5 Tarsakh 1492, Waterdeep — Assuming we now had all that we needed to solve Fistandia’s Seven Sisters puzzle, Casi, Devo, Thava, and I looked at one another and gathered around the least-cluttered of the two laboratory tables. Its surface was littered with a number of incomplete clay sculptures: misshapen bodies, bat-like wings, and adorable heads that resembled the homunculi upstairs: clearly, these figures were prototypes of the finished constructs who had been so helpful to us so far, and in that recollection, the four of us put our collective arcane knowledge together and realized two other important details about our tiny winged friends: A spellcaster could animate only one homunculus at a time, meaning that Cumin and Coriander had each been animated by one of the pair of wizards, and moreover, a homunculus would not survive its master, proving that wherever Fistandia and Freyot had gone, they were still alive.

4 Tarsakh 1492, Waterdeep – Our carriage stopped in front of an overgrown building with several boarded-over windows and a number of cracked, broken, or missing roof tiles. There was little remarkable about the architectural style, to my knowledge: there were hundreds of buildings like it throughout Waterdeep, and it was constructed with the usual tan clay brick crafted east of the city, along the muddy banks of the Dessarin River. I was fairly certain the masonry was imported from Mirabar, having passed through that city on my journey back to Waterdeep from the east, which marked the structure as having been constructed at least two hundred years ago.