Eberron Journal: Third Entry

From the journal of Vanivieve ir’Coralyn d’Sivis

Notes on the little coffee stand we went to, just outside the Fairhaven lightning rail station:

• I ordered the Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Nonfat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie Iced Vanilla Double-Shot Gingerbread Frappuccino, Extra Hot With Foam, Whipped Cream, Upside Down Double Blended (with Ice).
• Fairly typical order I’d ask for at any old Sharnbucks or Café Miron.
• It was ok. Their roast was a little dark for my taste, but that was offset by the vanilla and gingerbread.
• Is writing a review even relevant here? The place might not even be open anymore in our own time.

The year is 998 YK (again). We have returned to our own time, and all is right with the world as far as internal chronology is concerned. I’m writing this entry from a lightning railcar bound for the Sharn Skyway, where we are to be guests of honour at a party that – I’m told – is a more exclusive affair than the annual Skyway Gala.

It’s apparently been a successful two years we missed. But to the point:

Back in 996 YK, we learned a few things about Janek’s involvement in the blaze that eventually led to Cannith West’s downfall – it was quite odd seeing him before he rose to prominence in politics. His image as an unmarked Orien administrator, dismissed and disregarded, is quite incongruous considering the clout he has in the current day.

As I’m certain you’re aware, O reader, the fire that broke out during this party was incredibly important. People have speculated for years what might have been the result had Jorlana d’Cannith been present for the Dragonmarked House Conference.

A brief aside: the topic of this conference was allocation of House resources during the peace efforts after the war – houses like my own insisted upon neutrality, whereas others of a more mercantile nature saw unprecedented opportunity for profit. If you aren’t up on trade news, as I suspect of my audience (i.e any of my companions that might steal this journal), this conference was the fulcrum around which the present day business practices of the Dragonmarked Houses rotate.

Perhaps Jorlanna’s presence could have tipped the scales in another direction? She was known to have little respect for the highest bidder. But, then again, who knows (Me. I know, on account of the time travel)? She instead withdrew from society after the fire to care for her precious Janek, lightly toasted as he was.

Daja tells us this was an act. Considering Janek was indeed the one to start the fire, I’m inclined to agree.

He’d written several letters in Jorlanna’s hand to other house nobles that might agree with her more altruistic intentions, asking, cajoling, or outright threatening them to back down. Aster and I found these in his personal quarters, and quite convincing forgeries they were! I doubt I’d have been able to tell were it not for my own Dragonmark!

He’d placed an incendiary device in the Fairhaven Cannith estates, where the party was being set up. This we found in one of the back rooms, Aster demonstrating an affinity for technology that I really need to ask her about when I have chance. She’s suspiciously familiar with the Cannith approach to building a firebomb.

He’d also employed around a dozen Mirror Images of himself, keeping the various plates of his schemes aspinning. These copies of Janek attempted to thwart the efforts of our allies in their separate endeavours.

Robyn and Jaqueline went to find Jorlana herself, and prevent her from even attending. Through Jacqueline more than Robyn (who is taciturn as ever), I found out that they simply tracked her down and told her the truth – omitting the time machine angle – which I can very much respect. They’d found her bickering with the real Janek, who’d been insisting she come to a birthday party she did not want to attend.

‘We’ve received information that your life is in danger,’ Robyn had told her, after Janek had stormed off. When Jorlanna had grown dismissive, Robyn stated that ‘We do, of course, have evidence,’ producing the forged letters that I had helpfully notarised in the House Sivis style.

‘Did my daughter put you up to this?’ asked Jorlanna, but the elemental drained from her dragonshards upon looking closely at the letters. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Only Janek and myself would have access to everything in these.’ Daja had spoken of her overhearing Janek speaking with his gestionnaire of sorts, an entity belonging to the Lords of Dust.

Jorlanna grew tense upon mention of this group. I know little of them myself, but after our confrontation with Janek and the power they’d lent him, I suspect this tension has been earned.

