In the Shadows... [Research DTA]

🗡️ Co-written with Jaezred Vandree , Oziah Daybreaker & Toby (DM)  🗡️

---

Jaezred arranges the table before them: a bowl of incense, a stick of candle, a quartz gemstone, and his tome of witchcraft all to one side. He reads out loud from the commune ritual page on his book as he shuffles the newly-begotten, black-and-white tarot cards with expert hands, seeming more like a showy croupier than a sage fortune teller. Nonetheless, the incense in the bowl begins to spontaneously produce a thin smoke, filling the air between them with a pleasant, calming aroma.

When he is done, he looks Delilah sitting across from him in the eye and extends the deck, spread out face-down in his hands, towards her. “Draw three cards and put them face-down on the table, and think of the questions for each card. ‘Are the changes I am undergoing part of my shadowy heritage?’, ‘Do any of us three have the means of undoing these changes which are affecting me?’, ‘Will the condition currently affecting me get worse or become more dramatic?’” He straightens his back. “Right. Whenever you’re ready.”

She nods, rolls her shoulders and shakes her arms out, then closes her eyes. Reaching out towards the cards with a pale hand, she moves slowly from right to left, turning the three questions over and over in her mind. Her fingers touch three separate cards, a frown creasing her brow or lips pursing lightly in an unconfident way each time she does. Delilah peeks through her lashes to make sure she is holding onto the tarot card before moving on. When the third card is placed on the table the frown and pursed lips fade, though her narrow face is cut with sharper lines as she looks back to Jaezred expectantly.

The drow mage draws one final card from the deck and puts it above the three Delilah had laid down. Then he flips the first card she drew face-up: The Moon, reversed. He knits his brows together. “I think… it is saying that whatever is happening to you has nothing to do with your lineage.”

He moves on to the next card: Three of Wands, also reversed. “And apparently, we do not have the means to stop or reverse this, not currently, anyway.”

And now, the third card Delilah had drawn: the image of a tall, fortified tower being struck by lightning and consumed by fire as bodies plummet from it greets them — The Tower. Jaezred purses his lips.

“I do believe that it will get worse.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he flips the final card: a skeleton kneeling down, praying to the Heavens — Death. Symbolising metamorphosis, change. He sighs. “Yes, that’s quite obvious, but thank you, spirits.”

Delilah’s face is a pale grim mask as she stares at the cards. Oziah rubs her temples, pressing harder than any sane person would. But this whole situation, her love, the woman she freed from a cursed item a mere two months ago has somehow, in some way, found herself cursed. Again.

“Are you still unable to taste food? Is this also one of your symptoms?” Jaezred asks.

Delilah hesitates. “…Neither drink or food really satisfies me anymore. It’s like they turn to ash in my mouth.” She glances at Oziah.

She tries very hard to not be concerned and instead looks exasperated.

“And what about emotions? You are still able to feel strong emotions, yes? Have you noticed feelings of apathy lately?” Jaezred continues, fidgeting with the Death card in his hand.

“I still feel things very strongly, yes. But…” Again she looks at Oziah, closes her eyes and then reaches out to touch her arm. She does but there’s no immediate reaction. Delilah frowns, her expression uncertain. “Am I touching you, love?”

“Can you not feel that you’re touching me?!” Oziah exclaims.

Delilah opens her eyes, and Oziah sees the answer before she says it. “Not… really, no.”

Jaezred’s jaw drops a little. “Right, well…” He clears his throat. “Food and drink turning to ash in your mouth, sunlight sensitivity, wraith-like appearance in daylight, and now loss of touch. I believe the signs are pointing towards some influence from the Shadowfell. “When did you first notice that you can’t taste food?”

“I think… last month? When we went for that fancy dinner in the Witching Court.”

Oziah grips Delilah’s hand so hard she might break it and looks like she’s on the verge of tears.

“How have I not noticed this? Why haven’t you told me?”

“I-…” Delilah winces and yanks her hand back whilst also half fading into the shadows. “Because you always get like this. And even I wasn’t sure what was happening, if anything was really happening, not until recently, and even then-” Her hand fell to her daggers on her legs. “I feel this just fine. The notches in the leather on the grip, the cold metal that is so familiar to me. I feel that. I thought maybe… maybe I was just… tired, or something…”

She slumps down in a chair.

