The moleman turned his beady little eyes towards Jorfr.

“Ask me fer summin’. Within reason. Food an’ lodgin’ fer the night, a chunk o’ metalbug carapace, summin’ like that.”

Exchanging brief looks with his compatriots, it didn’t take the northman to make his choice: “We would use your holy hall for a rite.”

“Aite, but y’better be sure you know yer shit. Don’t want another fuckin’ repeat of last time, heavy-ass motherfucker…”

“It was not myself,” Jorfr defended himself from the questioning gazes of his companions. “My grandfather’s memoirs detail an incident during which he underestimated the potency of the local leyline well and ah… Became temporarily petrified.”

“Y’EVER HAFTA LUG TWO METERS ‘A PETRIFIED ICEMAN OUTTA A PIT TWICE AS DEEP AS HE’S TALL? NO? THEN SHUTYER TRAP!” the moleman exploded in indignation, prompting Allipeite to come to his side and calm him. He shoved the gun in Allipeite’s hand, uttering: “See if you can fix it. I’ll take ‘em to the ritual pit.”

Allipeite ran off, and Aeshador hopped off his stool onto the ground, ambling over to the entrance.

“C’mon, I’ll take ya,” he gestured for them to follow, then turned. “...Unless y’need to make preparations? Get a willin’ sacrifice maybe? I know a drunk that’ll let y’chop his dick off fer a growler of mushroom wine-”

“No need, we have all that is necessary,” Jorfr cut him off, being the first to follow. Aeshador proceeded to lead them through the settlement. Bioluminescent mushrooms abounded, growing upon the buildings and illuminating the main concourse to a near-daylight level.

Aeshador took them well outside the settlement, leading them towards a circle of standing stones arrayed around the unmistakably imperious silhouette of an Ankhezian obelisk. A conspicuous godray shone down from a hole in the cave ceiling, though it didn’t exactly stand out amidst the ambient light within the sprawling cave, which overall resembled a perpetual state of dusk.

A five-meter deep pit yawned in the middle of the stone circle, dug out down to a surface of solid blackstone that seemed to be the obelisk’s base. Stairways with tiny steps were carved into the surrounding stone, leading down into the pit.

With Aeshador watching, the four of them prepared and carried out the ritual; it was a time-consuming and tedious affair, requiring complex glyphs formed from hundreds of seals. Once it was all in place, however, merely triggering the ritual was a simple affair, and its internal logic carried it through, drawing from the leyline through Zel, Zef, and Jorfr as mediums. Being the subject of the ritual Victor could not contribute, instead meditating in the center of it all right at the obelisk’s base, staff in his lap.

One by one the innumerable seals plastered all over the pit began burning up, their ashes coalescing on the Second Eye’s brilliant-blue surface. Only the greater glyph’s innermost circle upon which the pendant had been laid was left by the end, and its constituent seals snapped shut around the ash-crusted gemstone, enveloping it in a layer of blessed paper.

This two-pronged method of containment reflected how the scroll described the rite.

SACRED ARTS OF LOST ITRIA

CURSE-SEALING DUPLEX BARRIER

A faint scream of defiance echoed in the moment just before the rite was complete, only to be stifled.

The first thing Zel heard when she came out of her trance was Aeshador’s increasingly obnoxious voice: “Ah fuck me, I felt that all the way ova here! This better not bite me up the ass, y’hear?!”

A short while later, back in Aeshador’s dwelling…

“Right, so that’s half o’ my debt done away with, now the other half: The four of you’s gonna stay fer a day or two ‘til our scouts get back an’ then I’ll tell you a real nice path through the Black Ruins, how’s that? You’ll save weeks a bumblin’ about in the supermassive shiftin’ shitshow, trust me!” lectured the moleman, using the same tone one would expect from a greasy dock worker telling a tourist to visit a seemingly random backalley pierogi shop.

Vic’s face scrunched into a look of confusion for a moment before he asked: “...Why did you offer us lodging before if this was going to be your offer to begin with?”

“Eyy, fughettaboutit,” Aeshador gave an eloquent rebuttal. “Y’expect me to have a fuckin’ sales pitch ready when you barge in on me like that. Fuck outta here with that. Settle in, it’ll be supper soon.”

Two days passed.

Despite the proportionately smaller scale of everything and certain behavioral idiosyncrasies, the party’s stay with Aeshador was perfectly tolerable and uneventful. Certainly, the townsfolk were curious about the outsiders, but they found themselves treated quite well. Their popularity only grew when word spread that three of the four had been involved in “helping Ubradeige find out what happens when you fuck with surfacers for the hundredth time” as one particularly clear-spoken moleman said it. Several children took to trying to climb Zelsys, and despite the fact even their undeveloped, metal-free claws painfully dug into her skin, she tolerated it; in fact, she used what would be a nuisance to anyone else as an opportunity for more subtle training of how precisely she could control where Metallum went in her body. Only once she felt herself running out did she shoo the kids away.

This all coincided with Victor, with Zel and Jorfr’s aid, making a breakthrough in his efforts to understand a section of the Itrian scroll. They understood it too, of course, but it was he who made the breakthrough, performing a ritual overnight. In the morning, when questioned as to why he looked as though he hadn’t slept and why the plates of his right arm looked like they’d been bitten by a large canine, he answered, staring off into space: “I dug it up and gave it form; the servitor, I mean. I’m… Not sure what it looks like. But it worked. I can feel it in the back of my head. I… I think it came from the same part of me that I suppressed for all those years. The thing was pure anger and violence, demanding that I sic it on my enemies…”

He looked up at Zel, his face lighting up with self-satisfaction.

“It couldn’t have come out better. You'll see.”