The Great Glass Mountain - Session Two

Valenta the Lost Knight and Tiber the Salt Knight tumbled down the hill, away from the shadows and away from Reme and the horses. Tiber bashed his head on a rock, leaving him addled and vulnerable. He asked Valenta if the Knight he rescued had escaped the shadows. She told him that it was so. He got up and looked around. The Squire would either double back and try to find them after losing any pursuers, or would climb to a high place to get a better view of the area. The Knights decided to do the same. Tiber was headed into the mountains anyway to find the shining thing atop the spire that he saw from the deck of the wrecked ship. The one the Pearl Knight denied was there.

The Lost Knight opened the locket she carried down the mountain with her, alongside her armor and longsword. Inside was a man she didn't recognize. Or couldn't name. The face was familiar. The white and gold clothing.

A waterfall cascaded down from a recess in the mountainside, bouncing off rock formations and pooling somewhere below before draining out into the marsh. The Squire Reme was nowhere to be found but Valenta remembered the mountain. There was a path that snaked up the cliff behind the waterfall and though the edge was a bit worn compared to the last time she walked it she could have walked it with her eyes closed. The sun had set by the time the Knights reached the top of the trail, where a white masked acolyte in a kilt waited for them. He recognized Valenta but would say no more. It was up to the Winged Seer to explain.

 

The path led beneath a rock overhang, where the waterfall poured out of a subterranean passage. In the stone roofed space, almost pinned to the ceiling by the series of poles held by the acolytes to support him, was the Winged Seer. The angel-man could barely lift his head to look at the Knights but he didn't need to. He'd been expecting them. He knew Valenta best of all. She'd forgotten him but he knew her from way back when. It was hard to see her like this. Because of what happened and because she was going to go through it again. He'd remind her who she was, since she needed the help. He raised a mangled wrist and a chain fell from the ceiling, though there was no ceiling but bare stone. She picked it up and it came alive in her hand, responding to her thoughts. 

 

The horse, alas, the Seer couldn't find. He was in a place where no harm could come to him. 

Tiber the Salt Knight felt his vision sharpen. He remembered why he came to the mountain. He wanted to know how to deal with the shadow men emerging from portals to the underworld, so the Seer told him. The easiest way would be to push Valenta off the edge of the mountain. But since he wasn't going to do that, he could travel a day's journey past the mountains to the north, and there come to the same end with more struggle and strife. Or if they really wanted to drag it out and suffer, they could travel to the Seat of Power. The Great Glass Mountain at the center of the Realm.

As for Reme, he'd be waiting for them when they went back down the hill.

 

Tiber, not typically the observant one, noticed the Seer was crying. He always knew what would happen to Valenta but it was hard to be confronted with it. He asked if he could do anything to help the Seer and the Seer told him not to seek the Citadel. The castle at the capitol was fine. The Citadel, the other one, was off limits. Best not to look in there.

 

The view from the mountain was occluded by rotating metal rings. The interior looked like a church under construction, bronze rafters rising up to a domed ceiling and falling down to form the base of a sphere. To the south the ocean extended an infinite distance. To the north it receded inland and narrowed until it met a castle that shone like glass. 

 

The Salt Knight woke up to find Valenta standing at the edge of the precipice in the Winged Seer's cave. He roused her before she could fall.

 

The Knights descended the mountain to look for Reme. Once they picked him up, they'd go north of the mountain range and find the ending prophesied by the Seer, one way or another. It was nearly midday before they gained the floor of the valley that led around the mountains and through the foothills to their goal. They didn't notice the Pearl Knight until he was already upon them. He rode his rosy steed and wore his full panoply of weapons and armor. Four men at arms accompanied him, clad in cloth and leather cut to look like fish scales and carrying bills topped with marlinspikes. They wore pearls on their coats and guarded Reme, who led his pony and the Salt Knight's scaly steed. 

 

Lauder the Pearl Knight was shocked to see Valenta. He swore to safely escort her to the capitol, where she would be received as befitted her station. He offered the use of the Scaly Steed, which the Salt Knight immediately objected to. He was happy to give up his horse for the lady, but the horse was his to give, not the Pearl Knight's. The Pearl Knight offered Tiber a contest of arms to gain his horse back, and win the Rosy steed as well. The Salt Knight rejected the offer, Lauder had no right to wager what wasn't his. Valenta the Knight of Chains thanked the Pearl Knight for retrieving Tiber's wandering horse and asked him to give it back. Pearl Knight Lauder reluctantly gave the horse back, allowing Tiber to offer it to Valenta. The men at arms relaxed.

