The Chronicle:

In Eisen, we resolved to stop by Heilgründstadt, where our travel companion from the River Mist Reginald Coleson had said he would meet his patron.  The Eisenfürst greeted us courteously and offered us his hospitality, but he was clearly a busy, weary, worried man with much work resting on his shoulders.

Many other guests were present as well, to make requests, propose deals, or offer alliances.  Or simply, like señor Coleson, to make a living.  We explained what we knew of the compass to Reginald, and showed him the one we still had.  Reginald was, after all, an archaeologist and very knowledgeable about Syrneth artefacts.  He became very interested in the pattern on the back of the compass, which mimicked the constellation called the Erebus Cross.  He said it reminded him of something he had seen or read a while ago, could not quite place it without doing some research.

Meanwhile, our companion Ricardo was giving increasing signs of mental instability.  He passed all bounds of courtesy at a solemn dinner in the presence of Herr Stefan von Heilgründ.  We had been warned that our host loved his privacy, and told that we should consider certain parts of his castle off-limits, on pain of expulsion or worse.  For unknown reasons, Ricardo thought it would be a great lark to use Avalon Glamour sorcery to turn himself invisible and lead the Eisenfürst's guards in a game of hide-and-seek.  None of us had had any inkling that Ricardo could do such a thing.  He even taunted our host, scoffing:

"Now, all your secrets will be revealed!"

We flinched, certain that we would all be beheaded.  Then, even more incomprehensibly, Ricardo let himself be caught, simply walking out from behind a tapestry.  The Eisenfürst was, unsurprisingly, livid with anger.  Ricardo was thrown in a cell and we were placed under house arrest.  Then, to make matters worse, one of the guests was assassinated in his bed that night: a Montaigne admiral currently in disfavour with the Empereur for excess of competence, César Marceau.

It was a mess extricating ourselves from this black situation, and in the end, we more or less ran away.  As a final irony, we soon ran into one of Herr von Heilgründ's other guests, an Avalon Highlander, who turned out to be the assassin!  Needless to say, the cur was delighted with the diversion we had provided.
 

Less delighted was Reginald Coleson, whose position had been ruined.  But he became so interested with the Aether Compass, as he called it, that he somehow forgot the incident although he was now on the run with us.  From his examination of the object, we learned that the metal used in its making was unusual, even for the Syrneth, and found only on certain Western Isles currently claimed by the accursed Montaigne.  The inscriptions on the back he could decipher only in part, but they spoke of "igniting the Soul's Mirror"; the instructions could only be fully interpreted using both compasses together.  Finally, Reginald said that the compass contained what he called "a power source" which he could not identify, at least not without breaking the compass apart and probably destroying it.

He identified, as the compass's probable origin, an island the Montaigne call "Ile de la Bête".  Apparently, they use the island for sport, as a hunting preserve where they release beasts brought through their foul Porté sorcery.  He suggested we all go to Freiburg, where he could make enquiries with his contacts in the Explorers' Society.

At the Explorers' Society, we met with a curt woman named Madeline du Bisset.  Reginald exchanged a few words with her, and agreed to ferry a strange box for her as a repayment for the slim information she was able to give him.  The box, inlaid with a Vestenmannavnjar rune, needed to be carried to the Society's chapterhouse in Carleon.  We agreed, since Carleon was a good port to resupply or hire a ship for the Western Isles.  While visiting Freiburg we also had to extricate Reginald from some zealous Inquisitors...

We enquired for a ship to take us to Carleon, and met with a trio of countrymen, sailors who assured us that they knew where to find such a ship.  They were two brothers, the burly Vincente and the nimbler Rodrigo, and their protégée Dolorès Diyah, better known as Didi.  They introduced us to Captain Conrad Hix, a disreputable man whom I immediately suspected of piracy.  We reached an agreement with the fellow, and soon departed for Carleon aboard the sloop The Drake.

