Scene Three - "A Cloak of Stars"

The council had said no.

Eloquently, efficiently, and in the specific way that very practical people say no. Where you can understand where they are coming from, and still wish for something different.

He stood in the market district of Duskfen with The Weave on his back and a pastry in his hand and the profound conviction that he was, objectively, the most charming man alive, and considered what to do next.

The council was a wall. Fine. Walls had doors if you knew where to look.

What he needed was someone who knew about the wizard.

He bought a another pastry, mushroom again, inexplicably good, and started asking questions.

The Record Keeper

The Hall of Municipal Records sat at the intersection of three root-roads near the center of Duskfen. It had the specific architecture of a building that wanted you to know it took itself seriously, carved stonework above the door, a plaque that had been polished so recently he could see his own reflection in it.

Inside, the smell of paper and wood oil and the particular mustiness of organized information hit him like a warm wall. Shelves from floor to ceiling, stuffed with volumes and scrolls and folders tied with colored string, each one labeled in handwriting so small it bordered on theoretical. Behind the main desk sat a gnome who looked like he had been placed there at the beginning of time and had been waiting ever since for someone to fill out the correct paperwork.

“Good morning”, Dandy said, deploying the smile.

The gnome looked at him over the top of a pair of spectacles so small they seemed to be making a philosophical statement about minimalism. He did not return the smile. He appeared to be constitutionally opposed to the concept of smiling during work hours.

“Office hours are posted”, the gnome said.

“I can see that”, Dandy said. “I'm within them.”

“Barely”.

“Technically within them is still within them, rules are rules" a slight smirk of someone who knows rules must be followed here.

The gnome considered this with the expression of someone who found the argument technically sound and personally offensive. “What do you need?”

“Information”, Dandy said pleasantly. “I'm looking for records related to a wizard. Local legend. Purple lightning, ridge, general air of mystery”.

“Category”, the gnome said.

Dandy blinked. "Sorry?"

"What category. Persons of interest. Supernatural phenomena. Unverified accounts. Local mythology. Arcane disturbances filed by district." He gestured at the shelves behind him with the weary pride of a man who had built something extraordinary and lived daily with the knowledge that no one fully appreciated it. “Everything is categorized”.

"That's….." Dandy looked at the shelves. There were a lot of shelves. “That's impressive”.

“It is”, the gnome agreed, without warmth.

"Could I see the files on the wizard?"

"Do you have a request form?"

Dandy's smile held. “I don't”.

“Then no”.

"Where do I get a request form?"

The gnome opened a drawer and produced a form so long it unfolded in three stages, each stage revealing additional sections that had previously been hidden by the sheer optimism of the reader. He placed it on the desk with the care of someone presenting a sacred text.

Dandy looked at it.

“How long does this take to process?" he asked.

"Fourteen days, there's a fee, I need a sworn statement of urgent need and two gnome cosignatories." Dandy nodded. He had been in enough councils to know how this worked. "Is there any part of these files you could share with me right now, today, without the form?"

The gnome looked at him for a long moment.

“No”, he said.

"The titles of the files? Just the titles?"

"No."

"A general indication of which shelf they're on?"

The gnome pointed at the door.

Dandy folded the form into his breast pocket, you never knew. He thanked the gnome with genuine warmth that was met with the expression of a door being closed, and walked back out into the market.

Off to a great start.

-----------------------------

The Siblings

He found them at a stall selling navigational instruments, compasses, maps, and small brass tools whose function Dandy couldn't immediately identify.

There were two of them. A man and a woman, somewhere in their sixties, with the specific physical similarity of siblings who had spent decades making the same expressions at each other and had gradually started to look like mirror images arguing with themselves. The woman was taller. The man was louder. Both of them were currently in the middle of a discussion that had clearly been happening, in one form or another, since childhood.

“….the lightning was blue”, the woman said, with the patience of someone who has said this many times and expects to say it many more.

“It was purple”, the man said.

“It was blue with purple in it”.

"That's purple…."

"That is not what purple means"

"If it has purple in it"

Dandy cleared his throat. Both of them looked at him with the mild irritation of people interrupted mid-thesis.

“Sorry to interrupt”, Dandy said. "I couldn't help overhearing. You're talking about the lightning on the ridge?"

A pause. The siblings looked at each other with the specific look of people deciding simultaneously whether this stranger was worth their time.

"You've seen it?" Dandy said.

