#LairsAndLusii #DMPost #PartTwoOfTwo MISS EVELYNE JUSTICAR Your bow is not waiting for you when you return. That would be delightfully convenient, wouldn't it, dear? The cavern still contains your arrows. The gouges from your boots. Your blood. The evidence of the encounter. What it does not contain are tracks. You are good at what you do. Good enough to know when earth has been disturbed, when stone takes weight, when the animal has dragged a limb or adjusted for a fight. There should be evidence everywhere. But there is none. Instead you find a trail made from something else.Small objects have been arranged along the cave floor. Tokens. Old wrappings. Field dressings browned with age. Little keepsakes of the sort one accumulates when one spends years keeping wounded creatures alive. Things from the shelter. Not similar things. Your things. They lead deeper into the cavern. At the end of the trail sits your bow. Behind it, the white aperture has widened just enough to reveal a structure burning beneath a black sky. It is a familiar building. It collapsed in a way you're all too familiar with. The windows, and their shape as the fire shines through them. The shelter. It burns again. There is a stranger watching outside. You watch them turn slightly, never enough to give you someone to track. The bow is within reach. So is the aperture. For ten years you have been following considerably worse leads. TARSUS It would be a fib to say you understood what exactly has happened to you. Understanding requires experience. You lack this. Moment ago, pain was something simply happening to you. A command was followed. The enormous creature was never cruel, good, or worthy. It was the organizational structure of existence. Something is placed within you. Maybe, it was always there. The distinction is beyond you. The voice of your God becomes comprehensible. Instructions cease being forces and become words. Words become things which may be obeyed. Which creates, quite accidentally, the possibility of disobedience. Do your best not to do so. The amulet warms against your thorax. The sealed map shifts inside its sacred wrapping. You know your purpose. Find the hero. Resurrect the hero. Retrieve the hero. This much is simple and true. The white aperture beneath the ruined altar opens only a little, appropriately sized for a creature of your stature. Beyond it is earth. Vast quantities of it. Packed strata descending farther than your new mind knows how to measure. Something enormous is buried there. Your map tears itself open. For the first time, the markings upon it change. The path is no longer across the land. It is through the aperture. Your God lowers itself between you and the opening. You understand its next words perfectly. THAT IS NOT OUR HERO. The amulet answers. Like a heartbeat. Your God is mistaken, perhaps. That is a new thought. You have begun to accumulate those very quickly, Tarsus. Five apertures remain open. And, for the briefest moment, five people are permitted to see past their own private invitation. There is a room waiting somewhere beyond all of them. A table occupies its center. Not a map laid upon a table. The table is the map. Mountains rise from its grain. Rivers crawl slowly through grooves in the wood. Tiny keeps, roads, heraldic standards, forests, villages, battlefields and things which have not yet earned names arrange themselves across its surface. Eight places surround it. Five have begun to change. One develops spikes along its back. One casts a shadow in the wrong direction. One acquires a little bell. One gathers ash around its legs. One is scarcely more than a raised platform, appropriately sized for a very small guest. Three remain exactly as they were made. Empty. The machinery beneath the table attempts to turn. Something catches. It attempts again. Five pieces move. Three do not. There is a terrible sound from somewhere underneath the world, much like a mechanism deciding whether a missing component constitutes damage or merely an opportunity for redesign. I would advise you not to worry about that. You have considerably more immediate problems. Welcome, dears. The Session has accepted your applications.