Once aboard, however, we learned that we were travelling with a most unusual passenger, a man so important Captain Hix had ceded him his own cabin and deferred to him in everything.  The man kept much to himself without interfering with the ship's business, however.  We eventually learned with some trepidation that our fellow passenger was the infamous Captain Allende, the Pirate King of the Brotherhood of the Coast.  When we met him, we saw a quiet, unprepossessing man but with an unusually alert demeanour; he was rather tall, well-built, with the black hair and golden skin tone of a Castillan, but not a man to stand out in a crowd.  Yet I was awe-struck to meet this man, reputed to have escaped from the jail-fortress of La Bucca.  But I alone, I believe, realized something even more extraordinary: Captain Allende was none other than long-lost Prince Javier Béjarano de Sandoval de Castilla, the man who should be king.  Castille had mourned him for four years, yet here he was, a pirate!  My companions were oblivious to my confusion, but I saw from a sharp look I received from him that he had noticed it.  At first, I avoided him to forestall any blunder on my part; I felt the weight of this knowledge upon my shoulders.

But I was soon to be distracted by a new event: during the night, off the coast of Vendel, the sloop hit a bank of hidden shoals.  The small crew scrambled to pump, restow the hold, and effect repairs.  Then the carpenter's team, trying to patch the breach below the water line, was savaged by sirens!  By virtue of being the only ones available – and the only ones expendable – we grabbed our weapons and quickly made our way down into the hold to protect the carpenter's mate and his men while they attempted to pick up where their crewmates had failed and to effect the repair.  The fight was bloody, violent, and stripped of any niceties.  Being the only one who knew how to swim, I found myself in the thick of the fray, far closer to monstrous sirens' teeth than I would have liked.  But in the end we prevailed, and the crew finished the makeshift repairs.

The crew of the Drake showed us new respect after that incident.  Having nothing better to do, and relishing the chance to sail, I had volunteered my services as an able seaman, and found myself working in the tops with Didi.  I learned that she and the brothers were in Captain Allende's employ, rather than Hix'.  My dear cousin Lucas, acting as his normal philandering self, had been flirting with Didi throughout the trip, and the poor young woman, very conscious of the unlikeliness of that idyll, was very wistful.  She was a quiet, romantic, bookish girl and I felt strong sympathy.  I was ashamed that my cousin would play with her feelings thus; but when I asked him not to trifle with her heart, he merely laughed at me.
 

We eventually reached Carleon, where Reginald took me to the safehouse of the Explorers' Society.  I could not get past the guests' waiting room, but as I cooled my heels there while Reginald delivered Madame du Bisset's box, I suddenly noticed something interesting.  The room was decorated with engravings of various digging sites of the Society; one showed a sketch of a site where a mosaic floor was patterned with the same constellation, the Erebus Cross, which adorned our compass.

When Reginald returned from his errands in the Society's restricted areas, I showed him the picture and he became very excited.  He ran back to talk to his colleagues.  After a much longer interval, he returned again, somewhat crestfallen.  It transpired that the site was in Vodacce, but was currently declared off-limits by the Society.  After some discussion, we agreed that Reginald would stay in Carleon to do some research and to petition the Society to be granted access to the site, while my cousins and I would travel to the Ile de la Bête.  We would then meet again in Carleon and advise.

In Carleon, we finally lost trace of our increasingly unstable companion Ricardo.  Perhaps ashamed of his recent eccentricities, perhaps called by the strange Sidhe, or perhaps simply unhinged, he bid us a brisk goodbye and disappeared.  To replace this capable fighter, Lucas decided to hire a man-at-arms, unfortunately another Avalonian.  The fellow, a sailor named Fergus, was an uncouth but brawny Highlander.

After loading supplies, the Drake set sail for the Western Isles; Captain Hix had been swayed by our guilders and, I suspected, by a quiet word from Captain Allende, to act as our transport a while longer.