“Seen it”, the man said, with the gravity of a person whose entire identity had been shaped by a single event. "It happened two years ago, I was standing at the edge of the eastern market. Clear night, and then.." he made an explosive gesture with both hands that knocked a compass off the stall and neither of them noticed.

“It was not that dramatic”, the woman said.

"I nearly fell over.."

"You sat down briefly"

"I sat down because my legs"

"Your legs were fine, you sat down because you were startled"

"Being startled by purple lightning is a perfectly valid"

"Blue lightning"

Dandy raised a hand. “The wizard”, he said. "Who is he? Where does he live?"

They both looked at him again.

“The ridge”, the man said, as though this were obvious.

“Which ridge”, Dandy said.

Another look between them. This one more complicated.

“The north ridge”, the woman said.

“The northeast ridge”, the man said simultaneously.

They turned to each other.

"The northeast ridge is part of the north ridge.."

"The north ridge runs east to west, the northeast ridge runs"

"That's the same ridge"

"It is demonstrably not the same"

Dandy waited. They had forgotten he was there. He could tell by the way neither of them was directing any part of the argument at him anymore, it had become self-sustaining, orbiting its own center of gravity, a celestial body that no longer needed external input to keep moving.

He took out his small notebook and wrote: north or northeast ridge. Possibly the same ridge. Lightning blue or purple. Wizard real, apparently.

He closed the notebook, thanked them sincerely into the middle of a sentence neither of them was directing at him, and left.

Two encounters. Current information: a ridge, somewhere in the north or northeast, with lightning of disputed color. This was either progress or the illusion of progress, which in Dandy's experience were sometimes the same thing long enough to be useful.

-------------------

He spent the next hour and a half asking everyone who would stand still long enough.

A woman at the herb stall told him she'd felt something move through the ley lines near the high rocks three years ago and hadn't gone back since, which was either relevant or the most Duskfen thing anyone had ever said to him.

A young gnome told him his grandmother knew something but his grandmother was in the eastern quarter and didn't like visitors and especially didn't like tall ones.

A retired cartographer told him the ridge didn't appear on any map he'd ever made, which he said with the professional affront of a man who takes the absence of things on his maps personally.

An elderly gnome told him to go home.

Two gnome children told him, in complete seriousness, that the wizard was a ghost who had died on the ridge three hundred years ago and now haunted it, and that anyone who went up there came back different. When Dandy asked in what way different they looked at each other and said, simply, weirder, and went back to whatever they had been doing.

By the time the afternoon light started going amber Dandy had a notebook full of contradictions, a strong opinion about gnome pastries, and exactly one more piece of usable information than he'd started with, which was that the ridge was real and the wizard might be.

He stood at the edge of the market and looked at the hills beyond the city's northern edge and thought about his options.

He had one option left.

He had been avoiding it.

-----------------------

The Conspiracy Theorist

The door was unremarkable. That was suspicious in itself, every other door in this part of Duskfen had something identifying it, a profession or a name or at minimum the hours of operation posted in very small lettering. This door had nothing. Just a door. In a root-wall. With a faint smell of something burned coming from underneath it that was either alchemical or culinary.

Dandy knocked.

A pause. Then movement inside, the specific sound of someone relocating things quickly in the way people relocate things quickly when they weren't expecting company and have complicated feelings about the amount of things they have.

The door opened three inches.

One eye appeared in the gap. It looked at Dandy with the focused intensity.

“You're human”, the eye said.

“Regrettably conspicuous”, Dandy agreed. “I was told you might know something about the wizard on the ridge”.

A longer pause.

“Who told you that?"

“A woman at the herb stall, She was vague about it”.

“Maren”, the eye said, with the tone of someone filing this away. “She talks too much”. A beat. “Come in”.

The door opened.

---------------------------------------

Dandy had been in a lot of rooms. He felt confident in saying he had never been in a room quite like this one.

Every surface had something on it. That wasn't unusual in a gnome home — gnomes were practical people who believed strongly in the utility of surfaces. What was unusual was the nature of what covered the surfaces, which was primarily string.

Red string. Blue string. Green string. All of it connected to things, notes pinned to the root-walls, small objects, a map of Duskfen so covered in markings it had become its own document. Then at the center of the far wall, a very detailed sketch of what appeared to be a purple lightning bolt, labeled in six different colors of ink with annotations that had annotations.

