Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn From: hutch@ibeam.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Subject: [DQ] Week 17: Memories Over Beer Message-ID: Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1992 21:34:00 GMT [ADMIN] Mike Sander has a post which this is a followup to, which describes our group's return to the Inn. But for no good reason it hasn't gotten here, so for those of you who have threadfollowing newsreaders, my apologies. No references line. -------- It was late morning. The Rabble had mostly gone off to work, except for a few, and the Dragons' Inn was quiet. A rendezvous was happening. Mary placed the pitcher on the table, and placed glasses for each of those assembled. A basket of hot bread followed. The two men smiled their thanks then began to converse. "Kadrys will be showing up later," 'Raelf told Lancos. "Valgar, we're over here!" He waved at a figure coming down the stairs. They were joined by the dark-bearded man. "Man, it seems like forever." "I know how you feel. I went to see my friend in the Guards, I found out that for the Guards it's only been six days since the Riots, but it seems like six months to me." Lancos reached for the pitcher. It was full of the thick chewy Catamount Porter that 'Raelf favored. He shrugged. 'Raelf grinned and poured a second glass to settle while he sipped his first. "Time is pretty bent today - too many Big Things goin' down. I think that I'm in three other places right now and I haven't been time-forking at all since I merged my timelines." 'Raelf pulled a shiny black toothpick from behind one ear and <> stretched it to chopstick size, then began twirling it like a baton around his fingers. Valgar leaned forward, reaching for the bread. "I went to the Mages' Guild - I wanted to ask for someone who knew about obscure curses. They were closed to the public - seems like something happened early this morning, almost brought the building down." "Bummer, dude," 'Raelf said, with a look of elaborate innocence. "Wonder what THAT was." He stabbed a piece of bread with the stick. Lancos gave him a sideways look. "Where's Kadrys off to?" "Dunno. Something about checkin' up on the Dragon." "Oh. Right. You know, I kind of miss that noisy sword." "Yeah." They fell silent for a while, then Lancos spoke. "Hey. Where's your older self at? I want to ask him some questions." 'Raelf choked on his porter. After a minute he recovered his composure. "I'm right here, Lancos. I told you, I merged the timelines." "I don't think I'm going to get used to this. You ARE the guy who went with us to Ak Ir'neg, right?" "Ayup." "And you say you're ALSO the guy who took Kadrys off to whatever that place was that he went to." "Right. We split once. We're merged now. Same as same as." "So what happened before? Why did you split yourself?" "OH. Er... You want the whole thing?" "Sure." "Listener? You know any creepy music, like Ballad of Tam Lyn? Great..." The bard substituted a gitarron for the mandolin he had been playing. He began to pluck out an eerie tune. " About fifty years ago, the Tan Ru probe wandered up from the outside spinward curve of the paraverse. It had grown old and wanted to rest - the cosmoi where it could be with other mechanistic minds were places where its magic-powered engines could not sustain themselves. It could travel anywhere, but its engineered psyche could not change it so that it could belong. After an infinity of travel, sampling and testing creatures on the way, sometimes consuming them for power, sometimes releasing them to madness or prophecy, the probe learned emotions. After a while it became fascinated with fear and death. So it went to a place where it could explore those things without interference. It got a better look than it wanted. The Entity that lived there, and its servants, were very clever and cunning in their evil. Tan Ru accepted a gift, and then used it, and was trapped. So it started a long slow process to escape. It watched a nearby nexus. After a few decades, something began to shape, a possibility that an ancient creature of magic might make a mistake, and the ramifications of that mistake sent out a scholar into the places where Tan Ru had last sensed a Traveller. It selected through the probabilities and gradually the chance became fact. It let hints be seen by its captors and co-conspirators, and they acted as expected, throwing power about clumsily and with wild stupid abandon. The Traveller returned with the scholar, and they acted, and the trap was closed. On the first timeline, the captors took just the Traveller and two of his acquaintances, using the probe's capture-remote to pluck them up from where they sat, and they used the death and destruction of the two in order to coerce the Traveller to command Tan Ru. They wanted power. The Traveller, like all compelled summoned beings, chose to give them only the letter of their desires, and not the spirit. The power they craved was given in a form they couldn't withstand, and the Entity and its slaves were destroyed. But this destruction freed the Evil collected in their Place of Shadows, and it escaped to saturate the Nexus and all the worlds it touched. The Traveller commanded the probe to twist time back, and things started on a different track. In that track, nobody survived: it required his destruction to power the timeshift. The second timeline was riskier. Tan Ru selected for dissension in ranks and betrayal of trust, and the Entity's chief servitor took power in its stead, imprisoning it. The servitor was wiser in the ways of the living, and selected lackeys to help it. When it saw the Traveller would come, it prepared a complex ritual with which to seize power from Tan Ru, to become something like a god. Between the servitor and Tan Ru, the ritual was devised, and at the end it was decided that five people were required. On this time track, the Traveller could not just be snatched from the heart of the Dragons' Inn. Tan Ru would lure them. A hint about a magic stone was left in the past of a giant race, whose losing fight against a demon horde could be won if only they had that stone; their Giant emissary would be bait. The