Session 229, Part Three - Cracked Shell
Cracked Shell
Before anyone had time to start making plans for a rescue, a roar and flash of light came from outside the palace. “Constables,” said Rock Rackus, with awkward solemnity, pointing out of a window , “Is that an asteroid I do spy?” Streaking across the sky, it disappeared from view, but a moment later light flashed and the ground shuddered. Moments later came the ear-splitting noise of the impact.
“Son of a bitch!” cried Rackus. “There’s more of ‘em! Follow me!”
Leon bid him wait. If he focused, and drained his magical reserves, he should be able to teleport everyone to the Coaltongue. They gathered round him and he cast the spell, but it did not work. It was as if the space between them and the ship was cracked or distorted.
Word came from Admiral Smith: he had been forced by the asteroids to ground the Coaltongue. The ship was about five-hundred feet from the palace. His words crackled, though delivered via sending.
Without further ado, Uriel formed a hole in the wall and they poured out onto the lawn. Uru bid a reluctant farewell to his new toy, determined that he would one day make a better one.
The Gyre filled the sky in all directions, but dark shapes loomed before it. To their right, Gupta, Sly, Rambylon and the other fey refugees surged towards them, having been forced to abandon Rock’s pirate ship after it dissipated. They had come down to aid a few fey stragglers in the grounds of the palace, and suddenly found themselves scuppered.
Behind them – in fact, on all sides, came legionnaires in pursuit. In their midst was a hideous demon – a glabrezu, enslaved by the Golden Legion.
This was their vision of the far future from Ingatan’s Refuge, only now they didn’t have Matunaaga to one-shot the glabrezu. (Nor could Quratulain, in her current condition. Hildegaard now carried her arm.)
Some of the devils were still intent on capturing slaves; others were setting off across the lawn towards the Coaltongue, intent on hijacking it now that the Aurum Treasure was gone.
They set off, each trying to outpace the devils in their own way. Gupta took on tiger form; Uru leapt on Little Jack; Uriel polymorphed into a bird of paradise; Leon created dimension doors for the slower party members. (As they went, their route took them past the Fey Titan Shrine, another detail that didn’t seem too important at the time, but came back to them later: the statue of the Voice of Rot had grown so large it no longer fitted on its plinth; Granny Allswell was gone – her statue reduced to loose gravel – and was that a tiny replacement standing on the plinth?)
Now they could see the terrible affect the meteors had had on Av: the world was coming asunder. But it wasn’t just the surface of the world that splintered and cracked, the cracks extended into the sky as well. As a piece of the earth tilted to one side, so everything above it pivoted, as if a mirror was being turned. Behind – the blackness of the Bleak Gate.
They ran, fighting off devils, severing chains. Any that came near Rumdoom were struck by the Stone of Not and dissipated. Uriel cast a powerful spell and pinned the glabrezu in holy light. They ran, though devils still hounded them, and captured many fey. Sly Marbo and his family were able to keep pace – in fact, Marbo was only slowed to their speed by the need to corral his youngsters. Rambylon kept up too, with his odd, high-kneed, backward-footed run. Onwards, across the facturing landscape, they ran.
They had cleared about half the distance when a mighty chasm opened up before them – thirty feet across and hundreds of feet long. The wailing of souls from the Bleak Gate could be heard as that realm too was consumed.
Quratulain leapt the gap with her rocket boots, taking pot shots at the legion as she went. Uriel flew on, keeping the glabrezu pinned. Heedless of Leon’s injunctions, Rumdoom tried to Fourmyle Jaunt. Instead of arriving on the far side of the chasm, he emerged several hundred yards away, and had to turn several times before he could see the fires of the Coaltongue in the distance. Grimly, he began to run.
Korrigan was concerned about the refugees and waited to help herd them through Leon’s portal. Just then, the area where they were standing broke away from its surroundings and began to sink. There was a great cry, as some the refugees were on the sinking fragment, and their family members were left above. They began to try to haul their friends and relatives out, when devils arrived from behind. Korrigan gave a shout that bolstered their resolve, and Uriel fired beams of radiance at the devils, all while keeping the glabrezu, trapped in agonising holy light.
Leon stopped to fill his lantern with the light of menagerie. Now all bathed within could turn into any animal form they chose. Accustomed to such strange tricks, the fey at once took advantage of his magic and turned into a host of birds. The devils were baffled as the trapped fey at once became an admixed flock of geese, sparrows, thrushes, owls, cranes, swifts, swallows, budgerigars… the list was endless. In this bizarre fashion, they escaped the legion.
Their ecstatic flight was cut short when a massive meteor slammed into Thistle Palace. The fiery shockwave bloomed outward, and consumed everyone and everything that had not crossed the chasm. Those on the other side now saw that these meteors were just the vanguard: Above the Gyre was blotted out, eclipsed by thousands of massive, pitted stones, some of them hundreds of feet across, all of them etched with veins of gold. Av was crashing into another world. The Dreaming shattered into splinters around them, all of its magic released in a sudden blast.
Released in an instant from all their cares and concerns, they lost consciousness for a time, and then:
You awake, scattered across the ground in a snowy forest. The fey are not here. And nor is Uriel.
Embers of blazing thistles drift by on a wind, briefly providing enough light to make out the debris of the Coaltongue, nearly crippled but otherwise lying without even a hushed whisper in this night-time wood. Your injuries won’t kill you, and the damage wrought on your vessel can be repaired, but as your gaze drifts upward, you see a starry abyss looking back, its nebulous teeth poised to crush your world.
You are back in Risur, many months after you left. Your mission has failed. Your path to the Gyre has been cut off, and what little hope you had left has, like a candle reaching the end of its wick, guttered and turned to smoke.
Then you awake, gasping in pain, disoriented by the roar of explosions and the thunder of shattering stones. You shake the dream away and take stock of your quite-real peril. …
End of Session