No matter how much you tried, and try you did, you had never seen your teacher this serious, this focused and grim. Unless a call from the Greater Spirits came, which they did....not too rarely, but this was a different kind of feeling to her eyes you'd seen when those came. This was like your teacher, wise and learned as you knew her, was preparing for an End. An End that she could see but had spoken nothing of to any of the village or even you for that matter, which absolutely unsettled the Chief of course, as they were, by right, to be told of any impending danger and doom, by the claws of monster or hands of man.

Unless this was the work of Spirits.

The thought alone gives you a shiver.

Spirits, being of incredible power and strange variety, had never caused the village any trouble for so long that the idea of it was a small heresy to even imagine. No spirit sent a message without reason, never came to the village themselves, never even seemed to consider the village as anything but something far out of the way and you had the idea it was because the place was so awfully boring and routine. The way you saw it and how your teacher described, which you thought she was really good at since she told much cooler stories than that old stumbling Storyteller who peeked in on lessons with that scowl on his wrinkly face. You'd never say that out loud of course, but you hung onto your great teacher's every word as she spoke, and a part of you fears how quiet and focused your teacher is. How grim their eyes are and how her usual smile had been thinned to a line of pure concentration. You feared, perhaps, the pact she'd told you of at the begining of your lessons had been broken. Had the Greater Spirits called on your teacher to settle some debt the village had incurred? Has there been a breach in the pact so severe that only her head could satisfy them? Had the Greater Spir---

"Child", calls your teacher as she fastened the straps of her old and yet beloved travel pack. The thing has been around the study hanging from a hook for almost as long as you've been her pupil. You almost thought with how it was always there that it might be her first pupil but as silly as it is, it was always there as she taught you her lessons of communication with spirits and important rituals. "I need you to visit with the Elders, especially the Chief. I've written a good few things on a letter they must be given, a good few things they must know, how to do them, and the why of the matter. I need you to hand it to them and then go to the workshop, gather the Skygem before going inside, and then lock the door behind you. Do not open it for anything. Do not open it even if the chief himself comes slamming on it and ordering you to."