roads were opened for a wandering Warrior, with just the right combination of eager brashness and experience. There was a FreeMan, an escapee from a strange slave galley - the cthonian mother who had been manipulated into bringing the Traveller still attracted her own kind, and they still enslaved normal humans. A Vampire, ancient and tired, was lured to the Nexus to fill a place in the rituals. And finally, a promising young Succubus was led from the hills and tricked into fastening herself to the Warrior. On a day of madness, the Giant's companion dragon was taken. The Giant and the Warrior gathered help - the Traveller and the Man Who Chose Freedom, and they were attacked by the capture-remote, and the spirit of the Giant was stolen. With the Traveller's help the Giant's Sword was able to move the body like a puppet, though it took all the magic it could muster. The four of them followed the carefully placed clues, to a cave which wasn't really there. (The Succubus trailed after them.) They entered the cave, and were lured by a confrontation with the dragon's alleged captors, to the portal to the Shadow Realm. The portal was a trap, and they fell into it, even the Succubus. Unwilling "guests" of the Dark Master in his home, they were tormented and came to despair, and the ancient Vampire shed his last trace of humanity, choosing the path of Evil. In the midst of a battle, carefully set up by the Dark Master, the bloodlust was made to overwhelm the Vampire and he attacked the Warrior, and was destroyed in the battle - the Dark Master would brook no rival powers. His spirit was damned by his choice of evil and it was dragged down to the Pits, and he had so savaged the Warrior with fang and with the draining of his life that healing was impossible. The Traveller was involved in the same battle, and was killed, with the human part of him captured in a jar, and the rest dispersing along the elements. By the battle rage the FreeMan was slowly and painfully transformed by the Dark into a bestial parody of himself, wild and without the power to reason, and was chained to be used by the Dark Master at a later time. After some days or years the Succubus, still free because of her evil, performed a blasphemous rite on the fallen, crippled Warrior, and the Traveller's scattered parts were brought together again. He destroyed the magical creature that his stolen human spirit had been bound in, but the spirit was all but gone, and he recovered only the echoes of its life. The Warrior, because of the blasphemy which had killed him, and the Vampire's bite, rose as a Vampire himself. Finally the Dark Master was pleased with what his pawns had become, and by way of a trick, got the surviving pawns together in his pentacle. He killed his servant Vornick in the center of the pentacle to lay a compulsion spell on the Traveller, forcing him to grant wishes by commanding Tan Ru in a way it couldn't resist. The first wish was to cause the chtonian being in Generica to be locked into an eternal timeloop, in combat with her many powerful enemies, those who had been the TRUE guardians of that city. The second wish was to grant him the power to open gateways between worlds so that he need no longer rely on the probe. The third wish was for power like that of the gods, to draw strength from worship and to use it to shape things to his will. The fourth wish - but the archetypal rules of service-compelling magics do not allow a fourth wish, and the Traveller used that breach to free himself and his friends. The Succubus was killed as they tried to escape, and Tan Ru shifted the others away to Generica, but to no avail. The Dark Master took power from the killing of the Succubus and stripped the probe of its sentience: it spun away into the nothing between worlds. The first place to fall was DiamondRise in Titania. The Giant had been returned to his city, his spirit crippled. The DiamondSword had been twisted by the time spent in the Shadow Plane, and grew corrupt. When they were attacked, the Giant died at the fangs of BlackSilver who had been his friend, and the sword was taken by the Dragon. At this, the Demon Mother gave her worship to the new godling and he took the power and shattered the walls. An army of enslaved and undead giants then swept forth to conquer the Nexus, and with her most powerful defenders looped in time, great Generica fell. The Traveller knew that he could not prevail and that he could never escape from the Dark Master. The Warrior continued in his unlife, hiding in shadows and never seeing the sun, trying to emulate those traits that the ancient vampire had used to survive. The man who had become a Beast, was returned by the sunlight to his senses, but nightfall made him revert. And then when the Dark Master took the center of the Nexus, night came again, remaining unbroken by day. The Traveller had only one hope. He had spent the months before the Dark Master's conquest in preparing a tool of power, a travel device. He returned to the past, to just before where things had started to go wrong. And he bent time by his presence, and twisted chance to his will. There was only one timeline he could see where Lord Raven was truly stopped, and he had to make that the real one. But he knew that it would cost an innocent life. The timefork was spun. Then when Tan Ru, in the first attempt to take the Questers, found a secret message planted in its mind, it began to search across the timelines. In a distant realm in the relative past it found a man, gifted in magic beyond most, but of a gentle, fragile nature. Torment and disaster drove the man to the right place. He was there when he had to be, and his power found the only way open to end his suffering. You know that story. He died as he saved us, and Raven was killed. My regret is for more than his death. I had to cause William to be driven here, knowing nothing of who he was, or what he was like. If he had not been chosen, the world would have fallen. But I couldn't give him the freedom to choose it. It was set up so he would have to do what he did once he was with us. He wasn't just a martyr. He was a sacrifice." And the music died as Listener stopped playing.