The warrens mostly emptied out after the kobolds realized that they could take advantage of the typically good-natured Western citizenry. While there are few human beings that would stomach becoming a glorified pet, the kobolds on the other hand easily rationalized their new status. After all, they truly believed themselves to be the masters. Still, many kobolds were mistrustful of outsiders or simply could not find a new home in the Imperium. Thus, even after the Kobold Diaspora, the warrens remained inhabited by a small population of crafty kobolds seeking to make a life inside the caverns beneath the Peril mountains.
Kobolds have a singularly unique viewpoint on many common human moral standards. For example, they tend to believe that another person’s property is only theirs for as long as that person can keep it from being snatched away. Nevertheless, a kobold will pitch a hypocritical fit if its own belongings are taken, and it will do whatever it can to retake the stolen goods.
Kobolds sometimes exhibit such a glut of antisocial traits that even their own kin grow weary of dealing with them. Such kobolds generally suffer exile. Some attempt to become “kept kobolds” in the Imperium, but their behavior quickly gets them labeled as “bad kobolds” and, once again, they are thrown out. Such kobolds end up living desperate lives and are known to beg, scrape, and even steal to survive.
Homecoming
Predictably, Jak was chastised by the quartermaster for having gotten the runed scimitar destroyed. He elected to take on the debt rather than give up his new sword, and now owed the Chateau a sum of 30,000 Golden Queens. This was a king's ransom, but Jak was surprisingly unworried. If the previous mission was any indicator, he was likely to eventually find valuables to replace the loss. Best of all, Anne didn't seem to care – when Jak visited the quartermaster's office, she kissed him on the cheek and said she was happy to see him return alive. Jak was too tongue tied to respond, and as the girl skipped away he felt his heart grow light from the intoxicating aura of her simple, youthful cheer. The quartermaster then proceeded to shout at him for the next twenty minutes as the young man blushed furiously, unable to think of anything but the pleasant little delivery girl.
Quentin didn't even bother entering the Chateau for the customary debriefing. The last Jak saw of him had been at a Cascadian village just west of the banks of the Sphynx. The Cascadian Knight made it clear that he intended to spend the next few days at an Imperial brothel and went into great and odious detail about all the various services he intended to enjoy. At this, Jak rolled his eyes and wished his companion good luck in avoiding a bout of the Southern Plague. It wasn't long until the two parted ways.
Jak's debriefing was much more interesting than his experience in the quartermaster's office. A pair of guards escorted him to the throne room itself, and then the entire room was cleared. Acelia herself was nowhere to be seen, so Jak stood in the quiet chamber alone. The great amethyst doors of the chamber were closed, and he looked around awkwardly as he waited.
After several minutes he began to pace the room. As he turned around to finish his fourth lap around the chamber, there she was; lithe, little Acelia, staring at Jak with her big wet eyes. She wore a black funeral gown; a dark gauzy veil covered her girlish features, her long violet hair cascading out from the back. Jak felt his heart skip a beat as he stared at her slack-jawed, searching for some words to say. He wanted badly to impress her, but his mind felt like a blank sheet of paper. Just like last time, Jak became painfully aware that his trousers suddenly felt much tighter.
She reached out and slowly placed the palm of one of her little hands on his chest; her long, thin, spindly fingers splayed out. To Jak, each fingertip felt as if it were radiating warmth directly into his heart. Contrasting the warmth in his chest, he felt as though icy tendrils were crawling into his skull from all directions. He stared silently, breathing heavily; he had no idea what was happening. Despite this, he had no desire to move away from her touch.
“Jak, I told you to take care of him.”
Jak blinked, uncomprehending. Finally, he realized she was talking about Lunarm.
“I'm sorry, I...” he began, and then paused to collect himself before continuing. “I tried. It was a mess in there. Quentin, he-”
“He sent you all away, and the moon did not make it. I already know everything about your travels, Jak.”
“But how?” he responded, incredulous.
“Jak, oh, my young Jak. It's the Chateau. My Chateau was built atop the confluence, the ley energy, just like the Towers in the East. One could say that this is the weakest point between our world and worlds beyond. All that energy... all that power. Can't you imagine, young Jak, how it could be used? Harnessed?”
She stopped speaking a moment, and finally removed her hand from Jak's chest. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from him. He felt as though the icy tendrils had slithered wetly out of his head all in an instant. A dull ache began to pound his skull.
She turned from her subject and walked up the stone steps that led to her throne of gems. She was not a voluptuous woman, but her sashaying walk was nevertheless entrancing and sultry. Despite the strangeness of their encounter, Jak could still feel his arousal amidst his other preoccupations and hoped naively that she wouldn’t notice.
The throne was a spectacle, and it became even more spectacular when Lady Acelia gingerly sat down upon it. Gemstones dotted its surface in a rainbow of scintillating colors. There were rubies, topazes, sapphires, and diamonds. There were bloodstones, amethysts, and alexandrites. There were aquamarines and emeralds. Indeed, there were so many different gems represented on the throne that Jak was convinced there couldn't possibly be more than one or two of each type. When the queen rested upon it, the throne's magic activated and each gemstone filled with a warm incandescence. The result was a multi-colored light show which danced and flickered all around the throne room. From his place at the bottom of the steps, Jak merely stared on in wonder.
