Silakan kembali lagi nanti.
The day began again. Never a morning in this company without someone being fast asleep longer than they ought to be. The pattern has become structural. The party does not question it; they plan around it, the way one plans around weather.
I. The Sleep That Was Not Sleep
This time it was Anaik.
He was sitting upright on a bench, in full armor, with his eyes open. To a passing observer he was awake. To anyone who attempted to engage him, he was not. His body was present and accounted for. His spirit was elsewhere, attending a gathering that had not yet released him, listening to proceedings the rest of the party could not hear and had no interest in waiting for.
The others took the morning for themselves. They rested. They roamed. They did what people do when the day has made no demands and someone else is handling the business of being unavailable.
Not Nero.
For a man whose entire profession is built on the ability to go unnoticed, Nero has a remarkable inability to sit still. The morning was slow and the air was warm and the grove was quiet and this was, for Nero, intolerable. He required activity. Activity required a target. The Emerald Grove had one.
II. The Deity and the Accountant
While the morning passed slow and relaxed, Nero stole the statue of a deity from the Emerald Grove.
The chronicle would like to add context. There is no context. He saw the statue. He took the statue. He sold the statue to a local. The transaction was completed before noon. The deity in question was not consulted.
Questionable, to say the least. But the sum was good, and the sum went into the party's shared account, which Nero manages with the transparency of a locked chest and the reliability of a man who has never once been caught short. Whether the deity minded, the chronicle cannot say. Whether the grove noticed, the chronicle suspects it will eventually.
It was almost noon. Anaik was still on the bench. Eyes still open. Still absent.
Everyone had enough of waiting.
III. The Fight Without a Thesis
The party headed north. There was no particular reason for this. Traxex was moving in that direction, and the party followed, because this is what the party does: it goes where the most determined person is going, and Traxex is always the most determined person about something, even when nobody, including Traxex, can articulate what that something is.
Sogong and Traxex arrived first and positioned themselves. Before long, Anaik woke. He stood from the bench as if standing from a bench is what he had been doing all morning, and followed them north without asking why.
What he found was baffling.
Inside a building: a fight, already underway. Three people. One ranger. One rogue. And a man with a sword. An impressive sword, the kind that announces itself before the man holding it does.
Anaik had no information. He had no briefing, no explanation, no indication of who was in the right or what had started this. He did not ask. He jumped the man with the sword.
The fight was over far too quickly for the chronicle to extract meaning from it. What the chronicle can record is the following: Anaik did not know why they were there. The chronicle's strong deduction, based on available evidence, is that no one else knew either. Not Sogong. Not Traxex. Not Nero, who was already inside. The party had engaged in lethal combat without a thesis, and concluded it without developing one.
But Anaik had a new sword now. The impressive one. The one that could cast a ward of protection on its wielder.
The party was satisfied with this outcome. The chronicle considered this sufficient as a closing argument.
IV. The Sword Displayed in Silence
The party scattered. Anaik, with the enthusiasm of a man who has acquired exactly the kind of thing he likes to acquire, went to find Nanang. He wanted to show off the new sword and the ability it carried.
They stood together. Anaik demonstrated the sword. Nanang watched.
Neither of them spoke. In fact, although Anaik had woken from the bench and was moving with all the physicality the party has come to expect of him, he had not spoken a single word since rising. He appeared to be deaf as well. Nanang, for his part, did not find this unusual enough to comment on. Or perhaps he did find it unusual and simply could not communicate it. Or perhaps he was also somewhere else. The chronicle can only guess.
The most reasonable explanation: the sleep from earlier. Anaik's body had returned to the party, but his soul had not finished the commute. He was here in the way that furniture is here. Present, functional, capable of considerable violence, but not currently accepting input.
V. The Devil Who Received Small Talk
The rest of the party teleported to the Blighted Village, planning to continue south. Anaik did not get the memo. He walked.
On the way, after jumping over a broken bridge in the manner of a man for whom broken infrastructure is a suggestion, someone appeared.
