Post by roguesgallery on Feb 1, 2014 20:08:37 GMT -5
It was gray.
Lifeless and dulled and gray.
The man huddled over his food, elbow-to-elbow down a line of similar men and some few women, all clad in the same timeworn garments of faded... gray. The man's eyes were shut in an effort to close off his ears, for the sounds surrounding him were the same too: an army of gray hogs feeding at the same gray troughs slogging and horking down the same gray slops. The sounds found their way deep into the mask of iron he wore, his only accoutrement that isolated him from the rest of the gray people. Locked in place by Art, he had long given up trying to remember just why he wore it... only knew that he did... and that he always would.
He concentrated on a favourite memory - nay, truly the only memory he held to in this place, and itself from a dream he'd been having and savouring - he sat alone upon a chair of stacked stones, atop a screaming-high peak in some lonely mountain place with only the soaring and shrieking winds to fill his ears... and the colours! Blues and greens and duns, dark and light and all shades in between, spreading out around him and filling him with... with- with -life-...
"It's coming!", the sky rumbled suddenly.
The man blinked and sat up straight, still holding a spoonful of mealy porridge in one hand.
"It's coming!" Only a few heads turned, though the man did not need to do so as well to know who was shouting.
It was Hobble.
"It's coming an' it's gonna shake things up around here!"
Hobble had been here the longest, longer even than Old Annie, and it was him that handed out names to these people... these gray-clad once-people who didn't even know what to call themselves when they arrived. Old Annie... Hang-ears... Beak... Crookfingers...
"Ironeye."
Hobble stopped ranting long enough to look over from he'd been perching at the table between Beak and Wander. He was old and his joints made uncomfortably loud popping sounds as he clamboured down and then hopped up beside the man who had spoken. Hobble rapped once upon the man's plated brow, right where he couldn't see but could hear the dull plink.
"You gonna get yourself gone too!", he crowed, his rheumy eyes wild and not a little spittle hanging at one corner of his mouth. "The eyes told me what's what and it's coming. The eyes say we all's gonna get gone from here... never coming back. Never coming back."
Ironeye watched Hobble gesture crazedly with one gnarled hand that gripped the eyes: an old jam jar, really, filled with water and some colourful glass beads... in a certain way and in a certain light he guessed they did look like eyeballs lolling about-
"Never coming back!"
A few of the others at the tables had taken up Hobble's shouting, and were repeating the phrase with a varied listlessness. Even Moan, who had no tongue, echoed the call with his peculiar keening. A splatter of gruel struck one wall, then a storm of it began to rain down. Someone shoved someone else and the screaming began again. Ironeye slipped down from his bench and squatted under the table just as a pile of porridge slapped down where he'd been sitting. A foot skidded through that, and the table overhead shook as the lifeless gray once-people began living again.
"NEVER COMING BACK! NEVER COMING BACK!"
Many voices screamed now, and a sharp high-pitched wail echoed beyond them. Ironeye huddled under the table and ignored someone's desperate hands as they attempted to hug him or hold him or wrest him out of his hiding place. One of the tables shuddered and crashed to the floor, broken, scattering a few benches and plates and spoons, and a coarse screaming erupted. Ironeye knew what was coming next. He hugged his knees to his chin and ignored the strange hands and sounds and waited.
* * *
The alarum interrupted everyone's evenfeast as green and yellow lights soundlessly burst into being all around them.
"Aw hells... it's floor three again."
One of the four men seated and enjoying a brace of perfectly-seasoned roasted coneys leapt up a hair faster than two others. The fourth sat serenely chewing a mouthful of dinner, shaking his head slowly and savouring what he ate.
"Come then Kard. Finish up and fetch Hailett from her station." The guard that spoke was unarmoured and wielding no weapon, but his voice and stance were a match to any grizzled veteran of such duties. He drew a slim wand from a leather loop sewn into the hip of his garb, apparently just for such a purpose.
"I'll set the wards.... there", he spoke, eyes and wandtip flashing green and yellow as the magic took. "Meet us at-" there was another brief pause as his eyes flickered again "-third floor facilities, east wing."
