After finishing his own lunch, Tric returns to his room with a bread bowl for Kachen. When he enters, the mage is reclined on his bed but dressed now in his new blouse, trousers, and sleeveless robe. Tric throws open the curtains to let light into the room, and Kachen accepts being awake. “How are you feeling?” Tric asks.
“More rested now,” Kachen replies.
“That’s good. In addition to the new clothes and satchel, we got your staff somewhere to be repaired so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Oh! Thank you,” Kachen says, surprised again by how much care and consideration Tric and Hepalonia show for him. He slowly begins eating the lunch Tric has provided.
Tric makes himself comfortable on the chair by Kachen’s bed, legs spread out before him, crossed at the ankles. “So,” he says, “orcs, huh?”
Kachen glances over at the closed door. These two elves have repeatedly shown that they have his best interests at heart, but he feels Tric understands him in a way that Hepalonia does not. There are things that Kachen does not think it would be safe for her to hear.
“Heppa’s up on the roof brewing. We won’t be interrupted,” Tric assures him. “How did you escape from those orcs?” The distant look in Kachen’s eyes provides a first answer. He is clearly shaken by the experience he went through. Tric pours him a drink. “Take your time,” he says. He gets up and closes the window to make Kachen more at ease and even goes so far as to lock the door. Sitting back down again, he tells Kachen, “Why don’t you start at the beginning.”
Without dapper inkcap dampening his emotions, Kachen is free to feel the safety and trust offered him. These reassuring feelings, already uncommon to the fugitive hermit, are even more potent when contrasted to the fog he was under for so many months before Heppa found a better treatment for him. And to the terror he so recently felt. And so, he voices things he has not dared speak aloud before. “I went in search of the artifact that your Uncle Thrandolil requested,” Kachen begins.
“Yes, he does that,” Tric interjects lightly.
“I located it and was on my way back west with it when I ran afoul of some goblins. They managed to catch me and stick me in one of their old cages. They took interest in the fact that I was a mage and sent one of their wolf riders to bring news of this—a captive mage—to the main orcish force. For the first couple days I was held, they were just deliberating over whether it was important enough to bother the orcs with, not wanting to get berated for troubling them unnecessarily. So for those two days, I was… keeping everything clamped down, trying to figure out what I was going to do. But once they sent a rider off to bring news of this…”
“It’s like sunset is starting, so you have to act,” Tric offers.
“So at that point, I just… stopped,” Kachen says.
“Let what happens, happen?”
“Yes. That decision, to stop pushing things away…” Kachen trails off, looking down at his hands as he tries to find the words to continue.
Tric has not had many occasions to see Kachen afraid. Even when the Estbryn Forest council was deliberating over his fate, the most Kachen exhibited was concern, frustration, annoyance. Perhaps in the Foul Fen, when Hezzis wanted to spear him… but even that alarm was muted by dapper inkcap. Now, though, Kachen looks upset, and not just about the rough time he had as a captive. He is shaken by what he himself did and saw.
“That was the first time I ever consciously made the decision to stop trying,” Kachen says quietly.
“It wasn’t just that that decision was going to kill all of the goblins and orcs there,” Tric says into the silence that follows. “It was that feeling of disgusting power that you know you possess?”
“And its effectiveness,” Kachen says. “I had just been out in the Bitter Swamp. I knew how much was out there. I had felt them. It wasn’t just like your village where a handful of undead remained from earlier skirmishes. Wars were fought in the Bitter Swamp. The amount of support that came was more than I could control.” His eyes drop to his hands again. “I had to adapt some techniques I had read about in order to get any of them to do what I wanted.”
“What did they do otherwise?” Tric asks.
“Ravage all the forces there. But a battle going on around me, with me still stuck in a cage without my staff—”
“Is not the security you needed to teleport.”
“I couldn’t have teleported without the staff. I was nervous trying even with it. I would never have tried without it. The staff is inclined towards that magic. I had never teleported before. I knew how to do so, theoretically, and I knew the bent of the staff, but it is not something done lightly. I needed the staff, but to get it, I needed them to respond to my orders. I had to implement the same effect that you saw me use in your forest when I stopped the skeletons there.”
