Something- pressing- up through- your skin- That voice again. Saying… hold your hands…
Just before the breaking of the dream you hear a distant chime.
This time you recognize, quite clearly as your senses wake, your Blue Lady’s voice.
“Rise, and look to those strings of cloud swimming on the sea of the sky. The slate-colored sun has mounted his vessel to sail that water once more; the heath is dawn-warm. “You saw the nightmare? “So many mancers must there be; disturbing the seven necromancer-gods each hour with their orisons; so many, and it amazes my heart that one of our gods should bend their hoary eye upon you, who are faithful, with their nightmare. “ We will find which has laid a curse upon your back. We will bring you out from this shadow, my cracked cup knight. “I promise.”
In the northernmost reach of the Middlemoss heath, over which you and your Blue Lady presently roam, there stand several of the famous Pilgrim Tohmbs.
| The Fourth Green The Mother of Worms is the fourth god-necromancer whose domain is ‘wanting’. Her Pilgrim Tohmb can be found beneath the ruined brickwork of a gutted brothel. The bouncer behind the tohmb door halts you with a riddle. The correct answer is ‘Ginseng’. | The Leper Stone The Thin Man’s ill mask looks down its flaccid cheeks of plaster from the upper middle of this menhir. Though it is a bad idea, the colony of lepers camping around the shrine’s base will not stop you if you take the mask. |
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| The Wandering Barrow This barrow’s entry changes to one of five different locations every night at midnight. The bodies are different at each location, but the smell of old death is the same. | The Chine Pit This is not really a shrine to Gallbladder, but to a famous Middlemoss butcher, who was a great friend among the local mancers. There is nothing here for you. |
All four shrines are disappointing. None of these gods gives you their sign of will, good or evil.
At some point in your day’s pilgrimages, you will be stopped by a bent old man in a cloak. He hobbles up to you on two canes.
“In sooth, I came hither what time I marked thy tread upon the heather. “I trow not thy errand, yet ken that thou seekst rede or remedy. “Nettles and spit on the wights yclept ‘Mancers’. Greater witching’s in the wit. “Get thee to Yellowmoor, yon manor. The hypnotist shall hew whate’er works thee woe.”
The old man sets his right arm on the crook of his right cane, and points.
Yellowmoor Manor
A mile-long slope unfurls downward, a long, wide, densely-woven rug of heather the color of mustard. At the base of this slope four dead trees stand, leaning like the hands of stopped metronomes.
The single manor in the middle of the trees seems more like four or five manors piled together, a tumble of architecture. Half the structure is sinking and bent. The other half is sick with spores. Three clocktowers rise from the roof, each giving a different time, each spinning at a different rate. A chimney exhales two lines of smoke in a double helix, one black, one white. The roof is patched with shingles: wooden shingles, shingles of pure onyx stone, terracotta. One low mist cloud obscures the place; it is not enough to cover the whole acreage, but instead roves lazy spirals round the manor.
A distant chime-carillon strikes up a complicated fugue in D-minor. For decades the people of Middlemoss have traded tales of various persons, ill-fated, who began to hear this chime in their dreams, and thereafter went missing.
Though you did not visit as the old man suggested, lacking invitation, the image of Yellowmoor clings like grapevine to your imagination.
Your nightmares are going to get progressively worse over the coming week. Your only recourse is enduring, the hypnotist will not see you before the week is out. The best that you can do is bury yourself in duty.
You can follow one of two courses: continue the search for your Lady’s stepson, or try to learn more about her daughter’s haunting ghost. If you spend the week on the former, you’ll receive the following clues.
| From the Reed Seller That he has been in Middlemoss for ten years, and memorized every passing face, and never seen a face like your Lady describes. | From the Frozen Skeleton in the Mancer’s Guild That knightly orders from the East sometimes recruit in Middlemoss | From Lady Orca That you and your Lady should move on… |
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If you instead pursue the latter objective, you can purchase a Hauntshield ritual for your Lady’s protection. It will keep her from seeing any ghost for ten days.
Why can’t you move your legs? Look down; they are rooted in this concentration of sallow mud. This is the dream again. You should wake yourself. These other trees have thicker thorns than yours. You must break a way out, break your own roots and thorns. Remember your- What is that lumbering sound? Something heaves its way through the cracking thorns. That sucking noise must be its enormous tread in this muck which roots you. Draw your Steel. But no, your arms will not bend. There. It comes through the trunks. What is this shaggy leviathan mammal with tusks? How the trees seem to lean away. Making space for it. Leaving your own bark exposed. You must run. Run. Run. It comes to eat you. RUN.
As you wake you hear the same chime.
