1 - The Spit of Mool
Steel and stone wriggle in the dark. A vibration shivers through a broad, blind surface. The vibration fades. Then again: zzzzzzzz. Almost soundless, a faint hum hangs in the cold, black air. It dies, like the song on the final breath of a speckled silver thrush.
A third vibration. A crack of light. The surface scrapes inward.
The door of steel-gilded granite slides aside under the final smash of a pendulum hammer. Daylight the color of slate opens its eye into the long tunnel. Framed in the daylight, your black silhouette stares into the darkness of Mool’s Chrypt.
If you carry a firebug lantern on your person, now is the time to whisper to the glowing insects. Let the lantern’s paper-yellow light slide over the dusted stones ahead. If you do not carry a lantern, strike a torch.
One by one you pick up the three pieces of your equipment, lying in the shade of a boulder by the door.
| Plate Mail Helmet The feather on its crest twists in the wind. Stuffy, and restricts your vision, but may deflect a killing stroke. | Pinecone Shield Decorated with your Blue Lady’s pinecone sigil. | Polished Steel Longsword A sharp, shining weapon. Well-maintained. |
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You swing your sword in an arc before the door; this passage will be wide enough. You pick up your source of light with your shield hand. With the darkness before you, you recall the exact orders of the mancer, Othelmedir.
“Resurrection is not free, my freshly-lived subject. “Not for you. “A classifier which can connect the nature motifs that I employed to- “You will not understand. Your body is a cracked teacup. Placing YOU back in yourself was- laborious. Now the debt. Your Lady cannot pay for your life, so you must pay yourself. “The grave of Mool - a grot - is three days north along a parched riverbed. The grot were long ago slain and mummified. “Go there, you Cracked Cup Knight. The spit of Mool is the only currency I will take.”
You raise your light, and you raise your sword, and step into darkness that distantly clangs.
The Upper Halls
A tropical-smelling, saddle-colored mist pools in the bone-rich alcoves which flank the corridors of Mool’s Tohmb. Your helmet is filled with the smell, and with the sound of your own heavy breathing.
You hear a single clang from somewhere below.
On first entering the rusted tohmb, you will find yourself in the labyrinthine upper passages, and hopelessly lost. In order to proceed down into the tohmb proper, keep an eye on the carved architraves over the intersections. Pass only under those which show a fresco of a long jellyfish with its tendrils pointing left. You will soon arrive at a hole in the floor, around which an urn-wide stairway curls.
At the bottom of the stairs is a pool of green water. You snuff your light at once, for there is light shining from a cluster of ruby crystal, sprouting like acne from the brickwork. The ruby light reflects off the green water.
You step a floor of disturbed dust, then quickly behind a column. Something is coming.
Gearslave Ape
A fabrication of wood, and rusted iron, and glowing translucent crystal shambles over the ancient stones. Simian in shape, it’s twitching, loping gait carries it past your hiding space. The red crystal in the ceiling shines like gum disease on its smile of foreign bones, like burst vessels in its glass eye. It moves to an unseen mancer’s will.
You may either follow behind this gearslave ape, or branch off down your own path. If you follow the ape, it leads you deeper into the catacomb. If you choose to find your own way, you will step upon a pressure plate several moments later, triggering a sweeping scythe that severs your jugular.
Not much farther ahead, another pair of gearslaves stands idle in the middle of a chamber with a star-painted vault. You can get around them by skirting around the outer row of colonnades. But on reaching the vault’s other end, you will find that your unwitting guide has vanished.
It is worth your time to explore some of the nearest alcoves. There are hidden treasures in this tohmb.
| Sunblind Dew This thin vial of water contains dew from a blade of grass grown in total darkness. Drink it, and your eyes will see without light. | Sacrificial Cleaver A heavy, ornate cleaver, used to sever the necks of cattle. | Hourglass The sand within this timekeeper has solidified into a single clump of mud. The sand can be replaced. The device is useful in the casting of certain spells. |
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After a couple hours wandering you arrive before a narrow but enormously tall doorway. There is Deadspeech carved on a nearby marble epithet.
“In the Sickening Cradle; “Under the Headstone Mountain; “The Thin Man breaths behind a silver mask. “His house shall awaken; hail, Sleeper, Dreamer.”
You pass through the opening.
The Chrypt Trench
You hold your sabaton back just before stepping over the lip of an invisible ledge, an end in the passage. Before you, a trench stretches. A hundred gearslaves creep and crawl over the jagged face of the opposite wall. They dart between the black holes marking other passages. Far below you, the faint light of the tohmb crystals shine off the surface of a lake.
