The Mothers’ Lair was the sixth level of the Tomb of the Nine Gods and the lair of the Sewn Sisters, the three night hags whom the party called the Mothers.12 It held the cage of the Boy and the green gate over the stair to the Cradle, which was sealed by five trials and opened with the five Skeleton Keys.23 The party came down to it before dawn on the sixteenth of Eleasis, 1492 DR, and left it that afternoon, after the Boy had given his life for its rest.13
The Boy, to the party at his cage
“The Ladies keep me here, and I’ve learned not to try, and to answer their questions. I’m good at answering. It’s the thing I’m best at.”2
Description
The level was a large chamber lit with green light, with wet stone underfoot. A bronze cauldron stood in it and breathed a haze across the room that hid the walls. The haze smelled and looked like soup. There were workbenches with needles, buttons and shears, a spinning wheel stopped mid-spindle, and three rocking chairs. The room looked lived in.12
A cage closed with a rusted padlock stood on the far side of the chamber.12 Above the floor ran galleries with five doors, each with a room behind it. The party took the doors in the order triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon and octagon. Below was the green gate, twelve feet high. The room had no secret doors, and the only ways out of it were the five doors above and the gate below.2
Geography
The level lay below the fifth level of the Tomb and above the Cradle.14 It was reached from the Hall of Decay on the fifth level by a stair. An ivory mask without face or mouth was fixed at head height at the top, facing back up the corridor, and more masks followed at each flight of twenty-five feet.1 A doorway in the chamber opened onto the stair going back up.2
Beyond the green gate a black staircase led down to the Cradle. One record calls it obsidian and others marble.34 The control panel of the fifth level, which held the way down open, stood four hundred feet above the head of that staircase.13
Inhabitants
The Boy was a child clone of Takhesis Calva, the version before the fall, who traded his life for a party he did not know. He was kept in the cage. He was a boy of perhaps twelve, unscarred, with the face of Takhesis twenty years softer and the blue not yet the ice that it became. He wore a bloodstained blanket. He had no name but Boy. He called his keepers the Ladies and said that he answered their questions. He held Takhesis’s memories of the party.2
The Sewn Sisters were three night hags who guarded the lower levels of the Tomb.5 A ledger that the party had taken on the fourth level recorded deliveries to the lower floors for “THE MOTHERS”,6 and the party had used that name for the hags for weeks.2 The three rocking chairs were theirs. Until the gate was opened no one on the level saw them but Inete, whose sight reached the gray underside of the room.3 They neither fought nor threatened the party on the level.3
Mister Threadneedle, a scarecrow, was in the room behind the pentagon door. The Boy called him the Scarecrow and said that he was nice to him.2
A dust mephit guarded the room behind the square door, and three wereboars came out of the mirror behind the hexagon door.2
Notable locations
- The main chamber, with the cauldron, the workbenches, the spinning wheel and the three rocking chairs.2
- The cage, on the far side of the chamber.1
- The doorway to the stair up, which the Boy could not cross.2
- The room behind the triangle door, where a lever stood inside glass.2
- The room behind the square door, where pages of spells hung in the air. The Boy called its trial the paper one that bites.2
- The room behind the pentagon door, which held a devil’s face. The Boy called its trial the dinner that should not be eaten.2
- The room behind the hexagon door, which held a mirror and the words “PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY”.2
- The room behind the octagon door, which held a lullaby written in Infernal and a compartment.2
- The green gate, which took the five Skeleton Keys once the five seals were open.23
History
Arrival
Before dawn on the sixteenth of Eleasis, the eighty-fourth day of the expedition, Taenae, Vogal, Vonara, Glade, Inete and the Goliath monk Raiketsu came down the stair from the Hall of Decay. They had been in the Tomb for about fifty hours, held all five Skeleton Keys, and had not rested since the fourth level. The paladin Savriel Tirinath had volunteered to stay at the control panel on the fifth level, so that the others could go on together.1
Across the chamber the party saw a small figure, about the size of a Human child, trapped in a case. Vonara was aghast.1 The party noticed the three rocking chairs at once and said aloud that they belonged to the hags. The Sisters did not show themselves.2
The Boy
At dawn the figure under the blanket flinched from the light and then lowered the blanket. The Boy asked, “Did Rani send you? Rani said she would come. She promised.” The party did not place the name at first. Taenae then recognized it as that of Rani Calva, the sister who had died for Takhesis.2 She had lived that death herself in a vision in the Maw Below.7
Taenae answered him at once. She had seen the blood on his blanket and asked whether he was all right, and asked his name. He said, “They call me Boy.” Asked what he was doing there, he said, “I’m not sure why I’m here.” He put the question off by naming each member of the party in turn, correctly, and stopped at Raiketsu, whom he did not know. Taenae asked whether he was hungry and gave him goodberries. It was the first food offered to him that had not come from the cauldron. No one in the party put a hand through the bars of the cage.2
The cauldron
