Fourth letter to Yanika: Selke and the Vision of Aitlas

To my dearest Yanika,

I hope all is still well at your side? Enjoying your adventures and your time alone with Emine? Well, alone is maybe a bit far-fetched considering you’re on an airship, but still, it’s probably more private than here.

Anyway, things here are reasonably good. Helix is sleeping off his hangover from our drinking yesterday, and I have a bit of time to write to you.

After the issues with Selke, Spade decided to investigate her a bit more, first contacting Ovik for more information, as he had been travelling with her, but he didn’t have much more information, and then asking Ace to take her to the temple to have Thyra check her out. It took a bit of convincing to have Selke go along with this, but eventually she did.

It was a good thing though that she was taken to the temple, because Thyra was very surprised about what she saw when she used magic to check out Selke, and kept her in the temple for a few hours, and had someone from the Artificer Guild come in too. She didn’t want to share any information with us, except that Selke is alright, but there is definitely more going on there. She will leave it up to Selke to tell us about what is going on if she wants to.

While waiting for the investigation to be over, we discussed what to do next, and what to do about Selke. I suggested she might be a clone or simulacrum made by Nathan, though I might have a different idea about it by now too, but more about that later. Kayne was very insistent about us not talking to Selke at all, and just leaving her alone, but as this is likely linked to everything else going on, we can’t do that of course, we will have to talk to her.

Anyway, while waiting we decided to do one of the visions of the future, namely that of Aitlas. Ovik warned us that the vision is of the future and how it will or might unfold if we stay the current course, and that dying in the vision might be permanent as it would be more difficult to pull the person who “died” back. The ritual itself is not very pleasant, it feels cold and dark, and gives off the smell of decay.

We woke up in a prison, clothed but unarmed. There was only one other room, which was a sort of washing room, and a locked door, which was promptly smashed down by Kayne, which of course alerted the guards. The fight would have been an easy one, even unarmed, if not for the fact that the guards have a stone golem to enforce the peace in the prison. Without any magical weapons, it was mostly up to Ace and Aitlas to deal with it, while the rest took out the guards themselves. In the end Ace managed to disguise herself as one of the guards and convince the golem to obey her. After some investigating, we found a ledger kept by the guards, and found out that we had been locked up for treason, and will be executed in two days time. It also told us that we were in the city of Silverkeep, which is quite far to the east from Himmin, and that we are five years into the future.

Next step was to get out of the castle and into the city in order to find more information about what had happened that landed us in prison, but the stealthy approach didn’t work so well. We got caught by more guards, but especially with a golem at our side, the fight was a short one. Once inside the city we quickly found out that we had been locked up for a failed assassination attempt on the king of Silverkeep. The attempt failed because the king had been alerted by another half giant, one with a dark stone-like skin, which sounds a lot like Opal, and we learned that this half giant was also still in the city, sadly, in the palace.

So we decided to sneak back into the palace, some of us disguised as guards, as most of us aren’t exactly human, and non-humans seem to be rare in this city. We ambushed a patrol of guards and used their armor and helmets to disguise most of us and then walked into the palace with Aitlas and Kayne as our “prisoners”. Getting into the palace like this proved to be easy enough and then we snuck around until we came to the throne room where the king, and Opal were waiting. Aitlas notified us that he could see a dark red aura around the king, but had no idea what that meant. We had a short talk to Opal, who told us to stop this attempt on the king, and that he was disappointed in Aitlas for following in Mos’ footsteps. He wants Aitlas to stop assassinating people and continuing Mos’ work. Aitlas was taken quite aback by this revelation and left, so I decided to ask Opal a few more questions to clarify what had happened. As it turns out, it seems that in the future we manage to destroy the assassin’s guild, but Aitlas takes over the ability of Mos, or gets corrupted by that ability. An ability which allows you to see the amount of blood someone has or will have on their hands, which explains the red aura. Mos described it as the ability to see who must die for others to live, Opal calls it madness and says that no-one can see the future. So we left the city, which ended the vision.

Afterwards we all needed a drink to recover, especially Aitlas.

But in all of this I must agree with Opal. Even if the ability is true and you can see how much blood someone will have on their hands, you still cannot kill someone for a crime they haven’t committed yet. This is a very slippery slope.

A few hours after the vision had ended, Selke returned to Ace and Spade’s, escorted by some paladins for her safety. Kayne objected hard to us confronting her about what she had learned, but I agree with Spade that it might be vital information, so we asked anyway. Selke didn’t want to tell us anything though, having been told that it would be best to keep it secret for now. She did convince us that all is fine for now, and that she is no danger to us or herself.

With how much the temple wants to protect her and keep her secret a secret, I think it might be that she’s not a clone or simulacrum after all, but is quite possibly an avatar or reincarnation of Arrisia, but that’s just a wild guess of course.

I hope to see you again soon my friend!

with love,

Zaela

Selke