By observing them without notice for some time, you can learn the distinct types of gearslave ape.
| Carver Ape These servants climb up and down the walls of the trench, carving out small boreholes, and placing the glowing crystal buds within. | Stonechewer Ape Their purpose is unknown. When they move, it is always accompanied by an enormous scraping, grating sound. | Yellow Ape Covered in wax. | |
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| Heavy Ape These gearslaves stand twice the height of a man. You do not wish to draw their attention. | Milk Ape Constructed of pale steel, painted balsa-wood, and glowing white crystal. They shamble without a sound. |
You watch as a procession of gearslave apes emerges - one ape after the next - from the mouth of one tunnel, like a long, lolling, constructed tongue. The apes jitter in time with each other, their movements like a clockwork ritual dance.
The line moves down zigzag ledges in the opposite trench face. Each ape carries one glowing crystal, each crystal a different hue, the hues arranged to form a shifting rainbow. The line passes by other working apes. One ape applies wax to a new crystal bud. Another taps out a recess for bones, using a chisel and hammer of gritty brown iron. A few apes have climbed to the uppermost niches. There they gather bones that are brittle and dry. To these they apply fresh coats of wax.
The lead ape in the procession reaches the bottom of the crooked cliff. The path sinks into the reflective lake. The ape lifts its crystal, a mass of sunflower-colored geode. It reaches its arms back behind its head with a clicking motion, then hurls the stone out and into the lake.
You watch as, beneath the water, other lights rise. Lights that are not reflections.
Glowing Jellyfish
These creatures possess some sort of necromancy, you know not what kind. Each geode dropped is “swallowed” by these jellyfish in the lake of the trench in Mool’s Chrypt.
Quench those sparks in your chest. Neither now nor later is the time for wrath. Better to watch. Perhaps you will learn in which casket is buried Mool and his spit. These apes seem harmless, though none has found your scent. Necromancy’s creations are filled with secret violence. Whatever is the purpose of this industry, it’s no concern of yours. Sorrow that a knight, pious to The Road’s Tenets, should find himself a robber. But, your Lady cannot pay…
A snap breaks your reverie. You swivel your helmeted vision across the opposite wall until you catch a speeding shape. One of the gearslave apes - a carver - is falling. The frayed end of its harness line wriggles in the air above it as it plunges down. The ape shatters the reflective surface of the lake. It slips under, its line attached to its waist sliding in behind it.
Almost immediately the old tohmb gasps with animation. A lurid kaleidoscope of colors blooms from the lake depths. Ten thousand jellyfish rise in a glowing cloud. The other gearslaves meanwhile have raised an artificial cacophony of voice, so strident that it pains your ears. It is near to the braying of livestock from a barn when a black wolf has stepped inside; frenzied, full of animal panic, lacking animal throats.
The hooting din of the mechanical apes will soon drive your stitched soul insane. You must get away from the trench.
Three paths lie open to you. One option is to retreat. Or, you could attempt to scale the jagged underground cliff, seeking a higher or lower passage. The stones are slick though, and it is likely the apes will notice you.
The third path is a narrow stone ledge immediately to your right.
As your helmet rings with screaming, you slide onto the narrow ledge.
Despite the voices rattling in your skull, and the precarious drop to the glowing lake, you make progress. The gulch narrows, the walls press together. Having greased your plate mail before entering the chrypt, you move thus far undetected.
Eight bridges span the gulch walls ahead you, set at various heights, curves, and grades. They are made of metal plates and suspicious leather. They look thin. Your ledge terminates where one bridge hangs like a slide, leading further down on the opposite wall.
A ramshackle shape of wood and metal drops right in front of you. The gearslave’s fake teeth gleam. It hisses. It speaks in scratchy but distinct Deadspeech, like a wax cylinder voice.
“A man! “Breath spoils the air. “Steel spoils the light. “Must be remade.”
Two claws of scabbed bone fly at your breastplate. You sidestep the clumsy attack with trained instinct, at the same time swinging your Polished Steel Longsword in a whistling arc. The bright blade cuts the monster of rust and wood like a sparring dummy.
An artificial shriek blossoms from the artificial throat.
A hundred crystal eyes turn on you.
The gulch answers with a reverberating choral scream.
You hurl the crumpling gearslave from the ledge and rush for the thin bridge of leather and metal. Two other apes drop from above. One grabs your shoulders from behind, the other charges at your face.
Your Steel hews a path.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The gearslave apes drop into an appalling machine hush. From a wide opening below, a booming shudders through the din.
A substance like oil seems to darken the shadows of the wide passage. The booms shake the surface of the lake.
