Eiyar was already of middling age, but he was observant and wiser than his years might have suggested. That came from the experience of ruling his tribe for so many years, Makmud imagined, but now he was concerned with the fellow chieftain's wisdom as an ends of its own rather than with how Eiyar had come to know so many things.

Makmud, the youngest of all the chieftains in this newly forged confederation, had sought out Eiyar for assurance as much as anything else. He entered a grandiose tent and found the warrior chieftain at work knapping his own stone arrowheads. "Do you think Inoch is making a wise decision?"

Eiyar looked up without ceasing his work. "This decision was not Inoch's alone," he admitted. "He consulted the seniormost chieftains and the eldest shamans, and all agreed that this may be our only means of repelling the ogres forever. I know that you and some of the others would be content with repelling them now and buying enough time to take refuge in more distant lands, but to those of us whose tribes are not yet uplifted, you must understand that our lands are of great sentiment. My ancestors fought and died to earn the clay that we build our huts upon, and if I am the one that loses that land it will bring a shame upon my name that shall persist throughout all of this life, and perhaps even into the next."

Makmud fell silent and found his gaze drifting once more to the ornate spear that he had inherited from his father.

"...how long has he been asleep?"

Eiyar looked back with a blank expression that Makmud had never before seen in his eyes. "I don't know," he admitted. "The shamans speak as if it has been generations, at least. None alive have spoken to him directly; their dealings are with those of his servants that have remained awake."

"It leaves a foreboding feeling in my stomach. I have seen the urtelem matriarchs, and they have admittedly to being wary of this as well."

"You know that the urtelem and djinn are prone to sometimes butting heads, but the urtelem rarely find reason to quarrel with the passive spiryts of stone."

"If the tales are to be believed, this great spiryt is anything but passive when he becomes roused to anger."

"Then let us hope that he is terrible indeed to our enemies."

[hr]

When the sun was retreating back to its sleeping place, word traveled through the stronghold like wildfire--the ritual was beginning. Atop the fortified mesa there was one large hut consecrated by tradition as a temple to the distant gods in the sky as well as the god that slept right beneath their feet. A large room had been painstakingly hollowed out beneath the hut, and it was there that the shamans did their rites. The temple above and the space outside were filled with throngs of hain. For lack of space almost all were denied the chance to witness the proceedings below, but Makmud's status as chieftain was enough to earn him that privilege.

A spiral staircase, rather than a mere hole with a ladder, led down into the room below. In the room below there waited the greatest shamans gathered about a stone altar, with the chieftains standing closer to the edges of the room. Nearly every facet of the stone walls had been painted and engraved, but in a few untouched places there were stonedjinn resting halfway inside the room and halfway within the earth itself. [url=https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/1/1d/Earth_elemental_5e.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20171011161918]One or two others[/url] stood fully within the room and dominated its space with their motionless presence.

It was not the shamans who first broke the silence, but High Chieftain Inoch. "Turm, we spill this blood in your name, and ask that you rouse once more."

Upon wooden trays the shamans bore great flanks of still bleeding meat. They placed them upon the stone slab, then beat them dry with wooden mallets, and then repalced the tenderized meat with more fresh cuts. They repeated the process until the entire altar was covered in a thin layer of blood that dripped off the sides and onto the dirt floor.

In case the scent of blood was not enough to garner his attention, they brought a brazier and filled it with dried herbs. The incense's smoke quickly filled the room, and then the shamans began their dancing and incantations. They spoke in the strange tongue of gods and djinn, so Makmud could not comprehend the meaning of their chants. Instead, he simply allowed the rhythmic chants and the sweet smoke to carry him into a deep trance. After a few moments, even he could hear the mighty voices of the earth!

He listened to them in a strange understanding, and it felt as though a soft healing rain was falling upon his shell. Perhaps that rain would wash away all of his worries, and things would be once more as they should have been.

...

...

Then, there was a violent shaking. It was Eiyar, grabbing his shoulder. Makmud returned to his senses and saw a half dozen hain staring at him. The blood upon the altar was dried, and there was dirt upon his shell. The rain hadn't been water after all, but rather loose clumps of dirt falling down upon him from the ceiling. "It's over now. You breathed too much of the smoke."

He tried to answer, but it was a cough that escaped his throat rather than words. He tried again, "Did the shamans commune with Turm?"

"Yes. When he roused from his slumber, the entire mesa shook."

[hider=Summary]
We return to the story of those hain that have banded together to resist Stog's marauding horde of ogre conquerors! The hain have formulated a plan to defend their stronghold on the mesa, and it mainly consists of awakening the local stonelord and hoping that he can turn back the tide of ogres. Makmud and the urtelem are apprehensive about it, but Inoch does it it anyways.

There is a ritual that the shamans carry out to commune with Turm, the local stonelord that's been asleep for something like a hundred years. Makmud attends, but the chanting and hallucinogenic incenses lull him into a trance. When he comes to, his pal Eiyar says that the ritual went well.
[/hider]