“Because I get worried about you? Because I care for the woman I love and her wellbeing and health?”

Delilah looks up. “So worried you’d lock me up in a tower and throw away the key?”

Oziah steps back like she’s been slapped and Delilah is doused in instant guilt. Tears begin to flow down Oziah’s cheeks freely now.

“They’re your words, not mine, if you recall,” the pale half-elf adds.

The strong, towering woman wobbles for a second but reaches out a hand towards her again. “My love. I would never. You know me. You know this. I made a shitty joke — because I’m worried.”

There’s a long moment of silence.

“I know it’s your first instinct to shield and protect me because you love me. I’d do the exact same — though else effectively.” Delilah lets go of the breath she was holding and shadow steps into Oziah’s arms. Perhaps it’s because she knows about it now, or maybe it’s the next phase of what is affecting her is already manifesting. Whichever reason, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the Pale Daughter is melding and becoming lost to the shadows. Oziah cannot hold her close enough.

“How was I to tell you what was happening when I don’t even understand it myself?” Delilah says into her bosom, biting back the tears that threaten to fall. “How — when I still don’t know why?”

Jaezred softly clears his throat. “Miss Delilah, do try to recall what you had been doing before that dinner. I think… we all know someone who might be able to know more about this condition.”

She has been thinking and continues to think, sealing the emotions that want to drown her in a deep well and sealing it shut with steel and iron. Shifting through her memories, Delilah goes back to the week of the dinner party at the Witching Court, then further back, and a little further before that. The shadows around her and Oziah’s feet dance. They begin to form half-shapes: a cat, a wall of books and scrolls, a single candle. It was a late night (or early morning, depending on how you look at things) of research. She was looking into Infernal Contracts…

“It was a tome,” she says suddenly and certainly. “When I was researching Infernal Contracts. Beastie reacted to something I didn’t see — I thought they were playing initially. I was… I was tired. Nearly the end of the night. I had looked at everything the scholars had pulled from the shelves for me except one…”

He leans forward, intrigued. “A tome? Do you still have it?”

She shakes her head. “It was from the library. I left it there when I was done.”

“Daring Academy or here?”

“Here.”

Jaezred nods. “Then you should go and secure that tome now, and in the meantime, I will get things set up here.”

Before he’s even finished, Delilah is shadow stepping out of the room, moving the quickest she’s ever done through the halls of Fort Ettin to the library to retrieve the book. Not two minutes later she returned with it, holding it in a shadowy, clawed mage hand.

“Is there any point to trying to remove a curse from this book?” Oziah asks as she stops pacing.

“No, but I don’t think this is a conventional curse, so anything we can gather about it would be useful.”

“Your reading said nothing we possess could undo this magic,” Oziah continues. “Who can we ask? Besides Kurtz?”

Delilah raises a questioning eyebrow. “You don’t want to ask him?”

“No, I’m just wondering if there’s someone closer to home we might consult.”

She nods.

“I want this solved and I want it gone. I want it out of you.”

Delilah takes Oziah’s hand. “So do I, if it can be.”

“If this is Shadowfell as I suspect, then Kurtz is the best person to ask about this. Pentaghast’s transmuter stone couldn’t do the trick so I don’t know who else to ask,” Jaezred says whilst he flips his tome of witchcraft to a new page, puts a pearl on the cover of the book, and lays his palm over it. He reads the words for the identify ritual for ten minutes, at the end of which he feels an odd surge of magical readings.

The book itself is mundane, he gathers, though it carries an enchantment. It is not a spell he recognises, nor is it of a school he knows — but it feels old, and dark; magic of binding, magic of blood, magic of seeking and sending. As the ritual resolves, all three of them hear as much as see the book’s cover begin to shift. Wisps of shadow collect around it, concentrating on its cover until they form a small pool of ink or tar, drawing ever tighter and rippling as it forms into a delicate little mouth. It pouts. It coos. And then there is a voice, high and fluttering:

“Another fly? Another cockroach? Glory, glory. Always searching, always prying, always digging, little rats, little worms. I taste you, Shadowling. Soon, soon. Lillibut waits. Lillibut is patient. Between, between, she waits between.”

There is a hiss and the mouth dissolves into shadows once more, leaving only a bitter taste in the air. It is Delilah who breaks the deafening silence.

“Shit.”

