Session 24: The Past Is What You Make of It

The water closed over Elora beneath the broken pillar, and for a moment the only movement in Sedgemoor was the widening circle of ripples. Thorn stared at the place where she had vanished. She had flown out there so readily, carrying the crown above the drowned ruins as though height might yield an answer that the shore had refused her. Now the pillar stood empty.

He cast the enchanted rope. It uncoiled across the water and wound itself around her, and Maledurk caught hold beside him. Together they hauled her through the swamp until they could drag her onto the bank. Water streamed from her clothes. Her eyes remained closed, but she was breathing, and the crown had stayed on her head.

“Can we take it off?” Maledurk asked.

They tried. The thing would not move. It clung to her with the same impossible firmness they had encountered before, indifferent to wet hair, grasping fingers, and the strength of the hands that pulled at it. Thorn let go before the attempt could hurt her. Elora lay still between them, her attention held by something beyond the reach of ordinary voices.

“I can send a message,” he said.

“Tell her to wake up.”

Thorn looked down at her face, considering how to fit everything she needed to hear into a few words. Far beyond his sight, Elora was watching four people approach the ruins.

The buildings stood above the water. That was the first wrongness, although she knew almost at once that it was also right. The ruins beneath her looked as they had before their collapse. Walls rose where the swamp had swallowed them, and the approach was familiar in details that eight centuries should have worn away. Eight centuries. She could accept the number when someone read it from an old account. Here, looking down upon a place she remembered, she could scarcely make room for it.

The figures drew closer. Bob. Krenn. Ophelia.

Luna.

Elora watched herself walking toward the ruins in another person’s shape. She could remember the approach from below, the uncertainty ahead, the companions beside her. Now she observed it from an elevated vantage, as though she hovered above the swamp. No one looked up. She could not tell whether there was anything of her for them to see.

The students discovered the invisible dome protecting the site. She watched them puzzle over it, find their passage through, and cross the water. Their movements stirred recollections so precise that she seemed to know what would happen a breath before it did. Here they would hesitate. There they would turn. A spectral figure would confront them among the ruins, and they would fight it before finding their way down. All of it happened.

Their indecision, viewed from outside, was almost painful. They lingered over things, investigated, reconsidered. Elora remembered having reasons for that. From above, with the knowledge of what waited beneath them, she wanted to urge them onward and hold them back at once.

Then they descended the stairs, and her view followed. Stone passed before her and ceased to obstruct her sight. She moved through the floor into the chamber below, where the four emerged and began their cautious exploration, and where Greskrendreghk waited within his magical protection.

The sight of the wizard brought the old danger close enough to feel. Elora knew what he had sought to do to Strixhaven. She knew how hard they had fought to stop him. Yet knowledge of their victory gave her little comfort as he began summoning creatures and sending them against the students.

She watched the battle unfold along its remembered course. The summoned creatures pressed forward, and the students fought them off. Beyond the struggle, the wizard remained enclosed in his protection, free to work while they spent their strength reaching him. At last the barrier failed. By then his creatures had been dispatched, and Greskrendreghk faced the four directly. The battle grew worse.

A bolt of power struck Bob, and he fell. Elora knew this moment. The knowledge caught in her like a held breath. Ophelia took another blast and collapsed moments later.

Now, Elora thought.

The two bodies remained on the floor. Luna and Krenn fought on. Elora waited for the impossible thing she remembered, the sudden return of familiar companions where the fallen students had been. Maledurk should have risen. Tempest should have stood beside him. Their strength should have changed everything.

Neither moved.

The wizard pressed his advantage, and Elora’s confidence in memory began to fail. She could see it in the struggle below, in the dwindling chance that Luna and Krenn could hold him off. The victory she remembered was slipping away while she watched. Was this another history? A possibility the crown had chosen to show her? Or was she seeing the battle itself, unfinished and terrible, with two of her friends dead upon the stones? She could not afford to settle the question.

Healing was her first thought, but she knew, looking at them, that healing would not suffice. Their wounds had carried them beyond its reach. She needed to call them back. She had acted within the crown before. The strange court and the forest had answered her choices. Whatever she was in this place, unseen witness or borrowed presence, she still had her own will. And she knew the magic of reincarnation.

Elora reached for Bob.

Something resisted. It pressed against her thoughts as she gathered the spell, a refusal without words. She had felt enough of the crown’s will to suspect its touch. For an instant the effort seemed to close around her, making even the intention difficult to hold. Below, Luna and Krenn were still fighting.

Elora pushed. The resistance yielded, and her magic reached the fallen student.

Bob became Maledurk.

