Blood of Elder Days
Group: Class Lines · Tag: sor_blood · Priority: 5
| ID | Journal text | Awarded by | Items consumed | Items granted | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Among the Ruins of Annuminas, where the old Numenorean capital is going quietly back into the lake, a woman called Erendis of the Drowned House keeps a fire nobody laid. She had no more teaching than I did -- our sort never does -- and the one thing she says can be handed on is this: stop fighting the blood. Half of what a young sorcerer calls losing control is the power shoving back against a hand held over its mouth. She stood up, put a hand on my breastbone, and said what I am out loud in Adunaic, which she says is not a sentence and not a gift but a fact, like my height. She gave me a plain grey signet -- not an heirloom, she keeps a box of them; it only means somebody knew and did not run. I am to come back eight levels deeper into the blood than I am now. | q_sor_c_dn, q_sor_c_off, q_sor_c_s1r, q_sor_c_s1w, q_sor_c_s2r, q_sor_c_s2w, q_sor_inc, q_sor_lrn, q_sor_rtn, q_sor_spawn, q_sor_stn | Shard of Sea-Glass | Shard of Sea-Glass, Signet of the Drowned House, Staff of Elder Days | |
| 2 | I came back to Erendis at the eighth level of the blood. She gave me a thumb-sized shard of pale green sea-glass that came off a window in Armenelos, has been in the sea for an Age and in her pocket for ninety years, and has never once done anything. That is the point of it -- it is not a charm, it is a bill that has not been presented. Everyone of our sort pays sooner or later: a friend, a door shut in the face, a thing done that cannot be put down, and the ones who go bad are the ones who never noticed they had paid. I am to carry the glass, not stare at it, and come back at the fifteenth level and say out loud what it cost me. | q_sor_c_dn, q_sor_c_off, q_sor_c_s1r, q_sor_c_s1w, q_sor_c_s2r, q_sor_c_s2w, q_sor_inc, q_sor_lrn, q_sor_rtn, q_sor_spawn, q_sor_stn | Shard of Sea-Glass | Shard of Sea-Glass, Signet of the Drowned House, Staff of Elder Days | |
| 3 | final | I went back to Erendis at the fifteenth level and told her the price in the words I would have used while angry, which is what she had asked for and the only version she says is worth anything. She did not comfort me. She listened all the way to the end, took the glass out of my hand, and set it into the head of a black lebethron staff she had evidently had ready for a while. The Staff of Elder Days is not lending me anything -- it only means I have stopped arguing. She named what is still ahead: the speech that dragons answer to, the sceptre that drowned with Armenelos, the unbinding. None of it was hers to give me today. | q_sor_c_dn, q_sor_c_off, q_sor_c_s1r, q_sor_c_s1w, q_sor_c_s2r, q_sor_c_s2w, q_sor_inc, q_sor_lrn, q_sor_rtn, q_sor_spawn, q_sor_stn | Shard of Sea-Glass | Shard of Sea-Glass, Signet of the Drowned House, Staff of Elder Days |