Session Twenty-Three — 07/05/26
1832 AS — Namal 26
The Truth Beneath the Satchel
I asked them to gather.
There are words that come easily to me. Too easily, perhaps. Words for taverns, for frightened crowds, for warriors on the edge of battle, for kings who need humbling and fools who need encouragement. I have spent a lifetime shaping sound into purpose.
And yet, when the time came to speak plainly to my friends, I found myself nearly without language.
The satchel felt heavier than it ever has.
Not because the book within had changed.
Because I had.
I told them.
Not everything at once. No truth of that weight enters a room cleanly. It must be carried in, set down carefully, and allowed to be seen before it is understood.
The artifact is called Grimoire Mutandi Und Sciencetia et Memoria.
A book of change.
Of knowledge.
Of memory.
And of truths too absolute to be safely spoken.
I explained what I could. That it is tied to the goddess of knowledge. That it does not merely record reality, but threatens to reshape it when truth is wielded without restraint. That some truths, when spoken by the wrong tongue or with the wrong certainty, may cease to be description and become command.
This is why I have guarded it.
This is why I have hidden it.
This is why I have lied by omission, dodged questions, stiffened at curiosity, and carried silence like armor.
I expected anger.
Perhaps accusation.
Perhaps the quiet withdrawal of trust.
Instead, they listened.
That was almost worse.
A shouted condemnation can be met with defense. A blade can be parried. But trust, offered after secrecy, has no proper counter.
Gildas understood the danger quickly. Of course he did. His mind reaches toward terrible ideas the way flame reaches toward dry parchment.
Mikani heard the burden beneath the words.
Brigit, I suspect, had already assembled half the truth from shadows, glances, and the weight of the satchel against my ribs.
Corvinas received it with the solemnity of a man who knows vows are sometimes prisons and sometimes bridges.
Roon remained Roon, which is to say more perceptive than he is often credited and less troubled by cosmic peril than any sane person ought to be.
We spoke of Salazar.
Of infernal forces.
Of the hostile rearrangement of realms and powers, of demons attempting not merely conquest but replacement. A takeover of the great machinery beneath the world. The Wand of Wells, the Grimoire, the Cataclysm, the Wells themselves — all of them feel less like separate mysteries now and more like pieces of a single awful instrument.
I do not know whether telling them made the burden lighter.
But it made the loneliness smaller.
That may be enough.
Gifts from a Queen
Later, the Queen asked what we desired in return for saving Catur.
There are many ways rulers say thank you. Most involve making gratitude feel like negotiation.
Still, we answered.
Corvinas asked for protection and chose a Sentinel Shield, a fitting thing for a man who seems determined to stand between death and everyone else.
Brigit visited the fletcher and selected winged arrows. I have no doubt they will find their destinations before their victims realize a journey has begun.
Gildas asked for a scroll of Dispel Magic, so that he might copy the spell into his book. This is what wizards call a gift. The rest of us call it more ways for Gildas to become alarming.
Mikani asked for gems and chose the finest diamonds as components for magic that may one day pull a soul back from death.
No one joked much about that.
Roon asked for winged boots.
This concerned me immediately.
I asked for an alchemy jug and passage to the Gale.
One should never underestimate the usefulness of a vessel that produces exactly the wrong liquid at exactly the right moment.
A ritual was prepared.
Magic gathered.
A portal opened.
And we stepped from the deep into the storm.
The Gale
The Gale is not a place.
Not entirely.
It is a wound in the world where the Elemental Plane of Air presses too closely against mortal terrain. Wind screams there without pause. Snow drives sideways. The sky feels less above than around, as though the whole region has forgotten which direction is proper.
Mikani communed with nature and found what we needed: a settlement nearby, and beyond it, the path toward the Monastery of the Open Hand.
Roon, newly gifted with flight, decided to test his boots.
I cannot say this surprised me.
He rose into the storm with the confidence of a man who has never properly respected gravity and has now been given tools to formalize the disagreement.
For a moment, it was almost beautiful.
Then the white dragon emerged from the snow.
It came like a shape cut from the storm itself — pale scale, cold breath, violence given wings. It struck Roon hard enough to remind even him that the sky has predators.
He returned to the ground alive.
Naturally.
We debated whether the dragon was guardian, warning, patrol, or merely another creature in this world with poor manners and excellent timing.
I recalled a song from Norhundra of a ruthless white dragon once defeated there. The old songs are rarely as dead as one hopes.
Maps, Wind, and Sensible Fear
We reached the settlement and found a cartographer named Joshua — a small gnome with the weary precision of one who has mapped places that would rather remain unmapped.
He gave us a rough path toward the Monastery of the Open Hand.
Two days, at least.
Longer, if the terrain objected.
It will object.
The map marked hazards, pitfalls, and places of interest. We learned more of the Gale’s inhabitants: ice mephits, air elementals, pyramidons, myrmidons, and patrols that make casual travel unwise. The land is watched. The wind itself may be watched.
That thought unsettles me.
Not because we are being observed.
We are always being observed now.
By Wells.
By demons.
By queens.
By gods, perhaps.
By books.
The Monastery lies ahead.
So does another Well.
Another truth.
Another piece of this widening pattern.
Ink After Confession
I told them.
I write the words again because I need to see them.
I told them.
For so long, I believed the secret defined my duty. I believed my silence preserved them. Protected them. Spared them from a burden I was uniquely cursed or chosen to carry.
Pride hides easily inside sacrifice.
That is an ugly truth.
The party deserved to know long before today.
But fear is a persuasive jailer, and I have been an obedient prisoner.
No longer.
Whatever comes next, they face it with open eyes.
And I face them without the wall I built between us.
I do not know whether this was wisdom.
I only know that it was necessary.
The Gale howls outside.
The monastery waits.
The Wells are failing.
Salazar moves.
And somewhere beneath all of this, the Grimoire rests, silent as ever.
But tonight, for the first time in many years, I am not its only keeper.
I continue to write.
Not alone.