Also, Jaqueline popped a Janek that was hiding in a nearby tree. That’s not a metaphor; she gingerly poked the Mirror Image with her rapier and it burst like my youngest brother Pommerique’s dreams of becoming a baker.

Our other companions, the rowdier two, were sent to disrupt the party itself. I initially assumed Daja had them do this to maintain the regular timeline – after all, the party needed to be destroyed for consistency’s sake. Upon further reflection, I’m more inclined to think she did it just to spite Janek. I’m told Mock and Shiira tore down several walls, chopped every piece of furniture into firewood, and reduced a cake that cost upwards of a hundred platinum dragons to a sort of sugary foam. They also popped two or three Janeks themselves?

‘Popping a Janek’. Sounds like something to take if you have a headache.

At any rate, we regrouped and I was able to use a description of a ring Janek wears to track down the man himself. Robyn, being the Great Detective and all that, had managed to frame our case in such a way that Jorlanna entrusted us with the cleanup.

I want to write about my tracking spell first, though! I’ve been finding greater success by diversifying the objects I use when performing magic. The three that work best are my House Sivis Pen of the Scribe, the lantern by the light of which I used to write the letters to next-of-kin during the war, and this very journal you are reading from now! Holy symbols to me, all of them!

When I cast the spell to Locate Object, I spoke a prayer to Aureon and opened the journal to the page I am currently writing on, which was of course blank at the time. And ink began to stain the page, the source of which was nothing I could see. Before long, an elaborate illustration of a compass had appeared, as if on a map drawn by a master cartographer (it rather reminded me of my sister Suzette’s trademark compass rose on all her maps). But the ink kept flowing around the page, the arrow of the compass spinning to point in the direction of Janek’s signet ring.

I’m terribly proud of this, as you can perhaps tell.

Janek was in the Cannith Library, of course. He’d resorted to creating fires through magic, as his device had been disabled by Aster. At first, he seemed a capable conjurer, but nothing too threatening, especially considering our force consisted of:

• Aster, a ranger who can fire off more arrows at once than I have fingers and toes
• Robyn, a rogue that I’ve seen backstab someone from the front using reverse psychology
• Mock, a fighter who may be around seven feet tall, wielding an hammer just as large and twice as heavy
• Shiira, the Bleeding Heart; I’ve seen guillotines back in Zilargo that came down with less force than her axe
• Me, who admittedly is quite bad in a fight, but I did find a sprinkler system and say ‘Après moi, le déluge’ which is very funny if you speak Zilargan and know a bit of history
• and Jacqueline, who… well, I’ll get to her in a moment.

But the battle against Janek quickly became absolutely terrifying. With all the fire and weaponry flying about, I could hardly concentrate on my spells. Which is bad if you’re trying to, say, keep everyone alive. But Janek had been granted power by the Lords of Dust, and he shrugged off our combined assault, growing more and more warped and grotesque as he did. Soon he was this huge, crimson, demonic thing, tearing around the room like a mage chariot, leaving destruction in his wake.

At one point he battered into Jacqueline and sent her sailing across the library to crash down under a pile of burning books and ruined shelves. I honestly thought she was dead under there.

And that leads me to the most… difficult bit to write.

Jaqueline is – and I write this without exaggeration – perhaps the purest soul I’ve ever encountered. In the time I have known her, she’s tried to do good without want of reward at every opportunity that presented itself. She’s gotten incredibly invested in the plight of others she’s only just met. Zut, she ended up bawling when she heard from Jorlanna just how much she loves her daughter, despite her stubborn streak.

(There is a part of me that feels it’s unfair to describe Jaqueline with this ‘purest soul’ status when we’re travelling with Shiira, as Shiira’s whole obsession is maintaining such a state. I might be more inclined to address Shiira as such, if not for her predilection with karmic good and evil.