Near the end of the week the nightmares will bleed into reality. You will have to deal with any three of the following afflictions.
| Merchants’ Ill Welcome Every shop gate, when it opens, rings not with a bell, but with a chime. | Prickly Cuisine Your black bread, your tubers, your sheepmeat, all burst with prongs. You cannot eat it. You must go hungry. |
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| Immobilized A test of patience. Your Lady will eventually find you; her words break the spell. | The False Foe This statue appears like an enemy about to strike. It is an illusion, only a statue, but the fear lasts for many hours after. |
The hypnotist’s servant who comes to convey you to Yellowmoor is striking. He is hairless down to his eyebrows. His skin is shiny smooth like a baby, but stained in beetle-colored tattoos.
When he tries to take you alone, your Lady will object.
“Let us both glide over the names on The Road, the spokes of your cart walking the shadows of my cracked cup knight and I forward together.”
The wagon is stranger than its driver. Two decks. You are sent by a thin stair on its left side up to the top, which leans. Three plushily-upholstered violet armchairs, bolted to the boards, face sideways on this deck. It is pulled by two oxen, each with a mutant set of horns ending in five prongs like grasping fingers.
“I will hold your hands.”
The tassels and stones of Middlemoss heath roll in fast motion. Entering your helmeted vision on the right. Exiting left. Every stone on The Road jostles the thorns in your stomach.
“Look at those swans in the sky, my cracked cup knight.”
The sky is no harbor. A colossal vulture with swirling eyes swoops there.
“Breathe and be still. All will-”
The wagon stops with such abruptness that you are thrown out, over the driver, over the oxen and their horns.
You land at the door of Yellowmoor.
It opens.
Down the crooked carpet steps, one step at a time, with a thumpthump*, thumpthump, *thumpthump, like a heart in a decrepit breast, comes the man with two canes.
The hypnotist.
His hood is thrown back now. Tongue-colored hair forms a coarse, stiff mane with his beard of four points. His face is painted white with big circular eyeshadows. His nightshirt dances with strings of beads.
When he reaches the bottom step the hypnotist looks at you and winks. The squelch of his eyelid is stretched-
Bloodless-
Greedy-
Your insides quiver as the faintest laugh begins to trickle from the hypnotist’s hair-framed lips.
You can try to escape, but it will gain you nothing. Your fate is sure. Nor can you attack the hypnotist. Your feet refuse to approach the painted invalid.
A better use of the remaining moments is to slay or study the hypnotist’s lackeys, now converging from two acacia doors on your right. There are six at present. They wear straw hats, and though they carry no weapons, their hands are large for grabbing. Each is differently-shaped. One of them is a starving sadist. You should behead that one now, with a horizontal chop; it will spare your Lady his torments when you are disabled.
You will notice your shadow wavering near the end. It is a phenomenon worth committing to memory.
The laughing chime clangs louder. Louder. LOUDER. In your skull. In your brain. Your vision narrows to a tunnel lined in thorns.
As Katabasis swallows you, your last unaltered perception is the Hypnotist of Yellowmoor’s swirling laughter.
The Trance of Yellowmoor
Ouroboros is the trance, cyclic and swallowing.
The Trance of Yellowmoor
You must push forward. You must; each moment that passes makes you half as slow. Forward is the only path; to what? Why you slog you can’t remember, nor where came this place of darkness. But this is not the thorn dream. Is it? You have the Cat’s Eye Spear, your fingers not remembering when they pulled it from your pack, only knowing the feel of its grain in your palm. Hold it lower, and see what this morass is that clatters around your waist. What are these? Painted beetles. Scarabs. They clack like wood, but seem to scuttle like living beetles as your legs plow a way. There must be thousands, stretching all directions. How came you into this sea? That banging sound in the distance awakens a cowardice you try to bury. It booms, booms, booms, more fateful every moment, in time with the half-life of your momentum, growing, but not manifesting. Why can’t you turn around to look?
The Trance of Yellowmoor
How many miles have you walked over The Road? How many epitaphs? How much of your Time? You will not retrieve those years, not by walking in reverse. Then why do you? You must allow that there is something rousing in the deep gully dropping away on your left, and the red-flower hedge on your right, and in the epitaphs, underfoot. You love the taste of the air, for even it feels younger in reverse. And yet the gully now seems shallower. The hedge shrinks. And stone by stone, the road loses its names. Now it loses even its stones. What is this? … Now it is only a thin line of stones. Yes, you feel vibrant and younger. And the spring in your step drives you backward faster.