The flashing lights died down, and the lady continued speaking. “To be brief, Jak, I am the Chateau. It and all of its secrets are mine. I claimed them long ago. Your secrets are nothing compared to the ones held by this ancient place.” A wan smile began to form on her face. “Truthfully, I pulled the events from your mind just now,” she added, speaking in a casual tone as though she believed that she was adding some meaningless afterthought.
Jak frowned at this, and said, “So it's like the Innates that Rafael told me about... you can read my mind?”
“Like Rafael...” she said wonderingly. Her wan smile seemed to turn sadder, then disappeared entirely. “Something like that, perhaps. He was born with nothing. I made him into something more. I gave him the Great Gift. Perhaps he was trying to tell you. But am I like him? I wonder. When I claimed this place, I too was nothing. It was the Chateau alone which bequeathed to me the Great Gift. It was not my birthright. I took it.”
“What is the Great Gift? I don't understand.” Jak was growing frustrated by her opaque, mysterious manner of speaking. As always, Jak was ravenous in his curiosity and grew frustrated at the way she dangled bits and pieces of the truth in front of him. Unfortunately, getting straight answers from the Violet Lady was proving difficult. He began to feel as though he were speaking to a stone wall.
She raised a hand dismissively, then let it fall. “That Gift is not for you. Magic, on the other hand... oh, young Jak. I have much to tell you. First, you must show me the blade.” She raised her right hand slowly and extended one slender finger.
Before Jak could approach to hand her the blade, he felt it slipping out of its new, fine leather sheath on his back and looked in wonder as it slowly floated up into the air, then drifted lazily across the room into Acelia's beckoning hand. The blade looked absurd against her tiny frame. It was obvious that a woman of her size should not have been able to hold such a weapon, even with two hands. Even so, she daintily held it out with one hand as though it were a light rapier. She stood from her throne and took a few swift swings with one hand
, then brought the blade close to her face and studied the runes engraved upon it.
“Oh, Jak,” she said. She released the blade, and instead of dropping to the floor it drifted back again into the sheath on Jak's back. With languid grace, she sat back down and said, “Fate surely has chosen a unique path for you. You should be dead, having used this blade without any true knowledge of the mystic arts.” She looked him over, and her eyebrows furrowed pensively. “Is it possible? Are you really the one I've been looking for, the weapon from the West? Did they really succeed in...” she trailed off, staring into Jak's transfixed eyes. “Please, hold perfectly still. I must perform a reading on you. Do not worry, young Jak.”
Jak had no idea what she was saying. He wondered what she meant by “true knowledge” – surely he was a magician as good as any, having learned to channel elements through his body. And did she just call him a weapon? From the West? He wasn't from the West. He had been born on his father's farm in Cascadia. Were these just meaningless riddles, or was there something deeper beneath them?
He didn't know what she meant by a “reading” either. If it was anything like what she had done a moment ago after touching him, he wanted nothing to do with it. He wasn't sure he had a choice in the matter; she was his queen, after all. He nodded and his voice cracked as he acquiesced. “Yes, my lady.”
Acelia fixed him with an intense stare and several beams of rainbow-light shot out of her throne, directly into Jak's body. His entire body was paralyzed as he was lifted into the air in a crucifixion pose. He tried to scream, but no sound came out of his open mouth. His whole body arched backwards, and he hung there as the moments ticked past, suspended by invisible strings. At some point, his vision went black and he lost consciousness. When he awoke, he was lying on the cold, stone throne room floor. Acelia was still sitting atop her throne of gems, staring at him with a look of great fascination.
“What... what did you do to me?” he said, standing up. His head was throbbing, and he rubbed it with one hand while trying to get his bearings.
“I read you, Jak,” she said. “I knew you were special when you came here. I could sense it. That is why I sent that disgusting man to look after you. Even so, I did not dare to dream that they succeeded in their mission when they made you.” The fascinated expression now changed to one of sympathy. She walked over to him and stroked his aching head with a delicate hand. “Your head hurts, I know. I am sorry, but it was necessary. Now I will give unto you a wonder, the wonder of knowledge. Stand fast, young Jak. This will be a tough pill to swallow. Hold out your hand.”
He raised an eyebrow, continuing to rub his head. “Pill...?” He slowly extended his hand as instructed.
She reached a hand into the cleavage of her funeral gown and withdrew a tiny, furry-looking nut the size of a pebble. “Take this. It will tell you what you need to know.”
She dropped the nut into his palm, and he looked down at it. It was a fuzzy little thing, but he felt it pricking his hand like a cactus. He looked up and started to ask a question, but to his surprise, Acelia was gone. He was once again alone in the room.
He sighed to himself. Why did this place have to be so bizarre? He had come to learn, and to train himself. He had come to find adventure, and grow into a man. He had come in the hopes of meeting a beautiful woman, and gaining her affections. To varying degrees, he’d found all of these things. Unfortunately, it was all so wrapped up in this strange enigma of the queen and her peculiar interest in him.
