The stair gives way beneath Sir Thickrod’s weight. Stone drops into darkness, carrying him, the fugitive, and the elderly witness into a circular archive below the tower.
They land amid pale dust and ringing stone. Petrified-wood shelves curve around the chamber, their sealed scrolls and tablets untouched beneath centuries of gray ash.
The Elderly Witness
An archive beneath a watchtower. The elder kings hid more than roads here.
At the chamber’s center, a stone lectern stands unbroken. A single tome rests upon it, bound in dark hide and secured by a silver chain sunk into the floor.
The tome’s pages turn without wind. On one spread, a missing heir’s name appears beside an account written in a firm, familiar hand.
Sir Thickrod
The name is Caelan Aster. The writing records the heir’s own hand.
The Fugitive
Caelan Aster. That is the vanished heir. Read it, Sir Thickrod. Perhaps this tells us where the Crown went.
✓ Quest Accepted
Establish whether the tome’s account is trustworthy
“Perceive the authenticity of the book and feel for magical aura.”
SUCCESS (Legendary Perception, rolled -1)
Sir Thickrod steadies his hands above the open tome without touching it. His legendary perception separates age from artifice: the hide has dried naturally, the silver chain is centuries-old, and every page bears the quiet wear of genuine use.
He reaches with his arcane heritage. A deep, restrained aura answers from the book, not as a ward or glamour, but as memory sealed into ink, binding, and bone-white page edges.
Sir Thickrod
The tome is authentic. Its magic preserves testimony rather than concealing it.
The Elderly Witness
Then the hand is true as well? No scribe copied these words for a dead king’s convenience?
The letters carry a living cadence beneath their age, each stroke shaped by the same deliberate pressure. A faint thread of heir-magic binds the account to Caelan Aster’s bloodline and refuses false attribution.
The Fugitive
Then read it. If Caelan wrote this himself, the Crown’s trail may still be waiting beneath those words.
Quest Complete
Establish whether the tome’s account is trustworthy