RP Crowsong

After a moment's pause, Smoke decided to pull away from the group and put her words into action. She wasn't exactly a trained scout, but she had some amount of experience, at least. She made sure to keep the group in sight; that limited the distance at which she could range, but it was more important to avoid getting lost right now.

Granted, that was experience in dungeons. And generally with monsters, not humans. Humans who likely hadn't been this way in days.

The big problem was that in a dungeon, you could tell that a passage was in use because, otherwise, it'd be covered in dusts and cobwebs. In the forest, there were signs of passage everywhere. She couldn't tell the difference between a flower that'd had its head torn off by an errant boot and one that a deer had taken a bite out of, nor could she recognize whether a bush had been dismembered by a jogging human or by a fleeing fox. She was sure there were differences, but. Well.

Blarghhh.

At least Dzwonyr was also looking.

"Anyone found anything?" she asked, returning to the group.
 
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Dzwonyr continued in silence, his vocalizations-- if any, given the fearsome quiet that bled from his form-- mere grunts and hushed breaths of exertion as he pushed forward with the weight of a fairy atop his shoulders. It seemed he was testing the strategy of ignoring Fen until she got bored and ran off. Climbing on his shoulders-- he had half the mind to yank her off and throw her halfway back to Pyotr's house...

Abruptly, he stopped-- eyes narrowing as he looked about, his draconic eye warming within its socket. His tongue drew along his teeth as he sighed, and pushed forward, trying to guide himself towards the disturbance he'd felt.

"Weird magicks are at work, here," He called out. "Stay vigilant. All of you."
 
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Strange magic indeed.

Sana paused a moment to take note of a tree as they passed. A tall old thing – or, it should have been with where they were in the forest. This space hadn’t been recently cleared by iron or fire, there wasn’t the damage for that, the lingering trauma of the woods trying to reclaim what had been recently lost. No, this was younger than it had any right to be, it all was. Time flowing the wrong way? By moments for some, instants for others, but if the cause had wormed its way into Potyr it certainly offered some explanation as to where the rot had gone.

In theory, anyway.

“We’re nearing the source of the magic, the effects seem more pronounced.” Sana said. “Some sort of chronomancy, though I can’t say I recognize the spell. We’ll need to careful we don’t fall under the effect as well.”
 
"Weird magics? Oh I couldn't have guessed from the corpse on my back slowly getting younger!"

While snarkier than anything else he had said up to that point, watching a man ignore the fey on his head like she was little more than the newest fashion in headwear made it difficult to take Dzwonyr seriously, although, something was most definetly off with that forest. Wide, tall, old trees with the bark of a sapling, leaves too young to be so plentiful; it looked unnatural, nearly artificial. Eventually, even the leaves on the path didnt crunch below his soles, too green and soft to do so.

He rarely paid attention to the shadows in the edges of his vision at this point, after thirty years of being accompanied by them, constantly checking for them to not be an incoming threat was a habit he'd lost. Yet, in that moment, his head whipped back a couple times- they were stirring, uncomfortable under the thick blanket of magic covering the place, that was not normal nor was it something he'd ever seen. His head pounded under the constant wirring of their gossip, desperate whispers from all directions, each step towards the mountain pushed him further and further on edge, shutting him up.
 
Fen tittered happily, ignoring Dzwonyr's grumbles - only sticking out her tongue at him in reply. Taunting this close was dangerous, of course, but he'd already proved himself not-a-danger. At least when the others were around. Big stupid thing, lots of big words, but his claws were cut and his teeth had rotted out.

The mention of time magic, however, gave her pause.

"Fen was right, see, right, right. Pyotr-thing dying backwards!" She paused, tilting her head. "Body-back, not soul-back. No more soul to stick inside, hm? Bark but no wood."

She gave a look around for real, this time. Not a mocking one, but an actual, good, hard look at the forest. Did it look like anything she might've encountered before? Did it look recognizable at all?
 
