When Val was very small, he was once gifted a copy of the seventeenth Orlesian translation of Our Dangerous World, which he poured over so often the bindings fell apart and had to be restitched with an alarming (and to anyone not named Foncé, cost-prohibitive) frequency, until it was forever lost when he dropped it into a defunct well in the southern garden of Falaise sur la Mont. This means that Andrasteia's gesture for spiders is met with rounded eyes glimmering with excitement--spiders!, for Val, as a naturalist and a lover of even the worst and most dangerous of the Maker's creations--and, so, such a glimmer contains an equal level of respect. A creation of the Maker is yet dangerous.

His second love, architecture, has its heartstring plucked at the sight of the rest of the chamber before them. Its thickness, its functionality, its apparent wickedness, make this no sight of traditional beauty. But an interesting sight--a gigantic carving, underground?--yes, it is this.

Staircase into water, rusty waterline, puzzle, large dragon, mysterious shapes and valves. Stay close? How can he! Already he is moving toward the basin, the arch, studying its shape and the clues contained in their surroundings. Staircase into water, door, the rusty mark of old water, the cracks in the ceiling. Someone else will worry about the spiders. Val is looking for any mechanism that might influence the valves. Or is it the runes themselves? If only there were time to sketch it.