the watcher publically blaming the leaden key for something is so funny. like imagine someone telling you irl that the illuminati created christianity, burned the library of alexandria, and also did 9/11
the watcher's source? they talked with that one really old guy and had cryptic visions of the past
The Leaden Key’s hands may get morally dirty from time to time in service to their Queen, but a well-timed oath guarantees those hands can be virus-free!
For @pillarspromptsweekly #0069: I rolled Woedica, holiday decorations, and survival. Cross posted on AO3.
The poor Leaden Key only want to decorate for the holidays :(
“Pass me the twine, won’t you?” Joel called back to the other initiate.
“What are you doing, initiate?”
Joel turned on his ladder from where he had been hanging mistletoe along the brow of the statue of Woedica. The Acolyte stood with her arms folded, her face inscrutable behind her mask. The same mask that he now wore and honestly it made it a bit hard to see where to hang things. “Decorating?”
The Acolyte didn’t move but he could feel the disapproval.“I can see that. For what purpose are you desecrating the Oathbinder’s shrine?”
“It’s Winter’s End. What’s the harm in being festive?” One of the other Leaden Key initiates had told Joel they always decorated for Winter’s End. Joel was starting to wonder if he had been having him on. His companion slowly edged toward the door while the Acolyte focused on Joel.
“The mistletoe I could understand if you didn’t hang it from Woedica’s crown, but these?” She gestured to the jolly, red bows hanging around the door frames.
“They add a little color, don’t they?” Joel said hopefully. He was beginning to think this situation would not end well for him. The other initiate was almost at door. Was it a bit too quiet, or was it just him?
“How exactly do you think this is going to end for you?” asked the Acolyte.
“We all drink hot rum and sing a few carols to Woedica?” said Joel desperately.
The Acolyte paused. “I don’t think we’ve had a good carol to Woedica in a while.”
The other initiate, who had made it to the door at this point, went stiff. “Uh, Acolyte–”
“Tak' that, ye hooded bastards!” The room lit up in a whoosh of fire.
Joel fell off his ladder and crawled around to the back of the statue of Woedica as the Acolyte started slinging spells back at the mad, dark haired elf that barged into the room. Fire licked the walls. “No, my tinsel!” He put his head between his knees and tried to breath deeply. He wasn’t trained in combat. He was going to die here, beneath this statue of Woedica with an uneven mistletoe crown.
The Acolyte’s voice fell silent. The entire sanctum was too silent except for the footfalls of the elven man.
“Thir's th' yin that wis oan th' ladder.”
The footsteps started to circle the statue toward Joel and he started breathing more rapidly. The footsteps stopped. Joel, with dread in his stomach, looked up to see the elf brandishing a scepter in his direction. “Wait, no!” Joel pulled off his mask and held up his hands. “I surrender!”
The dark haired elf paused. “You… surrender?” he said in a distinctly, polished Aedyran accent, completely different from the Hylspeak before. Maybe there were two of them…
The elf’s face twisted. “Ye fyndes never surrender!” he spat.
So he was crazy. A crazy, murderous elf that had burnt his friends and holly to ash. “I promise you, I’m surrendering,” pleaded Joel. “I never liked these guys much, anyway. It was just something to do on the weekends. I think the Acolyte was going to kill me for my holiday decorations, anyway.”
“Your… holiday decorations.” The elf looked up at the Woedica statue and his nostrils flared in laughter. He looked back at Joel before closing his eyes with a pained expression. “I will let you go, if–”
Joel grasped desperately at the hope. “If?”
“–If you promise me you will never wind up involved in a cult again.”
“I can do that, sure! Or, uh, not do that.” Joel scrambled to his feet.
The elven man lowered his scepter. “Now I would suggest removing yourself from this place as quickly as possible.”
“Can, uh, can I collect my mistletoe?”
The elf let a deep breath in and out his nose. “Is that really the most important thing right now?”
“...probably not.” Joel worked his way around the statue toward the door, trying to prevent turning his back to the man. “Um, Happy Winter’s End.”