Aleyah nodded from her spot near the middle of the group, both in response to Fen and Sana. "It seems there is some sort of charm, either on the woods or the mountain itself. Conventional tracks will be impossible to find, and if the effect is on the mountain as a whole, we won't be able to judge proximity to the vault by the strength of the effect," she said, looking about the wood. She stopped, then, shaking her head in either frustration or defeat. "I have no damn idea how the old man even found the vault, if it's hidden like this. You all had time to search the house- did anyone find anything of importance, anything strange?"​
 
“I suppose we will have to see if we can detect any differences near the mountain.” Sana said, tapping the top of her staff with the pad of her finger. Was there much more she could do at the moment? Perhaps if she hadn’t been keeping an eye on the little one she could have done a more thorough job snooping. Sana sighed, not so much defeated, as it was just to make a sound. “There's a possibility that the magic is leaking from a specific point if it is happening because the vault has been left unsealed.” Doubtful, but an option worth vocalizing at the very least.

“Smoke and Dzwoyr, was there anything relevant you found upstairs?” She asked.
 
As if on cue, Dzwonyr fished into his pocket-- and pulled out the oddly-shaped stone, looking it over as he shrugged his shoulders to try and get the rapacious imp off of his shoulders before she snatched it from his fingers and tried to stab him with it.

"I'd found this stone, wrapped in his clothes. Unsure if it's related to the vault, but it very well might be, as I'd said in the house." He stated, giving a glance up towards Fen. "Does it ever occur to you to talk less?"
 
Fen's comment irked Smoke. If only because it suggested there might not actually be anything useful in his restoration.

"If the chronomancy in the air was the cause of his regeneration, wouldn't he have started 'rewinding' sooner, rather than decaying into the state we found him in? Unless this leak Sana refers to began within the last few hours, while we were at the house." She did her best to keep her tone light.

"And--no, Sana, I didn't see anything. Other than that map I mentioned."
 
At Smoke's comment, Fen shrugged.

"Could be. Couldn't be. Dunno, dunno. Maybe - the only things that go backwards are the things that can't go forwards!" She pressed her hand against the side of her head, tilting it. "You're the expert!"

She giggled from her perch.

"Fen's good at finding, though, Fen's good at finding," she chanted, kicking her feet and swaying forward and back. "Save a lotta fuss and fess, but you tell Fens to say things less!"

Still laughing, she covered her mouth in a muting gesture, muffling the noise, then leaned backwards and winked at Smoke.
 
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By this point, whatever spell had taken hold over the corpse of Pyotr had seemingly run its course. He had, at a glance, stopped reversing, now seeming entirely as if he were asleep. Scars, gained from years adventuring, some of which the assembled people were with him when he received, many of which Ashen Smoke had healed herself, were gone, fully repaired in a way that not even healing magic could accomplish. His body was still limp and unresponsive, though, and whatever effect was permeating the area clearly had not extended its effects to the group at large.

Aleyah, to her credit, was still searching. At this point, though, it was clear to all she was beginning to become frustrated. "How in the hells did he find this place, then? I've not seen anything, and if this forest is under a chronomantic spell, it's likely that whatever tracks he left to find his way back later are fully erased, between the rain and the magic. It doesn't-" She let out a frustrated sigh, before looking directly to Fen.

"You were there, before any of us. You arrived between my last visit and their arrival- sometime after the old man's death. Did you see anything that would seem strange? And Spirits abound, please do not talk in a circle."​
 
“The timeline is an issue, though the process didn’t start until after he had been unearthed, yes? Perhaps in the air isn’t wholly wrong, though we certainly don’t have enough time to try to learn the spell through its rules.” And harder to say if nailing down the particulars would lead them to the source. “Still, something that works on the dead and inanimate does seem to align with what we’ve seen.” Sana said, echoing Fen. Sana fell quiet for a moment, her lips pushed into a fine line.