The fact that she is so concerned with the karmic outcome of her actions has me worry that when she does good, it is not because she wants to do good; instead it is because she’s afraid of what might happen were she to act otherwise. A fear of karmic retribution should she act in accordance with her actual nature. She certainly destroyed that cake with an unhealthy glee.

Alright, now I feel guilty, and rightly so I think.

If she were to ever read this, I think she would be justifiably upset with me psychoanalysing her actions. And does it matter the reasoning for an act of good if the world is better for it? Karmic good and evil are explicitly framed in terms of the net morality of the entire world and not of one person; so even kindness for selfish reasons makes the world a better place. Doesn’t it?

But there’s a quote I can’t remember who to credit for. ‘You’re supposed to good because you’re good, not because you’re seeking moral dessert’.

My head is beginning to ache. Perhaps I need to pop a Janek myself??

…Which brings me back to Jaqueline. I’m procrastinating.)

We couldn’t do a thing to the demon Janek. Spells bounced off, and our arrows and blades couldn’t pierce his hide. As I said before, in the melee Jaqueline had been sent flying, and ended up unconscious in a pile of rubble. But it wasn’t strictly Jaqueline who pulled herself from the wreckage.

I was hiding behind a desk when it first appeared, so I didn’t quite see the whole thing. A laugh rang out through the room. I struggle to describe it, but I’ll do my best.

Think of those who, when confronted with gore or trauma or whatever, get a little lightheaded. They can’t quite face what they’re seeing, so they retreat into themselves, disassociating. They grow giddy, almost as a form of self defense. They begin to laugh at the horror.

Hold that in your mind. Now imagine a person who created said gore and trauma. And this person considers said gore and trauma the greatest thing they’ve ever accomplished; some grotesque magnum opus. And also they’re operatically trained, so they can really project.

A laugh rang out through the room.

Jaqueline was gone. Her clothes had changed, her face had… well, the thing didn’t have a face. At first I thought it wore a shining theatrical mask, but I soon realised the mask was its face. Looking back, it must have been polished bone. The mask had no eyes. Just a mocking, comic smile.

It wheeled through the dying fires, dropped behind Janek, and eviscerated him. Whatever defenses we’d been unable to surpass were reduced to nothing. And then it didn’t stop. Janek was reduced to a fine red mist.

We all stared as the thing that used to be Jacqueline gave us a deep bow… and then she fell to the floor, herself again. Mock ran over to her, in a remarkable display of either compassion or idiocy.

The rest of us, who saw our companion turn into something more dangerous than a literal demon, and then collapse amidst the fleshy confetti of its victim, were rightfully a bit wary. I noticed Aster kept her bow trained on Jaqueline, despite her lack of consciousness.

I need to ask some follow up questions. But Jacqueline, quite understandably, didn’t feel up to talking about it. And me writing anything else now would just end up sensationalised and inaccurate. I’m upset and I’m frightened when I think about it.

There’s better news to focus on, so I shall do so.

We travelled with Daja back to our own time, and people seem to recognise us. I’ll attach some newspaper clippings at some point to give further context, but it seems that we’ve changed things quite a bit.

The foiling of Janek’s plots and Jorlanna’s presence at the conference has resulted in a tectonic shift in the nature of the Dragonmarked Houses. Yes, they’re still businesses first and foremost, but they seem to be less cutthroat than the ones I know. They perform charitable work! And actually introduced regulation to discourage monopoly!! I can hardly believe what I’m reading.

And in this altered timeline, we are a crack team that Daja assembled to save the world. Multiple times. The business with Janek Vonet was but the first of our many escapades – over the last two years, Daja and her team have taken down monsters and mafias, solved problems and perils, faced dungeons and… well, you get the point. And none of us remember.

We’re on our way to a party in our honour. Or, more accurately, in the honour of whatever heroic versions of ourselves we’ve returned to replace. I’m trying not to dwell on that part. I shall instead distract myself by picking out an outfit for the event, with Aster’s help, and try to live up to this stolen life, with the help of everyone else.