May 11, 3042

Hello, Fea! I'm back.

Sorry about the interruption...adventuring is like that, you know. Anyway, it gave me a chance to realize that you probably did not have this Letter spell that Lord Mikhael shared with me—that would certainly explain why I haven't heard back from you yet! I will include a copy of it for you in this next packet, and look for your reply soon.

Anyway, to continue my description of the conclusion of this madness with the illithid: We did defeat the creature, but soon ran into a different sort of trouble. Do you remember those statues I mentioned? The mindflayers molded out of some strange, gray, magical clay? Well, Lord Mikhael decided that, as it radiated a very strong conjuration-summoning aura, it might be of interest to a conjurer acquaintance back in Glenzor—one who goes by the unsavory name of SkinEater. This person apparently also holds a lien on part of Sindaraen's soul, in return for getting Sind out of some sort of trouble involving a guild of cleric-assassins or something....I haven't managed to get the details out of him very clearly yet. So while the rest of us were continuing to extract our share from the mindflayer's labs and libraries (including a Wand of Lightning Bolts for myself!), Mikhael contacted SkinEater and offered him some of this material. Meanwhile, Callous had apparently been communing with his god about the disposition of some of our more evil acquisitions (notably a Ring of Halfling Control—Simon wanted to use this to force some of those barbarous native halflings to serve as replacement sailors for all the orcs we had lost on the voyage).

Well, most of the following negotiations went on in private, but the upshot was this: Tyr had told Callous that the gray substance was tremendously evil, and that every ounce of it should be destroyed. He asked Lord Mikhael to allow him to incinerate it, but Mikhael said that he had already made an offer in good faith to SkinEater, and that Callous would have to wait until Mikhael had heard back from him before any action was taken. I was not quite bold enough to eavesdrop on them, but I wish to Erevan that I knew what was said in the calm, controlled argument that followed—the tension was crackling so thickly in the room I was afraid they might eventually come to violence. I gather that Mikhael insisted on keeping at least a sample, and Callous would have none of it.

Now, I have faced many fearsome opponents in my last decade or so—the mindflayer was not, perhaps, the worst of them. But I had no wish to be on the wrong side of a heated argument between a powerful evil conjurer and a god. I felt the best course would simply be to allow Callous to destroy the statues. The strange substance made my flesh crawl. For the moment, however, I decided to simply sit back and allow Mikhael and Callous to try to come to an agreement; no matter how I felt, it would have been presumptuous to interfere in a quarrel between people I have known such a short time.

Even the best of etiquette must sometimes be overriden by necessity, though. When Simon decided to take a sample for himself, I had to act. I'm certain he would have found a profitable market for it somewhere, with SkinEater or with someone else, but in this case I felt it best to keep control of the material ourselves—and once it got into Simon's pockets, it would never be controlled again. I'm afraid I had to Color Spray your husband and tie him up to keep him from tipping the balance of the struggle through sheer randomness. (You forgive me, don't you? If not, well, it was Mikhael who donated the manacles.)

I had just gotten that under control when Sindaraen came and sked my advice. He felt that he might be able to buy his soul back from SkinEater with this find, but he was afraid to anger Tyr—he felt that the god's blessing had been all that kept him alive, a few times during the fight with the salamanders and the illithid. I made no secret of my feelings about the substance, but Sindaraen was so torn between the alternatives that we spent an exhausting half an hour going back and forth on the issue. In the end, appealing to his hunger for the +4 ring we had recovered from the githzerai (the one that Callous had claimed), I offered to trade my own +4 ring for his paltry +1 if he would destroy the statue himself, thus taking the argument out of Callous' and Mikhael's hands. What is amazing is that, after an agonizing argument with himself, he actually agreed to do so. It was a little too late, however—at just about that point, Callous strode out of the room where he had been praying and cast a potent Flame Strike on the four statues. Mikhael, who had been in contact with SkinEater again, seemed resigned—I think he was just as happy to have the issue settled. He hadn't expected that his little business venture might cost him a good friend; I must say, though, I admire his tenacity in defending the value of his word, whether it was given to someone as vile as Skineater or not. Most humans—nor even some of our lawful kin—are not so honorable.

The news he reported from his erstwhile client made me more than certain that we had done the right thing, however. These mysterious illithid figures that had caused us so much grief, that had disturbed me enough to feel I had to side with a lawful-good cleric instead of supporting Lord Mikhael's freedom of choice—these gigantic statues were each composed of hundreds of pounds of a valuable component in a ritual designed to discover any creature's true-name: each was made solely of enchanted grey matter.

Yours,

Lairunya the Queasy