Chamber of the Stone
Summary: a cave near the village of giants in The Rime, home of the Stone of Remembrance
Neighbors
NPCs
Notes
First Impression
The passage opens into a vast cavern, hewn not by pick or chisel but by the slow patience of the mountain itself. Columns of living stone rise like titans holding the ceiling aloft. Their surfaces are carved with spirals and knotwork that shimmer faintly with rune-light, as though the mountain still remembers every hand that touched it.
The Stone of Remembrance
- At the hall’s center rests a colossal monolith of smooth granite, black as midnight veined with silver.
- Its face is polished to a mirror-sheen, reflecting not only those who stand before it but also flickers of ancient scenes: elves in ritual, giants in council, dwarves in chains, goblins jeering in the shadows.
- The stone hums faintly, a resonance felt more in bone than ear.
Atmosphere
- The air is unnaturally still—no drip of water, no stirring of wind. Even whispers carry, as if the stone itself leans to listen.
- Torches burn longer here, flames bending toward the monolith.
Visions
Thalador
Vision 1
The runes flare, and the carved figures writhe to life. You see dwarves—broad and proud—bound by chains of light. Vanha figures in long robes stand over them, chanting. The chains are not iron, but words, etched into their very souls.
The dwarves strain, veins of stone bulging through their skin, until the first of them shatters apart. Half their kin rise, towering as Giants. The others collapse, bent and twisted, their bodies shrinking and eyes burning with cunning fire—the first Goblins.
Vision 2
The stone reveals a moot of giants beneath open sky—their circle unbroken, voices rising in storm-song. Then, slowly, the vision twists: the same moot, now divided. Half the giants stand with elves and druids, half with Vanha masters. Their voices clash until the air cracks, and a fissure splits the circle in two.
Cador
Vision 1
The stone flares blinding silver-green, and your reflections vanish. You stand in the ruins of a vast Vanha citadel, a city of light and crystal towers carved for beings taller than giants. At its heart blazes a fountain of soul-light—shifting, endless, alive. The Soulfont.
Around it, Vanha mages chant, their hands weaving runes in the air. Dwarves lie shackled nearby, their souls drawn in threads of silver toward waiting crystals. The air is thick with screams—half mortal, half something more.
Then a shadow falls. From the mountain’s depths, a rift yawns open, and something older than words pushes through: a storm of raw, unshaped magic, the Fomor’s gift of chaos. Runes unravel, towers quake, and the Vanha’s perfect order collapses into discord.
You see giants and elves breaking free, tearing their chains, weapons rising against their masters. Dwarves shatter the crystals that bind them, unleashing fire and fury. Even the earth joins in—roots wrench stone apart, rivers burst their beds.
The Vanha scream as their magic turns on them. Souls meant to be bound into crystal scatter like sparks in a gale. Towers collapse, and the Soulfont itself implodes in a burst of silver-green light.
When the vision clears, only silence remains. The citadel lies buried beneath mountains of stone. The Vanha are gone—swallowed not by a single foe, but by the weight of their own hubris.
Vision 2
The stone shimmers, and Cador sees a line of giants and dwarves standing side by side before a Vanha fortress. Their weapons are raised not in war, but in ritual salute. Runes blaze overhead, binding their alliance. Then, with a thunderclap, the runes shatter—and the dwarves collapse, screaming, as their forms twist into goblins.
Laurence
Vision 1
The stone flares, and the hall darkens. Your reflections vanish, replaced by a vision of a mighty cavern city, its walls carved by dwarven hands, glittering with veins of gold and silver. Dwarves labor at forges, their hammers beating in rhythm, their faces proud and unbroken.
Then the vision shifts. The Vanha arrive—tall, radiant, wrapped in light and shadow. They extend their hands not in friendship, but in command. Runes blaze across the cavern, chains of pure language, binding dwarf to master.
The dwarves resist. Their forges blaze hotter, their songs rise in defiance. A king of stone-beard and fire-eyes hurls his hammer, shattering the runes—but the backlash twists his people. You watch in horror as some dwarves collapse, their bodies warping, shrinking, eyes wide with madness. The first goblins scream into being.
The cavern erupts in battle: rune against hammer, light against flame. The Vanha weave spells that tear the air itself; the dwarves answer with steel, stone, and fire. The clash is deafening—and then it all shatters into darkness.
Vision 2
He sees Vanha scribes gathered in a luminous hall, scrolls and crystals stacked high around them. They argue furiously, pointing to diagrams of souls being drawn into vessels. One scribe smashes a crystal against the floor—the soul-light within it flickers and dies. Silence falls, horror on their faces.
Aoife
Vision 1
The monolith flares with a silver-green light, and the hall around you dissolves. You stand in a chamber vast as the sky, where a fountain of shimmering essence rises like a living aurora. The Soulfont.
Vanha parents gather with their children—tall even as babes, their forms pale and translucent, like bodies of glass. The children move, but their eyes are empty, their mouths silent. They are vessels waiting to be filled.
