Ely edit 14 June 2023:
1-6 qps, depending on length and quality.
Potential +1 qp: if part of a series: x (going to assume this is part of Eru's continued history)
Total: 4 qps
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OOC: This is a fictionalized version of the start of my master quest. I was given a puzzle to solve but the mobol wasn't working properly. I tried hundreds of combinations before the imms realized it was broken.
This is written from Tolza's perspective with her permission.
The desert wind whipped down the canyon, fine sand and grit stinging the skin. The two travelers kept close to the canyon wall, a weathered expanse of brown and red stone, richly veined and polished smooth by centuries of harsh weather. The skies above blazed with stars, clear and bright in the cold air of the Aiel Waste. Travel by night was unpleasant, but travel by day was a nightmare. The first rider was a woman, dressed in the banded dress of an initiate of Tar Valon though if she wore a ring it was concealed beneath sturdy leather gloves. Her face was covered by a gray shoufa, it’s veil wrapped around her face as proof against the abrasive dust. The combination of Wetland and Aiel garb was slightly ridiculous, as though she had wandered the Wastes for so long she had gone slightly native. An impression that the dusting of sunburned freckles across her nose in no way dispelled. The second man was a brute by any definition, massively built and muscular, with chain mail beneath a battered brown jacket that blended in with the rocky terrain. He wore no shoufa, but a weather beaten leather hat with a broad brim that would have been the envy of any peddler in the western lands. His skin was leathery and cracked and his hands horny and calloused from a lifetime of hard labor. An axe, nearly six feet from bit to butt spike, hung across his saddle bow, giving his horse the appearance of an ox with a collar. Their horses plodded forward in resignation, footsore and at the end of their end of their ropes, kept moving on a diet of old oats and a steady regime of refreshing weaves. Their passage down the canyon was an clattering reverberation, the sound of hoof strikes on stone echoing off the narrow walls.
“I guess we lost the Aiel,” the young woman said in a self satisfied tone.
“There are three of them behind us, near that greyish boulder,” the man responded without bothering to look over his shoulder. “Probably another half dozen following them out of sight.”
“Well then why haven’t they attacked?” the Accepted asked, her tone made waspish with the irritation of a long journey with poor conversation. The armored man rolled his shoulders.
“Maybe because they are afraid of lunatics, Aes Sedai, and most of all, lunatic Aes Sedai,” the warrior responded. The Accepted made a sour sound but didn’t argue the point further. Her mentor had vanished into the wastes months ago without so much as a word. It wasn’t until she had stumbled on Walden, drunk in a Murandian tavern, that she learned anything of the matter at all.
They approached a cleft in the canyon wall, a gap of ten feet where some ancient upheaval in the rock had rent the smooth rock. It yawned ominous, like the mouth of some long dead predator. The riders dismounted, the final few feet of the progress made up a ramp of tumble down stones and gravel that was ill footing for horses.
“You are sure this is the place Walden?” the Accepted asked, peering upwards at the yawning black cave mouth. The rough arch of moonlit stone was not something any Accepted would face without disquiet. It was too reminiscent of a silvery arch that many of them saw in nightmares.
“It isn’t exactly the type of place you forget Zoot,” the old warrior replied, finally stung to irritation of his own by an aspersion cast against his navigational skill.
“It’s Tolza,” the Accepted snapped, all but hissing the words.
“Who can keep track?” Walden replied philosophically.
The aperture narrowed as they entered the cave, squeezing to the point that Walden’s armor scraped as he turned sideways to make the transit. Once through the constriction the cave opened dramatically into a space a hundred feet across. Great stalactites hung from above, ancient spires of limestone encrusted with salt from the long forgotten moisture of its formation. In the center of the space rose a stone column, too regular to be formed by dripping limestone. It was reddish, smooth, and carved with sigils which the shadows rendered in blacks and dark blues. The ends of the column were not visible, as it seemed to continue both above the cavern's roof and into the earth below. Even at night the place was not completely dark. Moonlight seemed to soak down through the ceiling, carried by veins of semi transparent quartz that cast a vague and sourceless light over everything. Tolza reached into a pouch and withdrew a lantern, sparking it alive with a flit. The oil soaked wick took flame and spread its flickering radiance through the cavernous space. The stalactites and stalagmites glittered with crystalline inclusions and mineral deposits. Many of the smaller ones seemed oddly truncated at the tip, as though formed by an artist who had been forced to rush. At the far end of the cavern water dripped, surrounded by a rainbow shimmer of mineral oil on the rock. The central column remained a sullen red, dull and listless, save for where shadowed symbols were carved into its surface. The air was still, sour, and unclean, as though tainted with sweat and other less pleasant aromas. There was something almost fungal on the air, though dry and desiccated.