The party left the Boy for a time and examined the chamber. Detect magic showed evocation and transmutation in the cauldron’s haze. Vonara dispelled it. The haze thinned over the next minute and the galleries came into view, and the brew in the cauldron went inert with it. Vonara and Taenae searched for secret doors and found none.2
During the search Glade stayed at the cage and kept talking with the Boy, who told him how the gate worked and repeated it a couple of times so that the party would have it. There were five doors, a room behind each and a lever in each room. With five levers down the seals opened and the gate took the keys. He named the trials: the glass one, the paper one that bites, the dinner that should not be eaten, the mirror that wants a word three times, and the book that is a song to be sung backward.2
The cage and the doorway
The party asked the Boy to keep its presence a secret. He asked, “Heroes don’t lie, do they?” The party answered, “Heroes keep secrets, for the greater good. You’ll understand one day,” and he accepted it. Vonara told him, “You are already a fantastic hero.” He glowed. He said that he was no hero, and Vogal said of Takhesis, “He was…”2
Vonara tried the padlock and failed, saying, “Even heroes have bad days…” She then opened it with her broom, keeping her hands off the rust. Taenae hugged the Boy and he hugged her back. After more of Glade’s talk of the forest he said, “You’re even more weird than I thought, Glade.”2
The party then tried to take him out. He got up, walked to the doorway and tried to put one foot on the stair going up, and could not. He said, “I can’t leave, I don’t wanna get in trouble, so I can’t leave the room.” The party comforted him with the words “Don’t be scared, little one,” and Vonara cast dispel magic to unbind him. It failed.2
What the Boy remembered
In the course of that morning the Boy gave members of the party memories that Takhesis had kept of them. He mentioned, as a friendly fact, Vogal crawling into the devil face on the first level.2 He told Taenae of the Maw Below, a dungeon beneath Port Nyanzaru,8 where the gods had argued over her and Takhesis. He told Vonara that Takhesis had kept all of her songs, as tunes without words, and asked her anxiously whether that was a good thing to keep. To Glade he recited a saying of Glade’s own, pleased to have it right: “Sometimes the most beautiful scenery on the forest path is the one who walks by your side.”2
The five trials
The party then went through the five doors. Behind the triangle door Glade worked the lever inside the glass by telekinesis. To enter the room behind the square door he passed into the Ethereal Plane by blink, and he and Taenae pulled three pages of spells out of the air before the room’s guardian, a dust mephit, appeared. It was killed shortly, and its death burst caught Raiketsu, Vogal and Glade on the way out. The pages were scrolls of cloudkill, ice knife and false life, which Taenae kept.2
Behind the pentagon door the party fed the devil’s face every scrap of food in the chamber, which passed the trial. Behind the hexagon door it took the words “PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY” for a summons and was careful not to say them, until Taenae said them aloud by accident. Three wereboars came out of the mirror, and the party fought and killed them. Behind the octagon door Vonara read the Infernal lullaby, worked out that it had to go backward, and read it backward, and the compartment opened.2
All five seals were then open and the gate was ready for the keys. The party did not put them in. The room, the cage and the trials had taken about two hours.2
Wongo
Wongo, one of the Trickster Gods, came to the cage and begged Vonara to take him in. He whined and asked again and again, and in the end she accepted him. She had been the last of the party whom no god inhabited.2
The offer
At the end of that time the Boy, who had listened to the party argue about the green door, made an offer. He said that he had something precious to him and that he would spend it so that the party could rest. He told them what it would cost him and did not say how it worked. After long deliberation the party agreed.2
By then the party believed that the Boy was Takhesis, and that if the Boy died its chance of bringing Takhesis back died with him. It went on with the rest all the same.3
The Dead Fish
The Boy began, and the green light lifted. Glade told the others that the child was bringing them into a pocket dimension. The place had the shape of The Dead Fish, the tavern in Port Nyanzaru: its warmth, the fish, and the bar that was too tall. No one stood behind the bar. Raiketsu, the only one of the party who had never been to the Dead Fish, asked, “When the fuck did we get to a bar?”3
At the Boy’s request Vonara performed for him, with showmanship, a show of magic and a folksy, feel-good song that told a story of the heroes saving the world. She then let him fly on her broom. Vogal spent the night in quiet introspection, turning over everything that had happened on the adventure. Vonara weighed it all too. Her greatest worry was the safety of her friends and loved ones, and she thought deeply of “the Brothers Taban”.3
In the night Inete saw the gray underside of the room. Three figures leaned forward over the sleepers, at work in their laps. Five iron skulls were counted, and one of the figures waved, at her and only at her. They were the Sewn Sisters, and they were helping the Boy to spend himself. Inete wrote a note to herself, so that she would remember the hags if they tried to wipe her mind before she woke.3
The party slept for eight hours and woke fully restored. Taenae’s exhaustion lifted, and the sixth circle of Glade’s magic returned.3 During the rest Glade gave up sunbeam and took disintegrate in its place.4 It was the party’s third rest inside the Tomb.
