Chapter 3: Crow's Nest

The person holding an arrow ready lowers his bow with a dumbfounded expression on his face. He looks away in embarrassment and tries to surreptitiously put his arrow away without anyone noticing.

Greybeard stares for a moment longer, then shakes his head slowly. "My apologies... I haven't seen a Naucan in years. I... never did get used to... er." He stops, not wanting to embarrass himself by saying something irretrievably rude. He turns to a girl standing nearby watching Verrian and Ember with wide eyes. "Marit, run and find Renaya, please. Ask her to come quickly, if she's able."

The girl doesn't move, too fascinated by Verrian and Ember to get her feet to work.

"Now, Marit," Greybeard says more sternly, and the girl shakes herself out of her reverie and nods to Greybeard, running off back up the corridor.

"My granddaughter. She does have her flights of fancy," he says by way of apology.

It is not more than a few short minutes later when the girl Marit returns, holding Renaya's hand (to be honest, pulling her along a little bit too). The fallen mage wears an expression somewhere between irritation, fond amusement and curiosity.

Renaya says, "I am told that you would like assistance interpreting a book? I'm afraid Marit here wasn't terribly clear on just what it was I'm being dragged along for." She maintains the same quiet, slightly detached tone, but there's a spark in her eyes that wasn't there before.

Renaya gently separates her hand from the girl's and joins Verrian and Ember for the quiet conversation. "A vault, you say. Interesting," she muses quietly. "Well, I don't know how much help I will actually be, but I can certainly try."

As Verrian and Ember lead Renaya through the tunnels, some of the darkness seems to lift from her mood. She stops in the room with the stone tables and runs her fingers lightly over the pitted whitestone. "Fascinating," she says. "These are the symbols you're hoping to translate?" When answered in the affirmative, she nods. "I'd like to come back and look at these again once we've taken a look at the door."

Moving along, her expression grows angry as you move through the room with the cells, her lip curling in a derisive sneer, but she says nothing.

When entering the final room, though, she pauses atop the first platform to take it all in. "This is..." she says in a hushed voice. "What are these statues doing here? I had no idea..."

She lifts the hem of her robes as she walks down the stairs, and moves immediately to put a hand on the base of one of the statues. "These are of Valerman origin. Or at least Valerman style..." She references the nation across the Spine Mountains to the south, known for its agricultural and natural wonders. "Why in a tunnel complex beneath an Alcaven village?" She walks around the base of the statue, looking up at its twining form reaching toward the ceiling.

There is a childlike sense of wonder on her face as she moves through the room, turning in a full circle as she walks toward the stairs to the upper platform. "Incredible! How could I have missed this all these years? How did we never know this was here?"

Renaya shakes her head, responding absently, "No idea."

She approaches the wild scratching on the walls and bends closer to read it carefully. "Fascinating...". She traces some of the symbols with a finger and moves to trace the same symbols around the door frame.

"No no no..." she mutters as she continues to go back and forth between the wall scratchings and the door frame. "He had some interesting insights, but I think he was too anxious... he didn’t finish the translation. I could be wrong... though I don’t think so... I believe that the first part is correct, but I think it goes on to say ‘Life taken will bar the way forever.’"

She falls quiet then as she continues studying the symbols.

Renaya clicks her tongue against her teeth. "Give me a moment," she says. Though in your short acquaintance, she has generally been a little withdrawn, and certainly not confrontational, you know from conversations with Yelnar and the townsfolk that Renaya has a reputation for being formidable and stern. Her sharp, no-nonsense tone is the first tangible evidence you've had of that. She will answer when she's good and ready, and not before.

She steps back to take in the door frame as a whole, one hand over her mouth as she stares at it through narrowed eyes. Those nearby can see her lips moving, though silently; whatever internal monologue she is keeping up is trying to make its way out, perhaps.

"No!" she cries suddenly, and rolls her eyes ceilingward. "Not life. Or at least, not life as we think of it."

She turns to the others, a faintly smug smirk on her face. Her tone turns to one many of you would recognize from the more pedantic instructors back at the School, when they think they've got a particularly clever problem for you to solve.

"As I said, these statues are of Valerman make. Not the mountains, and the dwarves there," she says, looking briefly at Ephwrath. "But the fields and forests of the southern part of the country. What was Valerma's strength before the War? What made their nation stand out? Their talents at growing things, particularly agriculture."

She stops there, and lifts her eyebrows with an unspoken question, looking expectantly at each of you in turn. Looking for the answer to the riddle.

Renaya clasps her hands at her waist. She doesn't say anything, but as each answer comes, her lips are pressed more and more tightly together, a look of bland disappointment growing around her eyes.