Kard swallowed the glorious-tasting mouthful of rabbit, eyes still shut fast with enjoyment.
* * *
"Did you want the official report or just th-"
Hurdal set down his goblet and snapped his fingers, both silencing Hailett and answering her question. For the briefest of moments, he thought she was actually going to keep speaking. The hitch was nothing more than the woman's realisation of just how angered Hurdal was over the incident, however, and Hailett smoothly moved on and into the briefing.
"Inmate Karad incited a disturbance which resulted in an interrupted meal, several minor injuries, and two broken tables." She made a quiet whuffing as she caught her breath, but otherwise made no show of it. "The disturbance was quelled by one Bewilderment evocation and one Silence illusion. Inmate Ka-"
"-has been remanded to an isolation stall, where he shall have plenty of time to rant." Hailett said nothing but something about her look must have betrayed her thoughts to Hurdal, for the coordinator continued speaking but his tone became arch. "All of floor three will see a tenday reduction in priveleges and all are even now scrubbing the facilities clean after which they will all of them be subjected to the Garden." Hurdal ignored the look on Hailett's face and continued. "This incident has been documented and will be closed upon receipt of your report, which has been done. Good day, administrator."
Hailett stood where she was, even as Hurdal dismissed her with his words and an airy little wave of one hand.
"Coordinator-", she began brusquely, not at all seeing the incident done nor her day good, "-Inmate Karad is a diviner of Savras, not some back-alley charlatan in here for selling false-wards and dragon-oils... he is a prophet, and his words may have caused us no little trouble but his words ought be heard." Hailett took a step towards the coordinator, who now stood at his desk, face taking on the hue of the wine at his elbow. She saw and knew she'd stepped in it but good this time... but Hurdal had waved away her insights and suggestions for the last time.
"How dare y-"
"How dare you sir!" Hailett stomped one foot in place, clearly angry now. "How dare you sit in your well-appointed offices and spit upon the tenets that made Spellhold what it is. Lord Azuth did not give us the Garden and the Gate to twist the minds of our charges, nor their tongues. We are here to rehabilitate the wayward and to-"
"ENOUGH!"
The word slapped across Hailett's mouth with a stinging sing of magic, her words and ability to move instantly cut clean but her eyes smoldering. Coordinator Hurdal snorted and his eyes rolled as he approached her, fingers hooked and reaching in his ire.
"You Tethyrian soft-hearts are all the same!", he shrieked, marching stiffly over to the woman and grabbing the ruff of her service uniform. "YOU did not serve here when that... that madelf and his vampire nearly destroyed this place! YOU did not send to pyre nearly every lifelong friend and colleague!" His clenching fingers twisted the fabric of her uniform as he made a fist. "YOU have no idea what made Spellhold what it is... and you never shall!"
He gave a little cry and tore, ripping the administrator's service emblem right off of her uniform and threw it on the ground, disgust plain on his red face.
"You are dismissed from duty... now and evermore."
Hurdal's eyes flashed with summoned Art that reached out to limn Hailett even as he spoke his last to her: "GET OUT."
With a flash, the errant woman and all her belongings stowed in the administrator's quarters appeared suddenly and unceremoniously in a heap on the dock at the island's west shore. Released from Hurdal's spells, Hailett groaned and sat upright as one of the shipfolk rushed over, bewildered and blinking.
* * *
The line moving through the Garden was silent, as usual.
Gray once-people shuffled between arcing stone cupolas that were rife with splayed blooms of yellow and pink and white... their heady scents sweet and lingering. As they passed, a soundless sightless Art stole over each of them, making a muddle of recent memories so that they were easily slipped away and gone.
Kard touched each as they exited the place, only directing those that looked at him when he did so to take their place in the back of the line to once again taste of the Garden.
When the guard touched Ironeye, the masked inmate didn't even know it.
