The Elect

There was a door out of the dying world, and only the Elect might pass it; the rest were left to entropy and the dark. Two of the party were named worthy of it that night — and the naming ended in blades, and a god came up through the floor.

Sylvie took them all in a blink — Pinchie with them — in a swirl of black smoke to the Celsian Athenaeum, leaving Rhys behind with a curse to go and die. An antiquarian dwarf, Dagga Brunnvar, met them and named the toll: any who came by teleport owed the treasury an artifact. Heyou gave up his spare wooden leg, and Dagga turned it over, and marked the glow on him, and said the Keeper of Splendor would want to see him. They penned Pinchie outside. A sealed vault-door near the entry hummed to Sylvie's magic, and Dagga would not say what lay behind it — the dean's business. The Sacred Pyre burned atop a sheer tower, and the halls ran chill and dim and warded.

They scattered to look the place over. Heyou went invisible and found a cabinet of old flasks — flight, iron skin, long-lasting things — and was reaching for it when Dean Therion Calanthe, an elf, stepped up behind him out of nowhere and displaced him into a lightless metal cell, where Ygva lay unconscious on the floor. Draz climbed the outer walls and the pyre-tower — the fire there gave light and almost no heat — found a shrine to God-King Otheidas by its crown and scepters, and overheard guards speak of "the heir," come with a garrison that filled the Abandoned Southern Wing. Jamal took up a standing violin and played until Dagga stopped him, and then drank with her, and gave her his loyalty. Sylvie read the Splendor of the place — thick at the temple, at the dean's quarters, at the pyre's core — and was brought to the Barn to dine with Inola, a simiah woman burning white-hot with it, who called her dazzling.

In the cell, Heyou opened the floor and lowered himself and Ygva into a rough tunnel lit by no source at all — and found the dean waiting there too.

By evening Dagga had won them an audience. In the hall stood many copies of the dean, and with them Dagga, Inola, a fungal priest of Ossa-in-absence named Ash-begets-Tide, and Casper, great-grandson of the god-king. The dean asked what they wanted with the witch — meaning Ygva — and Sylvie told it plain: their town's pyre gone dark, a branch sought to relight it, and her learning under Ygva to keep it from going out again. She healed Ygva awake where she lay. And Inola named the thing they had come into: only The Elect might ascend to the World Above; Ygva had seemingly invited two candidates for it — Sylvie and Heyou — and Draz and Jamal were not of them.

Sylvie would not take a salvation bought by leaving everyone else to the dark, and Inola said there was no other kind to be had. The dean would not widen the number; he would spend their power, he said, but not keep them as eternal company. And then a bolt was loosed — through Heyou, and glancing off him into Sylvie — and the hall went to blades.

Something had risen in the dean and looked out through his eyes now, throwing an aura of dread across the hall. Draz's arrows found only illusions of him; Jamal charged and was beaten back, and Sylvie turned the worst blow with her magic; her fireball died on the air without touching them. Dagga stood over Jamal to guard him; Inola herself put her burning blade through the true dean; Draz shot a double away and found the real one, and the dean teleported off and burst a fireball over Jamal and Heyou. And Ash-begets-Tide chanted over Ygva, and two sapling treants came up out of her body, and she was past all saving. Sylvie siphoned the dean near to death; Heyou ran the length of the hall and stabbed him down — senseless, not slain. And as the dean fell, the floor of the audience-hall broke open, and the Runt God came up through it — into a room of fraying alliances and doubtful neutrals, where the saplings that had grown from Ygva still put out their leaves.

Retcon (storytime cleanup): the dean fights possessed — projecting an aura of fear — and is left unconscious, not slain; he dies only later, in Session 21, when Sylvie drains the life and the Godshard out of him.