“If the magic is related to the vault, it’s a possibility it’s been recently opened by someone else who knows of it then. Maybe someone else who Potyr had mentioned this too—” A lot of speculation in this line of thought, without much to go on, was there? Daggers and conspiracy in the night, still, would be smart to assume there was someone one step ahead of them, wouldn’t it?

“Ah, excuse me Fen, please, anything you could share would be appreciated.”
 
Fen looked directly back. After a few long seconds, she shrugged, then tilted her head.

"Words are lines, not circles," she said simply. "Can't make a circle from a line. That's just silly."

She scratched her head, hat flopping to the side.

"Didn't see nothing, didn't know nothing. This vaulty-thing - big important thing. Saw nothing of it, but I wanna, and when I wanna see things I can find them."

She turned her attention to Sana, now, thin, toothy smile quirked on her lips.

"Not for sharing, though. It's mine. I found it fair, and I found it square. Or - circle, cause it's a circle, too. Ha! See? Now I talk in circles."

The fae reached into her robes and pulled something out with a glitter of silver. Holding out her hands, she popped it open and lifted it out for everyone to see. A compass, the needle made of a pair of twining dragons - one silver, like the case, and one gold.

"Look-don't-touch," she said quickly, pulling it back a bit. "It likes me more. Not-yours."
 
Fen had not lied- it was certainly a compass. It was intricately crafted, the twinned dragons that constituted the needle rendered in such fine detail that one could make out individual scales on each creature. Notably, they were not Greatwyrms- the bodies too slender, a noted lack of gemstone or crystal in the made of the compass and its case. It was clearly made with care, but not necessarily reverence- at least, not in the way that the Greatwyrms wanted.

Upon being revealed to the group, sourced from within a pocket on Fen's person, the needle began to swing wildly, starting in a spin, before bouncing back and forth in sweeping arcs. It continued to alternate between these two movements, pointing in no direction in particular, providing no real guidance. It seemed, to those gathered around her, that the compass was just as lost as they were. Of course, Fen knew better. All it needed was a destination.

Dzwonyr would feel a burning from behind his eyepatch, a simmering anger he had felt once before, between the party's dissolution and reunion. The socket of the hidden eye began to feel cold, but beyond the discomfort, there was no direction, no will behind the feeling. It was not his own, and, for now, he felt no obligation to act on it.

Aleyah watched the compass spin, before looking to the fey-creature. She wanted to take it, given how flighty Fen seemed, but part of her knew that would almost guarantee their inability to find the vault. It was unlike anything she had seen, and in Wyrm-cities, would be almost certainly illegal. How, and why, a fey had something like that piqued her interest, but there were more important matters at hand.

"It's a very lovely compass, but how, exactly, is it meant to help us here? It seems just as lost as the rest of us."​
 
A very lovely, very broken compass. Ashen Smoke's frown deepened as she leaned in, locking her hands behind her back.

"Does it have some sort of command word, then?" she tried, looking to Fen and making an effort to wipe the disbelief off her face. "Or is there a special way of reading it?" The cult had some tools like that; things that read like gibberish unless you knew how they worked. But it was hard to see how you could do that with a compass.
 
“If we had his notes, we could have looked for any mention—” Sana again tapped her staff against the palm of her hand as she cut herself short. Would he have written it down if he felt like others were also after the vault? Possible, but it wasn’t like they had the book to sort through at this very moment. Instead, she looked from the compass back to then crystal that Dzwoyr held.

“A silly thought, but is there any resonance between the compass and the stone?” She asked.
 
"Not lost. Just not going," Fen snipped, a little offended. She pulled the compass close to her chest, hopping down from her perch on Dzwonyr's shoulder and parading to the front of the group. "No read, no word, no nothing. Just want."

She glanced over her shoulder, tail flicking.

"No ants on Fen's compass, no, no. Any ants on that stinky rock, keep 'em away. Don't want 'em. Don't need 'em. See?"

