"There's an iron mine a minute's ride east of here where rocknoses enjoy hanging out. It should be easy enough to find a live one."

“Exciting! Sounds like I’ve got a lot to do.”

"You don't know the half of it."

    "Oh, right!" exclaims Sendhei. "Did you find anything interesting in the Dregs?"

"I did, as a matter of fact."

“Oh? Do tell,” says Saevetei, sipping more of her juice.

"Those ruins you saw behind the Skulker's End village?" he says. "They're the entrance to... well, I think they were probably sewers or something, thousands of years ago. Why they required a blood sacrifice to open is a mystery."

    Sendhei snorts. "Of course they did. Set likes that."

Taharqi shrugs. "Set, or Yog, who knows."

"A blood sacrifice to open a way to sewers. How excessive. I suppose having a village of cannibals nearby made that very straightforward. Or did it need animal sacrifice?"

"No, the inscriptions mentioned human sacrifice specifically." He shrugs. "Anyway, the reason I went was because I heard rumours about an elder demon inhabiting those ruins and... I wanted to explore. I found the demon."

    "Is it dead?"

"It is indeed rather dead." And Taharqi, who has finished eating as much as he wanted to, gets up to walk over to his pile of loot and after some rummaging finds what he's looking for in one of the bags and takes it.

It's an eye, about the size of a grapefruit, yellow and slitted and surprisingly unwet and, most of all, rather thoroughly infused with magic.

"Oooooo," says Saevetei, staring. "I really need to get some kind of analysis equipment up as soon as possible, that looks fascinating."

"This isn't the most interesting item, either." He rumages some more and then finds the most interesting item: several pieces of what seems to be a staff of some sort, long and bone-white and having one end shaped as a gem-encrusted cobra's head, and rather extremely completely astoundingly magical.

"It is very upsetting that I'm stranded away from my laboratory. I can tell there's a lot going on, but I have no idea what, and it will drive me a little mad until I find out!"

Sendhei and Taharqi both grin, and Taharqi starts laying out the pieces of the staff in what he estimates is the right order. He gets it wrong a couple of times, but corrects himself and then...

...the staff snaps back together and becomes whole once again, as if it was never broken.

    "Well, that isn't creepy or anything," Sendhei says in a light tone.

Aaaaaaa what is going on with it, she wants to know! Is there something that it's doing?? Or is it just sitting there, not doing anything, being excessively magic but in a way that she can't actually study at all?

Now that it's successfully gotten back to its original shape it does not seem to be doing much of anything.

Wait, no, that's a lie, it starts doing a thing where glowing runes start appearing along its length and etching themselves in a spiral script. And... there's some other bit of magic in there? There are definitely at least two things in there, one which is mostly dormant and doing the runes thing and the other which is... surrounding it, in some way.

"There are two parts to it. I think. Magically speaking, I mean. A dormant thing inside, it's doing the runes, and a. Shield? Shell? Around it? They're separate, though. Augh this is so frustrating!"

Taharqi gingerly picks it up and starts to read the runes. When he does that, the non-dormant part starts interfering with the magic the mostly-dormant part is doing and preventing it from writing all that it wants to write there.

"Mmm. Maybe a prison? The shell's not letting the gooey magical center do all the things it's trying to do."

"Some of the runes are blurred and... there are letters placed where the runes should have been instead?" The process stops and the runes settle. After reading it once through, Taharqi says, "'Betrayer', is what the overriding runes say. The rest of it goes... 'A gift from the', 'give us advice', 'and allow us to control the', 'must be brought', 'The Tower of the Bat where', 'placed on the altar', 'awakened to share with us', 'only awakened by', 'and their blood'. Those are all the fragments."

"Mmmmmrhhh. And now it's stopped doing things, so there's not much else I can perceive. My professional witch opinion is that it is bullshit and probably some amount of dangerous."

    "My entirely unprofessional opinion is that same."

"And my opinion as an easily bored person is that I know exactly where the Tower of the Bat is and I am going there to figure this out."

"Are you going to go running off immediately, or do I have time to build a house and make a garden so I'm free to go with you."

"...well, I'm not sure I'm waiting for you to build a whole house, unless your magic lets you do that extremely quickly or something."

"I will be done with it in a couple of days," sniffs Saevetei.

    "Nice."

"I can wait that long, yes," says Taharqi with a raised eyebrow.

"Great! Because it'll go faster with help."

"Yes, ma'am."