Chapter 1: A Brazen Mage

Quest Name: “Gnarlroot the Eld’s Stolen Bones” (Progress: 4/11)

Quest Type: Epic, Multi-stage, Class-specific

Class: Spirit Mage (Level 30+)

Materials: [Hive Scepter], [Silver Wire] x11, [Silver Rod] x3, [Glass Bell] x3, [Serpent Hide Gloves], [Serpent Hide Boots], [Mantis Goggles]

Objectives:

- Collect all [Eld Bone]s within Gnarlroot the Eld’s Graveyard

- Raze the Spirit Oak “Gnarlroot” to ashes

Reward: 200XP, 450gold, [Spell: Summon Skeleton]

(When 11/11 Complete: [Spell: Summon Epic Skeleton])

Quest Text:

Sometimes when rains soak the soil deep enough, he rises. Frigid water tickles root tips, whispering old trickling secrets, and the spirit awakens. A nebulous memory of sorrow and anger stirs the Eld to roam; to seek answers for the state of his bones.

Over long centuries, the Eld has devolved deeper into malignancy, hungering for his stolen bones. The graveyard exists because of him, or so the whispers tell. And he—an elder spirit twisted into an oak tree—is the black hole center of his little graveyard galaxy.

Today, a host of bones riddle the grounds, encircled by a short iron fence; a cage. Saturated by a fortnight of tenebrous rain, spirits stir throughout the Eld’s deathly domain. He is awakening. Put them all to rest. Then put the Eld to work... as your skeletal minion.

~<>*<>*<>~

In a swirl of shadow and glitchy pixels, I awakened. My first sensation was that of confusion. It melded into a hungry anger.

My Spirit Oak grew stout and gnarled on her hill; her proportions a golden ratio of countable buried corpses. I had congealed from her sap and mud into this conscious, invisible mist. My mind was cloudy from a long sleep. This has happened before, I think.

I saw the season had grown into a wintery shade of autumn. Gnarlroot was clothed in a tangle of vines which lashed her branches to the mud. The storm adorned her in a silvery shawl of water, twisting ribbons down her black bark.

I dare not wander far from my tree, for she is the center of me. But I knew when grave robbers churned the earth around her roots some long time ago, they stole several of my bones. As seasons marched on, my skull and spine fused with the wood of her trunk. Conjoined in this way, telling where I ended and she began was a foggy prospect. My remaining skeletal parts hid under the dirt, invading newer graves.

The lesser dead orbited my tree in drifting spirals. They did not need the caress of water to fuel their haunting. When I slumber, they lurk and creep. Some learn new things to teach me when I rise. They—many of them—still remember the name of their living persona. But not I.

Gnarlroot the Eld, as my name was known within span of memory, could conjure dread in weak hearts. Dead spirits, however, were seldom verbose in their tellings of things. Shorter, hushed syllables like “the Eld” stood in its place.

I floated across the gloaming now, an astral guess of my shape in life. All spectral denizens felt my presence as I hovered toward the spiked iron fence. Many joined me there; some curious, some wary, some keen to impart me with fresh information. I rose to seek vengeance for the theft of my bones; this was no secret.

I observed the path which curved outside my graveyard fence. It had been paved it in flat, black stone. A distorted wraith called Antonia drifted near to give me the names of new riding beasts. I recalled riding goats and mesa striders and horses, but now metal monsters exist? She told me they rumble along, fast as any horse.

Then Antonia was silent, grinning a grey-toothed grin. She gawked, her empty eyes reminding me of when I had assailed past travelers. I had plundered memories from captains and passengers alike; always seeking hints at the fates of my missing parts. Antonia had taken pleasure in witnessing such incidents.

For more than one traveler, my pitiless acts had caused them to lose control of their mounts. Sometimes, they had found themselves in a crashing caterwaul of beast and blood and bone. On rare occasion, such a traveler-turned-corpse had ended up underground here. Unfortunate victims, buried among my filigree of phalanges.

I heard a rumbling buzz in the distance. A strange conveyance appeared from the west, through the slashes of black pine and hanging mosses across the road. Of course, for me, the road was a gorge of impassable, frozen black. The narrow spires of my fence were the bars of a prison.

But there were a few key locations where the iron was weaker. I could produce my psychic ability at moderate distances from those secret points.

I readied myself to glean the riders’ minds clean.