The elven man blinked. “Oh, ah, yes. Happy Winter’s End.”
The key to what, you ask? Success? Change? Happiness? Love? Choose your goal and move forward stitch by stitch as you create the repeating large-scale skeleton key motif in this bold cowl. In this KAL sponsored by skacel, Kyle Kunnecke guides you with helpful video instruction that clearly demonstrates two-handed knitting, working with two colors at once, and his favorite technique, locking floats. HiKoo® Concentric is used in this project because not only does it shift in color, but it is also made of luxurious 100% Baby Alpaca. The resulting fabric is soft, lightweight, and cozy.
So I’m gonna knit a thing for the Leaden Key ttrpg campaign...
I mean how could I not?
My yarn arrived today so I guess I’m doing this for sure now!
On the right we have “Pastel Pop,” which I’m pretending is more of an adra green (pretty teal shade though!) and on the left, “Berry Good,” chosen for its resemblance to soul essence since my Leaden Key girl is gonna be a cipher/chanter and needs a cowl that looks like her soul whip. :-D Hopefully these very thematically appropriate (?) colors will also look good in colorwork together!
Previously: Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; Chapter 7; Chapter 8; Chapter 9 - or catch up quicker on AO3!
I should probably wait more than a day [and a half?] between posting chapters but...well this one goes so well with the last one! And it’s my two favorite elves. :-D
Trying something different, just posting a preview of the chapter below and a link to AO3 to read the rest, because I keep getting weird problems with read-mores for fics on my dash. All the accents and quote marks show up encoded instead of in readable format, but only if there’s a read-more. So...let me know if this preview & link format works for you or if you’d prefer the read-more with the whole chapter on tumblr behind it.
This is the sequel to Clan and Court, in which Watcher Violet, Priest of Eothas, welcomed her enormous clan to Caed Nua just in time to go investigate things in Dyrford. If you haven’t read that yet, start there and meet a few of her siblings who are recurring characters in this sequel. Bonuses in the sequel include: Aloth! Lenneth! (but not as a Watcher) More of Vi’s siblings, including Garivald being the mayor of their city! And plenty of mysteries to solve, Leaden Key to interfere, relationships to navigate, and oh yes, they still have that betrothal contract to deal with, technically.
Chapter 10: The Adra Antelope
Word Count: 1.3K
Rating: PG
Preview below - read the chapter on AO3
Think she’ll lead us stret to the hooded fyndes? Iselmyr suggested hopefully.
Aloth couldn’t discount the possibility. There had to be more Lenneth wasn’t telling them, and he had noted how earnestly she argued for the pursuit of the animancer, even if it meant leaving the Leaden Key (coincidentally, or conveniently?) unchallenged. But for the moment, Lenneth seemed to be leading them nowhere directly, but taking a most circuitous route, as if she knew she was being followed.
Fortunately, Aloth had a fair bit of experience with tailing and being tailed. Ferretting out the Leaden Key around the Dyrwood had been much simpler when they kept coming after the Watcher. In his attempts to shut down their well-hidden operations since then, he’d had to learn their tricks more thoroughly than even when he had been one of them. Iselmyr had little patience for these subtleties -- but she could also be remarkably perceptive when he let her take the lead, and keeping up with a mark as slippery as this one seemed to appeal to her competitive nature. Between the two of them, Aloth managed to keep Lenneth in his sights, just barely, as she skirted the temple district, blended with the crowds in three separate marketplaces, doubled back through alleys, and traveled rooftops through a seedier district that turned out to be the home of the Adra Antelope.
Aloth watched her vanish into the inn, not by the front door under the weathered sign painted with the inn’s namesake animal in garish green as far as it could be from the actual color of adra, but through a second-story window. He crept a quick patrol up and down the streets overlooking both that window and that door, waiting to see by which she would emerge. As he turned the corner, he caught sight of a familiarly hooded figure lurking across the street from the Adra Antelope’s entrance. The sight made Iselmyr crow with joy. Our quirry! Ga’on, let’s take this’n oot --
Previously: Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; Chapter 7; Chapter 8; Chapter 9; Chapter 10 - or catch up quicker on AO3!