The change was immediate. One moment the student lay dead; the next, the companion Elora knew was there, rising into the battle. She turned her power toward Ophelia. Again she called a life back, and Tempest stood where the fallen woman had been.

Luna and Krenn faltered in astonishment. Then the fight gave them no more time to wonder. Their new allies were already engaging the wizard, and the desperate balance of the chamber shifted. Elora watched Maledurk and Tempest fight with the strength she remembered. The two students rallied beside them. Greskrendreghk, who had seemed moments away from victory, could no longer overwhelm them.

This, now, was how it had happened. She remembered seeing it from Luna’s place. She remembered the shock of those transformations, the relief that followed, the sudden possibility of surviving. She had carried that memory with her without understanding who had made it possible.

The four defeated the wizard. As he fell, the ruins began to shake. Dust loosened overhead. The survivors hurried for the way out, their victory already giving way to the need to escape. Elora followed their flight with her eyes, feeling the old urgency even though falling stone seemed unable to reach her.

Then Thorn’s voice sounded within her mind.

Wake up. We can’t get the crown off. Contact us if you can.

The chamber, the fleeing figures, the trembling ruins all remained before her, but his words recalled another place. A pillar. Water. Her friends waiting on the shore. She had a body somewhere, and it needed her back. Elora drew her magic inward and worked the restoration that had freed her before.

The crown slipped from her head. Thorn had scarcely finished sending his message when it came loose. Elora opened her eyes to the swamp and the faces above her.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m back.”

Maledurk was beside her, alive and solid, with no knowledge of what she had just done. The sight of him made the vision harder to dismiss. She had watched him rise from death a moment ago, and eight hundred years ago, and in the recent past of her own remembering.

She began to tell them. At first the account sounded like a retelling of the battle they knew. The dome, the descent, the wizard behind his protection. Thorn listened with recognition. Then she described Bob and Ophelia falling, and remaining fallen.

“I brought them back,” she said. “And they became you. Just as we remembered.”

Thorn grew quiet. Around them, the swamp covered the chamber she had just seen. There was no sign of its violence now. The water lay against the old stones, dull and undisturbed beyond the marks of her rescue.

“We never knew why that happened,” he said.

Elora looked at him.

“When we were there. We knew they stood up as Maledurk and Tempest. We knew that was how we won.” He glanced toward the crown. “We didn’t know you were there.”

“I was Luna.”

“You were watching Luna.”

She considered the distinction, and found that it made everything worse. For them, Strixhaven belonged to a past close enough to remember without effort. For Strixhaven, those students had lived eight hundred years before. Somewhere in their journeys, the ordinary sequence of years had ceased to apply to them. Now Elora had reached backward from one part of her life and intervened in another.

Thorn followed the thought further. They had spent so long searching for someone responsible for their strange journeys. Some enemy with the reach to cast them between worlds. Some hidden power arranging dangers for reasons they could not discover.

“Perhaps we’ve been influencing more of it than we thought,” he said.

Elora frowned. “All of it?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps there is still someone behind it. But this battle, at least…” He looked from her to Maledurk. “We helped cause our own victory.”

She remembered the pressure against her mind. The crown had resisted her, and that troubled her nearly as much as the rest. They had already seen evidence that their actions within it could alter history. Thorn’s intervention in another battle had been followed by the disappearance of the lich’s history from the records in Waterdeep. After Elora’s own visit to the strange court, those accounts had returned and the king’s history had vanished instead. But this time she had done what their memories said had happened. Had she preserved their past? Completed it? What would they remember now if she had watched without acting?

Thorn’s gaze returned to the crown. They could keep putting it on. Each attempt might teach them something. Yet they had no reliable way to choose what it showed, and no assurance that the person wearing it would remember to leave. That last danger had become difficult to ignore.

Maledurk remembered a balcony and thousands of people cheering for him. He had liked being their king. When Elora had pulled him free of that experience, he had wept.

“I liked it there,” he said, with a stubbornness that made the others smile despite themselves.

Thorn could hardly fault him. He too had remained absorbed in what the crown showed him. His own departure had been forced upon him after he changed the battle. Something had expelled him, whether the crown itself or another will he could not identify. Elora could free herself, but she had still needed his voice to remind her.

“What if we could all go?” Thorn asked.

He began turning the possibility over aloud. Perhaps there was some way to bind them together, to let the crown admit the whole company. Maledurk’s strength could be useful inside those visions. All of them could act, instead of standing helplessly around one unconscious companion. Then he reached the difficulty.

“If we’re all in there, who reminds us to come back?”

No one had an answer. They needed a signal they would recognize, some means of remembering where they belonged even while the crown filled their senses with another place. They did not know how to arrange it. Nor did they know how to enter together in the first place. Pulling at the crown had never drawn a second person into its visions.