* * *
"Coordinator Hurdal has explained the situation, and I am satisfied with his actions." The voice quavered briefly as something interfered with the magic, then righted itself. Another face appeared in the facets of the crystal... it was bushy-browed, bearded, and balding and could only be Surtan's. "I concur", his image agreed, "And furthermore, I nominate Mendelsar's apprentice... er... whatever the lad's name is.... as a replacement."
Hurdal sat at his desk, a scrying crystal before him and glowing with awakened Art. Faces flashed across the surface of the device as, one after another, the Azuthers agreed or disagreed on whom should serve to fill the recently-vacated adminstrator's position at Spellhold.
"Revanel is too young", Chybor countered. "I submit we promote Jorundor to the post." The crystal flickered and Chybor's last words quivered and crackled.
Through the little window in Hurdal's office, the storm outside flashed lightning suddenly as a momentary lash of rain muddled the view.
"Let us moot again when the storm here has passed... say, on the morrow at the least", the coordinator spoke into the crystal, watching the faces swim past upon its facets as the far wizards agreed. After a few more moments, the scrying device dimmed and went dark and Hurdal rose to go stand near the window.
He sighed as he watched daylight wane and more rain than had fallen in the last few tenday combined fell scattershot across the asylum grounds. Hurdal's anger had passed, but the argument and firing of Hailett had brought back all those terrible memories. He folded his arms and watched the storm, wondering if her berth on her journey back to Velen was uncomfortable.
He hoped it was.
* * *
Ironeye awoke suddenly, his dreaming so dark and blank that when he opened his eyes he thought he might still be asleep.
The quiet voice that had stirred him sounded out again, and he knew he was awake.
Rising from his bunk, the inmate moved slowly to the back of the small cell. He paused a moment before crouching down and pressing the side of his mask to the finger-wide air ventings, turning so that the hole over his ear lined up. Almost immediately, he could hear Hobble: his words were indistinct and distant and babbling, but they sounded very much the same as what he had been saying yesterday, before the rioting. As he crouched there, however, a second voice seemed to join Hobble's...
"...left... left... down... left... down..."
Ironeye blinked within his iron mask, for the second voice cut through the gray haze of his mind with a gleaming-sharp clarity. The voice sounded so... insistent.
"...left... left... down... left... down..."
He turned so that the slit of his mask touched the vent.
"...who-", he breathed softly, "-how..."
All at once, the heavy cell door frowning at the far end of his lodging shuddered and clicked. Ironeye gasped as the metal and stone then whispered itself open a hair.
* * *
He looked around nervously, taking in his pitch-dark surroundings whenever the lightning outside flashed through some distant window.
No one was about.
Ironeye had descended from the main prisoners' holdings on the second floor of the tower, and now stood among the broad halls of the first floor. The air was warmer here, likely due to the kitchens that made up half this level. He moved slowly but with purpose, the feeling in his limbs still dull but driven with some purpose that he could not quite manage to grasp a hold of within his thoughts. The words he'd heard clearly in his cell seemed to be moving him physically, and he let them. Convinced he might yet be dreaming, the masked prisoner gathered the length of his drab tunic so that he would not trip or catch its hems on something and alert the guards.
He stepped slowly, barefoot and trembling, though into the forekitchen and saw that no one was about. Lit only by the embers in the soup hearths, Ironeye saw the lengths of worktables and moved among them like a shadow. He passed rows of pans and pots, strung across one wall and flanked by a wall of cold ovens. Set in a recess there was a broad bank of cooking utensils, sticking all handles-out from their little shelves. Ironeye saw the knives among them and took one.
At the rear of the kitchens was the dark mouth of a spiral stair, its stone steps carved from the bedrock beneath the tower. Ironeye descended sluggishly, still hearing no one else about. The steps went round and round for many moments, and eventually they spilled into a large, cool larder. The chambers were dark but lit by a single enspelled fixture. The prisoner reached out and tapped it, but it was enchanted to respond only to the touch of those who held reign at Spellhold. Still, even in the dimness, Ironeye could see well enough to duck under the criss-crossing rows of hocks and sausages strung up to cure, and where enormous stacks of firewood were stood saw the mouth of a passage that should not be there.