The death of the Boy
The Boy died directly after the party woke, and quickly. There was a short moment in which he realized that he was dying, and then he was gone, his body on the blanket in the open cage. He left no message for Rani. Vonara said that she did not get to say goodbye.3
Five things lay on the workbench, evenly spaced, with a sixth space empty. Inete, counting, said, “Least favorite in this place is Raiketsu.” None of the gifts was labeled, and each went to the one it was meant for: the Boy’s bag to Taenae, a cigarette case to Vonara, a chained flask to Vogal, a quill to Inete and a pot of soil to Glade. Vonara lit one of the cigarettes.3
Raiketsu wrapped the body in his cloak of protection and left the cloak on it. He said nothing over it. Vogal said, “He looks like a hero… he was a hero.” Glade said, “Sometimes you leave friends in the forest, and sometimes you step around them to find new paths.” The body stayed in the open cage, wrapped in the cloak.3
The gate and the Sisters
The party turned the five keys in the gate, and the room went mirror-still. Three figures stood up out of the rocking chairs and stepped through into sight of the whole party.3
The Sisters brought a tapestry and showed three scenes in it. The first was Alice, Taenae’s wife, at the edge of the canyon, her lips moving. The second was a war council. The third was the lich Valindra Shadowmantle, a pale figure on the terrace of the Heart, watching the mouth of the canyon in silence. Vonara said of her, “Ornery old bitch.” Azaka Stormfang, Wakanga O’tamu, Kaelar Veilthorn, Kaveth and Princess Mwaxanaré were also seen in the weave, silent.3
As their last act the Sisters returned to Vogal three cured Goblin fingers, with the words “waste not”. He took them and said, “Not sure how to feel about it.” The Sisters left at once. Their parting words, as remembered, were that they would be watching the party die, or perhaps live.3
The visions and the descent
Acererak, whom the party knew as the Architect, then spoke to all six, beginning “Allow me to remind you”, and showed each of them a vision of their own death. Raiketsu’s vision reached the other five as a psychic echo, so that all six knew it.3 It came true in the Cradle that afternoon, when a shadow formed behind Raiketsu and Takhesis killed him.4
On the stair Vonara said, “I’m not nervous, are you nervous?” She liked the obsidian staircase. The six went down toward the Cradle on the afternoon of the sixteenth, about sixty hours after entering the Tomb. They took the five gifts and the three fingers with them. The five Skeleton Keys were spent in the gate, and Raiketsu’s cloak stayed on the body.3
By then no one stood at the control panel four hundred feet above. Withers, the Tomb’s custodian, had come to the control room on the fifth level and taken Savriel away, and the party did not know it.3 She stepped out of the dark at the top of the black staircase after the party had gone down, and the gate ground shut behind her.4
Destruction
No return to the level is recorded. It was destroyed with the rest of the Tomb before dawn on the seventeenth of Eleasis, when Omu sank and became a caldera. The Boy’s body was lost with it. The five gifts and the Goblin fingers were carried out.9
Appendix
Appearances
Mentioned in Session 89 and Session 90.