Veyr might know more. At least he would understand the questions. They used the wand he had given them, and Sedgemoor vanished.

The wand brought them back outside the hedge maze. Thorn regarded the familiar entrance with the weary recognition of someone who had already earned the right to be on the other side. Fortunately, they remembered the route. The answers had not changed, and they passed through without repeating the battles and difficulties of their first visit. Soon they were admitted to the tower.

Veyr listened as they described the drowned ruins, Elora’s vision, and the two lives she had restored. His interest sharpened as the account went on. By the time they reached their questions about entering the crown together, he had several questions of his own.

Until now, he observed, the crown’s visions had appeared to concern Nogbruth. A king, a court, a battle, the disputed histories of a lich. Whatever contradictions they contained, those experiences had seemed connected to him. At Strixhaven, Elora had encountered their own history. And she appeared to have saved them within it.

“What would have happened,” Veyr asked, “if you hadn’t cast the spell?”

Elora had no ready answer. Thorn leaned into the question with visible unease.

“If we’d managed to get the crown off before she did it? Would we have lost the battle?”

The tower around them seemed very settled. Its walls stood. They were all there to have the conversation. Elora found herself taking an unreasonable amount of comfort in those facts.

“When we won,” she said slowly, “it could have been because I would help us later.”

That seemed to be what they had witnessed. Saying it aloud did little to make it easier.

There were other uncertainties. Elora had seemed able to act as herself, but she had never seen what she was in the vision. She could not say whether she had been present in her own form, had acted through someone else, or had existed there in some fashion for which she had no name. The crown gave them experiences. It offered no explanation of how to understand them.

“Doesn’t it want to get back to its owner?” she asked.

They had sensed a will within it, an impulse toward wherever it belonged. That much remained part of the puzzle. But they had no direct proof that someone elsewhere was controlling it.

“Perhaps it has somewhere of its own to go,” Thorn said. “We don’t know that it belongs to the person we think it does.”

He could imagine an object powerful enough to tempt anyone, with purposes separate from those of whoever happened to possess it. Yet that, too, was only a possibility.

Nemu’s experience complicated matters further. When she had worn the crown, she had risen and moved about. They had fought to remove it from her. Afterward she had described watching herself act, unable to stop what she was doing, as though she had been pushed out of her own mind. Elora remembered that account with renewed discomfort. Nemu had seemed to be more than the gnome she appeared. They did not know what she truly was, or whether that explained why the crown had treated her differently. They only knew that it could leave one wearer motionless in a vision and send another walking about without control of her own body. It was a poor foundation on which to plan another experiment.

Still, they had learned something at Strixhaven. Elora had tried the crown in several places, and it had remained silent until she reached the site of the battle. The location mattered, even if they did not yet understand why.

Veyr returned to the suggestion that had sent them there. Their lives contained an unusual number of encounters with powerful beings and terrible dangers. Revisiting those places might reveal more. The crown had responded at one of them. Perhaps others held similar opportunities.

“Perhaps there is something you need to do differently,” he suggested.

Elora considered that. They had survived their adventures. They had won the battles that mattered to their survival. It was difficult to look back at those victories and know which part ought to change.

“Or perhaps,” Veyr continued, “you need to save yourselves.”

They had just seen how that might work.

Thorn began searching his memories for things less obvious than a final battle. There had been people along the way whose lives they had entered and then left behind. They knew what those encounters had meant for their own journeys. Often they knew very little of what followed.

“The eggs,” he said.

The memory came back in pieces. The Underdark, purple worm eggs, a cart, and the guide who had helped them reach the surface. They had escaped, and the man had gone away with what they had gathered. What had happened to him afterward? What had become of the eggs? Would keeping one, or changing the bargain, have mattered?

They could ask such questions about almost anywhere they had been. Elora thought of the dinosaur races, of how easily some small alteration might produce a different winner. But they had no way to judge which changes would teach them anything, much less which ones they ought to make.

Then she remembered Barovia.

“There was another road we could have taken.”

Thorn looked toward her. They had flown up to the castle. It had seemed a useful way to reach what awaited them there, and afterward the long exploration of Ravenloft had filled so much of their memory that the earlier choice was easy to overlook. Before the castle, there had been a house.

A young woman sheltered inside it. Strahd had captured her, and she had escaped him. His creatures came at night, attacking the place where she stayed. The house had been boarded against them. They had been asked to escort her to another city in Barovia.

They had not done it.

As they recalled the request, Elora found herself picturing the boarded house more clearly than the castle. There was a difference between remembering that they had chosen another route and remembering why someone had wanted them to stay.