The first few days we fared smoothly, but of course this could not last.  As we swung towards the high, uncharted seas, the winds blew colder and the waters grew choppy.  One afternoon, the lookout spotted a lone Vendel whaler plying its trade, giving chase to a pod of sperm whales.  We looked on idly as our course took us closer and a trio of small boats went after the whales.  Then without warning, what looked like a small island rose from the sea in front of one boat, capsizing and sinking it.

"Leviathan," said Hix, shaking his head.  "They're dead men."

Horrified, we pressed him to go to the men's aid.  Even as we spoke, the beast destroyed a second boat, then the third, before turning towards the Vendel ship to ram it.  It looked like a gigantic whale, with horns, and tusks, and...  It was like nothing I'd ever seen.  In moments, it reduced the whaler to a sinking wreck, leaving men in the water to drown or to be eaten by sharks.  In a final splash of titanic proportions, Leviathan sank back beneath the waves.

Hix refused adamantly to get any closer to the wreck site.  "They knew the risks," he said.  Allende looked sombre, but remained silent.  Aghast, we pressed Hix until he lent us a ship's boat to go rescue the drowning men.  We rowed out to the whaler's wreck among the carcasses of dying men and whales, as sharks started feeding madly.  We were able to rescue some of the sailors, but as we fished them out of the water we saw with a cold shiver that Leviathan was still there under the surface, observing us... that he could smash us too if he wished.  As soon as we had the whalers on board, we rowed back to the sloop as fast as we could.  I would swear the monster was aware and thinking.
 

Along the way, I realized that my skills at cartography and navigation would not suffice to extract the compass's meaning; I needed help.  I asked who was knowledgeable in such matters and was told I should consult Captain Allende.  Despite my shyness and awe, I approached him with my request.  He graciously accepted, and quickly became fascinated with the sheer mathematical and technical challenge.  As we pored together over charts, calculations, and nautical tables for long hours over the course of several days, I gradually forgot what he represented and got instead to know him as a man of sharp wits, keen intellect, and wry, quirky humour.  I would never have guessed that this intent, serious man hid such a devilish sense of fun.  At last, we extracted all we could from the compass, and established the co-ordinates of the Ile de la Bête.

We had to proceed cautiously as we got near the Island of the Beast, for this area was patrolled by Montaigne ships.  We gave them the slip, but we could not easily avoid the flotilla blockading the island.  We finally decided that my cousins, their men, and I would use a ship's boat to approach the blockading ships at night and slip through.  A second ship's boat carried the Vendel sailors we had rescued, for they volunteered to help us.

Our oars wrapped for silence, we rowed to the nearest Montaigne ship.  The enemy expected no one, so it proved relatively easy to climb up the anchors' chains and sneak on board.  We quietly subdued the watch, one man at  a time.  Meanwhile, Lucas made his way to the captain's cabin; not wanting the dishonour of striking a man in his sleep, he woke the captain and told him to grab his sword.  The Montaigne captain requested to be allowed to dress properly first, and Lucas granted this.  The man took the time to dress in his best uniform before buckling on his sword belt.  After three quarters of an hour of waiting impatiently, Lucas eagerly got on guard.  But the man, rather than fight, then offered his surrender and his sword with pompous dignity.  Lucas was furious of being deprived of a duel, but could do nothing but accept the surrender.

From there, my cousins and I rowed again to make our way to the island's shore.  There, we were faced with another problem: the compass could only point us in a straight line towards its twin, through a dense jungle, and we had mo map of the island.  The only cleared area we could see at first was a road that ringed the island; along it, we found a series of ancient, gigantic buildings left by the Syrneth and now used by the Montaigne "sportsmen."  These we carefully avoided.