The grungy horse-less buggy’s style was peculiar, but then again, I had learned that tastes of humanoids vary widely. The only certainty in existence, that I could tell, was change itself.

“He returns,” stated a tall, mustachioed, and monocled specter called Belvan.

“The Green Grem-lin!” Antonia squealed.

I watched the metal monster come nearer and I thought the name fit.

Then my mind flared white. I sensed something vital within the gremlin-mobile. An animal instinct overtook me. I craved, and a tendril of lavender ectoplasm dripped from my chin onto a twist of iron fence.

“The motorcar is a Gremlin,” Belvan corrected. “That’s its name.” He glanced down at an hourglass talisman hung round his neck. He watched sand swirl within, though it reminded him that he barely existed.

I realized the Gremlin was slowing, so I allowed it. No need to rush something better accomplished with a slow, methodical care. The “motorcar” as Belvan called it, turned, coming to rest on the road’s muddy shoulder.

A man emerged, ducking his dreaded, peppery head out from under the car’s doorframe. He stood, his skin a leathery grey-umber, his ankle-long coat a grim, dim purple. He walked to the rear of his motorcar and fiddled with a latch. The back hatched up creakily.

I salivated with an angry lust, watching the man retrieve something from inside the shell of the scarab-like mount.

I lunged at the fence… only to spark out and reappear in a smoking swirl; back where I had leapt from. Chagrinned and incensed, I floated away from the gate and waited.

Hap Emerson tapped my spectral shoulder. I glared. Hap shivered, hesitating. “Th-this one’s been coming here a lot, he has,” said Hap. “Investigating and snooping about.”

Ol’ Hap had no gravestone. His skeleton rested forever below my oak’s branches in a place where the autumn leaves left a blanket. Hap was old, but not the oldest.

There was something amiss. Tension wavered in the air. I peered across my yard’s main dirt trail to the right. I glanced to the left, squinting suspicion. The denizens of my yard, my minions, my allies; they possessed insights I lacked.

“He’s got something planned, he has,” Hap spat out, punctuated by a single, nervous giggle.

My grounds’ cloudy, skeletal caretaker cleared his throat. Peculiar, especially since Belvan had no throat.

“Jus’ look what he’s done with the fence posts!” Ol’ Hap implored with plaintive whimpers.

Antonia’s grotesque eyes glared in his direction. She threatened to pounce. Daunted, Hap Emerson vanished.

I lost my voice long ago, along with my true name. So I asked no questions.

“I am reminded of the Riddle of the Kobold King…” Belvan spoke, but I had no patience for his rambling. I tuned out everything. Instead, I focused on the man in the purple coat.

He donned pine-green boots and matching gloves. Raindrops rolled away from their smooth gloss. He drew goggles over his forehead. Rounded, flat, and dark, they covered his citrine eyes with a horizontal figure 8, resting on the bridge of his angular nose. He walked backward from the motorcar toward the graveyard gate, uncoiling a black cable, laying it in the mud as he crept.

He stood to turn. I saw what had made me spring; my lost femora and humeri! They were bandoliered across the man’s chest. Rage kindled anew, but I could not approach near enough to strike the intruder.

When he placed a gloved hand on the gate, I sensed a swarm of dead eyes upon me. The spirits of my yard came nearer to me. A crescent of conspirators. As I gazed from empty stare to bleak face, my suspicion grew. These fools had a part to play. Whatever the bone thief’s grizzly goal, they knew.

I shifted my focus back to the man at my fence. He wore iron rings in his locked hair and a thick, twisted loop of iron around his wrist. Ol’ Hap complained the man had tinkered with the fence. So, the interloper thinks grave-iron bands will protect him.

I floated up, peering at what graveyard perimeter I could survey through the rain and dim darkening. It dismayed me to see at least three fence posts were missing, maybe more. Silver rods with glass bells at their tops stood in place of stolen fence parts.

Purple Coat Man swung open the short gate and strode inside. I saw a scepter gripped in his right hand now. The cable in his left. The cable had a strange, stubby head and metallic, tooth-like prongs. He knelt to connect the cable’s head to a black box on the ground.

The blur of rain had hidden the box from my notice. This enraged me. I couldn’t fathom the box’s purpose. This enraged me more.

I rushed to attack.

