Arthurian Cultivation

Hunter the hunter dutifully took them to see the lord. The man seemed shaken after the fight with the bear. He was a good sort though, and dutifully saw them through town. Taliesin gave him a token in thanks for his conduct, which the man looked at as if it were some fae gift. Unsure if weal or woe, but knowing it held great power.

The Lord’s manor had a large high-arched roof. Decorative beams supported the dense thatch. The place was humble but well kept. The adornments were few, the town clearly not most prosperous, yet it remained a noble space.

We were led to the Lord, a middle-aged man with the build of a warrior and scars on his chin. We found him instructing his children, a younger boy and girl, in the arts of writing. The pair complained as their father removed himself from their company, so I took it upon myself to distract them by grabbing smoke from the huge central hearth and forming it into creatures for them to chase.

With the pair laughing, the Lord of Rivermouth began to speak with Sephy and Bors.

Sephy, of course, talked rings around him, making it seem entirely natural that while looking for some colour-obsessed bandits, and only after he was thoroughly focused on that, did she slip in that she was also interested in a bounty he had placed years ago.

The mere mention of it changed the mood of the room instantly.

What followed was the most total collapse of a man I had ever borne witness to. Phischer was a cruel man who had grown crueller with deception. The Lord of Rivermouth, a man chosen by the good, if challenged, King of Gorre, cut the very image of a rural noble. Muscled and in hard-wearing but fine clothes, we had met him in his hall, where dogs slept in the corner and his citizens kept busy with practical work.

The mere mention of the ‘false healer’ saw him slump back on a simple bench. His eyes went distant. An aide or steward appeared and hurried the children away. The other servants seemingly found excuses to leave, and within the span of a minute the once warm, friendly room was empty apart from us, the lord and his guards, who stayed with their liege, eyes fixed to the floor.

Lord Rivermouth began to tell the tale of his greatest mistake, trusting ‘the sage Emrys’.

His wife, ill and fading after the birth of their second child, the Lord had sought solutions, selling what jewellery and riches he had to offer up a bounty on her healing.

A few came, but none could offer succour. Then, as he feared his wife would pass any day and so spent his nights beside her for fear of leaving her lonely in her final moments, a false miracle came.

The sage Emrys arrived, a man wrapped in a cloak, wearing an eye patch of raven feathers, and with the weight of ages behind him. He offered a cure, and the Lord, desperate and tired, agreed against the counsel of his retainers, who found the man unearthly and strange. The sage nodded and promised to return and offer healing before the morning came.

The man returned at the witching hour, when the moon was full above. The Lord was briefly exiled from the room. Lord Rivermouth was a Wood-level cultivator, but even his elite guards, who were only at Stone and had yet to create their hearths, felt something that night.

Lady Rivermouth woke the next day. Her hair shone, her body rendered thin and frail now full and hale. She laughed and there was great rejoicing. The sage remained for three days. He refused guests, speaking only to the Lord and Lady, asking the Lady questions about her health, which she gave among many effusive thanks.

They showed their children their mother’s saviour. They spoke of debts that could not be repaid. They offered to rename their youngest after him.

But the sage refused. He was gruff, and the Lord allowed him to leave, but only after all but forcing his wealth upon the man.

He had one more day of bliss. Then the next day he awoke, turned over and found his wife shrivelled and pale. She was, if anything, worse than she had been before the cure. Her breaths shallow, her skin sallow.

She did not last the day.

She spoke of pain in her body, of a feeling of rotting inside. She called it dark magic, too good to be true. Of how the potion had tasted of fresh blood, cursed blood. The man broke down crying before us. It was such a pitiful sight that Bors walked over and embraced the man to keep him from slipping to the floor.

The guards eventually came over and helped, taking away their liege.

Apologies followed. The man was clearly a good and just person. His people worried for him and clearly did not appreciate seeing him brought low. Sephy gracefully suggested that we be put up in a separate building rather than imposing directly on their hospitality.

We did not promise revenge. The risk that this monstrous soul might have local spies was too high.

So it was that we found ourselves sitting around in a simple one-room cabin in a gloom.