We followed the compass's needle through the dense vegetation; fortunately, a full moon gave us some light although the thin mist that clung to this humid island made it difficult to avoid obstacles.  After fighting some of the hideous demented beasts released by the Montaigne, and forcing our way through the wall of jungle, we suddenly emerged into a large clearing towards the centre of the island.  A complex pattern of stone and metal ruins marked the entire clearing.  In the very centre, a pond of mirror-like smoothness reflected the moonlight – multiplied to give a glow of its won.  Miranda frowned; although she remembered this clearing as the place in the vision she had received when the other compass was stolen, she did not remember this pool.  But by the side of the pool stood a man in dishevelled explorer's guard, flaunting the compass he held in his hand.

"It's him!" she hissed.

We walked towards him – and found our way blocked by an invisible barrier.  Try as we may, we could not get past it, nor throw anything through it.  The man smiled and bowed at us mockingly.

"Welcome, my Castillan friends, and my felicitations for eluding our noble hosts.  Allow me to introduce myself: I am Lucius Malveck."

He was vain as a peacock and only too happy to babble on about his own cleverness.  It seems that with the help of the stolen compass, he had been able to use the pool, itself a Syrneth artefact, to send visions to the holder of the other compass and lure us to bring it here.  There was no mysterious box, but he showed us another trick he had learned: he pointed his stolen compass at us, and ours was ripped from Miranda's hands and flew to Malveck's, passing easily through the invisible barrier where our own projectiles were still bouncing.  The two compasses snapped to interlock, back to back.  Laughing maniacally, Malveck twisted them, and a rumbling sound rolled over the clearing.

Malveck crowed with arrogant pride: he announced that together the compasses controlled all the protective wards on the island – including, of most interest to him, those that kept the wild beasts trapped at night.  He had just dropped those wards and the beasts would be able to stalk out and attack the hunters who tormented and slaughtered them during the day.  His plan was apparently to ransom those nobles from their wealthy families, and also to get his own sport from tormenting them.  He showed irrational hatred for them, not because of their decadent pastime, but because of their social position.

"Hey," suddenly exclaimed Sebastian, Lucas's man-at-arms.  "What about his wards now?"

We lunged forward.  Sebastian was right: Malveck had failed to realize all wards were dropped by his action.  Startled, he tried to bring the wards back up, but was too late.  He whipped out a rapier and started defending himself, showing considerable skill, but we outnumbered him.  We brought him down and snatched the dangerous compasses from him, but while we were momentarily distracted with figuring out how to control the wards, he ripped a Porté gate and escaped the island.

We managed to reinstate the wards by separating the two compasses, although some of the beasts had already escaped.  We examined our surroundings and particularly that strange pool, and discovered that two indentations on opposite sides of its edge matched the compasses exactly.  Lucas and I each took one of the compasses and pressed them into those indentations.  Upon turning them to fit the locks, we saw images form onto the smooth surface of the pool.  Those images found a strange echo expressed directly in our minds, and we glimpsed some of the strange experiments once performed by the Syrneth on this island.  We dimly grasped that this had been an attempt to build a device capable of harvesting power from the stars themselves and use it for vastly incomprehensible feats.  But the island was too small for the Syrneths' purposes, and a larger, more powerful machine had been built in Vodacce to complete the project.  We could barely begin to comprehend the images, but what we saw next was more recognizable: Reginald Coleson, on his way to that site without waiting for us.

The otherness of these images seemed to warp and twist our brains.  No wonder Malveck was unhinged if, as he described, he had been communing with the pool for weeks now.  Lucas and I were left with pounding headaches.  We knew the machine could not be allowed to function again, for it was too dangerous.  Malveck was surely planning to ambush us again and steal the compasses, and foolish Reginald was headed for disaster.  The device was activated by a particular position of the stars, one I recognized from my own studies, which would occur in approximately a month.

We made our way back to the Drake, still eluding the Montaigne patrols.  With a glance to check Allende's approval, Captain Hix agreed to take us back to Carleon; we urgently needed to contact the Explorers' Society and find out what Reginald was up to.