Swordhaven Gardens, Maze and Divorare Pass
The courtyard at Swordhaven
Swordhaven opened its royal gardens and ballroom to visitors. Nobles and their households gathered alongside knights and servants, but the courtyard was no refuge from the old dynasty. Lady Xaria asked the Hero to demonstrate their skill against the noble ghosts that still treated Swordhaven as their own. She and Lord Harley meant to take a party deeper into the grounds.
Xaria said she could no longer wield a sword after taking on a burden passed down through her family. One of her ancestors had sealed an evil inside their body. An heir took on the duty by defeating the previous guardian, and Xaria alone among her siblings had beaten their father. She hoped to teach others to wield a weapon even if she could no longer wield one herself.
Favors in the gardens
Not every request in the gardens led to the maze. Nialla wanted a chance to play the piano without knights bringing private invitations from their lords. She told the Hero that Princess Brittany had given her a choice about marriage that many noblewomen never received. She had no interest in those suitors, or in men in general. Iberis asked for poisonous Blithe Roses on Lady Marigold’s behalf, sparing her the suspicion that would follow if the nobles saw her picking them herself.
Nora, the head maid of House Cavendish, asked for help harvesting the Queen’s Crocuses. She remembered the poisonous plants as a gift to a queen of the Drakath Dynasty. The flowers and the ghosts were reminders of how much of the old court remained in the grounds where the new one gathered.
The two sides of the maze
Lord Harley and Lady Xaria welcomed the Hero as their first volunteer. Before the Alteon Rebellion, King Dethrix and his court had tormented Greenguard. Loyalists had fought for him while their enemies died trying to put Alteon on the throne. Ghosts of both sides remained in the maze. Some of the old nobles still behaved as if their age had never ended.
The party set out to put the spirits to rest and make the gardens safer. The Hero helped clear the path, and remnants of the old court began turning up in the maze. Harley warned that the maze was larger inside than it looked from outside. Every time he tried to map it, the hedges shifted behind him.
Silk in the hedges
The first scrap was fine silk in a shade fashionable under Dethrix. It might have come from one of the old galas or from the loyalists who ran into the maze after Alteon defeated him. Harley remembered joining his father in pursuit of those fugitives.
Harley said the maze had been surrounded. Xaria believed the fugitives died hiding from their pursuers. The cloth could point back to the day the rebels won, but nobody could say exactly when it had snagged in the hedge.
Glass from Queen Marjorie’s court
A piece of broken glass belonged to the collection of Queen Marjorie, Dethrix’s mother and Drakath’s grandmother. The party remembered accounts of her galas, where she threw goblets onto the floor while the guests danced. She had even thrown them at Dethrix until he learned to dodge.
The account passed down from Harley’s father described her laughter as if the throws were a game. Dethrix later threw things at his own son, Drakath. The comparison took the conversation from a court amusement to what the royal children had endured.
Dethrix’s coin
A gold coin bore Dethrix’s face. The party explained that new coins used to be made whenever the throne changed hands. A ruler with a grudge against a predecessor could strip the older money of its value. Dethrix hated his father, Dudley, though Dudley had reportedly wanted to keep the old coins in use.
Dethrix had put his face on so much that even old signs carried it. The coin made the dynasty’s vanity tangible enough to joke about, until the next finds showed what the court’s power had meant for prisoners.
The hunt
The party found old shackles marked with bites. Under Dethrix, some captured rebels were executed. Others had a limb broken and were let loose in the maze for the court to hunt. Harley said Dethrix had his enemies buried kneeling toward the throne, and after the rebellion Alteon ordered that they be laid to rest properly.
Harley said some of his father’s comrades were still missing. He thought their remains would be almost impossible to find, but the numbers engraved on the shackles could be checked against the old dungeon master’s records.
The scent of an old lie
One relic reeked of a perfume Harley recognized as his aunt’s. She had defended him when other nobles called him an ogre, and she had sworn she never attended Dethrix’s galas. Harley took the scent as evidence that she had lied.
