Theodora

Theodora was the scholar who built and worked the Vex Caves — the "old mage" of the Harrows legend. Her name and her story come from the diary the party recovered from a sealed chest in the cave's library, kept waterproof through great care so that it would survive the sea. The plaques she set throughout the caves are signed with her initial, "T."

She came to the caves because their geometry concentrates the weave — the force of magic — more powerfully than anywhere she had read of, and she spent better than twenty years there, entirely alone, studying it. Her diary charts those years:

• In her first winter she began writing to Maladora ("M"), someone she had loved and left behind, addressing her entries to her as though speaking to her across the distance.
• By her fourth year she had built the throttle and confirmed it worked, channeling the weave exactly as her calculations predicted. A supply boat came monthly; its captain, thinking her dying, left her small kindnesses at the gate. In truth she felt she had never been more alive.
• By her eleventh year she had catalogued nineteen "resonance intervals" and had gone years without speaking to another soul; the captain still left supplies, but they no longer spoke.
• By her seventeenth year the long solitude had begun to work on her. She felt watched — in the corridors, at the throttle — though the caves were sealed and nothing could have entered. She told herself, plainly, that it was only a mind gone lonely, manufacturing company.
• In her final entry, no longer counting the years, she admitted she had taken to imagining Maladora standing in a back chamber she had left untouched for her, silently watching her work. She wrote that her work was finished, the plaques set, the throttle holding, and that any scholar could pick up where she left off — but she would not be one of them. She was tired. She was going to stop.

Her last written words were a warning and a farewell: "do not move the throttle... the cave was unsafe before me. The cave will be unsafe after me... Stay clear of this place. Send no one in my name." — and, to Maladora, that she had loved her all these years.

The Last Letter

Deeper in, in her living quarters — a desk kept dry all these years by careful wards — the party found one final letter, unsent and addressed as always to "M":

M, I will not be coming. I cannot leave the work, and I cannot leave the cave, and I have begun to suspect that I cannot leave the things that have started to attend me here. I do not know if you ever existed in the way I remember you, or whether I made you into the shape of a person I needed. Either way, I am sorry. ... I died doing what I came here to do. — T

By her own words she had stopped believing she could ever leave, and had come to feel that something in the caves had taken hold of her.

What Became of Her

She did not die and leave the caves to their silence. In the darkest, deepest corridor — beyond piles of bones and the bodies of relic-hunters who had come chasing the legend of the caves' treasure — the party found her still there: a hunched, wet-breathing, skin-tight thing, decayed far past anything human, cradling a small ringed instrument in the dark. Theodora had outlasted her own death and become something that drained the life from any who reached her and raised their corpses to stand around her. Every soul that had made it this far into the caves without succumbing to their other hazards had met its end with her.

The party fought her and put her down, and the dead she had raised fell lifeless the moment she did. Whatever she had once been — the scholar who charted the weave for decades — the weave and the long solitude had unmade her in the end.