---

Oziah’s instincts said the magical mouth wasn’t demonic, persey, and it wasn’t quite like the spell magic mouth according to Jaezred, but more powerful. Made of dark magic, it seemed to have been a live connection rather than a recorded conversation and whoever or whatever it was seemed fully aware of who they were talking to.

Which brought the girl of shadows to the next important question: Who or what is ‘Lillibut’?

But none of them recognised the name and without much more to go on than ‘dark magic’ and a vague threat the only place she could find answers was at Daring Academy.

“How do you keep stumbling into these situations?” Jaezred asks her on the ride in his phaeton carriage from the dusky pink Fort.

“Two words: Disaster lesbian.”

The scholars of the Academy were not enthused to see her again. Perhaps it was her wraith-like appearance coupled with a quiet stillness that unnerved them, or maybe it was the fact that she was followed around by a ghostly shadow cat that would stare at them with not-eyes as they worked, or perhaps they just disliked her attitude — she wasn’t known for her sunny disposition after all. Whatever the reason, when she enlisted the help of Henkel Kruum, a human scholar of the occult and the lower planes who had made his way to Kantas in the wake of the Rift War two years previously to study a large-scale fiendish incursion directly, she should have known the cannibal smile he gave her would spell troubling answers.

“Ah yes, of course – the Thief of Forms,” Henkel says, picking up a scroll. “A fascinating being, though, as might be expected, quite shrouded in mystery and apocrypha. She is rumoured to hold at least one of the Books of Keeping.”

Delilah watched him shuffle through more scrolls, that ever present smile rubbing her the wrong way.

“Should you decide to seek her out in order to resolve your… malady,” he continues, knowingly looking her up and down, “I would be willing to provide you with certain crucial details, as well as some speculative conclusions that may be of use if, in return, you would bring me the book – or books.”

And there it was. Delilah’s smile is deceptively pleasant in return despite the murder in her eyes. “Of course. Why not? What harm can come from helping the scholar who is so ready to help me, yet willing to hold crucial information I paid to have, withheld from me.” She stalks closer, hands closing over the hilt of the bone handled shortsword strapped to her back under her robes of night. “One of your colleagues, Quentin Duvius – he specialises in the study of planar gyroscopes, stability and seals – he came with me to learn first hand what he wanted for the help I offered.” She stops beside him, uncomfortably close. “Would such an expedition entice you too, Henkel Kruum?”

His smile has faded but the haughty expression still lingers in his eyes. “I have no interest in venturing into Lillibut’s enclave myself – I have every faith in your ability to prevail without my direct intervention.”

“Of course. I am quite the formidable woman – one you do not wish to test.” …

---

Jaezred slips into the chair next to Delilah’s and props his head up on the table with a hand, looking at her. “So, did you find out anything?”

“That scholars of the Academy think withholding information somehow endears me to helping them get rare books,” she says, her smile deadly sweet. “I was given just enough to let me know I’m fucked and yet not enough to do anything about it — unless I promise to bring back a book or two.”

“Didn’t this happen to you before? I think the news may have spread amongst the eggheads that you’re a bit of a pushover,” he chuckles. “Well. Do you want me to force the information out of this scholar?”

“As entertaining as it would be to tag team the man into giving me what I seek, he is still withholding information I’ll need if I’m to be free of this curse,” she replies sullenly. Then she suddenly smiles. “Although, perhaps we can make arrangements for after we return with any volumes of this Book of Keeping Lillibut has in her possession. A side of consequences to go with the choice to be oh so helpful, hmm?”

“I was actually offering something along the lines of the suggestion spell, but yes, after getting what you need, I think it would be good for this little bookworm to spend a little bit of time as a chamberpot. But what are these Books of Keeping anyway? And where is one supposed to find Lillibut?”

“That is what Henkel Kruum, the scholar in question, is holding back from telling me.” Delilah sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I swear Jaezred, I don’t know what it is about me but I really do attract them – curses and conniving assholes.”

Jaezred almost doubles over laughing. “Well, I can’t do anything about the former but the latter — I’m telling you, you must’ve gotten a reputation after Quentin What’s-His-Face pulled that off against you. That needs to change.”

“Yes, it does. Now, here’s what I was thinking…”


Continued in ‘Hell — Ain’t a Bad Place to Be’ 🐲