The gnome who lived here was short even by gnome standards, with hair that had given up on any particular direction and the eyes of someone who had been paying extremely close attention to everything for a very long time and had developed strong feelings as a result. He moved through the string like a man walking a familiar garden, ducking and stepping without looking, leading Dandy to a chair that was clear of string and sitting across from him on a stool that was not.

“You want to know about the mage of the ridge”, the gnome said.

“I do”, Dandy said.

“Why?”

“I need his help with something”.

“What kind of something?”

“The kind that affects every living person in the known world”, Dandy said. He had learned that vagueness helped nobody and specificity at least got interesting reactions.

The gnome stared at him.

Then he stood up, went to the wall, and pulled a string attached to a note near the top left corner. The note swung forward. Behind it was another note. He turned back to Dandy.

“I knew it”, he said. “I knew this was connected”, He gestured at the wall. “Sit. I'll explain”.

"You don't have to explain everything, a quick synopsis will do" Dandy said nervously.

“I do”, the gnome said firmly. “You'll need the context”.

Forty minutes later Dandy had the following: a complete theory of how the mage of the ridge was connected to seventeen seemingly unrelated events in Duskfen over the past two years, a hand-drawn diagram of the ley lines converging on the northeast ridge specifically, the coordinates of said ridge expressed in a gnomish navigational system that took eleven minutes to explain and that Dandy had a forty percent chance of correctly interpreting, the name of every person in Duskfen who had reported seeing the purple lightning and whether the gnome trusted their account, and a very strong cup of something hot that he had drunk mostly to have something to do with his hands.

He also had the directions.

They were specific. They were confident. They involved landmarks Dandy wasn't certain were real. One of them was described as the place where the fog doesn't move right, Dandy had a kick out of that one.

He looked at his notes. He looked at the gnome, who was watching him with the bright-eyed certainty of someone who has just handed a stranger the most important information they will ever receive and knows it.

“Thank you”, Dandy said. “This is very thorough”.

“I've been working on it for two years”. the gnome said simply.

Dandy stood, thanked him again, and left.

He stood in the root-road outside and looked at his notes and then at the hills and then back at his notes.

He had spent four hours talking to gnomes. He had bureaucracy paperwork in his pocket, a notebook full of contradictions, a cup of something still sitting warm in his stomach, and the directions of a man with string on his walls.

He looked at the hills.

Well, he thought. The string man did seem very certain.

He went north.

--------------------------------------------

The Ridge

The conspiracy theorist's directions were specific , confident, and expressed in a navigational system Dandy only partially understood. They had gotten him to the northern hills, which felt like progress by comparison with where he'd been four hours ago.

He went up.

The climb took the better part of the afternoon. The trees thickened as he went, pressing in until the light arrived in pale fractured pieces. Halfway up the quiet landed, not peaceful, not restful, but hollow. Wrong in a way that settled between his shoulders and stayed there. No birds. No rustling. Just his own footsteps and his own breath and somewhere above him the faint sound of wind through open rock.

Then the fog.

It sat across the path ahead, a solid wall of grey, perfectly still while the branches around it swayed in the evening breeze. Dandy stopped in front of it. Stood there a moment.

*The place where the fog doesn't move right.*

He looked at it. It looked back in the way that fog does not usually look back at people.

"Huh, maybe I should start investing in string" Dandy said.

He walked through the fog.

Cold. Damp. Unmoving. Three steps and it was gone, the ridge opening out before him, a long flat shelf of rock, the whole of Duskfen spread below in the gathering dark, lanterns blinking on one by one across the city like something waking up.

Dandy stood at the edge and looked out at it and breathed. Taking in the sights of a city who doesnt know it is in perile. He turned.

There was nobody here.

He looked left. Rock. He looked right. Rock. He looked behind him. Trees. He looked at the open edge of the ridge. More rock, and then a very long way down.

He walked the length of the ridge twice. Checked behind every outcrop that was large enough to hide something. Found nothing except a small lizard that Dandy admired.

He sat down heavily on the nearest rock.

“Right”, he said, to nobody. “Fantastic, Excellent use of an afternoon. Very productive. The most charming man alive, ladies and gentlemen, defeated by a hill”.

He reached into his bag and found half a pastry he'd forgotten about. Mushroom, slightly squashed, and ate it in that specific way that people eat things when the eating is not about the food.