He introduced himself as Raphael. He spoke with the specific gravity of a person who expects the introduction to land, the way a stone expects to reach the bottom of a well. Anaik could not have cared less. He did, however, feel something in Raphael that could not be safely ignored. Not a threat, exactly. More the quality of standing next to something that has decided, for now, not to be a threat, and understanding that the "for now" is doing all the work in that sentence.
So Anaik nodded along.
Raphael spoke at length. Anaik was teleported to a grand hall: a table set for a feast that no one was eating, decor that suggested taste or at least significant resources, and Raphael himself, who had dropped his human appearance and revealed his true form. A devil. Wings, horns, the complete arrangement.
Anaik kept going with his act.
"Yep, yep." "Ah, I see." "Whoa, that's crazy." "Happy for you." "Sorry that happened."
Raphael appeared satisfied. He released Anaik. Anaik walked away in the direction of his party as if he had been briefly delayed by weather.
He tried to tell the party. They could not have cared less. They wanted to go south. Traxex had a feeling. Whoever Raphael was, however big of a deal he considered himself, the party did not get the memo. The chronicle suspects this is the first time a devil of Raphael's apparent stature has delivered his full introduction to a room of people and received, in aggregate, the emotional response one gives to a mildly interesting weather report from a neighboring province.
VI. The Sheep That Were Not Sheep
They arrived at the south, as Traxex had intended all along, the way Traxex intends everything: without explanation and with the expectation that the party will follow. They followed.
It was a swamp. For a swamp, it was rather bright. Green, almost too green, in the way that things are green when they are trying to be something other than what they are. There were even sheep, grazing on the land with the placid disinterest of creatures that belong there. Everything about the scene suggested peace.
Nanang hit one of the sheep with his staff. As hard as he could.
There was no provocation. No hint. No indication that the sheep had done anything to warrant the attention of a sorcerer's blunt instrument. Nanang simply saw the sheep, calculated nothing, and swung. The party, who by this point might have predicted this, did not predict this.
Every sheep in the field turned into a redcap: a gnome-looking creature with a sickle, red cap, and a disposition that did not require further explanation.
The party was caught off guard. Despite this, it was quick work. Nanang died, but he is Nanang, and this fact no longer occupies the space in the chronicle that it once did. The chronicle has found that recording Nanang's deaths with the gravity of a first occurrence becomes difficult when the occurrences accumulate. He was revived. The pattern continued.
What the chronicle found far more noteworthy was Traxex.
She was using a spear.
Not a bow. A spear. A weapon that requires proximity, patience, and the particular willingness to be within arm's reach of the thing you are trying to kill. None of these qualities are associated with Traxex. The chronicle does not know whether this is her way of sulking about the bow she wanted and did not receive. The chronicle does not know whether this is a philosophical statement. The chronicle records it and moves on, bewildered.
VII. The Lodge, and What Was Decided Without Words
Before long they arrived at a lodge in the swamp. It looked lovely. Almost out of place, the way a clean shirt looks out of place on a man who has been traveling for three days. The party went inside.
Inside: Auntie Ethel, the merchant from the Emerald Grove, and a girl called Mayrina. Ethel was forcing Mayrina to eat the food she had prepared, spooning it toward her mouth with the insistent tenderness of someone who has decided that care and control are the same thing. Mayrina was resisting in the manner of someone who has been resisting for a long time and has not yet been released from the obligation of doing so.
This just looked wrong to everyone.
Nero initiated a conversation with Ethel. Not out of goodwill. Not out of concern for Mayrina. The chronicle suspects Nero initiated the conversation because even without a single word exchanged between them, the entire party had arrived at the same conclusion.
Beat the shit out of this grandma.
This does not make sense by conventional rationale. An elderly woman is feeding a girl soup in a clean lodge in a swamp. The correct response, by any reasonable measure, is a polite inquiry. The party operates on a completely different wavelength. They have, across four sessions, developed a collective instinct that bypasses reason and lands directly on violence with a frequency that the chronicle finds increasingly difficult to frame as coincidence.
Anaik landed the first blow. A heavy one. He did not hold back even the slightest.
