Northern Ex Closure

[Briarheart]

I slowly made my way over to one of the buildings that had a small stable next to it and pushed open the door. I was greeted by a rustic interior that I suppose all backwater villages would have: Fireplace in the middle of the one-room building, roaring with enough of a blaze to heat the place. Fur-lined cots off to the side, a sparsely-decorated small table in the opposite corner with a set of chairs to match. Racks filled the rest of the space, adorned with various tools and weapons one would need to survive the frozen wastes.

A man with a thick beard and skin as dark as the hides he wrapped himself in looked up from stringing a bow. After taking several seconds to size me up, he decided that the egg-shaped woman with glowing eyes and a village's worth of clothes was no threat to him. He rattled off a rough greeting in a tongue I did not recognize. Possibly a local dialect, heavy as it was on consonants and an over-reliance on K's and V's.

“Tradespeak,” I replied as I set my bloated pack on the wooden planks of the floor.

The man smiled and effortlessly switched to common tongue. “Ah, yes, sorry.” His accent was still thick as molasses, though. “Are you the one I received the message from? The crazy woman who needs help navigating the snows northward?”

“That would be me,” I said with a nod and a flicker of amber light from my eyes. “The sooner we can leave, the better.”

[Briarheart]

The sun was high in the sky, reflecting off the mirror-like surface of the snowy hills when we finally reached my destination. It took some looking around before I found the entrance to the cave that was referred to on the scroll that was safely stashed away in my pack.

A small marking was etched into a rock, partially covered by a few errant flakes. I brushed it off with a gloved hand as I threw my bag down onto the ground. Taking my mittens off, the freezing air of the Great White Expanse immediately bit into my skin. I hissed at the sudden bite of cold, scrambling to undo the buckles on my back and snatch the rolled piece of parchment before my hands froze off.

The symbol that was etched into the cave's entryway matched the one scribbled in faded ink on the scroll. Without a doubt, this was what I had come halfway across the world looking for.

The First Sanctum.

Lichensith Ulroke's personal hideaway. His safe house and panic room. Where both his uprising and downfall began.

It was here that I would find... what, exactly? Now that I was here, what was I really looking for? Some sort of closure? The final pieces of the puzzle that was the Silver Assassin and the Crimson Hands?

Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. It was slightly frightening.

Killian approached me to say something, but a quick blast of cordyceps spores silenced him. In a few minutes he would be dead. In fifteen, he would be resurrected and on his way back home without me, resuming his normal life with orders never to speak about our trip, that I was with him, and that if anyone asked about the weird growths coming out of his neck and forming a collar to say that they were some sort of skin condition.

[Briarheart]

With a lit torch in hand and several layers of rancid animal hide stripped from my body and left on the cave floor, I descended further into the cave.

My mind wandered to that year I spent trying desperately to re-educate Ulroke and mold him into the leader I thought the Hands deserved. It was unintentional that information about the First Sanctum escaped from his lips, but I listened intently as he babbled on, each word stained with blood and hate and fury and fear. How all of his plans were formed there, of the records he kept there of various pawns in his game. I had always thought that the Seventh Sanctum was his headquarters, but absolutely nobody else was privy to the knowledge of the First. Not even his Left or Right hands. Red--sorry, Amari probably wasn't aware of it herself, and she was being groomed as either his heir or the weapon he used to reshape the world.

It was also the first I heard of Isabelle, his ex-wife.

It intrigued me to hear the stories about this poor thing, of her history as princess and a guardian of a tree that had some spiritual importance to her people on the other side of the world. Of her escape to the Skavian Wilds, and of his accidental discovery of her hiding place.

Of how he was once a man capable of love and compassion, of how he was once a father. He was a man once, and not the monster that I had come to known. It was that day that affirmed my belief that I could rehabilitate him, that I truly could fix that poor bastard and shape him into the strong but understanding leader that I felt the Crimson Hands deserved.

We all make mistakes though, yeah?

[Briarheart]

After a couple minutes of walking down twisting, claustrophobic paths, with nothing but a small flame and my ragged breath accompanying me, I found myself coming to a doorway. On the scroll, the assassin noted that the door itself would be unlocked. In fact, the entire First Sanctum was left unguarded. No hexes, no wards, no zombified guards to keep would-be trespassers away from all of his secrets and treasures.

And so, I reached out, turned the rusty iron doorknob, and pushed my way into the First Sanctum.

“Holy shit,” I muttered breathlessly.

For a man who kept his quarters rather plain in the Seventh Sanctum, there were a lot of things, for a lack of better term. Covered in layers of frost and ice that drifted in from the holes in the roof of the cave, undisturbed for years, sat enough pieces of furniture of a familiar Coronian style to furnish an apartment. There were other tables scattered about, each covered with tarps and linens. Off in another part of the cave, also covered with a thin layer of ice, was a full-fledged alchemy laboratory that would've put my own to shame. There was also a desk brimming with notebooks, folders stuffed with torn pages, and writing utensils

Normally, I wasn't one to poke around other people's belongings, but curiosity burned deep within my chest. I knew of this mythical time when Ulroke was a decent human being, but what sort of mementos did he keep from that time?

I took a step closer, my briar-knit hand hesitating for a moment before tightly gripping the linen sheet covering one of the tables and tearing it away.