The possibility that it belonged to somebody else was raised. Harley still called for an investigation and a retrial. His affection for the aunt who had stood up for him made the discovery painful, but he wanted to know what she had done.
A last letter for Felix
The party recovered a letter so worn it was close to falling apart. Its writer thanked Felix for fighting for them and wished to see him smile again. They asked him to live the life ahead of him and trust that he could find love again.
The party thought the letter had come from one of the prisoners tortured at the galas. Harley knew someone named Felix who was away from Greenguard. He offered to take care of the letter and intended to pass it on if that man returned.
The boars at the center
A mold-covered tusk recalled the animals Dethrix had used in the hunt. His boars had been raised to be violent and fed on human blood. The party imagined a wounded prisoner limping through the dark, pursued by hogs while the nobles laughed.
After losing their masters, the hogs had become feral. Harley had tried to clear them out before they could reach town, but more kept coming from the center of the maze. Then the party found new visitors collecting blood among the hedges.
Pigment from the maze
A novice Extinction Artist admitted to taking blood from feral hogs for paint. The Artist had hoped to find traces left by the old nobles or their victims. In their view, the galas shaped Dethrix, and his rule set events in motion that eventually brought Chaos to the stage.
The party discussed taking the Artist in for questioning, though collecting hog blood had not clearly broken a law. The Hero instead pretended to be interested in patronage. The novice pointed them toward a colleague who made music.
A performance for the end of the world
Aficionado Cosima hoped her music would make listeners feel as though they were awaiting execution. She denied being the Decadenza and said she was only an Aficionado, below the rank of a Virtuoso studying under a Maestro. Among the things she had picked up was a broken violin. She said Prince Drakath had once practiced in the maze and smashed his instrument in frustration. Xaria’s father said Dethrix had broken the violin over his son’s head regardless.
Cosima wanted her art to capture the end of the world and let an audience share the thrill. Harley connected the Artists’ interest in the maze to the origins of Chaos. Xaria told the Hero that she and Harley would arrest the Artists and question them in private. Their work inside the maze would have to continue another time.
Through the hedge at Divorare Pass
A dent in the hedge led Harley and Xaria into a part of the maze where daylight gave way to dusk. They heard a sound somewhere between a howl and a roar. Harley was concerned that a beast this close to the entrance might hurt someone. Xaria dealt with more Extinction Artists while Harley told the Hero what they had found. Harley wondered if Darkovia’s Eternal Night might have followed the creature.
Their next task was to clear the Artists away so they could safely approach the beast. The materials they recovered included sketches and scores. Harley said the Artists were using brass horns to imitate the creature’s howl, and he intended to warn the nobles whose lands surrounded Darkovia. Xaria recognized the Artists in blue from Queen Lynaria’s memorial, where she had assumed they were performers from Mythsong. Now she wondered what Maestro Nazarene intended to do in Darkovia.
Nazarene’s notebook
Nazarene wrote that the gardens gave the Extinction Artists a place to work, but she feared Maestro Trecento’s followers would get them expelled. Declaring a project would keep another Maestro from interfering. Her disciples heard the creature howling in the maze, and Nazarene chose it as her subject.
Her notebook traced the beast back to Dethrix’s campaign against vampires and werewolves. He had werewolves captured so court mages could mix their blood with that of other monsters. Nazarene wrote that he meant to turn the hybrids against Darkovia and apparently released them into the maze when he could not control them. She named this one the Divorare, a werewolf changed with dragon blood, and took its existence as evidence for the extinction she envisioned.
The victim of an experiment
Xaria considered killing the Divorare a mercy after what it had endured. Harley wanted to subdue it instead. He had known werewolves in Battleon who helped keep their neighbors safe, and this creature had been kidnapped and forced into its present form. He asked the Hero to restrain it without trying to kill it.
The Hero subdued the Divorare. Harley said the forced transformation had shattered the creature’s mind. He thanked the Hero for treating it with respect and said he would look for Clerics who could help.