A Vanha elder steps forward, weaving runes in the air. Threads of light drift upward from the Soulfont, each one pulsing with unique color and song. With solemn hands, the elder presses a thread into the chest of a waiting child. The child gasps—eyes blaze, skin flushes with life. In a heartbeat, the hollow vessel becomes a person: laughing, crying, clutching their parents with trembling hands.
The hall resounds with voices—songs of welcome, tears of joy. The Soulfont hums like a choir, endless, eternal.
But then, the light flickers. One thread fades, dissipating into the air before it can be caught. A child steps forward, waiting, their glasslike body trembling. The elder reaches again, but the Soulfont gives nothing.
Silence falls. The child stands in the glow, their eyes hollow, their form translucent. They move, but without spark—like a puppet of flesh. The parents weep, pressing the child to their chest, but the child does not weep with them. Its lips move soundlessly, its gaze fixed on nothing.
Around you, whispers rise: “An empty. A hollow. Unfit.”
Some turn away in grief. Others in fear. The vision blurs as the child stumbles, falls, and lies still, not dead but never truly alive. The Soulfont hums on, indifferent, its light both wondrous and merciless.
Vision 2
Her reflection fades into a vision of a grand festival long ago—music, drums, laughter. Elves, humans, and giants share food and song beneath lanterns. Then, suddenly, the music falters. A Vanha envoy arrives with a retinue of armored figures. One by one, the voices fall silent until only the Vanha are heard, their song reshaping the melody into something cold, ordered, inhuman.
Clodagh
Vision 1
The monolith shimmers, and for a moment it is no longer stone but a window into a vanished age. You stand in a hall of radiant crystal, where towering figures move with grace and purpose. The Vanha. Their eyes shine with inner light, their voices weave like music, each word shaping runes that hang in the air before fading.
Some walk as scholars, bent over scrolls of living light. Others guide children—tall even as youths—through games that teach them to shape flame into birds, water into dancing forms. They laugh, they sing, they craft wonders: bridges of starlight, instruments that play the winds, gardens where trees glow like lanterns.
But beneath the beauty lies unease. Their magic—woven from souls, bound in runes—thrums too loudly. A child’s toy whispers with a trapped spirit. A garden blooms impossibly fast, but its roots writhe like snakes. Even as they create, shadows coil in their work.
You hear their words:
“Order is mercy. To bind is to preserve. What we shape, we perfect.”Yet you also see a Vanha mother bending to comfort her child, a craftsman mourning a failed creation, friends debating passionately at a fire. They are not demons. They are a people who believed in their brilliance, who loved fiercely, and whose greatest flaw was their certainty that nothing lay beyond their grasp.
The vision ends with a whisper, half lament, half warning:
“We were not monsters. We were dreamers who flew too close to the sun.”
Vision 2
Her reflection fades, replaced by a vision of elves in a hidden grove, placing bread and water before starving human settlers. The humans are gaunt, hollow-eyed, on the brink of death. The elves lay hands upon them, weaving warmth and song. For a moment, hope blooms—and the vision dissolves into ash.
Group Vision
The monolith shudders, and the world falls away. You stand in a vaulted chamber deep beneath the earth, its walls lit by rivers of molten gold flowing through carved channels. At one end rises the Throne of the Durun-Khazad, where the Lord of the Dwarves, clad in blackened steel and hammered bronze, grips a war-hammer as if it were part of his own arm. Opposite him, wreathed in light that flickers like a storm barely contained, stand the Lords of the Vanha—tall, radiant, their eyes burning with conviction.
Lord of the Dwarves:
“You would tear open the bones of the world, remake the stone that the Forge Lords themselves set in place. The mountains live, and you would murder them. The earth is not clay for your whims—it is the body of creation.”First Lord of the Vanha:
“Creation is unfinished. The Weave is not a tomb but a loom. The world was given to us not as a monument, but as raw cloth. We would shape it into perfection.”Second Lord of the Vanha (voice like a cutting blade):
“Your so-called sanctity is ignorance. Stone decays. Rivers shift. Flesh rots. Only by binding, only by weaving, can truth endure. We do not desecrate—we complete.”Lord of the Dwarves:
“Completion? You would chain souls like oxen. Already the mountains shudder from your meddling—runes carved so deep the stone itself cries out. You call it harmony. I call it hubris.”First Lord of the Vanha (angrily):
“We seek to end decay. To preserve all that is worthy. To stop death itself from claiming what it should not. Can your Forge Lords promise such a gift?”Lord of the Dwarves (rising, voice like thunder):
“If the price of your gift is the breaking of the earth, then it is no gift at all—it is blasphemy. Better the stone stand silent than sing with stolen voices. Better war than bondage.”Second Lord of the Vanha (coldly):
“Then war you shall have. And when the last mountain crumbles, the world will remember that we were right.”