“Would that have been something heroic we could have done?” Maledurk asked. “Saving her?”

“It could have been,” came the answer.

“Perhaps we’re being punished because we didn’t.” The suggestion carried his usual humor, though it was not entirely a joke.

“Well, you are,” Thorn said.

“I am,” Maledurk agreed. “Definitely.”

Their laughter briefly eased the room. Elora continued thinking about the woman. She did not know whether helping her would explain the crown. It might have no connection at all to the forces moving them from place to place. But it was a choice they could understand, and someone had once asked them to make it.

“Perhaps something important would happen because we helped her,” she said.

Thorn was willing. He was also determined that they acknowledge the practical difficulty. They could put the crown on Elora again, but they could not command it to show them the house. Going to Barovia first might help, just as going to the ruins had helped at Strixhaven. They might have to try several places. Even then, they had no assurance that any vision would concern the woman.

Elora looked to Veyr. He could send them to places they had visited. With enough knowledge of when something had happened, he might even bring them near the right place at the right time. Their visit to Strixhaven had taken them to its present because none of them had known their remembered adventures belonged eight hundred years in its past. Barovia might be simpler.

Yet before they settled on the journey, Elora asked the question that had been troubling her beneath the rest.

“What are we trying to do?”

They had once spoken of gathering allies against a great enemy, of a threat that might endanger everyone. Was that still what they believed? Were they following evidence, or merely the next mystery? The feared enemy remained a theory. Their experiences had given them reasons to suspect a larger design, but they had no certainty about its author or purpose.

Thorn admitted that understanding the crown was itself worth pursuing. For Elora, curiosity remained part of it. She wanted to see what they had missed. She wanted to follow the road they had passed by.

“I think we should go back to Barovia,” she said. “Take the other path.”

“At least it’s a plan,” Thorn replied.

And if they learned nothing about the crown, they might still learn what had become of the woman.

Veyr returned at last to their question about entering the visions together. It might be possible. He would need to study the crown more closely before he could say how, or whether, he could accomplish it. The idea interested him, but he had no method ready for them.

Then he offered a way to pursue both matters. Their experience in Barovia sounded recent. Perhaps they could simply return and discover its present condition. They might not need the crown at all for that. He could send them through a painting and continue his studies while they were gone.

“If we leave it here,” Maledurk asked, “how do we get back?”

“We have the wand,” Thorn reminded him.

“Oh. Yes.”

Leaving the crown was a different question. They had kept it in their possession through everything. Elora considered Veyr, trying to distinguish trust from the convenience of having found someone who could help. He had given them no reason to believe he wanted the crown for conquest or dominion. His curiosity seemed sincere. He wanted to know how its powers worked and why it behaved as it did. Their well-being occupied a less certain place among his interests. That did not make him an enemy. It did make Thorn thoughtful.

“We know where to find him,” he observed.

Elora felt comfortable enough with the arrangement. Maledurk agreed. Still, Thorn proposed that one of them remain. Tempest could watch over the crown while Veyr worked. The prospect improved his mood. If the scholar misbehaved, he might find himself dealing with a storm inside his tower. Or perhaps, as they cheerfully considered, he would spend some time as a potted plant. Maledurk laughed.

They left Tempest with Veyr and the crown. For Elora, there was a peculiar relief in preparing to travel without it. She had only just begun to understand how much she might owe to the thing, and how little that debt resembled safety. It had allowed her to save her friends. It had resisted while she did so. She could not yet fit those facts together.

Veyr led the three travelers to a painting. At his spell, the image changed. Hills appeared beneath a dim sky, with forest spreading along their slopes. The colors were so muted that the scene looked almost black and white. Elora recognized the quality of the light before she had taken in the shapes of the land. Barovia had felt like that. Even memory seemed to drain its colors.

“The crown will be safe here,” Veyr told them. “I will do my best. If I discover anything, I will let you know.”

His anticipation of their return was plain. They would bring him more experiences to examine, more questions to add to those they were leaving behind. Thorn looked once more toward Tempest. Then they placed their hands against the painting and stepped through.

The tower gave way to the foot of a mountain. They stood on the path by which they had first entered Barovia. Ahead, the valley opened beneath its subdued light. The town lay where they remembered it, its distant buildings gathered below the heights. Above it, upon the cliffs, rose Castle Ravenloft.

Elora looked up at the place they had spent so long wandering, and felt the pull of remembered corridors and the search for Strahd. Then her eyes lowered to the town. Somewhere among those buildings was the house they remembered. They could not tell from here whether its windows were still boarded, whether anyone remained inside, or what their earlier choice had cost. Beside her, Thorn and Maledurk surveyed the familiar valley.

The road lay open before them.