Ironeye approached the hidden passage and saw that the open door was made to resemble a joint of the wall itself, and was hung with crossed woodaxes. He set down his knife and lifted one of the axes off its hooks, clutching it two-handed to his chest as he hesitated a moment and then stepped into the dark passage.
Without stopping, he closed the hidden door behind him and heard something in the wall click and then settle as the machinery governing the device worked shut.
He moved down the passage by touch alone, something within him tugging him forward despite the reservations that fluttered just out of reach of the dulled grayness of his mind. The concerns about being led down under Spellhold by an unknown voice and then discovering the secret door that had been left open for him did not seem to matter so much when he emerged from the passage.
Ironeye stood in a small concave chamber carved out of the bedrock all around him, dimly-glowing blue runes carved into the floor in three places. In the centre of the chamber was a pile of old rocks... probably river stones by their roundedness and size... but what struck the prisoner the most was that they had been piled together to make the shape of a chair. A breeze that wafted about the chamber made him shiver as he realised it seemed to issue from the pile of stones itself, and he could not stop himself from what he did next:
Axe still held tightly to his breast, the prisoner sat down upon the pile of stones, which tumbled and shifted and fell away... and, in a soundless lightless flash, he vanished.
* * *
Hobble shifted uneasily upon the floor of his cell.
The isolation ward had none of the comforts of the regular cells, as they were, but still he'd somehow gotten to sleep. His dreaming showed him the same portents as it had of late: the rumbling, the shaking, the sensation that Spellhold itself was moving and rolling. Faceless screams echoed from everywhere while disembodied eyeballs floated all around, staring. Hobble recognised the omens of his god, despite the Garden and the efforts of Spellhold's management, and he moved purposefully and bravely right for the tower wall that was cracking apart before him.
Light lanced through the shuddering wall, beckoning, and then the wall was gone.
Outside the tumbled wall was not the green and gray of Brynnlaw island, but a sunlit village of red-roofed buildings and smiling folk. Hobble's home... where he wished to be... he ran to it and did not look back.
* * *
It was no dream.
Ironeye stand upon a pile of rounded stones that once might have been shaped like a chair, atop a screaming-high peak in some lonely mountain place. Winds shrieked past him, but he paid them no heed. The sky was a glittering starlit dark, but he could sense the view all around was green and brown and every colour in between. Even the air was changed, no longer heavy with salty brine but cool and crisp and familiar.
As he turned to look and breathe in the scene, the mask shifted queerly and then fell open, the magic that had kept it locked gone. As he reached up and pulled the device from his face, another art leftover from Spellhold faded away too, and the grayness that cloaked his thoughts eddied and departed.
Arindol.
"My name is Arindol..."
The man stood slowly, setting the axe he held aside.
"Arindol", he repeated, and then staggered as the last few years of misshapen, misplaced, muddled and forgotten memories settled back upon his brow. Sprawling among the rocks, Arindol heaved and laughed and wept and stared at the marks upon the palms of his hands... and remembered.
It was dawn, rising pink and orange and golden across the vista, before Arindol moved again.
In the morninglight, he could clearly see down the mountainside, beyond hills and a stretch of wooded vale, to where a sliver or a road ran and turned up to a gate, where a small outpost stood. Even as he looked, a few dots that may or may not have been mules and a cart and drover dragged themselves along that sliver and toward that gate. Drifts of pale snow dotted the land, though the skies had dawned clear and brisk.
He stood watching for awhile until the sun had climbed enough to warm his body, and he had surmised enough that the portal beneath Spellhold had taken him somewhere along the borderlands between the Heartlands and Cormyr, though by the colours of the banners strung at the outpost... he squinted and decided they were purple... he was closer to Cormyr...
Arindol took up the axe and hefted it. Perhaps he could get a few good coins for it. He stared down at the iron mask where it rested, and after a few moments bent to retrieve that as well.
He took a deep breath, and prepared himself for the return he'd never thought to have.
After another deep breath, he clasped the mask about his head and shut it fast.