Tric nods. That makes sense to him. “Right, but instead of just stop, you told them you had to get out.”
“Unlike in your forest, I didn’t have a bone amplifier on hand,” Kachen says.
Ah, right, those skulls really do do something, Tric reflects thinking of what Heppa has shared from her research.
“In your forest, I had the staff from the swamp with its skull mounted atop it. I put the Ring of Gritta inside that to be the focus crystal.” Kachen slowly turns the emerald ring on his left middle finger. “There, I had the amplifier and the focus crystal. That’s what helped me control so many skeletons.”
“Oh, that’s why there was green light shining out of it,” Tric realizes. That has long been a mystery to him and Heppa. When they first met Kachen, they were looking to obtain necromantic control crystals for Thrandolil, and now it turns out Kachen had Heledd working on a similar project at the same time! “What was the most advanced undead creature that came to you? In the forest we saw a revenant. Since then, I have fought a wraith and a ghast.”
“There were creatures of a similar power to wraiths and worse. Floating tattered robes… they didn’t all get close enough for me to see the particulars. And yes, there were ghasts. Almost anything you can imagine had fallen in the Bitter Swamp at one point or another, and they all came.”
“Since you have left, what will they have done? Do you know?”
“I don’t know,” Kachen admits.
“They wouldn’t fall over as soon as you left?”
“No. They were attracted to me, but I wasn’t animating them. It is entirely possible that an undead army is still actively fighting orcs and goblins or—”
“Ah! Problem taken care of!” Tric says brightly.
“Or that they’re done with that and are on the move now. There is a large force of undead out there now… because of me.”
“Look, you didn’t have access to your medicine. If you had not acted, the same thing was going to happen sooner or later, was it not? And then you would have been too weak to control them at all.”
Kachen protests, “Prior to working out a solution with dapper inkcap, I spent years with one part of my mind always tamping down undead.”
“Do you think you would be able to keep one part of your mind that way when you’re chained up all day, being poked and prodded?” Tric counters, trying to make him feel less responsible. Then he tries a jest. “So you said you didn’t have an amplifier. What, did you use your own skull?”
“No, I used my hands,” Kachen replies seriously.
“Oh! That explains their condition when you arrived.”
Kachen spins his ring so that the emerald faces inward and puts his hands together to demonstrate. “That is how I created a bone echo chamber.” Then he holds out his healed hands, palms turned inward so that he can study them. “It is not what I want for myself, but I can understand why necromancers or dark sorcerers—
“Or shadow mages,” Tric interjects.
“Would seek to rid themselves of flesh. That magic is definitely not compatible with it, as you saw with my hands.”
“I feel like that’s a sign that one should avoid doing that in general,” Tric observes.
“I agree with your assessment,” Kachen says grimly, and Tric is relieved to hear how uncomfortable the human is with what he did. “But I was desperate,” he adds, trying to justify it to himself.
Seeking to improve Kachen’s mood, Tric tries to apply his own magic to this situation. He pulls out his knuckle dusters and pokes lightly at Kachen with them. “What would anyone do if they were chained up, poked and prodded? Kept from food. Kept from water. Kept from freedom. Kept!” The rhythm of his words coaxes out positive feelings, but the magic pools only around Tric, not reaching its intended target.
Although he still feels guilty about what he did, Kachen takes some solace from the fact that Tric does not judge him for it.
“You did what you had to do using the tools at your disposal,” Tric says encouragingly. “That was actually quite clever,” he adds brightly, feeling better and better about how Kachen handled the situation. “What a way to use what you had on hand, literally! Imagine if you hadn’t been in control when this happened. How much worse might it have been? You took the control that you had to take. You did what you had to do, and you got to safety. We’ll have to deal with all that at some point,” Tric waves his hand dismissively, “but we can do that then, all right? For now, you’re still healing. You’re not there yet, but you’re getting there.” Overly cheerful now himself, Tric rambles, “Things are looking up. We even got you some new clothes! But of course you know that; you’re wearing them now. And your staff’s getting fixed!”