Today is the last of my spring break, so here’s a chapter to wrap up Violet and company’s first full day back in Citlatl. Writing will probably go slower once I’m back to work tomorrow, so I’ll try to space out posting the buffer chapters a little more...For now, however, the investigation is finally under way!
This is the sequel to Clan and Court, in which Watcher Violet, Priest of Eothas, welcomed her enormous clan to Caed Nua just in time to go investigate things in Dyrford. If you haven’t read that yet, start there and meet a few of her siblings who are recurring characters in this sequel. Bonuses in the sequel include: Aloth! Lenneth! (but not as a Watcher) More of Vi’s siblings, including Garivald being the mayor of their city! And plenty of mysteries to solve, Leaden Key to interfere, relationships to navigate, and oh yes, they still have that betrothal contract to deal with, technically.
Chapter 11: Pursuit
Word Count: 3.1K
Rating: PG
Snippet below; read the full chapter on AO3
They returned to the Adra Antelope en masse, and on guard in case of another attack. If any more of the Leaden Key were watching the inn now, however, they were keeping their distance from the pair of watchmen poking around.
Anselm hailed his colleagues as he approached. “Any progress here?”
The watchmen looked up, startled to see their Head of Investigation looking over their shoulders, as it were. “Sir! Ah...no, sir...that is...yes, just doing a basic...er…”
His partner stepped in. “As we understand it, there was some sort of street fight.”
Anselm arched an eyebrow as he looked over the scattered bodies lying along the street. “Yes, that seems about right.”
“But we’ve got no leads yet on what they were fighting about, or what became of them as won the fight.”
Anselm sighed. “Perhaps I can help you there. These kith attacked my assistant, here,” he waved toward Lenneth, who looked awkwardly out from her hiding place behind Edér when she realized Anselm meant her. “My assistant,” he repeated, “whom I’ve deputized, along with these others, to aid in an investigation that is of the highest priority for the mayor as well as for me. So it is very important that we identify these bodies.”
“Oh,” the second watchman said, looking in dubious awe at Lenneth standing unscathed among the cloaked dead. “Right, sir. Shall we…?” He reached toward the nearest body, glancing back to Anselm for permission.
“Momentarily,” said Anselm. “We’ve one more thing to look into here, and after that you may take them back to headquarters. I want to know the moment you determine the identity of any of them.”
“Yes, sir!” said the watchmen, stepping back.
Anselm turned to Violet. At his nod, she stepped forward, reaching out for whatever remained of the kith who had met their end here between magic and blades.
“My name belongs to the gods and my hand to their service,” the lost soul’s memory echoed through Violet’s senses.
and in today's adventure in pillars of eternity... i ran into everyone's favorite Leaden Key intern i mean initiate.
Brilliant writing obsidian. thank you so much xD
The Leaden Key is recruiting! That is, we’re running a Leaden Key ttrpg campaign and have place for one or two more players.
The campaign’s gonna be set after PoE1. Players are a group of loyal LK agents who are chosen for a very important mission. Some time ago, Thaos went to Eir Glanfath, and now it turns out the Leaden Key suddenly has a new Grandmaster. But there are people who know that man is an impostor. The group’s task is to investigate the threat and deal with it accordingly.
Game: Discord, Sundays, 4pm EST, starting at the beginning of March.
You can message us here (reply to this message, reblog, send an ask or a chat) if you’re interested in joining the team! If the recently concluded adventures of the God Squad looked like fun (that’s because it was!) and you wished you could join us, here’s your chance!
Disclaimer: “I acknowledge I'm playing a character who works for and highly respects Thaos and who will happily hunt down Aloth.” (If you want to include a cover letter: in a few sentences, explain why you like/respect Thaos/think he's an interesting character XD)
