Recap Online Session 27.06.2018

"This is getting stranger and stranger," Tylendel says as he moves toward a window overlooking the giant chamber. He sees twenty-thirty workers in strange harnesses seemingly sifting through the mass pouring out of pipes into the grooves of the floor.

He watches for a while, then goes into the next chamber. Here stands a strange statue - a skull encased in a helmet of glass and copper, with copper armor and tubes. As Tylendel moves past it, it begins to move its head around, following him. He stumbles along the walls, his back touching a mask hanging from a knob, then moves into the chamber beyond. Like this room, the door slides open automatically, revealing more vats - these filled with glowing light, surrounded by half-corporeal spirits operating boxes attached to the tubes.

A switch is flicked and the light disappears in one tube, leaving only smoke. The strange automaton follows Tylendel, lifting one arm mechanically and pointing at him, then saying something in a strange, low, static voice.
Tylendel continues north, and another door slides open, revealing a large chamber filled with all manner of strange things - coiled pipes, broken plates of iron, mysterious devices, bent pipes etc. The automaton follows and stops in the doorway. Trapped with no more doors, Tylendel wills the automaton begin rusting. It works! Moving back to a door he hadn't checked, he find only a narrow slip. He goes back to the automaton, finds a strange card which he takes back and slips into the crevice and the door opens.

He finds another large chamber without exits, the walls lined with benches. The opposite wall has a number of pegs. There is a metal box in the middle of the floor; the top is transparent, showing bubbling water. Pipes run from the ceiling into it, spreading the bubbles. He returns to the balcony, follows it south to the door on the opposite wall of the great chamber with the machines.

He rounds a corner, passes between two alternating blinking red lights which emit a beep, then finds a similar watchroom with windows facing the strange machinery and workers on the floor below. He opens a double iron door on the south wall, faces another undead creature towering over him. It begins drawing its sword, growling the word narushitel . Tylendel runs, then turns around and tries to will its spirit out of its dessicated husk of a body. He manages to stop it in its track, head bowing down, as if he had indeed emptied it of any soul. At that point, he hears the Crow-king's voice from the balcony nearby.They speak. The Crow-king reveals that the red mass being worked on below is Candathi ore. Tylendel tries to gauge some clues from the ugly dwarf. He learns that the Crow-king calls this strange place the "Maelstrom Citadel", among other things.

He begins exploring the southern area after the Crow-king leaves him "as a guest", but tells him he won't leave again.

He finds more strange places, eventually clicks on a button on a panel of strange glowing circles and lines, and he finds himself elsewhere - by a stair. He walks up into a hallway where the ceiling is lit by wide, round plates of light. He begins to wander, then sees he is being followed by red beams of light appearing and disappearing and appearing again closer; he tries to will himself into a chamber he saw on a strange machine's glassy surface, and gets there: An octagonal chamber, the corners occupied by pillars, seven mirrors on the walls between them (and a door on the eighth wall). The Crow-king appears by his side. Tylendel wills a mirror to show him Byrkburgh, which he manages. He then tries to see the "real" Crow-king, seeing him in a chamber before an umberstone door of Brentonian origin, with a half circle of lost cultists surrounding him (inclduing one with a helmet shaped like a skull).

The Crow-king begins to insinuate that he could teach Tylendel to use his sorcerous powers, that they could be strong together, that if he can live because the coming of Creeping God is an apocalypse that can't be stopped.
When the Crow-king disappears, Tylendel continues to test the mirrors. He looks for the "secret place" on the plains, and finds an army encamped by the unnatural crevice he once explored himself, south of Mistmark.

Through the mirrors, he sees, deep down, the entrance to a great temple partially crushed beneath unimaginable weight. Two cultists stand guard here by a campfire. He looks inside, discovering a Brentonni ruin of imposing size.

