What the Elves Wore

The grenade that ended the last page begins this one. It was a sonic grenade. It went off among them, and the sound filled the gallery and left Grek deaf. That is all the records give it: one line, and an ellipsis after it, as if he had more to say and no time to say it.

They don't say who threw it. They don't say how the fight with the painted lashunta ended, or what became of the one held fast. The next thing written down is a room, and the party standing in it, so they came through. I will leave the rest where the records leave it.

A word on the deafness, because novitiates tend to pass over it. A sound weapon in a stone room does not need to be aimed. The walls finish the work. Grek was in the room, and that was enough.

The voice is a tool. So is the ear.
In a closed room, sound does not choose.

— the Field Canon, on Close Quarters

The room beyond had a circle of stars on its floor. Mould had grown over it, so the stars showed through a living layer, the way old paving shows through moss. On the wall was a bas-relief of elves, and the elves were tattooing the stars onto themselves. There was a tapestry on the wall. There were beads on the floor, and the beads were opals.

I want to be careful here, because this is the room the order keeps coming back to. The basin room had stars on its ceiling, letting the light in. The gallery had twelve elves with starbursts and tattoos. Here, at last, was the carving that joined them. The stars were overhead, and on the floor, and on skin. The records don't say what it meant. They only show that whoever built the statue cared about it enough to put it everywhere.

The Fragments keep this room. Novitiates are usually taught it before anyone tells them how little the records say.

And beyond the room of the sound there was a room of stars,
and the stars were set in a circle in the floor, and the mould had taken the floor,
and the stars were under the mould, and still they were stars.
And on the wall the elves of the old time were cut in stone,
and they were marking the stars into their own skin, one upon another.
And there was a cloth upon the wall, and beads upon the floor, and the beads were opal.
And Kopalo looked at the elves who wore the sky.
And beside that room the name of Halqueem Zan is set down,
and a question with it: whether he had founded a cult, or found one.
And the telling does not know which. And the telling does not know who asked.
And they searched the place called the head,
and they found the stars again, taken down in pictures.
And she who kept the record asked why stars should be kept in pictures, in a place made of stars.
And no one answered her, and so the question is kept.

— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told

The Fragments say "the place called the head" as if everyone knew where it was, and I should be honest that the records don't. His note says only Searching the room: the "head", in quotation marks, which may be the statue's head or may be something else that the party called by that name. The photos of the stars are real; they are in the note. As for Zan, the note has his name with a question mark after it, found a religous cult?, spelled in a hurry, and I can't tell you any more than the Fragments can.

They took what was there to take. Two healing serums. A personal comm unit. Three weeks of field rations. A credstick holding a thousand credits. Fifteen of the opal beads, each worth about eighty. The records list these things without saying whose they were.

Outside, something had been filling the air to the west, a fog that someone had called up. Now it was clearing. In the rubble to the south-east were two large creatures, and they looked familiar. They were ksariks.

The order teaches novitiates about ksariks early, because they are ours, in a way: Castrovel's own. A ksarik is a plant that has learned to walk, four-legged, about twelve feet long, crested, tailed, with its face wrapped in vines and its eyes on stalks. It spits acid. It hunts in packs. The note says these two were hunting. It does not say what.

Qwitch was over to the west, apart from the rest. The note sets that down beside the ksariks and goes no further, and neither will I.

The next line reads Back at HQ, and novitiates tend to take it for a journey. It wasn't one. The party never left the field. They reached HQ from where they were, with the ruins still around them and the ksariks somewhere in the rubble. The records don't say whether anyone tended Grek's ears first, or how he followed the talk if no one did. They say only that the party told the Starfinders everything.

The Starfinders wanted them to follow it up: find more information, or find the system. He wrote that their enthusiasm had turned to anxiety. Then he wrote the offer. Two thousand credits, if the party could find the Devourer.

Most of you know the name, and the cult that serves it: a scattered faith, with cells on many worlds, that wants to unmake everything there is. I notice that the Starfinders did not offer money for the ruins, or the stars, or the elves who wore them. They offered it for the Devourer. Whatever the party told them, it was enough to turn their eagerness into worry.

He came out of a room of stars with pictures of more stars, and was asked to go looking for the thing that would put them all out.