What Moved Like a Vesk

The last records left him at the mouth of a roofed cave, with a Devourer pendant already in the party's keeping. The next ones open on a figure ahead of them. They do not say exactly where, and I will not place it more precisely than they do.

It was a vesk, or it looked like one, though thinner than vesk run. It wore brigandine, not the trappings of a cultist. And it moved oddly. The notes give it only that word, oddly, and I have thought about it more than it probably deserves. A body that moves wrongly is telling you something before it has done anything at all.

They closed in. Someone reached out with a sense for magic, and the answer was immediate: a great deal of it, far more than any soldier in armour should carry. So the party struck first.

The Observances have a Reading for this, and Taeon would have known it. Novitiates usually meet it in the marshes, learning to tell a stick from a snake.

Note the creature that moves wrong in its own shape.
Do not trust the outline. Trust the gait.
Note the leaf that does not lift with the wind.
Note the bird that sings, and the branch that does not bend under it.
A shape can be borrowed. Weight cannot.
Do not wait for the mask to fall. It may not.
What hides is not always weak. What is weak is not always hiding.
Ask what the air knows. The air is not deceived.
Then choose: go wide, or go first.
If you go first, go together.
So watch the walk. So listen under the skin.
The false thing has a true one inside it. Meet that one.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Disguise

The Reading does not say what the true thing will be. That, I think, is the honest part of it.

Bren's blow landed first and got through its armour. Taeon reached for its mind, meaning to lock it where it stood, and it shrugged the hold off as though nothing had touched it. ED210 came forward with its heavy weapon. Then the records stop calling it a vesk.

They call it a monster, and in rougher words than that. They name it a Skreesire. The order's bestiaries describe the Skreesire as a bulky, rounded psychic thing with tentacles and wings too small to carry it, a creature of rocky hills. The notes do not say how the slim figure in brigandine became that, or whether it had been that all along, and I will not guess for them. What they record is the fight. Most of the party's blows slid off it. Only the heaviest got through. It struck back hard. At one point something meant to rattle someone failed to take hold, though the record does not say who was meant to be rattled.

The fight went on. Grek swung badly enough to throw off his own aim for a while. Someone recalled what was known of such creatures: its magic was the magic of warding, and of taking hold of minds. That explains, perhaps, why Taeon's hold failed. A thing that masters minds is not easily mastered by one.

How it ended, the records do not say. The party came through. That much is plain, because what follows is a search.

They found a symbol of the Devourer and took it. They found a body a few days dead, lying on a satchel, and in the satchel a good collection of coins, about twelve hundred credits. The notes do not say whose body it was, or whether the creature killed them. Then Bren, moving about the site, came upon a hidden entrance. Someone wondered aloud whether the Skreesire had been guarding it. The question is written down with a question mark, and I leave it there.

The tunnel beyond was made, not grown. There was concrete work in it. They climbed down six feet and walked eighty or ninety feet west, into a severe room gone to rust, with a single light burning above a door forty feet away. The door was an airlock. They put their helmets on. Past it was another open doorway.

Then a blue mist came down.

Taeon and Grek felt fine. The others did not. The mist carried spores, and the spores settled on the mind: judgement, presence and clear thinking all dimmed together. It would last two hours for Bren and three for Hugh, who appears in the records here for the first time, already among them, with nothing said of how they came to be.

The Field Canon, in its later additions, keeps a single line from that tunnel:

Sealed helmets did not stop the blue mist. Some were spared; cause not determined.
(Kopalo, from field notes; the tunnel.)

— the Field Canon, on Spores, later additions

I would like to know why he was spared. He did not write it down, which I take to mean he did not know either.

They went on into a big room. It smelled of ozone. There were pillars, and there were body parts, and among them the remains of something undead and humanoid, cut into small pieces. Someone in the party worked at the computer there and broke into it. It called itself Reception. It named the mist an entrance deterrent, and it named the room a chamber of devouring. And through it the mind-spore trap was shut off for good.

The records end in that room, with the trap silenced, two of the party still slowed by it, and the pieces on the floor not yet explained.

I notice that the word devouring is the computer's, not his. He copied it down without comment, the way he copied everything he had not yet understood.