Reining himself in a bit, Tric says about the undead hordes, “We’ll get to that when we get to that. But there is a more immediate matter I’d like to have a consultation on. There’s a shadow mage, I believe, in the underbelly of this city. I don’t know if you’ve ever met one of these ne’er-do-wells… They claim they’re not doing necromancy, but I’ve been to the Grey Woods. They definitely are.”
“That’s where you got the sword from?” Kachen asks, glancing over at Butterbell’s saddle bags.
“Yes,” Tric says, realizing that Kachen must have done more than just get dressed after he woke up. He has certainly been in this room alone long enough to poke around a bit. “Did you ever know Gaenyn of the Grey Woods?” he asks almost jocularly. He catches the flicker of recognition that crosses Kachen’s face. “Yes, we have his sword. He did this to me,” Tric adds, pointing at his lightning scar. “But he doesn’t have his sword anymore. He doesn’t have his life anymore.”
“Good,” Kachen says, far more subdued than Tric is. When Tric last asked him about the Society of Shadow, Kachen was not comfortable enough to provide a truthful answer, particularly not with Heppa present. Now, though, he feels he owes Tric an honest response. “He caused my mother’s death.”
“Oh, I’m really sorry,” Tric says. “Gaenyn put on airs of decency, but it was just a front. Those shadow mages are wily, they’re deceptive.” They had lines they would not cross in theory, holding onto the fiction that undead were sometimes raised incidentally to their magic. Gaenyn claimed that the group dealt with anyone who overtly practiced necromancy, but that one woman who raised a wraith after the caravan attack was clearly still part of their group.
“I do know of the Society of Shadow, members of the line of shadow mages,” Kachen tells Tric. “In fact, I lived with them for a while with my mother when I was quite young… until they threw us out. At that point, I was old enough that she could send me to Alduin. We parted ways at the docks in Aldril, and I never saw her again. Gaenyn took away what little safety we had, forcing her into exile, and I do not know exactly what became of her, but I know she died not long after. The… undead beaconing that I experience did not start for me personally until she was dead. My mother was of Mal-Ravanal’s line, and up to that point, she was either protecting me as well as herself or else she was the sole focus of it. When I was twelve, it transitioned to me. That is how I knew she was truly gone. I got no more letters from her after that point. Just the curse, as you call it.”
“These shadow mages, they’re almost certainly responsible for what happened,” Tric says, bonding with Kachen even more over shared distaste for the group. Seeing how downcast Kachen looks at thoughts of his mother, Tric leans in and gives him a consoling hug. Kachen stiffens for a moment, unused to closeness of any kind, but then he relaxes, accepting the embrace. Tric releases him and shares, “We cleansed the Grey Woods of shadow mages, but one or two of them made it out alive. I’ve seen their shadowy veil in this city, and I don’t believe in coincidences. We’re going to put a stop to that.”
“We?”
“Not you personally. You need to heal. And also, I’ve recruited a white mage from the local House of Light. I believe her skills will come in very handy, but I don’t know if you’d feel comfortable around her.” Kachen does not comment, but Tric can read from his posture and how his eyes flick away that he knows who Tric is talking about. Tric is not surprised; Kachen did craft an artifact for Heledd to make her look like Rhaessa. But there are things going on behind his eyes that make Tric wonder just how Kachen was able to make such a convincing illusion if Rhaessa is a complete stranger to him. Maybe they went to school together, Tric thinks.
“What will you do with the sword?” Kachen asks, side-stepping the whole issue of whether he will participate in the shadow mage hunt or not.
“We haven’t decided yet. We might pawn it. Or we might try to disenchant it. Do you have thoughts on what should be done with it? I don’t necessarily think the sword is evil…”
“If you decide to pawn it, I would like first right of refusal.”
Interesting… Tric thinks, surprised that Kachen would want to make an offer on the weapon. “Okay, I’ll talk with Heppa about that.” Kachen begs off any further conversation for now. “All right, finish your stew,” Tric says, getting up from the chair. “And… I’ll let Heledd know you’re here?”
“Thank you.”