Liar
Session: 2025-07-30
He reached for what he had.
Mirror Image. Three of them, standing where he stood. He didn't wait for anything else.
The room was full of people with black running from their eyes.
He'd had three images of himself at the start. By the end there was one left. He let it fade.
Victor had fought through it — heavier than usual, something pulling at him, but he'd fought. Nobody went down.
None of the townsfolk had tried to stop. None of them had run. They just kept coming until they couldn't. He'd seen fights like this before, in the sense that he'd seen fights where the other side was not concerned about losing. This had that quality.
There was a room behind the fireplace.
He found it by the way the wall sat wrong. Inside: a poisoner's kit, writing materials. The writing didn't say anything he could read — not a language, not a code, just marks. He stood in the middle of it for a while and said the words for Detect Magic, slow and patient, the way the ritual required.
Nothing came back.
He tried again. Still nothing.
He stood there and thought about what it takes to build a thing like this — the kit, the room, the concealment — and how long it takes, and then he stopped thinking about it.
Mica was gone. He was glad she was out of it. He didn't dwell on it.
They locked the doors from the outside. Prudence and Deathbringer were where they'd left them, which was the best news of the past several hours. Elara said something to the party as they gathered the animals. He listened for the meaning of it. It had the shape of a threat, without quite being one. He didn't respond. They walked.
The path to the church. The embankment. The door.
Then a blink, and the church was something else.
The ceiling was gone. In its place: not sky, not darkness — nothing, the kind that felt wrong to look at directly. The room was the same room enlarged past what the walls could contain, and the proportions in it were all wrong. The symbols had been torn open, written over, made into something they hadn't been before. The floor was still the floor. That was the only part that hadn't changed.
Four shapes in the corners.
Mirabelle at the dais, looking up when they came in.
Behind her stood a piece of obsidian, carved into a sculpture of some kind, with an eye worked into the face of it. The eye was pulsing yellow. He looked at Mirabelle. The pulse was in sync.
"Hello," she said. "My young wizard friend."
He wasn't a wizard. She was speaking to Victor.
"I asked the villagers to bring you to me." A small gesture toward the four shapes in the corners. "These are my guards. They will die for me."
There was something in her voice that sounded like an apology. That was the part he couldn't find a frame for.
She said Kelemvor was a false god. She said she wondered if they could help her. Then she looked at him, and the look was almost sorry, and she said: "I am sorry. But my master demands this."
Vath called the moon down.
Moonbeam goes where you move it. He moved it.
The first pass took less out of her than it should have — something absorbed it, deflected it, returned the damage lessened. He moved the beam again. And again. He tracked her through the rounds, kept the light moving, kept adjusting. He summoned a polar bear to try to contain her movement. Something put him on the ground — his bear going down he heard more than saw — and then his vision went, and he finished the rest of it blind.
He found her without seeing her, and put the knife in her throat.
The church was just the church again.
He opened the book of Valkur's teachings. The pages looked right — the binding, the script, the layout. He turned to the first page. Someone had written across it in black ink, a single word. He turned to the next page. The same word. He went through several pages.
Liar, every one.
The dais was three people wide, which was wrong and he noted it. The glass case had polished sea shells. The stained glass showed Valkur in the usual postures: in combat, at the helm, one hand with a platter of fish, one hand reaching toward the ground. Inside the reliquary chest: ten candles, a pouch of incense, an incense burner. Inside the podium: a ladder.
He went down.
The room at the bottom had been there before the church. They could tell by the stone — older, different cut, carved out rather than built up. Symbols on the walls in black and red. He had seen symbols like this before and not known what they meant. He still didn't.
Eight of them on tables. No eyes. The sockets had the same black in them that the people at the inn had — but here it was moving, not pooling, finding its way along the table legs toward the center of the room.
On the table at the center: a sphere.
Black and slow. Inside it, if he looked — and he did look, once — there were eyes. Human eyes, dozens of them, suspended in the ichor. The black from the eight bodies was feeding into it, filling it, adding to whatever it was becoming.
He stood there for a while.
He didn't know what it was. He didn't touch it.