He also inspected the army's command tent, seeing the Deserter, Khapa Urbil, a gold-masked cultist, a silver-masked cultist and one cultist with a half-gold/silver mask, as well as a woman chained to the central pole - which he realizes is the legless woman he saw dance in the air the first time he visited the rift.

He uses a mirror to seek out Syr Nathyn Evett; he sees  him riding hard at the head of a company of Black Crow Troopers, with Lady Rheië at his side, up a grassy slope. Behind them, arrows come flying from a forest encroaching on a river following the foot of the slope they ride. The sky beyond the woodlands roils with inky black clouds.

Then he seeks to see, through the mirror, the Holy Sword and High Protector of the East, Ionatan Heroth, and the mirror shows him a bay. One end of the bay is occupied by birchwoods, the other is craggier, steeper and higher, with a seemingly abandoned chapel on a bluff. Here, Tylendel sees a horse grazing outside. After a moment, he sees the Holy Sword depart the house of worship, mount his horse, and ride off.

Tylendel, moving between the mirrors on the walls somewhere in the Maelstrom Citadel, seeks the light - the light that should be shining over his home province smothered by the nocturnal dark of the Creeping God.
Concentration is taking its toll on Tylendel - even as he is meditating in a chamber on the Holy Hill, he splits his focus in two, one half continuing the meditation while another quests through the mirror. As the Crow-king said, even the Creeping God has taken notice of this young man who is channeling sorcery (the Crow-king also wondered who had "infused" Tylendel in the first place).

He finds vast bands of light rushing through a void; as if he were riding hurried northern lights. He follows it as it races through utter darkness until, at last, a map seems to appear before it, filling the darkness as it gradually appears in the light. Then, the light hits it like a massive rock hitting water, the light spilling across the flat of the map. At the same time, the mirror through which Tylendel looks shatters into thousands of shards, sending him flying with the back of his head into the door... of the small chamber in the House of Martial Holies, on the Holy Hill.

A guardsman immediately scrambles, going for help upstairs. Tylendel's face and hands were hit by tiny shards of glass, and he is bleeding. He is aided, but feels as if he still lingers halfway between Between and Eras. The people helping him at first seem ghostly, as if they were spirits, but he recognizes among them Karlon Rymés and Syr Dostan Anpetór. When they speak, their voices echo and sound muffled, as if they were trying to talk to him through a rushing river. The Crow-king, however, is all too clear where he stands at the footend of Tylendel's new bed, saying something about Tylendel owing him another debt.

Tylendel glides in and out mentally, still as if he is still holding on to the Between. He tells Syr Dostan, seated on a stool by his side, that he "found the light" ... or did he say it at all? Did Syr Dostan reply that the light is coming, or was it an auditory hallucination?Confused, Tylendel's mind blanks out and he falls asleep.

He awakes, much later, the chamber he has been brought to by Karlon Rymés very clear and real. He tries to think about the light and where it went.

Syr Dostan arrives, tells him he's been "asleep for days" and needs to eat and drink to regain his strength. It seems that even the Knight of Greywolf Hall is losing hope as strength is sapped from him:
"The Creeping God won't attack. He doesn't need to. All he has to do..is wait..."
"There is one lord who insists on an audience with you," Syr Dostan says, "The one I told you about." Syr Dostan hadn't known the name of the lord in question when he first mentioned it, but now he knows - it is Duke Esmond Sollani of Halinhaven.

Duke Esmond enters the room, glad to see Tylendel again, squeezing his hand.
"I have brought something,"he explains, and talks quickly about meeting Yosha Artamon. The Duke, according to Syr Dostan, has brought supplies and food and more fighting men as well.

Apparently, Duke Esmond was on Drowned Knight's Island when Yosha Artamon and his cronies - Shuran and Bolin - arrived, demanding a certain treasure, eventually showing him the writ from the Prophet. Esmond decided to escort Artamon, as he didn't trust him, but doesn't say much more, promising Tylendel to tell more at a more appropriate time.