Mage detective thing

the crime scene

"Oy, are you done yet? I got a bloody watch to get back to and I ain't lettin' some whelp of a spellbeggar like yourself keep me from it." The Guardsman never once let his gaze wander from the robed man in the room. There was just no trusting a mage like that, he'd said before, but it was Guard Captain Montag's insistence that kept them here to start with. "There's naught to find, no matter how you search," he added.

"I'll thank you to stay quiet while I'm working," said Randulf. There was a peculiar...vibration, he supposed, coming from the back corner of this improvised hovel. It'd been a storehouse for a nearby tavern, but nothing tavern-related had been stored here for the last year. The room had been filled with everything from withered saplings to slightly pretty rocks (pretty, but not valuable). The victim, not sprawled in typical corpse-like fashion but seemingly already laid out as if in a coffin, was right in front of the only door. Yet, some kind of energy was coming from the opposite end of the building, from the inside of a crate that the victim had been sleeping in. The victim's own life force, perhaps? No, the victim is dead, Randulf told himself. If this is anybody's life force, it's more likely to be someone else's.

"You found something? Or are you making that face 'cause you're coming up with a good story for the Captain?" The Guardsman's eyes were largely hidden behind the visor of his helmet - the only proper armor the city's guards tended to have - but Randulf could tell he must have been rolling them impatiently. "Come on, then, you spent enough time in this rat hole. Let's get you back to the Captain so I can go watch someone who's like to actually do something."

"If that's the way you feel, Guardsman, I expect you won't be likely to listen the next time I tell you I've caught you a murderer." Randulf rolled up the sleeves of his robe, revealing the tattoo-like markings up his forearms. "No, I've found a curious energy here. The victim, there, you've already checked that he's dead, yes?" The Guardsman only nodded in reply. "What I find curious, though...usually the recently departed leave some shred of their life force behind, close by their mortal form. It's how High Priests and Chosen are able to revive fallen comrades."

"That never sat well with me," the Guardsman said.

"Yes, I gathered you weren't a particularly spiritual type." Randulf swept his tattooed arms slowly about the empty crate, as if to feel something that wasn't there. "But no. Whoever murdered the man over there--" Randulf gestured towards the corpse with his head, as his arms were busy-- "either did it long enough ago that his spirit has already departed this plane, or more likely, was so thorough as to kill his spirit as well as his body." Randulf's right arm stopped, as if being pulled to that specific point in space. "Hmph. This is interesting."

"What's interesting? Cause it sure ain't interesting to me!"

"To be fair, Guardsman, you don't seem to be interested in much beyond hitting things with truncheons." He focused as hard as he could on that specific spot. "It's as I thought a moment ago. This is someone ELSE'S spirit. Someone who isn't in this room."

"Eh?"

"I didn't think I'd be so likely to see it used in a murder...body-swapping is difficult magic at best. But our victim - if he even IS a victim - isn't the owner of this spirit. Which means, barring usage of soul-vessels or the like, we've got this spirit's body walking around with the dead body's spirit inside it. Someone's either very confused, or trying to fake their own death."

"Well, tell it to the Captain. You done now?"

"As done as I can be, I fear." Randulf wrested his arm away from its strange pulling sensation and unrolled his sleeves. He scrawled a quick note in his tome and nodded to his accompaniment. "I'd best make my report. If Captain Montag is as receptive as you've been, I doubt that'll take long."

sphinx of black quartz

Before Randulf was an immense statue of a creature ten times his size. It was obvious to him that such a carving would have taken years for any known civilization to create. Yet, here it was, in the center of the castle town courtyard. He could not place its design, but it seemed to be made of quartz...a pure, colorless, impenetrably dark quartz. He tried his best to ignore the panicked crowd amassing several feet behind him. He wished to tell the townspeople that they would not come to harm, that he had the situation in hand, but he dared not raise his voice nor even look away from the fifty-foot-tall thing in front of him.

He carefully rolled up the sleeve of his caster's robes, and tapped one of the lightning-shaped sigils tattooed upon his forearm. His whole arm began to glow just a bit, pulsing light up and down, with a frequency that changed with the position of his hand. Randulf swept this hand from one side of him to the other, settling at last upon a part of the statue that, had it been living, would have been where its heart was. The ethereal pulse around his arm was beating like a runner's heart, itself. This was no mere object. It bore Power. This crystalline beast was alive.

Randulf released his magical connection from the statue and stepped back slowly from it. He wished to better assess what it was. It sat upon four digitigrade legs, laying flat along the street. Those legs ascended into immense muscles; the forelegs could have flung a man across the courtyard with a single swipe, while the rear ones could easily have leapt over the guard tower. The beast's main body would not have seemed so impressive by comparison, except that it appeared to be heavily compressed, tucked back into itself several times, as though the beast could lengthen itself on command. Up front, however, was a head whose features looked much like those of any person in town. Sharp, strict eyes, all the better to watch for sudden movements. A thin, but flexible and precise, pair of lips, by which any vocalization could be fine-tuned to become any sound it could have wished. Atop it all was a headdress that resembled nothing Randulf had ever seen in town, but perhaps would have been popular in some distant kingdom, thousands of years prior. It draped down either side of the head, covering the ears and most of the cheeks. It gave the face a remarkably gaunt appearance. Randulf couldn't imagine what kind of nose would sit upon such a face; it had apparently broken off, long ago.

The biggest question that yet remained, then, was what in the King's name this monster was doing in the center of town. It blocked off most of the main square, leaving precious little room for foot traffic to pass, let alone the King's carriage that was due back any day now. Randulf could not remember anybody building it, but certainly no human could have had the time to carve something so intricate, let alone the strength to bring it here.