With his hand in good order now, Tric looks at the last problem left for them to deal with. “We need to deal with this staff carefully.”
“Yes!” Heppa says brightly, excited about all the experiences she has had today. Tric’s words actually healed, and Aglana demonstrated mer-magic!
“I think this artifact is part of what drove Mal-Vektor crazy,” Tric cautions. “It was like he was addicted to it. Or maybe it’s what caused him to go off into the wilderness.”
“Hmmm… Interesting. We don’t know what would have happened if you’d had the other staff for so long. You had it for just a week or so. Mal-Ravanal, that was about thirty years ago. That’s a long time.”
“I’m just saying, we should consider the option of destroying it.” Tric paces a bit, regarding the staff, but no matter where he goes in the clearing, he feels like its eyes follow him. “I’m not saying we have to, but we should consider it.”
Heppa is a little nervous about what will happen if they attempt that. She knows that they can safely separate the three components. After all, they did that to the staff they found in the Foul Fen. But outright destruction is a different matter. “I’d like to have a better understanding about what happens when you destroy an artifact or what the proper way to—.”
“Perfect!” Tric says, taking a step towards it.
Heppa hastily intervenes. “I’m not saying we do so immediately! My concern is that destroying an artifact is also a bad thing to do.” It could do nothing, or it could be even more corrupting than simply wielding the device. “It could release something.”
“It would be good to know that, wouldn’t it? But I’ve never heard any stories about powerful artifacts being destroyed. Have you?”
“No… We can safely separate them… but they’ll still retain some power of one form or another. The other runestones still worked when no longer mounted atop a staff inside the skull. And Kachen did seem happy enough with just the staff from the Foul Fen. Daddy and I never were able to get the skull to do anything on its own, other than be scary and intimidating.” Heppa turns to look at the staff herself. She will need to examine it more closely to make any proper judgments. Tric helps her untie it and keeps a close eye on her as she looks it over.
Heppa turns the artifact over in her hands, looking at how it is joined together and considering how she might take it apart. She finds herself thinking that she could settle down with it and spend the rest of her life studying it, but it would be so horrible to be alone that whole time. These thoughts go through her head and leave behind a strange feeling of disjointedness. That’s not me, Heppa recognizes. Those feelings are coming from somewhere else. She pushes them aside and experiments with putting the staff down. Satisfied that the artifact does not cause the same possessiveness as the one from under South Tower, she picks it back up again. “I think it makes you fear isolation,” she tells Tric. “And kind of makes you want to settle down, but I don’t really understand why.” She mulls that over for a bit and then announces, “But I don’t feel anything inherently creepy about it. It’s an odd combination, but I can put it down.”
“Sure, but you’ve only handled it for a few minutes,” Tric points out. “Who knows what thirty years with it would do to your psyche. To what lengths you might go to get some friends, when you also know it is dangerous for you to be around people. Like if you’re a necromancer.”
Heppa judges her mother and criticizes her for making decisions on her father’s behalf without consulting him, but right now, that is exactly what Heppa herself does. She cannot let this fall into her father’s hands. He already spends so much time alone in his library, which might not play well with how this staff seems to manipulate its bearer. And if somewhere deeply buried in his mind, he is missing his dead brother… maybe a necromancer’s staff is not a good thing to have on hand. “I think we should destroy this,” Heppa says.
With those words, Tric immediately snatches the staff from Heppa’s hand. He was open to her examining it some, but he has been uneasy the whole time. All he needed was the slightest bit of permission to break it. Tric cracks it across his thigh, which hurts far more than he anticipated. The staff snaps in half, and Tric drops the pieces, clutching his leg in pain. “That was dumb,” he groans.
“I was thinking we’d need to do each part individually,” Heppa comments.
“Or just throw the whole thing in the fire.”
“I want to look at the crystal, though.”
“All right, but we are destroying this,” Tric insists.
Heppa agrees. She picks up the top half of the artifact and pops the crystal out of the socket inside the skull. She sets that part back down so that she is only touching the runestone. It is a large uncut ruby with jagged edges. The bottom is flat though, and that is where the rune is carved. Heppa concentrates on it, drawing power through the crystal the same way she uses Lady Sabine’s ring. This is a powerful magic item, but Heppa finds herself dispassionately reflecting on it, with no tinge of fear anymore at what it might do. Her emotional response to the situation is muted by its aura of fearlessness. “I don’t feel anything regarding isolation just holding this. That might be coming from everything all together. Or maybe the staff was imprinted by the necromancer over thirty years, and those feelings all originated with him. This rune is about removing or increasing fear.”
