Grr

"I hear it's an application of Keeper transport"

As the tunnel gets longer, Rainwarden will sense that, if she had more gold, she could create structures in it.

...that's... a weird and sort of alarming thing to sense???

"What's... Keeper transport...?"

"Keepers can travel from one place to another within their domains almost instantly"

"...in some way that also lets us possess things? That's unsettling."

"No-one can possess you unless you pledge them your service."

She really, really needs to figure this out.

It's going to be kind of hard to sit still and concentrate on her magic with the tall red guy standing there, looming menacingly and looking impatient.

But there seems to be a whole lot of crazy shit going on and the sooner she understands any of it, the better.

"... I need to sit and think about this for a minute," she says, and she parks herself on the floor with her back to the heart and closes her eyes and reaches for the Tower.

The big question is, what changed? What is she now that she wasn't before? What does she have that she didn't before? Apparently she can move from place to place very quickly and possess things; what other drastic changes have gone unnoticed?

Magic settles in around her, invisible from the outside. She always sees the Tower in its knowledge aspect as a twisting spiral of light. In her mind, she reaches into the streams of knowledge and runs her fingers through them, looking for relevant facts. They flow past by the thousand, each individual glowing mote a piece of knowledge about something or other, brighter the more people know them. She has to wait a couple of seconds before something sticks and she pulls it out to examine it.

Dungeon keepers can have their imps claim ground for them like this. Within a Dungeon Keeper's claimed ground, they can look at stuff remotely like this, travel like this, manipulate objects and cast spells remotely like this, and spend gold to create rooms like this.

Ooookay. That's... that's something. (The mote dissipates, absorbed into her memory.)

She reaches out again, looking for more things about what it is to be a Dungeon Keeper.

If someone accepts an employment contract from a dungeon keeper, they are magically bound to the keeper until the contract ends; the keeper can remotely see through and communicate with them, can move them within the keeper's territory the same as they can inanimate possessions and prisoners, and can possess them.

A keeper can claim insects within their territory. The insects then become like imps; bound to them in the same manner as their minions and also compelled to obey their every command.

These powers just keep getting more concerning, don't they.

What else?

A keeper can convert any material into gold, and gold into mana.

A keeper's dungeon hearts are metaphysically as much them as their original body is. A keeper's body can travel instantly from one heart to another.

If a keeper's body or one of their dungeon hearts is destroyed, their awareness will pass to their soul in the realm of the dark gods, which is like this, and they must create a new body by passing back through one of their remaining dungeon hearts, like this. If they don't have a dark god protecting them when this happens, they risk being intercepted and tortured eternally by a hostile dark god.

She flinches, losing hold of the magic. The spiral of light falls away. She stares blankly at the industrious imps.

Things are clearly very, very different here than she is used to.

The Horned Reaper has taken to repeatedly hitting the wall with the back of his scythe.

She flinches again every time she hears the sound.

This is... bad. This is a bad situation and it is bad that she is in it.

But, since she can't change what's already happened...

She attempts to possess an imp.

This is not straightforward and will take a lot of trial and error.

It would go so much faster if she could read the Tower again, but you need a clear head to do that and right now her head is not at all clear.

Her information about Keeper transport is solid enough that it only takes her a few tries to assume the right form, but after that she spends a fair bit of time bouncing off of minions. At least when she's like this she isn't in danger from that scythe. Unless the creature decides to kill her giant heart with it, in which case apparently she gets tortured forever. This is not a soothing prospect to contemplate.

But eventually she will be able to possess an imp.

Everything is bigger now. She can feel the imp's fear of whatever just happened to it, and of the horned reaper behind it, and its boredom. She can access its instincts for how to use a pick.

The wall indeed starts to vanish noticeably faster.

This is very weird and unsettling and bad but if it gets the tall red fellow to leave her alone faster she'll take it. Diggy diggy hole.

Eventually a hole forms, opening out from the side of a hill.

Once it's wide enough for the Horned Reaper, he runs off, slicing all four imps in half with his scythe on the way out.

After a moment of pain and faintness, Rainwarden is returned to her physical form. The Reaper vanishes into the distance.

She stumbles, shaking, back to the room containing her dungeon heart.

If she were a real Rainwarden she'd—

No, let's not even start with that. He literally just murdered her without warning ten seconds ago, and she was powerless to stop him. She does not have the capacity to chase after him and prevent him from wreaking havoc. She is upset about the havoc but not upset enough to risk being condemned to eternal torture over it.

(Should have let him just kill her. She'd be getting eternally tortured but he'd still be stuck underground unable to hurt anyone else. Should never have listened to him in the first place, and then she'd just be dead and he'd be stuck underground et cetera.)