Ethel transformed. Her face cracked open and reassembled into something older and more honest. A hag. The true form beneath the merchant's smile.
The party unanimously went: "I knew it."
The chronicle has a strong deduction that no, they did not.
VIII. The Chase and the Eye That Sees
Now that her true form was revealed, everyone was after her. Even Nanang, who was not asleep yet, which is rare enough to note. Even Traxex, still with the spear, which the chronicle has given up trying to explain.
Ethel teleported Mayrina somewhere deeper. Then she became invisible.
This was not the obstacle it should have been.
Nanang could see her. He had, that morning while Anaik sat sleeping on his bench, procured a prosthetic eye from Volo. A glass eye that could see invisible things. This is what Nanang does with a slow morning. Other people rest. Other people sit by water. Nanang acquires a magical eyeball from an eccentric and installs it in his skull on the off chance that something invisible might need finding later. The off chance arrived the same afternoon. The chronicle adds this to the catalog of Nanang's acquisitions and notes that, unlike most entries in that catalog, this one functioned exactly as advertised on the first attempt.
The chase continued, but Ethel was fast and this was her domain. She managed to slip away. There was a passage behind the fireplace, a secret entrance into a cavern below. Everyone went inside.
IX. What Ethel Left Behind, and What Anaik Did About It
The cave was fully Ethel's domain. Upon arrival, the party could hear her voice, not from any direction in particular but from the air itself, the way bad news travels in a place that belongs to the person delivering it.
Scattered throughout the first chamber: people. Some were in deep trance, sleeping the kind of sleep that does not end on its own. Some were petrified, frozen mid-gesture, faces locked in expressions the chronicle chose not to describe. Behind each of them, a plaque. The plaques described what these people had been before Ethel found them, and what they had agreed to, and how the agreement had concluded. Each one was a cautionary tale written in stone and silence.
It was a ploy. Ethel's gallery of consequences, arranged to slow the party, perhaps to scare them, perhaps to guilt them into reconsidering. An appeal to conscience.
Nero was looking for mechanisms, examining the room the way he examines all rooms: as a system with moving parts and at least one exploitable feature. Nanang and Sogong roamed without apparent purpose. Traxex appeared to still be sulking.
While no one was watching, the petrified and entranced figures were reduced to rubble.
Anaik did this. Quietly, for a man of his size and temperament. One by one, while the rest of the party was looking elsewhere, he dismantled Ethel's gallery with the methodical efficiency of a man clearing a table after dinner. He did not announce it. He did not ask permission. He simply solved the problem of the room by removing everything in it that might have constituted a problem.
Nero yelled at him. The chronicle notes that this was probably out of concern that the victims might have been useful later, perhaps for some mechanism or contraption deeper in the cave. Both concerns were untrue. The party could have simply walked past without touching anything.
But well.
X. The Masked and the Deeper Dark
The second chamber held more of Ethel's collection, but these were still animate. They moved under some kind of control, their faces covered with masks, their movements possessing the particular quality of bodies being operated by something other than the person inside them. Meat shields, probably. Ethel's final delay before the party reached her.
Ethel had simply drawn spectacularly bad luck in the matter of opponents. A gallery of tragic victims is an effective deterrent for most adventuring parties. For a party that contains Anaik, it is furniture. Masked thralls under magical control are a serious obstacle for a group with reservations about collateral damage. This group has not, at any point in its recorded history, demonstrated such reservations.
They were through in short order.
XI. The Lair, the Cage, and the Pan
They arrived in Ethel's lair.
She described the fate that awaited them. Something to do with having their blood mixed with her stew. Most details are omitted here because none of the members were listening. The soup remark is only remembered because it sounded, to the party, like a good idea. The chronicle does not know what to do with this and will not attempt to.
Inside the cavern: a gaping chasm, and above it, Mayrina in a cage made of roots that was currently on fire. This was the arrangement. Ethel below with her magic. The girl above in a burning cage. The party between the two, expected to choose.
Ethel split into four copies of herself. All equally threatening, only one real.