In the splitting of a clock tick, something stunned me mid-jump. My misty form paused like pulled cotton in an arced stretch. Electricity sparked and squiggled through a web of thin, silver wires. They connected to the glass bells atop their poles and snaked along the lawns to coil up and around my tree. She was less naked than I had thought; entwined in fine wire and water.

Volts and rainwater soaked the grounds, placing every entombed spirit into a glitchy stasis. I watched along with my ghostly neighbors. The man in the purple coat walked up to Gnarlroot’s hill. I imagined my old tree’s anchored roots bursting through the dirt to boot the trespasser out.

My imaginings did nothing. He carried on.

A tablet was slung by his hip; neither clay nor stone. He held it up, and its gentle glow grew, casting his features into the light and shadow of a ghost story teller. He peered into the rectangular illumination, scanning and mouthing words.

The man ambled up to my Spirit Oak, unaffected by the electrified ground. I watched in helpless, bristling indignation as he planted the pommel of his scepter into the soil between two fat, twisted roots.

He spoke, reading something from his glowing tablet, too hushed to hear over the pattering din of rain and sizzling of the wires. The man ceased speaking, and flaming sparks rose from the head of the scepter. Liquid flame rode countless rippling arcs of electrical current, tormenting the bark with worm-like squirming lava.

My timeless tree burned despite the heaviest rain of a decade. I watched her branches give in to techno-sorcery, bursting into flame.

The man found a fallen stick on the ground. Its tip was orange with embers. He took several steps backward to a patch of flat, wet dirt. In it, he scraped out a charred shape, extinguishing the brand as he drew. He stood and resumed speaking words from the radiant screen.

Tendrils of zapping energy zipped into the symbol he had scratched out. A swirling orb of smoke appeared above the glyph, like the eye of a tiny sea storm. Then, one by one, my ghostly minions—the landlocked stars of my graveyard galaxy—shrank out of their spectral, humanoid shapes. They spiraled in toward the ball made of eldritch, crystalline mist. Each ghost blinked down to the size of a dot, vanishing into the swirling smoke. When they did, old bones appeared in the air. The bones fell to the shape-in-the-mud from the ghosts’s last point of being, arraying themselves along the fizzling lines of the sigil.

Each spirit, it seemed, had agreed to pay a toll; one of my buried bones added to the spell for passage out of the yard. What kind of dark bargain had they struck? Soon the spirits had fled. The bones stopped dropping.

I turned my attention to those bones strapped to the brazen mage. My legs. My arms. And if he destroyed my oak, he would have my skull and spine to boot.

I noticed, for the first time, that the man had etched garnet-red runes into my femur bones in his bandolier. Instead of anger and desire, a twinge of fear crept into me. Where had my army of ghosts gone to? Why was this raider here? All I wanted was to collect the entirety of my skeleton’s parts. A sense of confusion returned to me.

The man waved his glove over the smoky orb in strange ways. He recited a whispered poem, words carried away by the wind and the din. The tiny storm shrunk and a last wisp of cloud twirled out of existence.

“Be free, prisoners of Unbalance,” said the man. Then he went to the black box and flipped a switch. He stood tall and looked to his left. From behind the burning tree, a lone spirit drifted to join the mage by the skeleton sigil. The two gazed at each other for a long moment. They attempted an arm greeting. They failed to connect, of course, but a motive revealed itself. They were friends. I stared, still immobile. The wheels of my mind turned, conjuring up a name. I scanned the geography of the spirit’s face, his form. Perplexed, nothing came to me. I felt sure I would see a name.

I knew where his gravestone was, however. I would check once they finished their ugly business.

They abandoned the electrified sigil on the ground, one walking, one floating. They stood too near the scepter, still whipping blossoms of energy at the burning tree.

The bone-thief yanked both my arm bones from his leathery bandolier, dual wielding them. He performed a brief, flowing show, dancing them around in the air. He squatted to lay them behind the scepter, ducking low to avoid the silver wires pulsing with hot voltage and falling vine cinders.

Then he brandished the leg bones, skipping the twirls. He laid them in an X on the dirt between scepter and sigil. Then he stood, crossed his arms, and waited.

He muttered to the spirit occasionally, but if it replied, I knew not.

They watched my Spirit Oak. It felt like hours. As the flames devoured her, converting each part to ash, I felt myself fading. Night crawled toward morning, and at the pace of embers, my smoky thoughts evaporated into a dazzling nothingness.

The last feeble filament of thought escaped me, like swirling back to a beginning.