Shivering, he began to descend.
Lifeless and dulled and gray.
The man huddled over his food, elbow-to-elbow down a line of similar men and some few women, all clad in the same timeworn garments of faded... gray. The man's eyes were shut in an effort to close off his ears, for the sounds surrounding him were the same too: an army of gray hogs feeding at the same gray troughs slogging and horking down the same gray slops. The sounds found their way deep into the mask of iron he wore, his only accoutrement that isolated him from the rest of the gray people. Locked in place by Art, he had long given up trying to remember just why he wore it... only knew that he did... and that he always would.
He concentrated on a favourite memory - nay, truly the only memory he held to in this place, and itself from a dream he'd been having and savouring - he sat alone upon a chair of stacked stones, atop a screaming-high peak in some lonely mountain place with only the soaring and shrieking winds to fill his ears... and the colours! Blues and greens and duns, dark and light and all shades in between, spreading out around him and filling him with... with- with -life-...
"It's coming!", the sky rumbled suddenly.
The man blinked and sat up straight, still holding a spoonful of mealy porridge in one hand.
"It's coming!" Only a few heads turned, though the man did not need to do so as well to know who was shouting.
It was Hobble.
"It's coming an' it's gonna shake things up around here!"
Hobble had been here the longest, longer even than Old Annie, and it was him that handed out names to these people... these gray-clad once-people who didn't even know what to call themselves when they arrived. Old Annie... Hang-ears... Beak... Crookfingers...
"Ironeye."
Hobble stopped ranting long enough to look over from he'd been perching at the table between Beak and Wander. He was old and his joints made uncomfortably loud popping sounds as he clamboured down and then hopped up beside the man who had spoken. Hobble rapped once upon the man's plated brow, right where he couldn't see but could hear the dull plink.
"You gonna get yourself gone too!", he crowed, his rheumy eyes wild and not a little spittle hanging at one corner of his mouth. "The eyes told me what's what and it's coming. The eyes say we all's gonna get gone from here... never coming back. Never coming back."
Ironeye watched Hobble gesture crazedly with one gnarled hand that gripped the eyes: an old jam jar, really, filled with water and some colourful glass beads... in a certain way and in a certain light he guessed they did look like eyeballs lolling about-
"Never coming back!"
A few of the others at the tables had taken up Hobble's shouting, and were repeating the phrase with a varied listlessness. Even Moan, who had no tongue, echoed the call with his peculiar keening. A splatter of gruel struck one wall, then a storm of it began to rain down. Someone shoved someone else and the screaming began again. Ironeye slipped down from his bench and squatted under the table just as a pile of porridge slapped down where he'd been sitting. A foot skidded through that, and the table overhead shook as the lifeless gray once-people began living again.
"NEVER COMING BACK! NEVER COMING BACK!"
Many voices screamed now, and a sharp high-pitched wail echoed beyond them. Ironeye huddled under the table and ignored someone's desperate hands as they attempted to hug him or hold him or wrest him out of his hiding place. One of the tables shuddered and crashed to the floor, broken, scattering a few benches and plates and spoons, and a coarse screaming erupted. Ironeye knew what was coming next. He hugged his knees to his chin and ignored the strange hands and sounds and waited.
* * *
The alarum interrupted everyone's evenfeast as green and yellow lights soundlessly burst into being all around them.
"Aw hells... it's floor three again."
One of the four men seated and enjoying a brace of perfectly-seasoned roasted coneys leapt up a hair faster than two others. The fourth sat serenely chewing a mouthful of dinner, shaking his head slowly and savouring what he ate.
"Come then Kard. Finish up and fetch Hailett from her station." The guard that spoke was unarmoured and wielding no weapon, but his voice and stance were a match to any grizzled veteran of such duties. He drew a slim wand from a leather loop sewn into the hip of his garb, apparently just for such a purpose.
"I'll set the wards.... there", he spoke, eyes and wandtip flashing green and yellow as the magic took. "Meet us at-" there was another brief pause as his eyes flickered again "-third floor facilities, east wing."
