Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9620778" data-attributes="member: 7737">We turn away and contemplate our question.(17) Landor’s greatest secret.(56) The nature of Arno’s great power.(128) How to combat the evils that confront Tikandia.I know everyone is dying to know, so I'll ask all three questions, in order. You can decide for yourselves which is the One True Question!---17We reason that knowledge of either fact about Arno without the other might be useless. And we know that genies and djinn like to trick humans with their Wish spells. This marid might be equally devious.Dalris glowers at us and accuses us of being a power-mad sorcerer who doesn’t care about Tikandia at all.We respond that more magical knowledge is just what the doctor ordered, because “if Thayne’s description of what’s happening on Seagate Island was accurate, [we’re] not powerful enough to face Arno.”Dalris buries her face in her hands and turns away.We ask our burning question: “What was [our] father’s greatest secret?”“Aha! Greed triumphs over virtue once more!” Shanif replies.We angrily tell him to answer the question.Shanif says that first we must hear the story of the last days of Bhukod, because that is part of Landor’s secret. “The desolation you see around you was wrought by the same tarrasque that destroyed the Bhukodian Empire.” The tarrasque is even now sleeping “within the ancient temple”, lured by the self-sacrifice of numerous wizards of Bhukod who allowed it to feed upon them while they used their combined sorcery to cast a permanent Imprisonment spell. “It is that very prison which I now guard,” Shanif concludes.We cry out in alarm at the thought of a tarrasque this close to Wealwood and Saven. We have read stories about “the horrible great saurians and their voracious appetites for all living things. The monsters are virtually indestructible.”Dalris wants to know why Shanif has to guard the tarrasque if the wizards imprisoned it. (Imprisoned it, even.)”What is done by magic can be undone by magic,” Shanif answers. He was given his charge by the Bhukodian sorcerers before they died “to insure that the tarrasque’s slumber would never be disturbed by later wizards. Not even the great Landor himself could reverse my masters’ spell.”We don’t recall reading about any of this in Landor’s notes: no Yellow Marsh, no Shanif, and certainly no tarrasque.Shanif, reading our mind, thunders that this is Landor’s greatest secret. (It wouldn’t be a secret if Landor wrote it down. Duh.) Landor discovered another way into the tomb of the tarrasque, which is where he found the Sceptre of Bhukod “as well as the twin crowns of Lolth and Aerdrie. And it is here that the greatest magical treasure of all awaits Landor’s successor.”We want to know what is the greatest treasure of all, how to enter the tomb, and what are “the twin crowns of Lolth and Aerdrie”?Get used to disappointment as we turn to (178).</blockquote>

Verification