The Duskfen lanterns continued their patient illumination below. The stars were beginning to consider showing up. The wind moved across the ridge in long slow passes that seemed to be enjoying themselves.

He put his head in his hands. He thought about Valdenmere. About ten thousand people who needed someone to do something and had, through a series of events that made considerably more sense at the start than they did now, ended up depending in part on a bard who had just been defeated by a hill.

“You took longer than I expected”, said a voice directly beside him.

Dandy left the rock.

Not intentionally, his body made a unilateral decision without his consent and expressed it by standing up very fast and sideways and nearly going off the edge of the ridge entirely before his feet found their footing and he turned around with his heart doing something complicated in his chest and his dignity somewhere down the hill behind him.

A gnome sat on the outcrop beside the one Dandy had just vacated, so still that Dandy's eyes had passed over him at least three times in the last ten minutes without registering him as a person. He was right there. He had been right there the entire time. Possibly the entire afternoon.

Short in stature as gnomes were, but nothing small about the way he occupied space. Black hair. A cloak the color of midnight, deep and dark, silver-white worked into the fabric that caught the fading light the way stars catch darkness. His eyes, when they found Dandy's, were deeply purple. They held warmth and knowledge.

He was turning a small stone over in his fingers without looking at it.

He looked at Dandy with the expression of someone who had been watching a very entertaining performance and was deciding whether to applaud.

"You..", Dandy started.

“Yes”, the gnome said.

"You were sitting there…"

“The whole time, yes”.

"While I was…"

“Walking back and forth. Checking behind rocks. Talking to yourself”. A pause. “The lizard, incidentally, is not significant. I understand why you looked at it for so long but it is simply a lizard”.

Dandy stared at him.

“You let me sit down and eat half a pastry”, he said.

“I did”.

“While you were right there”.

“Correct”.

“Why?”

The gnome considered this with what appeared to be genuine reflection. “You seemed like you needed a moment”, he said finally. “And I wanted to see how you handled the defeat”.

Dandy opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the spot on the rock where he had been sitting with his head in his hands approximately thirty seconds ago and experienced a complicated sequence of emotions that moved through embarrassment, outrage, and something approaching reluctant respect before settling in a place he didn't have a name for.

"And?" he said. "How did I handle it?"

The gnome looked at him. Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile but close.

“Well enough", he said. “Sit down”.

Dandy sat.

“I'm Dandy”, he said. "Of Valdenmere. Musician. Occasional bearer of.."

“Extremely urgent news”, the gnome said. “Yes. I know”. He set the stone down beside him with a small precise click. “I have been expecting you for some time. Though I will admit the string man's involvement was a detail I did not foresee”.

Dandy stared at him. “You know about the string man”.

“Everyone knows about the string man”, the gnome said. "He has been investigating me for the entire time I have been hiding. He is not wrong about most of it, which I find both flattering and concerning." He looked out over Duskfen, the lanterns below them patient and warm. “My name is Zook”.

“The mage of the ridge”, Dandy said.

"Among other descriptions." Zook's mouth moved again in that direction of a smile. “I have heard worse”.

“I have questions”, Dandy said.

“You have many questions”, Zook agreed. "Start with the important one."

Dandy thought about it.

“How long were you sitting there before I arrived?” he asked.

Zook looked at him. "That was not the important question."

"It's the one I want answered first."

A pause.

"Since midmorning," Zook said.

Dandy closed his eyes briefly. "You watched me walk up through the fog."

"Yes."

"And you just.."

"Waited," Zook said. “Yes. I find it tells you a great deal about a person. What they do when they think no one is watching”. He picked up the stone again. “You ate the pastry. You didn't give up. You sat with it for a while and then you put your head up”. He turned the stone once. “That was enough”.

Dandy was quiet for a moment.

"The string man's directions," he said. “They were right”.

“Largely”.

“He said fog that doesn't move right, I laughed about that the whole way here and then.."

“He has been watching this ridge for two years”, Zook said. “He notices things. He draws conclusions that are sometimes incorrect but the observations themselves are usually sound”. A beat. “Do not tell him I am real, I want to see more of his work”.

Dandy laughed. It came out more genuine than he'd expected, it skipped the part of you that curated things and arrived unannounced and real.

Zook looked at him when he laughed. Something in his purple eyes that admired Dandy and all he had done to get here.

“Tell me what you know”, Zook said. “All of it. From the beginning".