It is a moment before you notice another sound. All across the gulch the apes chant; one word in perfect time; one word in perfect harmony; one word whose note leaps across the musical scale, like a church bell tumbling down a circular stair.
Mool. Mool. Mool. Mool.
Boom.
Mool. Mool. Mool. Mool.
Boom.
Mool. Mool. Mool. Mool.
Boom.
Mool. Mool. Mool. Mool.
Boom.
Mool. Mool. Mool. Mool.
Boom.
Your helmet fills with the reek of burning feathers.
Surviving the Gulch
There is no way for you to escape the gearslave apes. You cannot cut a way out, and cannot look upon Mool. To see the ancient grot mancer within his tohmb is to see a thing beyond living reason. Your eyes would swim with madness.
The only way out is to survive. The only way to survive is to fight your way to the bridge. Three gearslave apes - heavy apes - will drop down between you and the suspended crossing. Charge the first one the moment it lands, and shove it over the side. You must slay the next two with your Steel. Duck their heavy swipes, they can crack rock. Hew fast. Mool approaches. Do not allow yourself to fall from the ledge either, the fanging rock below would crunch you.
The thin crossing sways dizzily underfoot as you edge onto its surface. Undaunted, you start out over the lake.
You haven’t taken nine steps when you see the course is hopeless. A swarm of gearslaves gibbers at the far end. They swagger onto the bridge, adding their weight. You hear more apes climbing on behind.
Snap.
The combined weight tears the leather. You plummet.
Splash.
Water spills through your visor. You sink.
The glowing Jellyfish surround and flood your eyes.
The Heather Vault
You recall a voice.
“My Knight. I thought the moonlight had swept down in the evening and swept you from my side forever, across the red lake. What is this slimy feeling, between your scarred skin and your steel plate? Wet wool? Why are you soaked? “Othelmedir’s deeply resonant words spoke of your body as a cracked cup. It sang that your soul would leak from the porcelain, leaving only a dirty dish. But, I knew the voice lied.” The chrypt of Mool. The gearslave apes. The lake. The plunge. Why is there a fog around your thoughts? “You are shaking. All will be well, my knight, your breath once more is warm.” What is this soft thing between your fingers? Tall grass? Focus. Your Lady needed you to do a thing in the tohmb. What was it? “I will hold your hands.”
The Heather Vault waits beneath the higher catacombs in the ancient chrypt of the grot mancer, Mool. Tall, magenta shrubs bloom throughout the domed chambers and narrow corridors. The heather grows thickest near the huge crystalline lattices that are the vault’s light source, or toward the tubular holes in the ceiling, through which a mirrored, secondhand sunlight limps.
Mool’s gearslave ape servants rustle through dense boscage, laboring under the obscure will of the sleepwalking mancer. They massage salted, electrified water onto the enormous crystals, or chisel still longer tunnels for the multiplying bones. Or, they tend the small pools of jellyfish; all grot are fascinated by the amorphous, tendrilled sea life.
You sit up in the coarse heather. The fronds are pressed down all around where you lay; you find yourself enclosed in a cube of rusted bars. Your throat stings. You cough up a thin mist of the lake water inside your helmet. You feel at your hip and pat the heather - the apes have taken your Steel and shield.
You stand. You are in an overgrown, domed room. You can just see the wooden skulls of the constructs as they move through the heather. There is another matted space not far from your cage. The gearslave apes have a fire burning beneath an iron pot the size of a bathtub. You see the steam curling over the lip.
The fronds of heather part before your prison. One of the gearslave apes steps up to the bars.
“We are the marrow, man. Free marrow of the chrypt. “Man, you are the seed. “Your marrow is in your bones, behind a shell. “We will boil your bones free of your skin.”
Your prospects are gaunt and clad in tatters. If you remembered to collect your Portal Splinter back in Othelmedir’s tower, you could try to use it to pick the padlock on the front of your cage. The lock is rusted, however, and clotted with heather pollen. Your chances of picking it are small.
If you scan the area, you are able to spot your Polished Steel Longsword. One of the apes is using it to hack a clearing around the boiling pot. Your Pinecone Shield is nowhere to be seen.
Strange are the means and ends of necromancy. What purpose can this grot creature have in stitching souls to wood and metal? This construction before you: is its soul like yours? A man soul? Is it injured like yours? Enough. That helps nothing. There are too many of this creature’s kind for you to cut a way out, even if you still held your Steel. What then?
You spend some minutes examining the ape standing at your cage. Its uncanny stillness and unbreaking, crystalline staring accommodate this endeavor.
