Don Bassingthwaite - The Grieving Tree

“A few years ago in Zarash’ak, one of the scions of House Tharashk went mad and wouldn’t stop writing,” said Natrac. “It was a scandal. She scribbled on anything she could reach with anything she could get her hands on. She had to be restrained or she would bite her fingers and try to write with her own blood.”

Breath hissed through Dandra’s teeth. “You’re not helping!”

Geth glanced at her. Dandra’s face was tight, her jaw tense, her eyes half-closed in concentration. The others saw it, too. “Dandra?” asked Orshok.

Dandra lifted her chin. “It’s Tetkashtai,” she said. “This place frightens her. Il-Yannah, it frightens me. There’s madness here. You’re lucky that you can only feel the edges of it.”

“This was Dah’mir’s lair,” Singe pointed out. “Maybe something of his power is still here.”

She shook her head. “No. This is different. It’s-” She drew a rasping breath. “It’s older. An echo of something that happened a long time ago.”

“Can you tell what?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head again. “But it’s getting stronger.” She raised her glowing spear to light the way ahead.

To her or Singe, Geth realized, it probably looked like the corridor just kept going on and on. Out beyond the edge of human or kalashtar sight, though, the shadows opened onto a deeper darkness, like the shallows at the edge of a lake. “There’s something up there,” he said sharply. “The hallway ends.”

He felt an instant of bitter satisfaction as Singe’s face wavered between disdain and the need to ask for help. The wizard’s disdain won, though. He pushed forward, striding down the corridor. Everyone else followed hard on his heels. In only moments, the deeper darkness that Geth had glimpsed came into the light-a high archway with some kind of balcony beyond. Singe and Dandra stepped through the archway and out onto the balcony, their glowing weapons held high. Geth stopped just a pace behind them.

They looked down over a great chamber that still retained vestiges of the natural cavern it had once been. Vaulting arches of worked stone leaped across a high, rough ceiling. The lower walls had been smoothed and cut straight, but the chamber was still an irregular oval more than a score of paces wide and easily twice as long-even Geth’s keen eyes couldn’t make out its far end in the shadows. Broad stone stairs hugged the wall to one side of the balcony on which they stood, leading down to the floor ten paces below.

Spaced out along the walls and set into alcoves were the cold hearths of half a dozen ancient forges, soot staining the walls around them. Some still had the crumbling remains of huge bellows connected to them. Anvils, tools, and huge stone benches had been piled into the alcoves as well, all tumbled together as if they were nothing more than toys. Every smooth section of wall had been filled with more writing, though in this chamber the Goblin words were interspersed with strange sketches and diagrams.

In the center of the chamber, standing atop a broad platform, a strange sculpture of white stone reached up toward the ceiling. A thick base rose from the platform, narrowed, then spread and split into dozens of curved segments. The entire sculpture was cut with grooves across and along its surface. In places, sharp ridges and thorny spikes jutted out from it. The thing had an unpleasant, sinister look to it-so unpleasant and sinister that it actually took Geth a moment to realize what it was supposed to be.

“Grandmother Wolf,” he breathed. “It’s a tree.”

“If this is the Hall of the Revered, it must be the grieving tree,” said Singe. He looked at Orshok. “That’s what kind of tree grows underground, I guess. A stone one.”

Orshok just stared at the sculpted tree. “Why?” he asked. “What is it here for?” He glanced at Ashi, but she shook her head.

“Light of il-Yannah!” Dandra thrust out her arm. “Look there beside the tree.”

Geth followed her pointing hand. Close beside the stone tree-in its shadow-stood a strange heap of metal tubes and wires interspersed with pieces of glass or crystal. His eyes widened and his heart seemed to skip a beat. He’d seen something like it before, in memories Dandra had shown him through the kesh of her time as Dah’mir’s prisoner. It was a near match for the device Dah’mir had used to trap Tetkashtai in the psicrystal and place Dandra in her body.

“I think we need to take a closer look.” Singe grasped Dandra’s hand and drew her after him down the stairs. Geth and the others followed, picking their way carefully. The same footsteps that they had followed in the dust along the corridor marked the dust of the stairs as well. Ekhaas had been this way. When they reached the floor of the of the chamber, however, he was surprised to find that there was no dust on the floor at all-it had all been swept away.

Ashi noticed as well. “Someone was trying to hide their presence, I think,” the hunter said.

“Why here then and not in the corridor?” Geth asked.

Ashi shrugged.

The device beside the tree was considerably smaller than the one in the memory Dandra had shown Geth. In her memory, Dah’mir’s device towered overhead. The device before them, on the other hand, was only a little taller than Ashi.

“This isn’t the same size,” Geth said.

“No,” Dandra agreed, “it isn’t.” She circled the device and stopped before to a niche built inside it. To judge by the broken metal surrounding the niche, Geth guessed that something had been pulled out from inside the device. Something large-something the size of a crouching child.

“And find what waits in the shade of the Grieving Tree,” he quoted. “That’s where the Bonetree found Dah’mir’s dragonshard.”

“He built a model of his device?” said Natrac.

“I don’t think so.” Singe stepped close to the device and pushed against a piece of age-corroded metal. It crumpled like paper, sending green flakes drifting to the ground. All of the bits of metal and wire that made up the device, Geth realized, were similarly corroded, the crystals among them clouded by time. “Dah’mir was here two hundred years ago. This is a lot older.”

They were all quiet for a moment before Geth said. “The Dhakaani made this?”

Dandra stepped back and stared at the device. “That’s impossible.”

Singe spread his hands. “Maybe not. By all accounts, the Dhakaani were accomplished smiths. Their weapons helped fight off the daelkyr. I’ve never heard of Dhakaani artifacts that use dragonshards before, but-”

“No,” said Dandra. “It’s impossible that the Dhakaani could have made something to affect kalashtar.” Her eyes were wide. “This device has to be thousands of years old, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” said the wizard. “The Empire of Dhakaan fell after the Daelkyr War. I think historians agree it was dead by about five thousand years ago.”

Dandra raised her hand and wrapped it around her psicrystal. “How much do you know about the history of the kalashtar?”

Orshok and Ashi looked at her blankly and shook their heads. Geth spoke up, repeating bits and pieces that he had heard during the Last War. “Kalashtar come from across the Dragonreach. From the continent of Sarlona.”

“They come from farther away than that,” Singe said. He frowned. “Kalashtar are the descendants of humans and spirits from Dal Quor, the plane of dreams. That’s why you have psionic powers.”

Dandra nodded. “We’re not descendants as such-the Quori spirits that formed the first kalashtar were exiles from Dal Quor, and they were given refuge in Eberron by merging with a group of humans in the nation of Adara in Sarlona. As those first kalashtar married and had children, the original Quori spirits splintered among their lineages. The point is, we know exactly when kalashtar came into being. It was eighteen hundred years ago.” She pointed her spear at the Dhakaani device. “How could an empire that was dead more than three thousand years before kalashtar even existed build something to affect us? Why would they?”