Kard swallowed the glorious-tasting mouthful of rabbit, eyes still shut fast with enjoyment.
* * *
"Did you want the official report or just th-"
Hurdal set down his goblet and snapped his fingers, both silencing Hailett and answering her question. For the briefest of moments, he thought she was actually going to keep speaking. The hitch was nothing more than the woman's realisation of just how angered Hurdal was over the incident, however, and Hailett smoothly moved on and into the briefing.
"Inmate Karad incited a disturbance which resulted in an interrupted meal, several minor injuries, and two broken tables." She made a quiet whuffing as she caught her breath, but otherwise made no show of it. "The disturbance was quelled by one Bewilderment evocation and one Silence illusion. Inmate Ka-"
"-has been remanded to an isolation stall, where he shall have plenty of time to rant." Hailett said nothing but something about her look must have betrayed her thoughts to Hurdal, for the coordinator continued speaking but his tone became arch. "All of floor three will see a tenday reduction in priveleges and all are even now scrubbing the facilities clean after which they will all of them be subjected to the Garden." Hurdal ignored the look on Hailett's face and continued. "This incident has been documented and will be closed upon receipt of your report, which has been done. Good day, administrator."
Hailett stood where she was, even as Hurdal dismissed her with his words and an airy little wave of one hand.
"Coordinator-", she began brusquely, not at all seeing the incident done nor her day good, "-Inmate Karad is a diviner of Savras, not some back-alley charlatan in here for selling false-wards and dragon-oils... he is a prophet, and his words may have caused us no little trouble but his words ought be heard." Hailett took a step towards the coordinator, who now stood at his desk, face taking on the hue of the wine at his elbow. She saw and knew she'd stepped in it but good this time... but Hurdal had waved away her insights and suggestions for the last time.
"How dare y-"
"How dare you sir!" Hailett stomped one foot in place, clearly angry now. "How dare you sit in your well-appointed offices and spit upon the tenets that made Spellhold what it is. Lord Azuth did not give us the Garden and the Gate to twist the minds of our charges, nor their tongues. We are here to rehabilitate the wayward and to-"
"ENOUGH!"
The word slapped across Hailett's mouth with a stinging sing of magic, her words and ability to move instantly cut clean but her eyes smoldering. Coordinator Hurdal snorted and his eyes rolled as he approached her, fingers hooked and reaching in his ire.
"You Tethyrian soft-hearts are all the same!", he shrieked, marching stiffly over to the woman and grabbing the ruff of her service uniform. "YOU did not serve here when that... that madelf and his vampire nearly destroyed this place! YOU did not send to pyre nearly every lifelong friend and colleague!" His clenching fingers twisted the fabric of her uniform as he made a fist. "YOU have no idea what made Spellhold what it is... and you never shall!"
He gave a little cry and tore, ripping the administrator's service emblem right off of her uniform and threw it on the ground, disgust plain on his red face.
"You are dismissed from duty... now and evermore."
Hurdal's eyes flashed with summoned Art that reached out to limn Hailett even as he spoke his last to her: "GET OUT."
With a flash, the errant woman and all her belongings stowed in the administrator's quarters appeared suddenly and unceremoniously in a heap on the dock at the island's west shore. Released from Hurdal's spells, Hailett groaned and sat upright as one of the shipfolk rushed over, bewildered and blinking.
* * *
The line moving through the Garden was silent, as usual.
Gray once-people shuffled between arcing stone cupolas that were rife with splayed blooms of yellow and pink and white... their heady scents sweet and lingering. As they passed, a soundless sightless Art stole over each of them, making a muddle of recent memories so that they were easily slipped away and gone.
Kard touched each as they exited the place, only directing those that looked at him when he did so to take their place in the back of the line to once again taste of the Garden.
When the guard touched Ironeye, the masked inmate didn't even know it.
