The grimoires

You take a breath and think. The silver is the obvious thing to leave, but... You’ve read most of the grimoires to bits, anyway. Take Mentis Arcanis, for example. You can recite the first three chapters from memory by now. They’re also the ones most likely to be damaged on the road, and the ones that you’d be least likely to use while travelling.

You pick up the heavy tomes and place them back on the bookshelves dotted around the room. There’s many other texts, of course, but these were the only ones written in Draconic.

That done, you pick up the magic trinkets, the coins and the gems, and pour them together into the bag. You sling it over your shoulder, and recite another incantation, as you step through the wall back out into the stairwell. It’s quite a nice tower. Pity you’ll have to vacate it temporarily.

It won’t be too hard to come back, though, the place is riddled with magical tricks like the pocket dimensions, so many that you wouldn’t be surprised if the knight got lost on his way to the top. If you hadn’t prised the knowledge of the place’s secrets from the mind of its wizardly owner, the same thing would no doubt have happened to you.

You reach the bottom of the stairs, and walk through the hallway. Disoriented though he is, the knight has managed to open the door, and is struggling to fight a statue. As you pass, you kick one of his legs out from under him. He crashes to the floor, the sound echoing back and forth through the hall, and you keep going with a little more urgency in your step.

You glimpsed his tabard as you fell, and it bears the symbol of the Chevaliers of Saint Melmouth, the knightly order dedicated to the eradication of non-divine magic and non-human creatures.

Fuck. Looks like you won’t be able to reinhabit your tower, after all. He’ll probably burn the whole thing down on principle. The pocket dimension might be safe, but you’re not sure, and even if it is you’ll have to build the tower back up to reach it, if you want to re-enter its space.

You keep walking, past the fallen knight, past his horse, over the bridge, and down the path towards the valley. Only when you’re amongst the trees, and have been for some time, do you stop and think... where do you want to go? You could head back to the tower, and see if you could **** the knight into a trap of some sort. He’s not very bright, and he hates you, so he’d be fairly easy to trick, but if he’s recovered from the Disorientation he might have prepared some defence against magic by the time you get back.

Or you could abandon the tower as a lost cause, and keep going. There’s several human villages down in the valley, and a glamour could let you walk amongst them... or a speech and some carefully-placed spells might let you live as your true self. There’s also the more mountainous reaches of this forest, inhabited by elves, or the more swampy parts, inhabited by Lizardtoles.