Traxex finally used her bow. She fired in several directions, searching for the real one. Nero charged ahead, and before anyone could account for his position he was face to face with one of the Ethels. He knocked her down with his bare palms. Nanang cast ray of frost on the burning cage, stopping the fire. Anaik also used a bow, which the chronicle notes without comment but suspects was some kind of gesture toward Traxex. Sogong charged forward, but he was carrying the weight of a man in full plate and a conviction that has not yet learned to be fast, and he did not reach the fight immediately.
While all of this was happening, Mayrina was screaming. Rather loudly. The whole party was slightly annoyed. Except Anaik. "Slightly" does not fit him. The chronicle notes his expression and declines to reproduce it.
Ethel multiplied again. Nanang found the real one in a single spell, and everyone converged. Nero's fists, devastating. Traxex, who was somehow now using both the spear and the bow, which the chronicle refuses to investigate. Sogong smited. Nanang did something the chronicle forgot. And Anaik's new sword found its first worthy opponent.
Ethel stumbled. She was near her end, but not quite there.
"Don't kill her."
Anaik and Traxex said this at the same time. The chronicle notes this as the first occasion on which these two have agreed on anything without argument, negotiation, or the dragonborn volume that usually resolves disputes of direction. It was, in its way, historic.
The party aligned. Everyone produced their less lethal option. Anaik, for one, pulled out a frying pan.
He hit a hag with a frying pan. The chronicle recorded this. A creature of the Feywild, old enough to have bargained in the currency of souls and lives, brought low in her own lair by a dragonborn holding cookware. The chronicle does not editorialize. The chronicle is, in this instance, struggling.
Nanang pulled out a spear. A spear is, under most definitions, a lethal weapon. Somehow, it worked out. The chronicle suspects this says more about Nanang's relationship with weapons than it does about the spear.
Ethel yielded.
XII. The Negotiation, the Girl, and the Blade
The negotiation began. Ethel offered a reward if the party let her take Mayrina and leave. Anaik took the lead.
"Do we need Mayrina?"
The party seemed unsure. Anaik pressed on anyway, which is how Anaik conducts all negotiations: he begins with a question he does not wait for the answer to. He demanded that Mayrina stay behind. Ethel was about to refuse. Anaik pulled his sword again. The new one. The one that casts protection. In this context it was not casting protection.
Ethel relented. She gave the party a reward and returned Mayrina. Then she fled. All ended well. The hag was gone. The girl was saved. The party had cookware and a new sword and whatever Ethel had left behind. This should have been the end of it.
Mayrina, the moment she was freed, began lashing out. At Nanang specifically, though the target appeared incidental to the force of the complaint. She went on. She kept going. She did not want any of this. The party should not have intervened. Ethel wanted her child, the one not yet born, for her own purposes, and in exchange Ethel would revive Mayrina's dead husband, because Mayrina loved him and love, in Mayrina's accounting, justified the arithmetic. This continued for some time. Then she was done. She left.
Anaik ran after her.
He slashed Mayrina from behind. Nearly split her.
Nanang, who had witnessed all of this, had no response. His face said what his mouth did not: "That just happened." Anaik did not elaborate. He did not offer justification or context or the kind of explanation that a reasonable person might expect after watching a man cut down the woman they had just rescued. He simply did it, in the way that Birch's blood sometimes surfaces through the iron before the philosophy has time to weigh in.
Only Traxex commented. What she said, the chronicle did not record.
XIII. The Coffin in the Swamp
The party emerged from the cave. Outside, in the swamp air, there stood a coffin.
Inside the coffin they found him. Mayrina's husband. A rotting corpse already. Whatever Ethel had promised to do for Mayrina, whatever love was supposed to justify, the object of that love had been past saving for some time. The promise was built on a body that could not hold it.
The day ended with the party camping in the swamp. The fire was small. The air was thick. Nobody discussed Mayrina. Nobody discussed Raphael. Nobody discussed the petrified people or the masked thralls or the fact that a deity's statue was now in the hands of someone in the Emerald Grove who had paid well for it. These were the events of a single day. The party slept in the swamp and the swamp was green and the sheep were gone and the chronicle closed its record for the night.