Tiber got a chance to talk with his Squire. Reme said the Pearl Knight had tracked him down after he escaped the shadow creature. He must have had a pearl hidden somewhere close to the Seer's lair, he knew exactly where to find the Salt Knight. Valenta negotiated with the Pearl Knight over where to go next. The Pearl Knight wanted to go straight to the Glass Mountain but Valenta insisted they go around the mountain to the place the Seer had foretold. She swore that she would accompany Lauder to the Seat of Power after and he agreed to escort her along with his men at arms.

 

The Salt Knight Tiber, his Squire Reme, Valenta Knight of Chains, Lauder the Pearl Knight and his four men at arms set out through the wooded foothills. They passed an enormous cliff where the side of the adjacent mountain range had fallen away, revealing the skeletons of ancient beasts embedded in the rock. A hollow space in the stone suggested that one of the beasts was missing. Valenta wondered where it had gone and was told that she had killed it herself, alongside the Glass Knight. Its bones decorated the Funeral Plain and its skull the castle. The mention of the creature sent a pulse of sickening heat through her body. Like the rush of fear on realizing she had consumed a deadly poison, which far presaged the feeling of the poison itself. The Pearl Knight belittled the Salt Knight for his ragged panoply and his foolishness. Valenta told Lauder that the Salt Knight had rescued her once already and he relented.

From a cluster of hills much like the one where the Salt Knight and Reme saw the portal flecked with stars, a clanging sound echoed. The Salt and Pearl Knights rode out ahead of the footmen to investigate. Part of the hill had caved in, revealing a narrow hole in the rock. The clanging sound came from inside, accompanied by periodic pulses of blue and white light from a source they couldn't see. They dismounted and crept inside, traveling single file through the fissure. The Pearl Knight clearly resented the Salt Knight's presence up until that point, had likely plotted treachery against him. The prospect of adventure and exploration and mystery banished any such plans from his thoughtstream. His water plants and his wife and his pearls were nothing compared to this.

At the back of the cave was a chamber with a shrouded figure, shorter and wider than the ones who chased the Chain Knight down the talus pile. It beat a piece of blue and white metal into the shape of a sword, heated it with a furnace whose glow had no cognate in fire or in the light of day. Satisfied, the shadow cast the completed blade ringing into a heap in the corner of the cave and set to work on another. 

The Pearl Knight asked the Salt Knight if he would stand with him. Tiber opened his mouth to reply and Lauder was already across the room, picking up the sword from the heap of lead and pig iron waste where the spirit carelessly tossed it. The ghost smith turned to face the Pearl Knight. It reached and grabbed a fistful of cold embers from the forge. The Pearl Knight rushed it down and chopped it to bits with his cool new sword, which shone with starlight as though viewed through an obscuring layer of water. The shadow divided in two, the Salt Knight hefted his coral mace and joined the fray. He ill-liked Lauder but watching him get swarmed by shadowmen would make him look bad. They chopped away at the shrouded smiths and the Pearl Knight agreed it was time to leave. He blocked the tunnel and covered the Salt Knight's retreat, funneling the shadowy figures so he only had to face one at a time as he backed up. 

Outside, Valenta asked the men at arms what her relationship was to the Pearl Knight. He looked familiar but she remembered him being a lot smaller. They told her she was his mother in law. She was married to the Glass Knight and the Pearl Knights' wife was her daughter. She asked what happened after that and they said, as they had heard it, Valenta Knight of Chains had died of poison. But that obviously wasn't true because here she was.

The sound of hammering stopped. Someone yelled inside the cave. Reme drew his dagger and went to help Tiber, and almost skewered him when the Salt Knight came barreling out of the cave. The Pearl Knight came out a moment later, doublet missing a few pearls scraped off on the rock walls, carrying a cool new sword. The blade vibrated as the sinking sun hit it, and the Salt Knight warned him that he should put it down. Lauder peered at the cold sword and it shattered in the sunlight, flying pieces narrowly missing his eyes. He swore and almost cast the useless hilt aside, then decided it would make a nice trophy. 

