the wayfinders' ledgers we recovered from imré pointed directly to "kalphan riak" as the purchaser of relic's diaries
yesterday relic took that evidence to watch captain ir'talan who granted us a warrant – and assistance from two of the watch – to search kalphan's overdecorated place and interrogate him
he directed us to a restorer of antiques named "silas mroranon" who turned over the diaries!
unfortunately they don't contain the information relic hoped for
today was slightly more exciting
the 6 of us visited dar san which i'll describe by comparing it to a place i know well
viljatown gleams with well-maintained buildings and colorful banners and the music of thousands of ponies having thousands of conversations
dar san is that but with most of the color removed
it gleams with new construction and a uniform appearance and whispery æthereal music made of thousands of voices singing the same notes in perfect unison
for a moment i thought that maybe with the guidance of the unified voices i could join in and sing the right notes for the first time in my life and everything would be just fine
then the adarans guarding us from outside mind control focused a little more and actual clarity returned
the reidrans would try to hook my mind with the desire to sing with perfect pitch like other ponies?
i sing when i put shape to mud and bless it with fire
i sing just fine
my father's wisdom: "all things are beautiful and ugly and unseen"
the temple of inspiration is a symbol of an evil force that eats people and shits puppets
the look of the place makes it all the more tragic that they use it for these ends
subtly-proportioned geometrics and curves and spirals reminded me of central viljatown and especially the castle itself ... and those are such strong influences in my work
it's a shame we had to wreck the place
we fought our way through a dozen symbol-veiled guards to get to the crystal sphere "alta" that holds the potential to control the minds of everyone in sharn
to call it a sphere is slightly misleading because it had so many incredibly small facets that i couldn't even estimate their number so it's effectively a sphere
when zer' pulled it free a quori appeared to directly attack us
atesh manifested and kept them busy while we worked out how to defeat it for certain
i came up with the solution
we put all of bell's "shatter" tokens in one pile and i bubbled them together in a "resilient sphere" that meledri punted directly at the quori
right when it hit i dropped the bubble so the explosions happened all at once
there was nothing left of the quori and the shock weakened the temple's structure enough that zer' had to teleport us out just before it entirely collapsed
it worked perfectly ... but now i realize it shouldn't have?
the spell infusion bell used needs to maintain a sort of magical connection with the caster
to my understanding resilient sphere separates inside from outside by warping the magical field in a way that should have cut all those connections so those things ought to have ended up completely inert
it was a terrible idea that somehow worked and i'm glad it did but i'm also very annoyed because this means i've misunderstood something about the spellwork involved
those under the temple's psychic influence are free now – including from beren's father! – so that's one more major problem resolved
but meledri almost immediately swept us into another
her church mentor "luka sarhain" has been framed for murder and she needs our help in clearing his name
why us?
she can't trust the church itself because the leadership has been corrupted by fiends but she knows she can trust us to help her fight
and we will