The Trance of Yellowmoor
You wish you could remove your helmet, for this grotto whose walls are lined in webbed fungi is humid and dense of air. But you mustn’t, your face is repulsive. Better for Her not to see it. Why does she stare at you so fixedly? Why does her blue-black hair fall so freely around her bare shoulders? Her bare- This is a dream you must not dream. Fix your eyes elsewhere. Your oath. Your oath. Remember your oath to your Lord. To your clan’s noble blood. Do you forget that her skin was washed at birth in the purifying ash water of the virtuous families of the first Time? Hers is virtuous skin. It must remain so for her gravestone. Keep your eyes shut. That touch is imagined. Please, let this dream end.
The Trance of Yellowmoor
The stars wink. Slowly, off, then on. Do you believe that those seven necromancer-gods prolonged Time, knowing it would waver at its end? Have you come to the end? It is not the stars. Birds in the night cause the heavens to flicker. A parliament of owls haunts the sky in a drove as thick as the murmuration of starlings. That moon is the smallest you have ever seen, isn’t it? Impossibly small, but twelve times as bright. You want to stare at it? Well, it does seem to conjure a bright sleep. A sleep of pure illumination.
As you bury your eyes in their reflection, in a pool of silver water, you hear your Blue Lady.
“My Cracked Cup Knight, do you feel my hand on your hand? “Do your eyes receive that golden sepulchral light through the circle attic window? “Do you understand that we are sealed in this loft? “Please come back from this blind stupor. You are not in the cul-de-sac your glazed eyes see. “Every moment your breathing is shallower, your chest rises a little less, your helmet droops as over a table game. You sit in a creaking wooden chair, my knight. Please, there is no weight chafing your ankle. “Follow my voice. Let it paint a stairway from the pit.”
To break free of The Trance of Yellowmoor, you must believe in your Lady.
You’ll hear her same four sentences repeated in each of the endless trances you see from this point forward. If you listen carefully to each of the sentences, you can focus on one key word or phrase in each. Picking the four correct keyword will open up four specific trances to you.
| ‘Golden Sepulchral Light’ Opens the trance of Goldegrave. | ‘Cul-de-sac’ Opens the trance of The Dead End. |
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| ‘A Game Table’ Opens the trance of Toad’s Chessboard. | ‘Stairway’ Opens the trance of The Sinking Marble Pillar of the Sky. |
At the conclusion of each of these special trances you will hear that old chime sound. Each chime thrums through your body like an inner earthquake, bringing you closer back to reality.
You stand once again on the mushy tract of The Road, where in curls between bristling honey locusts. You feel aware. There is only a little fog at the corners of your visor.
You hear the chime clang. Not between your ears, but ahead. Between the thorns.
As you follow The Road, your footsteps disfiguring the putty-like epitaphs, the air clings to your skin, under your plate and wool shirt.
The thorns spread apart to reveal - and encircle - a soggy piazza. A fountain trickles to the left, disgorging dollops of amber algaic water. At the center of the clearing is The Upside-down Campanile of the Dream Chime. Somewhere deep underground, at its belfry, the chime echoes up again.
And when you push open the upside-down copper door, and step onto the inverted first-floor landing, the chime rings again. Louder.
Eleven Strokes with The Old Man Below
The chime clangs on, vibrating your bones’ marrow. It builds, marches, a battlefield snare pace.
In pain you cross the upturned landing. Chiming irradiates the air. Reaching the edge, you look down. The abyss gazes up. crumbled steps descend.
Hot chime-noise climbs. You stiffen. Bracing. Staid.
Your task is to destroy The Trancing Chime, the tiny gleam at the bottom of this inverted campanile. That is the only way to escape (and survive) The Trance of Yellowmoor.
You can reach the corner-landing below by walking on the bottoms of the stone steps. But soon the stairwell is too fragmented; a gap ten feet across and twenty feet down spans the next flight.
Step beneath the threshold of this lower-landing doorway. You’ll find yourself on a rotted workman’s scaffold. An earthen wall of worm-hands will try to strangle you. Cut them. Proceed down the angled ledge. Alternate between scaffold and inner stairs. Endure the radiating chime.
If you endure to the bottom, you need simply slash the lurid silver chime.
The cloying attic dust burns in your reclaimed breath like smelling salt. Through watery eyes you see your Blue Lady, her face long, but not harmed.
The light is golden and dim through the attic’s only window. Broken clocks are stacked in the corners. The window is barred, but you find the hatch, and from its rattle know that it is weak, that you can escape.
Just before you break the latch, something shudders in the hall below. Some foe. Examining your scabbard, you find your steel within. As you draw it, its oil grabs dust from the air. It burns with the golden light.
