Motif · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

The Gate of the Feral Gods

An artifact, celestial-tier by Carl's reckoning, in three parts — two pocket watches and a winding box — buried by legend in the Necropolis of Anser and hunted by a gnome commandant, a changeling principal, a glass mage and a dead bugbear. Dial a time on one watch and it mirrors on the other; times are places; wind the box and a one-way portal opens for twenty minutes, and when it closes the opening side stays open into the Nothing until a feral god comes through. Carl assembles it on the fifth floor and uses it to empty bubbles, and then to flood a city.

Segment appearances

Progression

Finding it

Named on Ruckus's card as the treasure a bugbear spent twenty years under the sea for (ch. 9); 'a myth', says Juice Box, then not: two pocket watches and a winding box, one with her brother, one with Kane, one with the mad mage (ch. 10, ch. 15). A forged watch fools Leon (ch. 11); Carl decides to take the house the old way for Kane's watch (ch. 12) and loots it from a corpse with a letter (ch. 16); Ghazi's winding box comes in a scorched satchel (ch. 21); Henrik's watch is looted on a sinking bridge as a court freezes the world (ch. 26).

Using it

Ghazi's note: times are places, the box arms when the second watch catches up, a portal for twenty minutes, then a two-way hole into the Nothing until something comes through (ch. 23). First use: three crawlers and a column of seawater onto a beach, and Who Let the Gods Out? (ch. 27). Then fifteen hundred people gated out of their bubbles, one bubble at a time, a feral god left in each (ch. 32, ch. 33); a portal from Imani's bubble to the sixth floor for the changelings (ch. 33); a decoy in the sand and the real gate under the sea into Larracos (ch. 34). Kept, not sacrificed: 'This isn't going to be a one-time thing.'