The long rest after the rift came with a price the party could feel. Lights flickered, dimmed, and did not recover. The hum that had threaded through the tower for weeks had a new pitch now, a thin wrong note beneath the usual drone. Something they had done was showing.
They were walking past a pile of corpses when one of them moved. A priestess straightened, her head turned towards Tiaumil, and her eyes opened. Jergal's book tore itself from his grip and struck him in the face. When he caught it, the pages had gone blank. Every word he had written, every death he had recorded, every confession he had inked in his own hand, gone. Then the ink returned, line by line, written now in a hand that was not his own. Jergal had read every entry. He had read and he had kept. Only when the book was full again did the corpse speak.
"Scripter. I have walked every hall of the dead. I have catalogued the passing of gods. I have recorded languages that have no written form." The voice was blunt in a way Jergal had never been with him before. "This tower keeps more from me than I knew. You have done well. You have found what has been done."
Jergal named the place for what it was: a mockery of his own work. The Collar Master had recreated his ledger in crude, vile shape, and it held him at enough distance that he could not walk the tower's halls as he might. There was one soul here, he said, that belonged on his ledger. Taken long before all the others. Still whole, where the rest had been broken. A diplomat. Find him, free him, and the reward would be measured in the same power Tiaumil had already been given. A blessing was added then and there: five times a day, Tiaumil could seize a soul within thirty feet before the tower claimed it. And when things changed, Jergal promised, he would speak again through the contact stones. The corpse sagged. The book closed in Tiaumil's hands.
Tiaumil counted Jergal's interventions as they stood there. Stopping Ularan. Ascending Pine. Sending Tiaumil himself. Resurrecting Naralis. And now this. Four of them now, when the gods were not supposed to move so openly. Red flags, but no clear answer to what they meant.
Upstairs, the air changed. It grew wet and warm and loud with the sound of water moving through unseen channels. The walls looked eaten from the inside. The first chamber held a pool, a black gate, and a single door east. A tentacle slid out of the water towards Siax while he was listening at the door, and chanting came through the wood in Primordial, praise for someone named Ihanvas whose reach would spread through all bodies of water. Tiaumil knew the name. A Merdelainian legend, the sort who tracked down the largest, meanest creatures and pulled them back in chains. Decades older than he looked, adored once, vanished a century or two ago.
A crackle of a laugh came from the pool. "More clever than you seem, dearie. I'm in all the water on this floor. You found me so quickly." The old hag made her case from below the surface: she was trapped, she wanted out, and Ihanvas was both her captor and her rival. Kill him and she would reward them. She offered a glyph key drawn up from her own reach, made of bone and twig and seaweed, and Tiaumil could see her influence on it at a glance. It would work, and it would also do something else, and the something else was hers. She proved the party could not keep secrets near any pool on her floor. She mocked Kael when he threatened to kill everyone in the tower, and she chided the rest for not asking what they wanted in return. Arya caught one detail of real value: the collared elf Pancheska's sister, the one who had escaped them earlier, was somewhere on this floor now, frozen.
They left the chamber with the tentacles following them at a patient, searching pace. Opening the eastern door was not clean. The tentacles lashed through the gap. Arya and Pancheska and the wildfire spirit were grappled in the same moment, and only Kael's parry kept him on his feet. Arya's fey step broke her free and carried the spirit and the elf through with her. They slammed the doors behind them.
Beyond the chamber was full of people, scrubbing the floor and the pool's edges with metallic brushes, chanting as they worked. Massive iron bolts in the floor. Chains leading down into dark water and out of sight. Three hovering globes of water suspended in the air, shifting without pattern. The cultists were cleaning out Tanjus's reach, erasing her scratches one inch at a time.
Then Ihanvas arrived with a troll in tow. He kicked the creature into the pool and spoke a single word: "Steam." The surface broke as a dragon turtle rose, swallowed the troll whole, and sank back into place, its chains visible for the first time. Ihanvas smiled, unlocked the doors, and invited the party in.
He knew them. He had known they would come. He was, he explained at some length, a legend, and he was used to being intimidating. He wanted the hag dead. He would pay handsomely, in keys and information and power, for any party that delivered. If they refused, he would not stop them passing through his realm, but he could not promise his creatures the same restraint. He made a fist, the dragon turtle heaved up through the surface on cue, and Kael felt, in a way he could not quite argue with, that this man could not be fought.
Kael stepped back, kept his face even, said they would think about it, and moved away. Ihanvas spread his hands. "Welcome. New players in our little war. I'm sure you'll enjoy the stay."