“Bloody buggering hell…” Tolza breathed as she lifted the lantern. Scratched symbols covered the floor, climbed the walls, coated the stalagmites. Many were combinations of symbols on the column, some appeared to be mathematical calculations, some even appeared to be snippets of the old tongue, though all were rendered in scratches made with the point of a dagger, or a sharp stone. Tolza wouldn’t have sworn to it but some of the symbols seemed to be daubed in blood.
“Glad they are still teaching elocution in that Tower of yours,” Walden remarked dryly. Though by the sound of his voice he didn’t disagree with the sentiment.
“She has lost her Light blasted mind. Six months…” Walden muttered. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Erulisse!” The word echoed around the cavern, doubling and redoubling in the confined space. Motes of dust shook free and drifted down, caught like rain in the glow of the lantern. There was a sudden stir of movement at the far end of the cavern. Tolza pivoted and the lanterns glow washed across the back wall. A skeletal figure suddenly sat upright among a thicket of unwholesome looking mushrooms, fleshy white things with caps a handbreadth wide. Papers flew in all directions, scattering like ashes from a kicked fire. Tolza had a momentary impression of large chocolate eyes huge in the lantern light and then a scream shattered the cavern, seeming to come from all directions. The emaciated figure flared with a glowing torrent of Saidar that enveloped the ragged remains of shredded clothing like a bonfire. Flows of air, water, and spirit woven in complex accretions lashed out in fine, thumb thick, filaments, giving the ragged emaciated figure at its center the appearance of some pale luminous thing from the depths of the sea. Runes and sigils lit on the column, burning with golden light in a strange reaction to the sudden flare of the One Power, symbols flaring and dimming in a weird asynchronous flutter.
“Boss!” Tolza shrieked, ignoring a lifetime of warnings about channeling in the presence of portal stones and snatching at Saidar. She slashed out with knives of spirit that parted the incoming flows. Rather than severing cleanly they thrashed like living things withering over long endless moments.
“Boss! It’s me!” Tolza yelled, desperately slashing with spirit to keep the tendrils away from her. What they might do if they seized her she didn’t know, but she doubted it would be pleasant. The portal stone behind her was flaring like a firework, sigils lighting in harmonic discordance, two patterns now in slightly different shades of gold. The tendrils spasmed and groped for her and then faded away to nothing.
“Tooz?” the emaciated figure croaked, the word coming out as though to speak at all was a tremendous effort.
“It is Tolza now,” the Accepted replied with a further hint of irritation.
“Who can keep track?” the ragged skeletal woman replied, clearly finding words easier to conjure the more she employed them.
“Anytime anyone wants to tell me what in the name of the Light is going on, that would be great,” Walden complained, having seen nothing of the interplay of weaves that had so illuminated the cavern for the women.
“Walden? What… what are the two of you doing here?”
“Staging an intervention Erulisse,” Tolza replied, grossing her arms beneath her breasts.
“Aren’t you supposed to call me Erulisse Sedai?” the older woman asked, stirring out of the mushroom infested corner to approach. She squinted her large brown eyes against the light, clearly finding it unpleasant, though Tolza made no move to narrow the shutter. The mushrooms appeared to be feeding on the trickle of water that seeped through the cracked limestone, perhaps on the rock salt and debris that gave the water its unhealthy sheen. Judging by the desiccated pieces of several of them, Erulisse had been eating them for some time. Up close she looked even worse than she had in the initial flash of panic. Her eyes were huge in her now sunken face, and her skin, normally a dark olive, was sallow and stretched over her skull. The mass of braids that normally kept her hair from open rebellion were so matted with sweat and dust that they appeared to have welded to a single piece. Erulisse’s fingers, long and artistic, were skeletal, almost avian in character, stained dark with what Tolza now realized was rock dust. She had been writing her insane notations on the walls with the tips of stalagmites that she had broken off, presumably with the power. That knowledge filled in another one of the way too many weird aspects of the place, the oddly flattened points of the stone outcroppings.