He thought to himself, How much stranger could my life really get? He placed the strange little nut in his mouth and swallowed with great effort. He felt its little spines uncomfortably dragging against his throat as it made its way down into his stomach. He blinked, waited a few moments, and felt nothing. Eventually, he made his way out of the throne room. He had chores and other duties to attend to. By the time his head hit the pillow that night, he had all but forgotten about his debriefing. He smiled as he fell asleep and secretly hoped that tomorrow he could get Anne to have lunch with him in the courtyard.
✽✽✽
Jak groggily gained consciousness but his eyes remained shut. At first, all he could feel was an intense strangeness suffusing his entire body. Then, one by one, he became aware of other, more tangible sensations. Wherever he was, it was cold here. Icy gale winds violently swept over his flesh, battering his fragile form. He became aware of a peculiar lightness in his body. What was this feeling? Was he in water? Slowly prying open his sleep-encrusted eyes, he realized that he was floating weightlessly through the dark sky of a bleak and silent void. A ubiquitous, fine purple sandy grit floated with him on the air. Above him there was only a dark, starless sky. Below him, an endless purple desert dotted with massive grey stone spires. He was so high in the air that these spires looked more like toothpicks stretching out of the ground. Feeling an inexplicable urge to reach out to them, he tried to “swim” through the air in that direction but discovered that he was powerless to do so. Flailing and flopping like a fish on land, he made no headway.
“Calm yourself, son.” He heard a familiar, deep voice echoing in the void. He recognized it immediately: it was his father!
“Pa? What are you doing here?” Jak suddenly felt an intense homesickness wash over him.
“Quiet yourself and listen, my boy. I'm here to educate you. You never listened to me much, did you boy? Went off and learned magic even though I warned you about it... couldn't even be bothered to come back and visit after you left.”
No matter how hard he tried, Jak found that he could not open his mouth to reply. He drifted along through the void, unable to do anything but listen to the low tones of his father's voice.
“I am going to tell you the forgotten nature of this world, something few know. Countless hungry magical spirits live just outside our Realm, in the void. They were banished there long ago by our forefathers. Some call them demons. I called them demons. Don't you remember?”
His father had never spoken this way when Jak was on the farm. How could he know something like this?
“There are three main supernatural forces in this world. One is the Innate, enjoyed by those lucky humans who are born with a trace of the power of a magical spirit inside them. The second is magic. Through rituals and arcane words, we can bend the laws of the Realms and open a channel to the spirits beyond. It is an outright theft of their powers. They do not appreciate this theft. Failure to perform the rituals correctly might allow the spirits to steal back from you. They might take your sanity. They might take your life. They might take something else entirely. Didn't I warn you, my boy?”
The voice was right, but the words weren't. This couldn't be his father. Despite the strange surroundings, only now did Jak begin to realize that he was dreaming. This false apparition of his father made him feel uncomfortable. He willed himself to wake up, but to no avail.
“The third force is the true magic, the blood magic. The forbidden rites of sacrifice. The Ways Goëtia. One kills or bleeds a lamb, a rabbit, or even a man… and draws out that life force, repurposing it. Using it to feed the magical spirits, who above all else hunger for the taste of living souls and will reward mortals for bringing it to them. Through unspeakable acts, the Ways Goëtia are a pathway to unspeakable power. There is a reason our Lady Acelia has banned it in her domain.
“You are lucky and you are damned, Jak. Despite your reckless stumbling in the mystical dark, you weren’t preyed upon by some astral spirit. You are no magician, even if you think you are. You are my son, and you are a living weapon.”
With enormous effort, Jak was finally able to fight through the strange paralysis and managed to speak. “You have my father's voice,” he croaked, “but you sound nothing like him. You're not my pa, are you?”
“I apologize for the deception but lies are sometimes the necessary path to truth. Let me play my role, young Jak. Let me show you the truth about your father, and about yourself."
Before Jak could respond, he felt
his essence being torn from his body. Suddenly, he found himself floating through the bright blue sky toward a bustling city. He passed through a suburb with handsome looking houses surrounded by picket fences and well-kept lawns. He saw cheerful human families going about their business. Here and there, he even spotted the occasional kobold scampering around and playing behind the fences. He had never visited the Imperium in his life, but somehow he knew that these were the suburbs surrounding Virtue, their capital city.
Eventually, he arrived at the city center. Humans in crisp suits walked briskly beneath tall buildings. He saw signs on the buildings with various slogans; here, “Be Great! Don't Miscegenate!” and there, “Magic: the ultimate poison. Don't risk it! You WILL get caught!” In this strange state, Jak found himself utterly lacking control over his own movement. He began to ethereally float downward and eventually fell through the ground. His vision went momentarily black, but eventually he emerged in a metal complex somewhere beneath the earth. Uniformed military men traveled the halls with purpose. One of them was a strongly built man in a special operations uniform. He looked very familiar to Jak. It was his father! Only... he was many years younger than Jak had ever seen him. How is this possible? His father had always been a Cascadian goat rancher, had he not?
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