* * *
"Coordinator Hurdal has explained the situation, and I am satisfied with his actions." The voice quavered briefly as something interfered with the magic, then righted itself. Another face appeared in the facets of the crystal... it was bushy-browed, bearded, and balding and could only be Surtan's. "I concur", his image agreed, "And furthermore, I nominate Mendelsar's apprentice... er... whatever the lad's name is.... as a replacement."
Hurdal sat at his desk, a scrying crystal before him and glowing with awakened Art. Faces flashed across the surface of the device as, one after another, the Azuthers agreed or disagreed on whom should serve to fill the recently-vacated adminstrator's position at Spellhold.
"Revanel is too young", Chybor countered. "I submit we promote Jorundor to the post." The crystal flickered and Chybor's last words quivered and crackled.
Through the little window in Hurdal's office, the storm outside flashed lightning suddenly as a momentary lash of rain muddled the view.
"Let us moot again when the storm here has passed... say, on the morrow at the least", the coordinator spoke into the crystal, watching the faces swim past upon its facets as the far wizards agreed. After a few more moments, the scrying device dimmed and went dark and Hurdal rose to go stand near the window.
He sighed as he watched daylight wane and more rain than had fallen in the last few tenday combined fell scattershot across the asylum grounds. Hurdal's anger had passed, but the argument and firing of Hailett had brought back all those terrible memories. He folded his arms and watched the storm, wondering if her berth on her journey back to Velen was uncomfortable.
He hoped it was.
* * *
Ironeye awoke suddenly, his dreaming so dark and blank that when he opened his eyes he thought he might still be asleep.
The quiet voice that had stirred him sounded out again, and he knew he was awake.
Rising from his bunk, the inmate moved slowly to the back of the small cell. He paused a moment before crouching down and pressing the side of his mask to the finger-wide air ventings, turning so that the hole over his ear lined up. Almost immediately, he could hear Hobble: his words were indistinct and distant and babbling, but they sounded very much the same as what he had been saying yesterday, before the rioting. As he crouched there, however, a second voice seemed to join Hobble's...
"...left... left... down... left... down..."
Ironeye blinked within his iron mask, for the second voice cut through the gray haze of his mind with a gleaming-sharp clarity. The voice sounded so... insistent.
"...left... left... down... left... down..."
He turned so that the slit of his mask touched the vent.
"...who-", he breathed softly, "-how..."
All at once, the heavy cell door frowning at the far end of his lodging shuddered and clicked. Ironeye gasped as the metal and stone then whispered itself open a hair.
* * *
He looked around nervously, taking in his pitch-dark surroundings whenever the lightning outside flashed through some distant window.
No one was about.
Ironeye had descended from the main prisoners' holdings on the second floor of the tower, and now stood among the broad halls of the first floor. The air was warmer here, likely due to the kitchens that made up half this level. He moved slowly but with purpose, the feeling in his limbs still dull but driven with some purpose that he could not quite manage to grasp a hold of within his thoughts. The words he'd heard clearly in his cell seemed to be moving him physically, and he let them. Convinced he might yet be dreaming, the masked prisoner gathered the length of his drab tunic so that he would not trip or catch its hems on something and alert the guards.
He stepped slowly, barefoot and trembling, though into the forekitchen and saw that no one was about. Lit only by the embers in the soup hearths, Ironeye saw the lengths of worktables and moved among them like a shadow. He passed rows of pans and pots, strung across one wall and flanked by a wall of cold ovens. Set in a recess there was a broad bank of cooking utensils, sticking all handles-out from their little shelves. Ironeye saw the knives among them and took one.
At the rear of the kitchens was the dark mouth of a spiral stair, its stone steps carved from the bedrock beneath the tower. Ironeye descended sluggishly, still hearing no one else about. The steps went round and round for many moments, and eventually they spilled into a large, cool larder. The chambers were dark but lit by a single enspelled fixture. The prisoner reached out and tapped it, but it was enchanted to respond only to the touch of those who held reign at Spellhold. Still, even in the dimness, Ironeye could see well enough to duck under the criss-crossing rows of hocks and sausages strung up to cure, and where enormous stacks of firewood were stood saw the mouth of a passage that should not be there.