But then, what about the next person who came along? She doesn't know what brought her here. She might be in a better position to deal with this situation than whoever the mysterious phenomenon would have delivered next.

Well, if that's so, best prove it.

She stands up straight, closes her eyes, and calls the Tower.

This time, visible things happen.

Over the course of a few seconds, her plain ordinary clothes transmute into something more elaborate, hairstyle included. A similar change sweeps the room, altering the decor into something with a lot of blue and black and teardrop-shaped gems. She's still standing there, glowing faintly; she's always been slow to complete the change if she can manage it at all, and it leaves her unpleasantly vulnerable while she wrestles with her Heartland. But there's no one here to threaten her anymore and she's going to need a lot more magic at her disposal if she plans to do anything about Tall, Red and Angry.

The transformation wavers; she nearly loses it. Ugh, does she have to...? Fine, for this she'll say all the stupid-sounding words it takes.

"High Tower," she whispers in her own language, "lend me your strength. Lonely Tower, give me your comfort. Wise Tower, teach me your knowledge. I am your Rainwarden."

The transformation slips again, farther; her hair comes unbound from its neat tail and blows in her face as the magic spins out of her control. Draperies flutter and unravel in the rising whirlwind. She grits her teeth and repeats herself, louder. "High Tower, lend me your strength! Lonely Tower, give me your comfort! Wise Tower, teach me your knowledge! I am your Rainwarden!"

It wavers again, steadies, starts to fall apart...

"Dammit, you idiot pile of metaphorical rocks, I need this!"

And with that heartfelt outburst, the magic snaps into place. The wind drops; her hair sweeps back over her shoulders and ties itself up again.

She opens her eyes.

In this state, her vision will go where she tells it to. She sends it out to follow the red creature.

The Reaper is running along a road, slicing through the trees along the side of it, occasionally veering off the path to bisect a bird or squirrel.

Okay.

There is... a lot that a Rainwarden can do to someone, with a little space and some time to prepare.

Part of her wants to warn before escalating but the rest thinks the first part should shut up and look at the data. If he wanted her to play nice he should have been more honest and less violent when he had the chance.

She breathes deeply, assigns a small fraction of her vision to warn her of any movement at the tunnel entrance, keeps the rest focused on him, and plunges her hands into the truthstream. What sort of creature is he, exactly? The knowledge comes faster and in greater quantities than she's used to, and she almost stumbles in the rush, but she keeps her balance and sorts through it.

He is a Horned Reaper. Horned Reapers are created by the Dark Gods to embody their wrath and to kill people in general and their enemies in particular. They are one of the most powerful types of monster; killing even a weak Reaper takes either a large number of well-trained, heavily armed soldiers, a comparably powerful monster, or an expert war magician. Killing an especially powerful Reaper is nigh-impossible now that the Avatar is gone, although with sufficient resources and preparation it can be possible to trap one in an effectively inescapable prison. They have extraordinary durability, strenght, combat skill (particularly with the scythe), and can develop immense speed and weak magical ability with training. They also have powerful innate fire magic, making them extremely hot to the touch, totally immune to injury by heat, and capable of throwing powerful fireballs given proper training.

Despite their power, many Keepers are reluctant to employ them because they are unruly; they are easily bored and easily angered, and likely to deal with either by going on a killing spree, slaughtering the Keeper's other minions as well as anyone else who happens to be nearby. A Reaper bound to a Keeper (or just sufficiently incapacitated) can technically be sacrificed to the Dark Gods at one of their temples, but most Dark Gods don't appreciate such sacrifices and some actively dislike them, preferring to keep the Reapers in the world.

... Well. All right then.

She considers the resources at her disposal, and the threat she faces.

Then she reaches out her magic to the horned reaper,

and she makes him Alone.

Other people can see him, but he can't see them, or hear them, or feel them touching him, or directly detect their presence by any other means, or understand anything they try to communicate to him, or successfully target them with magic or weapons or thrown objects. He can be injured but he won't notice the injury until the person who inflicted it is no longer near him. He lives in a world of absolute and uncompromising loneliness.

And now she has committed a fairly serious war crime, but at least she can be confident that no one is going to suffer for her mistake in letting him go free.

Of course, her dungeon heart might not qualify as a person in the relevant sense, in which case she just became the only person in the world he knows how to hurt. But that's a separate problem.

A few minutes later, the Reaper comes to a village. Frustratingly, it seems the population somehow knew to evacuate, so he sets about destroying their homes.

Most of the villagers flee. A rider is sent to warn the next village.

A knight in armor and a big man with an axe attack the Reaper, hoping to buy time for everyone else to escape. This goes surprisingly well, in that he does not immediately kill them. They proceed to slowly hack away at his legs.