Digging Deeper

When Dmitri tried to sleep, he saw the child with the mask. He'd given up trying to sleep hours ago, and had given up trying to puzzle out the meaning of the words he'd been told shortly after that. If there was one thing he'd learned in his apprenticeship as a mage, it was that sometimes you had to wait for understanding.

He wandered Inlakes a bit; after the procession of royals, the town was virtually tireless. Businesses that normally closed at dusk kept their doors open at all hours of the night, and there was more than enough coin flowing in the door to justify it. His feet took him to the school of Gamasen, but, predictably, their door was closed. They had no need cause to be open, and Dmitri's restlessness wouldn't change that.

So he roamed the streets, before returning to the inn some time later. The common room was still bustling, though the late hour made the conversations hushed, almost reverent. Dmitri's funds were still better off than they'd been in years after the business with the shipyard, even after the heavy cost of enrolling in the mage school. He purchased a cup of hot mulled wine from the bartender they kept on for the few nights that closing wasn't an option. The man's eyes were heavy, glazed with want of sleep, but he, like most, was more than willing to forgo rest in the short term to be a part of the pageantry, however far removed his position. Dmitri took the cup, warmth seeping through the ceramic surface into his hands, and settled himself near the hearth.

"Beware the serpent and the six. Summoner of snakes. The silver crown." He muttered it to himself for the hundredth time, and still wasn't any closer to decoding the cryptic words. Sighing, resigned, he drank, and watched the fire burn low to pulsing embers.

"You know," a voice whispered, "you're on the right track."

Dmitri's body spun around, wine slopping over the edge of the glass, covering his fingers in the sticky, too-hot wine. He saw no one, and cursed quietly at his nerves. After two decades of shades popping up at their whim, he really should be used to disembodied voices. He turned in on himself, focusing that part that let him see the members of his family. The chair next to him seemed to waver, and, suddenly, a woman was sitting there. Dmitri gaped slightly; ghosts he was used to, but Ilyena, his many-times-removed grandmother, sat in the chair looking as solid as the rest of the bar patrons. In his life, this level of solidity, full manifestation, had happened fewer than a handful of times, and never with one so old as she. The dead, especially the cursed dead, were supposed to lose themselves over the years, to fade into obscurity, not look like they should be sharing a drink.

"I knew, back when I was alive. I knew, but they wouldn't teach me. Untrainable, sorcerous, abomination. But I knew. I saw our family the same you do, Dmitri. I saw what was waiting if I didn't fix things." His complete lack of engagement had, apparently, been overlooked. Ilyena, however lifelike in appearance, looked dazed. Whatever was causing her to manifest so clearly obviously hadn't extended to her mind, her memories. She spoke in the strange patterns of the long dead, pieces of knowledge lost in a haze of dormant memory and crumbling personality.

"I found it in the past, Dmitri. The thing that was going to tell us how to fix it. How to know what the curse was. It was in the past, further than I was. I had to dig, dig down through what everyone can see, and go down, down into the past. I left it there, so that my child, or hers, could find it and save us. I was rushing home, and the Grey Moon stole my breath away. Stole it before I could tell anyone, Dmitri."

He sat, at a complete loss for words. Ilyena was known to him; she'd appeared, cooed over him as a child, told him a few rambling stories about the halfling who went adventuring, or the gnome who tricked the giant. Never before had she talked about family business, and he'd certainly never heard anything this impassioned from her. Her eyes clung to his, beseeching, as if she knew that this chance, this night, would be her one shot at whatever secret she thought she had locked away.

"You brought us back here, Dmitri, and the land remembers. The past remembers. You have to go into the past, and find what I left. Follow the way I followed, and dig deep, Dmitri. Dig deep."

At that moment, a log in the fire snapped. Embers were thrown into the common area on the still air. No one was sitting as close to the warmth as Dmitri, but everyone looked, curious, when he jumped into the air, swatting as his twice burned hand.

When he turned back, seconds later, Ilyena was gone, leaving another puzzle that he didn't have the answer to. Dmitri sighed, leaving the cooling cup of wine, and went upstairs to try to sleep, leaving a silver crown behind for the overworked inn staff.