Ironeye approached the hidden passage and saw that the open door was made to resemble a joint of the wall itself, and was hung with crossed woodaxes. He set down his knife and lifted one of the axes off its hooks, clutching it two-handed to his chest as he hesitated a moment and then stepped into the dark passage.
Without stopping, he closed the hidden door behind him and heard something in the wall click and then settle as the machinery governing the device worked shut.
He moved down the passage by touch alone, something within him tugging him forward despite the reservations that fluttered just out of reach of the dulled grayness of his mind. The concerns about being led down under Spellhold by an unknown voice and then discovering the secret door that had been left open for him did not seem to matter so much when he emerged from the passage.
Ironeye stood in a small concave chamber carved out of the bedrock all around him, dimly-glowing blue runes carved into the floor in three places. In the centre of the chamber was a pile of old rocks... probably river stones by their roundedness and size... but what struck the prisoner the most was that they had been piled together to make the shape of a chair. A breeze that wafted about the chamber made him shiver as he realised it seemed to issue from the pile of stones itself, and he could not stop himself from what he did next:
Axe still held tightly to his breast, the prisoner sat down upon the pile of stones, which tumbled and shifted and fell away... and, in a soundless lightless flash, he vanished.
* * *
Hobble shifted uneasily upon the floor of his cell.
The isolation ward had none of the comforts of the regular cells, as they were, but still he'd somehow gotten to sleep. His dreaming showed him the same portents as it had of late: the rumbling, the shaking, the sensation that Spellhold itself was moving and rolling. Faceless screams echoed from everywhere while disembodied eyeballs floated all around, staring. Hobble recognised the omens of his god, despite the Garden and the efforts of Spellhold's management, and he moved purposefully and bravely right for the tower wall that was cracking apart before him.
Light lanced through the shuddering wall, beckoning, and then the wall was gone.
Outside the tumbled wall was not the green and gray of Brynnlaw island, but a sunlit village of red-roofed buildings and smiling folk. Hobble's home... where he wished to be... he ran to it and did not look back.
* * *
It was no dream.
Ironeye stand upon a pile of rounded stones that once might have been shaped like a chair, atop a screaming-high peak in some lonely mountain place. Winds shrieked past him, but he paid them no heed. The sky was a glittering starlit dark, but he could sense the view all around was green and brown and every colour in between. Even the air was changed, no longer heavy with salty brine but cool and crisp and familiar.
As he turned to look and breathe in the scene, the mask shifted queerly and then fell open, the magic that had kept it locked gone. As he reached up and pulled the device from his face, another art leftover from Spellhold faded away too, and the grayness that cloaked his thoughts eddied and departed.
Arindol.
"My name is Arindol..."
The man stood slowly, setting the axe he held aside.
"Arindol", he repeated, and then staggered as the last few years of misshapen, misplaced, muddled and forgotten memories settled back upon his brow. Sprawling among the rocks, Arindol heaved and laughed and wept and stared at the marks upon the palms of his hands... and remembered.
It was dawn, rising pink and orange and golden across the vista, before Arindol moved again.
In the morninglight, he could clearly see down the mountainside, beyond hills and a stretch of wooded vale, to where a sliver or a road ran and turned up to a gate, where a small outpost stood. Even as he looked, a few dots that may or may not have been mules and a cart and drover dragged themselves along that sliver and toward that gate. Drifts of pale snow dotted the land, though the skies had dawned clear and brisk.
He stood watching for awhile until the sun had climbed enough to warm his body, and he had surmised enough that the portal beneath Spellhold had taken him somewhere along the borderlands between the Heartlands and Cormyr, though by the colours of the banners strung at the outpost... he squinted and decided they were purple... he was closer to Cormyr...
Arindol took up the axe and hefted it. Perhaps he could get a few good coins for it. He stared down at the iron mask where it rested, and after a few moments bent to retrieve that as well.
He took a deep breath, and prepared himself for the return he'd never thought to have.
After another deep breath, he clasped the mask about his head and shut it fast.
Shivering, he began to descend.