The gearslave’s ape-skull and ape-torso are carved from two pieces of crumbly spruce, in what appears to be a roughly-feminine shape. The wood sports a live colony of termites. Cobwebs span the spaces between its reticulated fingers and toes, like the webbing of a frog’s feet. No breath issues from between this one’s shining teeth - human teeth, from a human skill - but the body produces a general creaking noise as it sways where it stands. There is little metal to this ape. You take particular note of this one’s tail - it is a single curved rod of iron. It looks solid. It is fixed to the body of the ape by a weak-looking plate, held by nails red with rust.
The Boiling Cauldron
You see the other gearslave apes building the fire under the pot higher and higher. They carry fronds of heather, mowed with your Steel, and press the bundles to the flame under the tripod of the hissing cauldron. The heather is green, and a choking, acrid smoke fills the space.
This cauldron of cast-iron came to Mool in a Time a hundred-hundred years gone. It belonged in that long-ago age to The Hairy Nails Inn. Mool brought the inn to ruin with his necromancy. Only the cauldron survived the destruction, and so Mool took it, and carved his glyphs of Desire into the bottom. The glyphs have since been buried under the soot of many burnings, but they are there still.
To touch the liquid which is not water that lies within the boiling pot is, not just to die in a way that is horrible, but to have the spirit in your cracked body stolen by the mancer’s ritual. You must escape.
The simplest way out of your cage is to tear the iron tail from the nearby gearslave ape. Using this iron bar, the weak padlock on the cage may be pried and snapped. You will need to attract the ape’s attention again, it has since turned back to the pot. The best way to antagonize the artificial animal, given its feminine shape, is to show it the symbol of The Twin Grin, the symbol of The Sisterhood of the Yellow Smile. Shape that symbol out of a length of heather, then tap the bar of your cage, and get the gearslave ape to look.
The gearslave’s face cannot display emotion, but you hear outrage in its scratching voice.
“Sisterhood? Why Sisterhood? This marrow needs no burial. “This marrow serves. “Why Sisterhood? Stupid man, that was old flesh, before Mool! “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!”
Mool’s Boiling Cauldron erupts with a horrible hiss. This is the screaming of its prior victims. The nearest apes drop their bundles of heather. They hoot and jump mechanically, like clockwork toys.
The ape standing by your cage turns toward the cauldron.
Eleven Strokes with The Old Man Below
Lunging, your gauntlets clasp and rip the tail loose. The ape screams like a horse nail against steel. Two score eye crystals spin toward you. You jam the rod beside the lock.
You heave - the lever rod groans. The cage door clinks; ajar. A tonal choir howls. Apes cleave through brush. You emerge. You swing.
Crack.
The door is now open, but the apes have noticed you. They converge. You must act quickly.
Your first job is to retrieve your Steel. Fortunately, the ape cutting the heather is the nearest one in the swarm. Using your tail-rod-staff, disarm and clobber the clumsy creature.
Next, you need to escape this cauldron vault. Half a dozen tunnels present black egress. Unfortunately the apes have closed around you, cutting off most avenues. You cannot hope to cut through so many foes.
One path directly behind your cage offers your best chance. This is The Humming Hall of Andoleg, where the heather grows thickest in The Vault. Guarding Andoleg’s hall is an ape named Snowy Gore. He’s a capable opponent, but you can race past him instead of fighting.
Places to Hide
| Ald Medas Shrine In this tall chamber of The Heather Vault, you crouch among the splintered piles of ten thousand exhausted magical wands. | Big Eye’s Cave Seven ivory eggs encased in amber stud the ceiling. |
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| Selgon This pillared corridor reminds you of an apprentice knight you once escorted through a similar sepulcher. | Index Chamber A snake of yellow light slithers constantly through the air between two pilons in this room. The shifting illumination makes this a surprisingly-good place to hide. |
With a breath of relief you hear the mechanical thunder of stamping feet roll past your hiding place. It fades like a weathered storm. After several moments you emerge, Steel in hand, and begin to probe the vault.
“…but Mool survived, and within the halls of his chrypt he lusts for revenge.”
- The Shadows Time Forgot, Vol. IV
The heather thins as you squeeze between two slick walls of one corridor, the gap so thin that you must turn your rusted armor pauldrons sideways to avoid scraping. There is barely enough space for your breastplate and a frond’s-width of heather.
Finally you exit both the thin corridor and the heather simultaneously. You find yourself in a pentagonal room with a waxed dirt floor. Two white crystal tumors hang from the ceiling, lighting the space in sterile alabaster.
Mool’s Sanctum
Dried and sere tissue, and elongated bones of fantastic shape, and a chest-sized metal device made up of glass lenses set amidst miniature labyrinths of gear – all these and a hundred other oddities lay on marble tables in this room, or huddle in one of the five corners, or dangle from copper chains in the ceiling. Your sense of self-preservation (and your sense of sanity) warns you from lingering long in this space.