“Yeah Boss, but you know, by the same token you aren’t supposed to vanish for six months, eat a bunch of weird mushrooms and go…” she paused to sweep the lantern around the cavern with its coating of scribbled notes, “completely insane.”
“I’m not insane,” Errulisse responded, her eyes scanning the cavern as though seeing it for the first time. How she had seen to work at all Tolza had no idea, her mentor famously eschewing lightballs as a hindrance to the stealthy movement she preferred to effect. Maybe her eyes had simply adjusted to the gloom.
“Famously what insane people say,” Walden put in, irritated at having been ignored or perhaps merely masking the concern he felt for his niece behind his customary gruff exterior.
“The Portal Stone…” Erulisse said, making a gesture with her hand towards the stone. Disturbingly the column of mushrooms seemed to follow the gesture, as though somehow in sync with the young Brown Sister on some unknown level.
“I’ve cracked the code,” she reported proudly.
“Really Boss, because, don’t take this the wrong way, but it looks like you have been holed up in a cave for six months eating weird mushrooms and fingerpainting on everything,” Tolza admitted. “And what is that Old Tongue you have written down?”
“You can’t read it? Danelle will be disappointed with your progress,” Erulisse rebuked her gently. Tolza arched an eyebrow.
“I read it just fine Boss, but most of the texts we study aren’t written in insane scrawl,” Tolza rejoined. Erulisse knelt down and ran her fingers along the scratches in the stone, apparently perplexed that people would have trouble deciphering them.
“Passages from books, mostly The Mirror of The Wheel,” Erulisse explained.
“You wrote random passages of books on the cave floor? From memory?” Tolza queried, “wait, where did you get a copy of the Mirror of the Wheel?” Erulisse waved the concern away as though finding a copy of a supposedly destroyed book was of no import.
“I’ve cracked it you see, our portal stones are all broken, that is why we can only use them at random. Well we could use them, if we understood how the matrices were constructed but until now we haven't had any notion of what they looked like, I’ve mapped them you see,” Erulisse said proudly. Now she had rediscovered her power of speech, she seemed eager to talk, the words tumbling over each other in a burbling cascade that began to strain at the edges of coherence.
“But this one isn’t broken and you have learned how to use it?” Tolza asked. Erulisse shook her head violently, causing a disturbing rustle among the mushrooms.
“No. No, no, no, no, well yes, but no,” she babbled.
“Alright Eru, maybe you can fire up a gateway and you can tell us all about it after we’ve spent a night where we didn’t have to pick the gravel out of our asses?” Walden suggested. Erulisse waved at him in dismissal but continued talking to her apprentice.
“This one was broken, I have reports,” she waved to another section of indecipherable writing, “but it’s fixed now.”
“Fixed… you fixed it?” Tolza asked, a touch of asperity entering her voice.
“It fixed itself, or it partakes of a more fixed version of itself now. Someone is trying to use it,” Erulisse explained, her eyes gleaming with reflected light. Tolza reluctantly narrowed the shutter a touch.
“Someone in the Tower? Because I’m pretty sure they tell you on day one, don’t channel near a portal stone. In fact I seem to remember you telling me that exact thing,” Tolza challenged.
“No, not the Tower, well yes, maybe, not OUR Tower anyway?” Erulisse babbled on. Tolza realized that up close Erulisse smelled, not the normal scent of steel and oil that she associated with the armor clad Aes Sedai, it was a feverish and sour smell, old sweat, the slightly sweet ketotic smell of long hunger, the slightly acrid tang of swamp fever or some other malady.
“So by someone you mean…. Someone from somewhere they have a working portal stone? Like… another world?” Tolza ventured. Erulisse snapped her fingers in delight, the boney digits popping like a whip crack in front of Tolza’s nose.
“Exactly, someone on another world pushed this stone close enough to us that this stone took on some of the form of the functional stone in the other world,” Erulisse gushed with childlike enthusiasm. She gesticulated wildly, though whether it was with general excitement or towards more of the unreadable script she had scratched onto every available surface Tolza could not tell.
“You know Accepted, I could make us some of that ‘tea’ if you wanted,” Walden stated flatly, nodding towards the saddlebags containing pouches of forkroot. Tolza held up a hand. She didn’t want to try and drug her mentor any more than she wanted to try to shield her with the power but just because she didn’t want to didn’t mean she wouldn’t try. Erulisse was strong, but she was also half out of her mind with fatigue and sickness, and maybe the rest of the way there on excitement.
