The next day (after a good night’s sleep, a nice bath, and more soup from Masha), Mar’Khabazza convinces Magnus to come with him to the abandoned church just a few minutes walk to the northwest of the Salt House. After what the ghost leopard had to say about murdering all of the Cultists of the Eternal Sunshine, Mar’Khabazza wants to visit the church again and decides to pay it a visit.
On his way there he speaks with the neighbors about the church and its history and ends up chatting with a beautiful woman with green hair and equally green eyes. She is standing barefoot on her porch watching the city go by when Mar’Khabazza and Magnus approach. After exchanging silver-tongued pleasantries he asks her about the church.
“Very fussy they were as I recall,” she says as she sits down on the stairs leading up to her porch. “Their leader was convinced that his discovery of some phenomenon up in the mountains made him some kind of spiritual leader. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t but her certainly had delusions of grandeur.”
“What happened to them?” Mar’Khabazza prompts.
“You have heard about the ghost leopard, correct? The unofficial mascot of Opal that prowls about on the north road? Well one day I happened to be on this very porch watching the comings and goings of this little neighborhood when I saw that very leopard sneak its way into the chapel and then fade away again not fifteen minutes later. It was a day or two before folks noticed that no one had seen any of the Cult of the Eternal Sunshine and when they got the courage to go looking in their chapel, they found them. Dead. Slain by claws and teeth. It was a bloody mess.”
She sighs. “Of course it wouldn’t do to have it known that the town’s mascot was murdering people, even if it they were bothersome proselytizers. The Overseer came here himself. Ordered the church boarded up and the whole thing hushed up: It would not do at all to upset the apple cart here in Opal.”
“What do you mean?” says Mar’Khabazza.
The woman gestures around her with a pale slender hand and sighs again. “Look around you. Three hundred and fifty years ago the very ground you are standing on exploded from Cignoria and shattered Evet. The Upheaval destroyed a moon. A moon. Does anyone know why? No. Does anyone care? No.”
She laughs. It is a sorrowful sound. “An ageless moon is destroyed and perpetually showers dust and rock onto Cignoria, but all anyone cares about is scraping up precious ore from the flanks of the Upheaval. The Empire’s indifference to the Upheaval may just be it’s downfall. But it is too busy gathering wealth and metals for its endless war.”
At this last comment, she stands back up and moves to enter the building but as she enters she turns, “Come back again Mar’Khabazza. You make me laugh.”
Magnus stirs for the first time. “How did she know your name?”
“Weird,” Mar’khabazza says absently as the duo press on to the abandoned chapel.
They find a loose board covering one of the ground floor windows. Prying it open reveals a church dimply lit by the seasonal gloom leeching through a partially boarded up stained-glass window. An extensive narthex is at the western entrance and the nave extends to the east, bisecting the presbytery in a cross. AT the center of the cross is a statue of a robed and turbaned man holding a staff with an eight pointed star. The statue is identical to the statue in the ruined monastery in the saddle of the Mulpara Mountains where the earthnode lies.
Mar’Khabazza inspects the statue and spots a false panel in the plinth and recovers some long-forgotten booty: a moldering journal, a small sack of gems and a steel box with the circle and star symbol on its lid. It is empty but for a padded space for a heart shaped object the size of a man’s fist.
As Mar’Khabazza tuck this bounty away, Magnus spots a shadowy figure moving across the balcony over the narthex. Both immediately rush to the spiral staircases that provide access to the balcony on either end of the narthex and sprint up the stairs.
Upon reaching the landing, the figure is actually a shadow, the phantom that has been plaguing Mar’Khabazza these last weeks. It hurls a sphere of swirling void at Mar’KHabazza, seriously wounding him, before turning it’s attention to Magnus. Magnus swings his sword and it passes cleanly though the shadow but from its reaction his stroke does wound it somewhat. Mar’Khabazza recovers during the melee and though Magnus is wounded and Mar’Khabazza takes some additional wounds, the two of them manage to drive it off, shrieking as it flies away and crashes through the stainded glass window at the far end of the church.