She closed her eyes and focused. The vault. That's where she wanted to be, right? That's what she wanted to see. What was in it? Why was it important? Why did that one little mayfly die for it? The questions flooded into her head in a deluge. Want, want, want, want.

She opened one eye.

No ants.
 
Fen focused, the compass firmly held in hand. At the onset, the needle simply continued to spin, indecisive as it had been when she'd revealed it, but once given a moment, the spin began to slow. Suddenly, the spin stopped altogether, instead transitioning to an oscillation, the golden dragon aligning itself towards the mountain. The wavering stabilized quickly, giving way to a clear direction.

Aleyah wasn't exactly enthused. How could she be, in this situation? Delightfully odd as it was, Fen was a fey of some variety, one who had supposedly been imitating Pyotr, one that was now claiming to know exactly where they were needing to go. Of course, maybe it was that simple, but she had reservations. Of course, those reservations were tempered by the fact that it was the only lead any of them had, now. Odds were Pyotr had taken whatever method he'd devised to find the vault to the grave, and if they were going to find it, and find out what happened to him... this may be their only chance.

"Better than nothing," she said, mostly a grumble, before motioning for Fen to lead the way.

----

It took another good few minutes to traverse the forest. With the guide of the compass, they were never truly lost, but the forest seemed wrong, in the same way Pyotr did. It looked completely normal, in that there was no signs of a fire or other such disaster to clear the trees, and yet there were large swathes of forest where the flora was simply younger than it should be. In addition, it seemed that it seemed to shift around them, on occasion obscuring the mountain ahead, almost as if the forest itself was trying to keep them away.

Eventually, however, perseverance and the guidance of Fen's compass paid off. They arrived at the foot of the mountain, the storm finally fully passed. The golden dragon pointed to the foot, where the slightly inclined grassy ground transitioned into a rocky face surrounded by a steep climb. In the center of the pseudo-cliff face, a small, singular crack, thin and vertical, was present.

In Dzwonyr's pocket, the shard of stone from Pyotr's chest began to shake and hum.​
 
For much of the Fen-led trek, Dzwonyr was his usual quiet self. With one eye burning ever-cold within its socket, he had naught but the other to keep him alert-- and while a single of his pair was worth the whole for a layman, it still left him with a nagging unease to be so crippled. Voluntarily. But the eyepatch helped him focus, and kept it from seeing fully. And that was good enough for him.

The walk provided ample enough time for reflection, along with paranoia-- Dzwonyr saw fit to indulge neither, and remained focused as the compass honed in on its destination. As his rock began to shake and hum, he dipped a hand into the fabric of his jacket and pulled the trinket free-- clutching it in his hand and seeing if it tried to leave his grip. He started towards the crack of the cliff-face.

Big enough to fit in? In any case, he'd certainly pushed through far narrower spaces, in his younger years. And now, well-- he only seemed to find work as an assassin, which favored contortionist stealth above all else.

"Seems to be as good a place as any," He muttered. "I think the fae should go first. Guide the way." And trigger any traps. Ideally.
 
“What an interesting piece.” Sana muttered, watching the compass react to Fen’s… want. A touch of fae glamor perhaps? If it was a machinist’s work then that was a workshop she would love to visit. Another time perhaps, when there was time to ask Fen about her tool. Though, it was hard to say how much she could get out of the little one. They were talkative, but their explanations didn’t always make the most sense.

The magic which twisted between the trees certainly didn’t loosen its grip as the party followed Fen’s direction deeper into the forest. If she had more time perhaps she could learn the rules of it, but what was that but a fleeting wish, a tomorrow's sort of problem. Today's sort of problem was the vault.

Sana frowned at the suggestion of sending Fen ahead of the group, but she didn’t directly question the demand. She did, however, look down at the little fae.

“Fen, do you have a nose for traps?” She asked, “I can keep an eye open for arcane tricks, but I haven’t much of a talent for mechanical ones.”
 
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