“So you have a functional … what was it? Matrice? And now you think you can use the stone safely?”
“Matrix,” Erulisse responded primly causing Tolza to frown. “Matrix is singular Matrices is plural.” Heroically, Tolza resisted the effort to grind her teeth. She was in no mood to indulge her mentors constant desire to prove just how much cleverer she was than those around her.
“Got it,” she replied. “So you can use it, why haven’t you?” Erulisse Avehelm was many things, but hidebound was not one of them. If something could be done, she would do it, and if it couldn’t be done, she reliably found a way to do that as well.
“Ten symbols,” Erulisse said, making another gesture to what Tolza was coming to realize were field notes of a deranged sort. One of the pieces of paper that had scattered when Erulisse had started awake was close enough for Tolza to see. Every inch of paper had been written on, rendering the paper almost solid black before Erulisse had expanded to the walls.
“I need the right combination of ten symbols to create a key,” Erulisse explained. Now that her attention was drawn to it, Tolza could see that the majority of the scrawled writing was actually combinations of sigils taken from the portal stone.
“So you are just… trying combinations at random?” Tolza asked skeptically. Far more heroic Accepted than she had nodded off during Miren Sedai’s mathematics classes, but she was certain that eight symbols would make for a lot of recombining.
“Thats…”
“Three million, six hundred and twenty eight thousand, eight hundred,” Erulisse supplied. “Assuming there is no repetition in which case it's several orders of magnitude higher. I don't think there is though, there is too much encoding to make it practical.” Erulisse turned to the column and lit with the glow of Saidar. Ten symbols flashed to life then faded away, then another ten, then another. Each time she repeated the process a little power was expended, not a huge amount, but it would add up and fast. A novice channeling so much would be unconscious within an hour.
“Uhh Boss, have you been doing this all day everyday since you got here?” Tolza asked carefully. Erulisse had left the Tower over six months ago and had been here, according to Walden, for most of that time.
“Uh-huh,” Erulisse replied distractedly, continuing to flash symbols alight with wisps of Spirit.
“And how many combinations have you tried so far?” Tolza checked.
“Nine hundred thousand seventy six, nine hundred thousand seventy seven….” Erulisse counted, completely absorbed in channeling into the stone. It was a safe bet that Erulisse had an angreal on her, with or, more likely, without the Tower’s permission, but even so that was a phenomenal expenditure of Saidar over such a long period. It seemed likely it was more than bad diet and living rough that was eating away her body. It was probably a miracle she hadn’t stilled herself.
“Maybe you should take some time away Boss, gather your strength?” Tolza suggested gently. Erulisse shook her head violently, Tolza pointedly did not look at the mushrooms to see if they were emphasizing the point.”
“Nearing a breakthrough, statistically any random number in a sequence is more likely to be towards the mean rather than the edges of a distribution,” Erulisse said with perfect confidence that gave Tolza no assurance it wasn’t just insane gibberish. The lights on the portal stone continued to flash with metronomic regularity.
“Oookay… well then maybe if you show me how to help you, we can get through it faster? You can take a break and eat something maybe? I’m serious Boss, I think it would really help,” Tolza cajoled. Erulisse seemed to consider the idea, though she didnt stop trying combinations against the stone.
“Well that might actually speed things up a fair…” Erulisse vanished mid sentence, as suddenly and completely as she had never existed. There was a sudden pop as air rushed in to fill the space she had vacated the instant before, and an audible sigh from the mushrooms.
“Eru!” Walden called, taking a step towards where she had been and then freezing as he realized there was literally nothing he could do.
“Well curse me for a Murandian gong farmer,” Tolza muttered her mouth agape. Erulisse’s brute force approach had clearly worked. She tried to remember which sigils she had seen light in which order.
“Well what in the Light do we do now?” Walden demanded, angry with Erulisse but without any practical means to release that frustration. Tolza sighted and squatted down, placing her lantern on the cold stone and examining the long strings of sigils scrawled in her mentor's messy hand.
“We go after her of course,” the Accepted replied with calm dignity.
“She said there were millions of possible combinations,” Walden objected.
““Three million, six hundred and twenty eight thousand, eight hundred,” Tolza corrected. “But luckily for us, she already took care of the first nine hundred thousand seventy seven.” Tolza picked up a broken stub of stalactite and began to scratch symbols into the stone, then reached out with flows of Spirit as Erulisse had done.
“Nine hundred thousand seventy eight….”