We had found our target. We had proof. The potion of blood all but sealed it.

Yet we were unfulfilled. The tale told and the final sight of the Lord slumped over his guard’s shoulders had killed any festive mood.

Worse, it was sinking in that this meant we had to head into the Folly.

"Well we knew he was a fucker, but this is something else," Bors said, looking like he wanted to kick a hole in the wall.

"We suspected he was doing this already," I replied.

"But that’s a big difference from seeing it. Hearing the damage he caused. How can he do that to people?" Bors paced angrily.

"Why does he do that to people? He could just take the wealth, if we believe Lord Rivermouth’s view on his cultivation. Also, I find it hard to believe that he is surviving wandering around alone at the edges of the Folly at Bronze," Sephy asked the room.

"Do we know he is alone? Maybe he has a whole little group. That would explain why he takes the money," I replied.

"I think Emrys seals it. It is one of the other names of the original Merlin according to Maeve. He is clearly a wizard, and they are solitary creatures. As to why he is conning them out of their money?" I twiddled my fingers, trying to imagine the kind of mind who would do such things.

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"If he just burst in and stole it all, everyone would know there is an Iron rank behaving like some Unseelie nightmare. The kings would band together to put up a decent bounty. But someone who got tricked out of their money? It is not something you can raise the banners for," Sephy suggested. Then she frowned.

"It still does not make sense. Why even bother doing it at all? What does he need mortal money for? The amounts he has stolen would not buy him a pittance of anything worth an Iron’s time."

"We are thinking like rational people again. He is a wizard, a group famously detached from the world, who progress through knowledge and research. What if all this is just cultivation?" I offered.

"What?" The other two looked at me.

"That is the difference between witches and wizards." I conjured up everything Maeve had shared, plus the memories from the stories I knew. The warnings about their nature were quite clear. "Witches understand the world and their place in it. They understand the powers that be through exploring themselves and their limits. They are like a potion that studies itself. Even as they affect others, they are part of the process. Wizards are all about understanding the world as an observer. They are the cauldron watching the dance within."

"By torturing people? How were such vile creatures ever permitted to exist?" Bors growled.

"We all know tales of knights who would do anything to advance, pick any fight, steal from others, kill people over secrets and treasure," Sephy replied.

"And more often than not we hunt that kind of bastard down," Bors shouted.

"There is no group of ‘good’ wizards to hunt him down, or not enough of them at least. From the tales, wizards were at their best a bit of a nuisance when they were not like Merlin, the real one or the conman," Sephy added.

"Fuck." The conversation fell apart with that. I paused, trying to work out what time it was. With everything that had happened I was not sure if I had missed my window.

"I am going to focus on going to sleep. We need to relay this to Lance and see if she has heard from the others," I said.

"Good luck with that. I want to go hunt these Green Foot fuckers. The Lord gave us some potential locations," Sephy said. "Hopefully it should be on the way for the others before they meet up with us at the rendezvous point."

I settled into the cot at the edge of the cabin. Hopefully we could communicate quickly. Our long-range communications were reliant on Lance. Gaz’s little water trinkets were good for communication over short distances, but easily blocked, as our last two encounters had proved, with enough earth or well-crafted arrays easily cutting us off from each other.

Lance was far harder to block and had a much greater range. She might not love her dream glamour as she loved her moon glamour, but her mother had not allowed her to slack in her training. One of a dream-gifted’s primary roles was in enabling passing messages across the dreaming. It was a trick we had leveraged many times. Part of doing so taught us all a little about the strange realm of dreams.

The floating thoughts of all thinking beings made up the dream world. Big or small, minds constantly emitted wisps of this glamour. I had been surprised to learn that even rats had dreams. This was how the dream oracles functioned. People spoke, things were heard, and everyone dreamed. Shreds of the truth, no matter how hidden, bubbled up to the dream realm to be harvested by those with the talent to listen. The door of the mind remained closed but the oracle listened with one ear pressed to it.

They could also help others create a door and open it up for a full conversation.

Before her rise to Iron, Lance had not been able to create her own doors. She could accept an invitation and chat with her mother, but she could not forge a strong enough connection to do much more than share a dire feeling.