You find your Pinecone Shield leaning against a life-size statue of an immortal goddess. The statue is perfectly-molded from waxed copper. You cannot help but wonder how much the assorted treasures of this room would be worth at an Emerald House; surely the priests of Lady Horsehair would rub palms at sight of this woman in copper.
If you explore Mool’s Sanctum you will find some potentially useful information and objects.
Several incomplete gearslave automaton parts lie in scattered parts on the grated shelves. Some of the shinier pieces would fetch a few gold squares at any market, if you set aside scruples about taking from the tohmb. You will also notice inert pieces of crystal form a broken kaleidoscope of muted color near one of the three exits. The air that way is heavy with the smell of crushed beetles, a different odor to the rest of The Vault.
Against the marble edge of one table you will see a frozen streak of black bile. This is grot spit - Mool’s spit. You should take it.
If you stare too long about the room, your eye will eventually veer towards a small koi-pond full of finger-sized jellyfish. The jellyfish shed less glow than a firebug, and make no sound at all. If you touch one, you experience a tingle in the hairs of your arm, like a building static charge. You can use one of the empty vials lying about the room to capture one of these jellyfish and bring it with you. Strangely, once you have noticed the jellyfish, you will find it impossible to ignore the impulse to take one.
From elsewhere in The Heather Vault, you hear a deep, bassy gurgle.
Run.
Only once in your life have you seen a grot. It was a dead, mummified thing, encased in a glass box, in one of the tents of The Coffin Rollers which travel The Road of Graves. It looked like black rope, with frayed ends sticking out from its sides.
You stop. Breathe. The coarse heather rubs your visor.
Another alien gurgle reels within your brain.
Mool has now taken up the chase. Your only chance is to escape.
The specific path you should follow depends on the exit you took from Mool’s inner Sanctum.
If you left through the dimmed crystal opening, the one flanked by cobbled gallstone pillars, proceed down the left-curving corridor until you arrive at the Laros Vampire Clan’s burial chamber.
If you left through the underwater tunnel in the jellyfish pool, follow the tunnel until you reach the second air pocket. You will find a ladder here which leads to an upper level.
If you used the steel crank to open the hidden passage in Mool’s sanctum, you will have to fight your way through two gearslave apes. The apes aren’t tough, but will allow the mancer to close the distance. After killing them, you enter The Hall of Diffusion. Make worthy the lost time by grabbing the Cat’s Eye Spear lying on the magenta ottoman.
Once you find yourself back in the thick heather, you’ll notice something strange about the gearslaves. They still screech for your bones, and will attack you on sight; but their gemstone eyes all shine with a black-grey light, like the final broadcast of an expired star.
One huge gearslave rises to block your path. You cut. One swipe buckles its rusted knee. One overhead chop splits its wooden skull.
In the succeeding moment, catching your breath, you notice that bass gurgle is louder. The gurgle resolves into words incongruously rasping and wet at once, like hearing burning fir cones crackle under the surface of a scummy pond.
“Neoplasm. “Your ingrowth displaces the particles of my vapor. “My white servants will engulf you. “Be inflamed, expire, and absorbed.”
The Moonlight Climb
After flighted eternity you stumble under a possible means of escape. Silver moonlight shines like a beam through a slanted ceiling hole.
Climbing into the hole, you realize it develops into a tunnel, sometimes running horizontal, sometimes angling, sometimes purely vertical along coarse rock. Chains straddle the tunnel, supporting a complex network of mirrors which reflect some far-off moon.
A movement catches your eye. It is only the mirrored reflection of a shadow, somewhere behind. But the reflection of the shadow of the shape - an offspring-shape like a giant toad and a centipede - leaves you nauseous. You scramble up the rattling chains.
As the humpbacked moon begins to fill the whole frame of every mirror, you step underneath the next vertical in the tunnel, and are disheartened. Above stands a grate of thin but hard wire; invisible in the reflections yet all-too-corporeal.
Climb to the wire mesh, and start to saw through it with your Steel. It is difficult, but possible. Cut through at least three tines before trying to squeeze through. Ignore the gurgle and scurry at your back. Keep your hold on the stone. Hack. Chop. Cut.
With a wrench and a screech the wire grate tears from its mooring. You climb free. Something brushes your leg. You scramble.
Rounding a corner of stone, you arrive, finally, at the surface. After a moment of heaving breath, bent double, you collapse onto the dewy grass. You push your visor back, and let the lambent moon dapple your weary eyes.