“I trow thy singing hewer wert the source of the clamoring tune, that east I cast my voice as now, discomfited the brow of my house? “Dost thou think thee freed? Freed of Yellowmoor’s Trance? The wit is not so readily delivered of its woes. “Great is the witching that has once caught its hook on the wit. Greater than that mancy. Yea, even than that mancy of breath and bane. “Let thee come down to me, then, from the crown to the foot of my house. Ha, ha, ha. “See if thou dost not discover more trance than truth.”
There are thirty-seven distinct floors or wings across the architectures of Yellowmoor manor. From the south wing attic (where you begin) there are four viable routes you can discover to the first floor foyer (where you leave).
One way is to climb the shelving south chimney stones, cross the flying buttress which receives no sun, drop onto the marble balcony just below, smash through the stained glass window, and descend through the frozen servant’s wing. If you go this way, make sure to grab the Eldest Sun Ring on the ledge in the chimney.
Another option is through the rampart-hoardings surrounding The Inner Frog Garden, then up-and-down The Maze of Five Screw Stairs. This way means passing through the former duchess’s bedroom; take care with the two remaining members of the Duchess’s Guard. Their bodies have been washed of personality; they are The Hypnotist’s servants now.
No matter which route you take you will need to watch out for thorn hazards. They can burst and bristle from any wall portrait, keyhole, or houseplant. They are of course echoes of the trance, but the wounds they inflict are real.
Throughout your descent you are pursued by the directionless dry laughter of The Hypnotist.
The Hypnotist of Yellowmoor is a Wooly Vampire, a not-quite-undead, not-quite-alive misery, which feeds on imagination. Wooly Vampires eat the dreams of their victims. In so doing, they make weary the waking hours. They move into homes that have suffered great loss, slowly driving out the other inhabitants, and once settled can live off of only a small village of dreaming victims for hundreds of years. Their thralls are drained of all emotion, flesh without inner will, domesticated swords.
The Hypnotist, flanked by four thralls, leaning on his canes in his foyer, in the middle of a white bear-pelt carpet, awaits you.
“Nigh comes the knight. And Lady. “But I see thou hast misplaced thy shadow. Look. “ha, ha, ha. “A mongerer of shadows am I. Let me conjure thine.”
Your battle begins not with the canker that is The Hypnotist, but with his spongey thralls. Two of the four huddle backwards and take up positions on the white bear-pelt carpet, guarding the laughing hypnotist. The other pair will immediately attack. You’ll have to cut down both sets, four vacant men.
Each pair consists of a man with a gisarme and a man with an axe-shovel. One-on-one you could probably slay either easily, but together their attacks come in a difficult array of high and low cuts. Make use of your Pinecone Crest Shield as much as you can; it will be of no aid in the second and third stages of this battle.
Your Blue Lady has, fortunately, retreated to the double-stairs, and it seems your foes have no interest in her.
Throughout this fight The Hypnotist will use his evil chime. Each time it rings your vision will restrict to a thimble-sized hole, as black thorns close around your eyes. This lasts ten seconds.
The battle’s second stage begins when the last thrall slumps into his personal pool of blood. You’ll hear a sudden *CLANG* of the evil chime. Your vision darkens to nothing. A second later when it clears, you find yourself facing yourself. Your shadow-self, covered in shadow-thorns.
Your shadow utilizes your own maneuvers. Its dexterity is restricted by its prickly exterior, but its strikes are unweighted and faster. Each time its shadow-steel cuts you, your shadow-self absorbs some of your color. If you take seven hits, you will fade entirely. Your Pinecone Crest Shield can’t block shadow attacks. Fortunately, your own Steel is ever polished and gleaming. Use it to block, parry, and strike.
One other thing to watch out for: each time you strike your shadow, it will shed jagged thorns, which will lame you if you step on them.
Defeat your darkened self, then turn on The Hypnotist.
The battle is not yet over. You’ll see the white bear-pelt carpet surrounding the vampire become a thick, tall hedge of thorny material - jagged splinters of raw white ice. From the middle his laughter continues to tinkle through spines.
You’ll need to chop through this frozen hazard with your Steel. The chill will sink through your plate armor, through your skin, into your marrow. The laughter is like a cerebral rasp, smoothing your senses. Push through. Let go of thought. Retreat into the physical.
When you see nothing but pure white, and hear nothing but the laughter, plunge your sword straight ahead.
And pray you are near the center.
It is finished. Breathe. Look, his wasted body is forever stilled. The rug is only a rug. The chime, the laughter, the cold, all are gone. That touch- but it is only your Lady. And she is unharmed. Good. There is the door; leave. … Why do you glance behind? Your shadow is returned. The trance is over. Yet, was that a chime you heard just now?