The barkeep cocked her head, asked, "Nothing to say? Hungry enough, though. I can see by your clothing you're no brigand come to spend ill-gotten loot. You'd be dressed more elaborately and would have ordered hard spirits. What kind of scar do you think you'll find in the Plague-wrought Land?"
"I do not seek more scars," Raidon said, wiping his mouth on a piece of linen.
The barkeep laughed, shaking her head.
"You ain't here for a pilgrimage?" came a voice behind Raidon.
The grandfather was awake. His brown eyes twinkled, and laugh lines crinkled around them. His beard was streaked white and black, and so was his long hair tied back in a single braid. His clothing was damp from the spilled ale he'd been dozing in.
"I am not seeking a scar in the Plague-wrought Land. Why would I?"
"People don't come here for any old blemish," said the old man. "They come to be scarred by the Plague-wrought Land."
"To be scarred by…" Raidon trailed off, recalling what one of the ghouls outside Starmantle had said, before it tried to eat him. It babbled something about spellscars. About how spellplague didn't killed everyone it touched, but changed some instead. Sometimes monstrously.
Raidon inquired, "Are there those insane enough to subject themselves to active spellplague?"
A few of the people gathered in the bar shifted to expressions of self-conscious doubt or embarrassment; other faces hardened into looks of defiance. Raidon realized he'd erred.
"My apologies," he said. "I did not mean to offend. Pardon me for my ignorance of your ways. Suffice it to say, I am not here to undertake a scar pilgrimage, nor do I possess sufficient experience to comment on what you seek."
The eyes of the tavern's occupants remained on him. A few seemed mollified, though not all. Regardless, he might have no better chance to ask his questions.
He continued, "No, I am here for another reason. I am looking for an old friend who came here a few years after the Spellplague. A woman, a… a star elf actually, attired as a warrior. She was named Kiril Duskmourn, and she bore a sword called Angul. Were any of you here then? Did any of you see Kiril?"
The barkeep shook her head. "A lot of people come through here, and most never return once they leave. Those who go on the scar pilgrimage usually stay a few tendays or months building up their nerve, and then I never see them again. A few do come back, ecstatic or horrified, depending. Anyway, I don't remember this woman."
"I remember her," declared the old man.
Raidon swiveled back, his pulse responding but his face betraying no hint of his eagerness to know. "What do you remember?"
The grandfather put a finger to his lips, shook his head. "It weren't too long after the Spellplague picked up Ormpetarr and tossed it down again, like a child throwing a tantrum. Ormpetarr was reduced to its present sad state in moments. Many were killed. I remember the screams and cries of the survivors, I do."
The grandfather took a pull on his tankard. The barkeep must have refilled it during the old man's doze.
"But some of us survived. And a few of us stayed. That's right, I stayed!" The man's tone verged on belligerence. "Where else could we go? Plus, we had our own special souvenir of the Spellplague: a pocket that didn't fade away like most of the rest in Faerыn. It lingered, just beyond the city. Onnpetarr's claim to fame in the wider world, eh? These ruins aren't home merely to crazies, ne'er-do-wells, and criminals. No. Well, we got them, but we also got pilgrims."
Another sip, then he continued, "People began to trickle in, just one or two every month. The swordswoman you're describing was one. She wanted to enter the Plague-wrought Land."
"Why?" demanded Raidon.
"Probably heard the story of Madruen Morganoug and wanted to try for herself, same as the rest of the pilgrims that came later."
That name drew smiles and nods of happy assent from many others present.
Raidon cocked his head to signal his unfamiliarity with the name.
"You don't know much, do you?"
A thread of heat urged Raidon to grasp the man's head and bang it hard against the table. Slightly shocked to even entertain such a thought, the monk outwardly revealed his discomposure by narrowing his lips. He requested, "Explain."
The grandfather laughed. "Well, Madruen entered the Plague-wrought Land, and unlike everyone before him, Madruen returned. Of course, it was an accident he'd fallen in at all, and the rest of us figured he was dead. A day later he walked back into town, his skin aglow with blue fire and a smile plastered across his face. He was touched by the spellplague. He was the first spellscarred anyone ever heard about."
More nods from the clientele and even a couple of cheers. Raidon said, "Why did Madruen smile? Why did his skin glow?"
"He smiled because he wasn't dead. His skin glowed because he soaked up the wild magic of the Plague-wrought Land, and it remade him. His skin was like iron-almost impossible to cut through. He could withstand daggers, swords, even ballista! Madruen was a walking palisade!"
Raidon took a deep breath and found his focus again. The image of the Cerulean Sign tattooed on his chest flashed before him, and he supposed, indeed, he was spellscarred like Madruen, but with a different outcome.
"When his story spread, others started coming here, hoping to share in Madmen's good luck."
"How many who enter the Plague-wrought Land return?"
"Well, at first the survival rate wasn't too good. We're a few years in now, though. Pilgrims got a chance to get in and get out without dissolving into slime or blowing away in a puff of wind."
"And how many come back spellscarred?" pressed the monk.
"One out of every ten who survive in the first place," pronounced the grandfather as solemnly as if he were relaying news of a new king in Cormyr.
"And how many survive?" prompted Raidon.
"Not always the same. Sometimes it's one out of five, other times one out o' twenty."
Nearby patrons blanched.
"So Kiril Duskmourn entered the Plague-wrought Land," said Raidon, "and never returned." He uttered the last as a statement, not a question.
The old man nodded. "Yes. She was with a dwarf; his name I don't recall. He said he was a geomancer who wanted to study the Plague-wrought Land from the inside."
"His name was Thormud. But a geomancer? What's that?"
The old man shrugged. "Who knows? He said he was seeking something. A… a 'chalk horse,' I think. The dwarf and Kiril went in, and…" The old man shrugged again, then called loudly for another drink.
The barkeep complied. As she passed Raidon with another sloshing tankard, she said, "I sell safe routes into the Plague-wrought Land. How much you willing to pay?"
Raidon examined the map penned on rough parchment. A trail called the "Pilgrim's Path" was crudely marked. It snaked past Onnpetarr's gates and on into the hazy edge of the Plague-wrought Land. The path meandered relatively straight for a few miles until it rounded a landmark labeled "Granite Vortex." The route zigged and zagged between several more unlikely sounding locations, slowly wending toward the heart of the discontinuity. The last portions of the map contained several alternate routes, all marked with a symbol indicating ignorance of what lay beyond it.
The barkeep had assured the monk that if he stayed on the path, there was a better than even chance he'd survive. At least until he got closer to the center, at which point it was anyone's guess. But only those who pressed forward at the last were rewarded with a spellscar. Well, the handful who were not caught up and consumed. It seemed a mad gamble to Raidon. He hoped his own previous contact with the spellplague would offer him some protection now.
The pack burro to Raidon's left issued a complaining bleat. A gray-haired woman was hanging another waterskin to its already prodigious load. The woman's name was Finara, and she was a mage, or had been, before the Spellplague. She'd lost her way since then. She had not been able to learn the new weft of the Weave, and thus could no longer perform magic. Upon losing her spellcasting ability, followed soon by her wizard tower and livelihood, hard times found her. Finara explained she was a pilgrim now because it was the only option remaining. If she couldn't find a new understanding of magic in the Plague-wrought Land, she was happy to accept death in its stead.