Her advance to Iron meant that she could reach out to a dreamer, and according to her I was by far the easiest dreamer to find.

So I turned in. I let myself drop into sleep, only to have to take a few more minutes to sort through the day. Sleeping when I had the chance was a trick I had long mastered, a useful trick when you spent odd hours sneaking around or monitoring strange brews, but recently I had found myself struggling with it.

The nightmares of the Harkley mansion had stuck with me even with the poison gone. They did not come every night, they were not as visceral as they had once been, but that old fear had seeped in. Memories of my desperation, of the many dark moments, crept into my mind.

It seemed tonight was an unlucky night.

I was in my perfume lab, one of the few spaces where I was sort of safe. My perfumes were valuable enough that the powers that be had declared that no one would mess with my equipment or work. That, of course, led to those who resented me loitering outside my lab. I could hear them lingering, enjoying the threat they posed, formless words of old banter, names called through the wood. The one that made me twitch most was Reg. I hated being called Reg, and they knew that. I worked desperately, putting together a fresh scent, this pathetic sanctum of mine and its feeble protections dependent on my success.

They banged on the door and I winced as I nearly dropped the vial.

I tried to focus, but the banging got worse and worse. Maybe this was a senior, someone with authority to enter. Maybe it was not my idiot cousins. Fingers trembling, I reached a hand out to the door and turned the key.

"What took you so long!" Lance stepped through into the tiny room.

A wave of reality came with her. My mind cleared. I was not in the Harkley mansion. It was all just a dream. I sank back onto the workbench. Even if my body was a delusion, I found I could not stand.

My perspective changed. I had not even realised, but I had been in my younger body, before I had reached my full height, so intense was the power of the dream.

Lance looked around, her nose scrunched up as if surrounded by a foul smell, which, if this place were real, would have been more than likely. For a process that created beautiful scents, perfume had to trudge through a lot of ugliness to get there.

"This nightmare is old, rotten and powerful. Do you mind if I take it off you?" Lance asked.

"You can do that?"

"It is a way to cultivate dream glamour, removing bad dreams. It is not my speciality," she responded. "I will try not to look at it too hard. This does not look like anything recent."

"I have had a lot of bad dreams recently, since that priest," I mumbled.

"He may have left something in with the poison. You should have told me." She glared at me.

"No offence, but I know next to nothing about dream glamour that you or your mother have not told me. I did not know it was an option," I defended weakly, not saying that I had not wanted to share such a vulnerability with anyone.

"Well now you know." The dream rippled around Lancelot. "Let us focus. What have you learned?"

I explained what we had found, the story of the healing, the cruel sage and his false promises. Even as I skimmed over the details, not diving into the worst of it, I could see her eyes become hard.

"I am looking forward to killing this bastard."

"You will have to get in the queue with Bors and Sephy. Even I want a go at him," I replied. I did not appreciate such a foul liar wandering around.

"Arthur’s group reached their target but did not find anything conclusive. The one who had put up the bounty had since passed away, killed by grief. Tristan asked around discreetly, but his servants did not know much. It was his child. They got better for a day and then passed away. Though they did find out that the man’s manservant disappeared around the same time as the healing, which lines up with your discovery."

"It seems more and more likely," I nodded. "Sephy said to meet at the rendezvous point. It seems like we are heading into the Folly."

"It does seem that way. Maeve has not reached her target yet. I will need to check in with her next and pass on the news."

We then exchanged information, covering where the bandits had been rumoured to live. Hopefully, as the others swept over, they could handle it. Lance agreed.

"Sounds like a plan. Also Taliesin, next time you get weird dreams after being attacked by a dream cultivator, tell me, yes."

"Yes, fine. It was stupid not to reach out," I replied.

"We are cultivators Taliesin. Especially at Iron, we have far more control over our minds than we used to. We can still get nightmares, but not like this. Not unless you are actually worried about making potions in a tiny room."

"I am not. And thanks. I should have mentioned it. I just did not think. I am still not used to having people I can trust."

"Well get used to it. Now let us go get this scum!"