The Knights slept under the stars, the men at arms and Squire watched the horses and the perimeter. They'd reach their destination the next day. Valenta asked who the Glass Knight was and the Salt Knight explained he was the ruler of the realm.

The next day they came upon the place the Seer had warned them about. A huge bowl in the earth, filled with a thick forest of lilac-leafed trees that swallowed the light. Valenta climbed off her horse, intent on creeping closer to survey the scene. Something lanced through her foot. The sting of an insect, but larger. The pain went straight up her spine, then back down again. It felt amazing. 

She woke up in the camp. The feeling of suffocating heat, like a fever roasting her alive, remained for a moment. 

At any rate the dream had been prophetic, that morning they came upon the strange crater filled with trees that sprouted like flowers. The four footmen, three Knights, two horses, pony and Squire descended into the pit to put an end to the intrusions from the underworld. The canopy was so thick overhead that the Pearl Knight ordered his goons to light lamps, but the suffocating darkness swallowed even those. The only light came from a mysterious glowing banner or tapestry that hung from the trees up ahead. It cast shadows on the forest floor and the shadows coalesced into hands, which grasped at the ankles of the approaching warriors. The footmen beat at the undergrowth with their billhooks. As their eyes adjusted to the darkness the company realized they were surrounded. A ring of shadowy figures bearing cold swords and icy lanterns. Two of the men at arms turned and fled before battle was joined, uninterested in being dragged into the silent place from which the figures had came. They left the light cast by the dangling cloth and whatever happened to them they made no sound.

The Salt Knight stepped forward and challenged the shadows to attack him. He had no fear of death, even a physical personification of such. Six such figures fluttered toward him and the company piled onto them. The ghosts laid into Tiber, beating him down and nearly breaking his guard. Seeing an opening, Valenta rushed toward the dangling cloth, followed by the Pearl Knight. The Salt Knight drew the horde away from her, knocking the shadows back with whirling blows of his mace and falling back toward the rim of the crater. A spirit leaped onto one of the remaining footmen, searing him with its icy blade and sending him fleeing into the woods. 

Valenta and Lauder pushed through the tapestry, which extended grasping hands to caress them. On the other side was a portal, like the one the Salt Knight saw in the mouth of the old temple. On the other side were stars, familiar constellations overlaid with stars which had shone when the world was young. When the moon was pristine or before it existed except as a ring of debris around the world. Valenta cast one end of her chain into the portal and it tried to leap out of her hand, like a dog pulling at a leash. The Pearl Knight helped her haul it back but it was no use. Something huge approached from the other side of the gateway. A winged drake that shrank as it descended, until it took the form of Valenta's husband. The Glass Knight. She remembered that she hadn't been stung by the beast. He had. The poison had entered her another way.

Valenta let the chain go and fled, accompanied by the Pearl Knight. Blocking their escape was a seething wall of black shadow mass, covered with pinpricks of cold light. The pinpricks became a hail of flaming lanterns, which the blob spat out at the retreating Knights. The Pearl Knight pulled Valenta onto his Rosy steed, the Scaly steed having long since fled the conflict, and urged his mount forward. The lanterns burst and burned the Pearl Knight, who shielded Valenta even as the pair toppled off the dying horse. Valenta rolled clear and whirled to see Lauder disappear under a pack of the shrouded creatures. She surged forward and beat them back with her crooked sword, dragging the mangled Knight clear. He was heavy and the slope of the pit was steep.

The Salt Knight, Reme and the last billman had similar trouble escaping the crater, climbing the steep slope with the shadows in pursuit. Valenta dragged the Pearl Knight out of a thicket of lilacs, pursued by the converging shadows. The group gathered around him, ready to defend him from the onrushing horde. He beat at Valenta's hand on his surcoat, ordering her to drop him. There was a price to be paid and only paying it would end the pursuit. Valenta refused and the Pearl Knight drew his roundel dagger, slashing at her hand until she relented and left him.

The shadows closed over Lauder like hagfish devouring a whale carcass in fast motion. They swarmed him and the pile sank slowly as they evaporated away, until there was nothing left but his corpse. When Valenta dragged him free of the melee he had been burned, beaten and ragged. Scoured by the shadows, his body was pristine. Incorruptible. Laid on its back with its hands clasped around the sword like a stone effigy over a grave.

Then the body sank into the earth, leaving nothing at all.

The shadows left. The forest was just another forest.

The pearl on the man at arms' doublet turned an inky purple, then black.