That sounds appropriate for a necromancer’s implement, in Tric’s opinion. “So, smash that one with a rock?” he asks.
“I’m a little hesitant to just smash it,” Heppa says. “Doing magic with runes causes corruption. Smashing it might release some.”
“So we need to de-magic it?”
“Maybe.”
“You know, we’ve asked before whether I can dispel things like necromancy. Well… why don’t we try?” Tric holds out his hand for the ruby.
Heppa hesitates a moment but then gives it to him. “Good point. And if this doesn’t work, we can try smashing it. If it releases corruption, at least we’ll know for next time. It’s fear-oriented; if something fearful comes out of it, it’ll just scare us. It’s not like we’ll raise any undead… hopefully. And since Aglana can take corruption out of land, it won’t be a permanent thing,” Heppa adds, thinking of how her luminous water tamped down Mal-Vektor’s eerie fog. She opens up her map book and begins jotting down some thoughts.
While rubbing his thumb back and forth across the rune, Tric tells its tale, at least his necromancer-free version of it. The story focuses on valiant warriors and mages using it to protect themselves. After describing each dramatic act, Tric asks, “Was it really the rune, or were they just brave people? Is the runestone really just a rock?” When the story is done, he holds a plain, unetched ruby in his hand.
“You removed the rune?!” Heppa gasps.
“I guess that’s better than smashing it. This is the biggest gem I’ve ever seen. It’s not nicely faceted, but it could probably be cut down into something nice. Do you want to check it?”
“Sure,” Heppa says, taking the stone. “This could really help pay Alric back,” she murmurs as she looks it over. Then, holding the large ruby out in front of her, she reaches for the currents of energy that feed through runes. She feels power at her call but only through the much smaller ruby currently in a pouch on her belt, Lady Sabine’s ring. Mal-Vektor’s crystal might as well just be a rock. “Moss below, that’s amazing!” Heppa marvels. “I can’t access any magic through it. It’s completely gone!” She wonders if someone could just physically scrape off a rune and achieve the same effect.
“Hunh. Maybe this can work,” Tric says, surprised at his own effectiveness. “I guess it was just a rock to start with.” He thinks back to the time he tricked Sleidr with a box of rocks. Was it actually gold, at least for a moment? he wonders. I hope this lasts. “So you think it’s safe to give to Alric? It’s not just an illusion, right?”
“There’s no more rune-i-ness to it,” Heppa says, lacking a more technical term. She glances down at the pieces of staff still on the ground. “Throw them in the fire?”
Tric snatches up the two halves of the rod and steps up the fire. Heppa had not expected him to act so quickly, but before she can say anything about examining the skull, Tric stretches his hands over the flames and drops both pieces in. KABOOM! The sound of the ensuing explosion echoes from the valley walls. Shards of bone embed themselves in the surrounding trees. The force of the blast throws Heppa back, her face covered in soot, and pages of her map book float down around her. She hears a cry of pain from Tric. When the smoke clears, she finds him rolling on the ground, clutching his thigh. His cheek is nicked by shrapnel, but more importantly, one errant tusk has impaled his already injured leg.
“There’s a smart way and a dumb way to deal with magical artifacts,” Tric groans.
Heppa had thought something like this might happen. “Well, now we know,” she says consolingly. Some excitement slips into her voice as she adds, “My theory was right!” Dodging the detritus of an explosion was not ideal, but it did confirm her suspicions.
“Yup, you were right. You were definitely right on this one,” Tric agrees through gritted teeth.
Heppa crouches down next to him and opens up her poultice pouch again. She starts by extracting the large tooth and applying some pain-relieving ointment. After her examination is complete, she assures Tric that the injury looks entirely mundane. Then she begins stitching the wound shut. Tric is in good enough spirits to joke that Mate could help tie off the sutures. From safely up in the branches overhead, the magpie gives his opinion of the current situation: stupid, stupid.
Over the past several months Heppa has provided a lot of medical assistance to Tric and spent much time in close quarters with him. But having just met a rather old human, she examines her half-human cousin afresh. His curly hair is uniformly dark brown, with no sign of any white or gray. That is not entirely surprising; by both elvish and human standards, he is a young adult. Although Tric is a few years older than Alric, Tric’s cheeks show no sign of the prickly stubble that Heppa has observed on the barkeep. Even Tomas, who is about half Tric’s age, had some wisps of mustache starting. The skin on Tric’s face, though, is as smooth as any other elf’s. Maybe Tric just didn’t inherit facial hair, Heppa thinks to herself. She wonders whether that is because it is his mother who is human. They really need to meet more half-humans in order to settle some of these mysteries.