NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 5264478" data-attributes="member: 99">Eshik entered the Sanctuary again.  He quickly made his way out of the orb chamber and into the passageway where the crumbling veneer of the pocket realm opened into the void of the Place Between Places and gazed into the enormity of the nothing.Previously this would have paralyzed him and driven him to madness.  But he now had the consciousness of all the past incarnations of his soul swimming about his mind and the burden did not seem too great to bear.  He focused and became aware of shining beacon in the void.  Something tied to the place where he now stood inside the Sanctuary:  The other eye of Io, the Nexus.  He hastily turned and ran back to the orb chamber, willing himself outside the Sanctuary where he arrived touching it on the deck of the airship a couple of hours after he'd entered."Still North," he told them.  North and West they had traveled since leaving Karak Tor.  North to Opkhar.  West to Enmurinon.  North to Lumeth and even to Thanoria, the furthest north any of them had ever been.  It was good that they still had the heavy coats the Dwarves had given them for traveling up to Mayaheine's fortress atop the mountain.  But they dwelled little upon the cold because something worrisome was happening below them...The Mist was receding.At first it had been hard to tell.  But now they were seeing larger and larger swaths of landscape that bore the twisted and ruined signs of having been submerged beneath the Mist for the last half millennium.  This might have been cause for celebration considering that the Mist had done nothing but slowly rise for the last hundred or so years.  But knowing that the Dracolich was out there, doing something, they could not embrace it as something good.At the northern edge of Thanoria they saw this effect up close when they stopped to gather food and for Eshik to take another reading on the Nexus.  It lay still further north, off the maps as it were.  It appeared that the Mist had dropped at least 20 or 30 feet since they had departed Karak Tor.  They had a bad feeling about this.As they continued their flight north they saw storm clouds on the horizon and Llyra worried for the airship.  If it began to ice up they would quickly take on too much weight to remain airborne.  But they pressed on, knowing that if worse came to worse all but Eshik could enter the Sanctuary and he could continue riding Steelslicer.Finally they came to a sight most disturbing:  An enormous vortex was visible at the surface of the Mist.  Something was drawing it down in enormous quantities and whatever it was was almost directly below them...with the Nexus."You're sure it's down there?" asked Astavian."Positive," replied Eshik."Then let's do this," said the Paladin.They descended into the Mist.  It was thick here.  As thick as anyplace they'd ever seen it, being drawn into the vortex, which filled the air with a howl so loud that they could barely hear one another.  But it did give them a beacon to home in on by its noise since they could see nothing outside the bubble within the Mist created by Steelslicer's draconic presence.  And then, suddenly, they could see.Below was a small island at the center of which was some sort of structure in the vague shape of a rather bumpy cone.  The vortex was being drawn directly into the top of that structure.  But, apart from the vortex, not a wisp of Mist was anywhere near the island.  It seemed to hover, swirling, no closer than a couple of hundred feet from where the cold northern waters lapped at the shores.Peering down at their destination, Mialain suddenly said, "The island has feet!"Upon closer inspection it also had a head.  The PC's all looked at each other.  "A turtle!...A DRAGON turtle!"  That would explain why the Mist was kept at bay.  They made certain to land nowhere near the head.The ship touched down and Llyra was given her orders.  She was once again to circle above, out of harm's reach, and retrieve them if given the signal (which was the red rocket they'd been given by the Gnomes of the Feywild as a signal not to follow the PC's through the caverns to the Eladrin mainland).  She wished them luck and the airship silently rose back into the clear bubble that traveled through the Mist with the Dragon Turtle.They set about scouting the central structure, which appeared to be made from gigantic scutes from the Dragon Turtle's own scales.  Even so there appeared to be many layers of them stacked into a sort of pyramid and so slipping in between them was impossible.  They'd have to go in through the front door.While undertaking this scouting something strange seemed to be following them.  A small, reddish disturbance in the air seemed to be swirling around nearby.  It looked like a faintly crimson dust devil and it was getting closer and closer.  As was typical, the party turned to confront whatever it was.  They certainly didn't want it following them when they made their assault on the giant pyramid.It moved closer and then seemed to pick out Zanne in particular as a target.  It would momentarily stop spinning and hang in the air before them as a reddish mist.  It was clearly not the same as the Mist however since it wasn't being repelled by the Dragon Turtle.  It reanimated into a swirl and seemed to pluck at Zanne's robes and satchel.  In a sudden fit of insight, Zanne drew out the book she'd been carrying and studying ever since she found it in the ruined tower atop the Prison Mines of Pelor.A rune on the cover of the book flashed and the red mist coalesced into the translucent shape of a man.  His ghostly voice spoke to them, "You found my book!"Zanne replied that indeed she had and just exactly who in the Mist was he?He was the Wizard, Valakir.  It was his tower that they had discovered and his book where he had sought to collect as much information about the Mist as he could.  And when he had learned the rough location of the Isle of Wyrms and determined to go there to see if the Mist could be undone, he had left the book behind so that knowledge would not be lost in the event of his death.The party asked many questions and Valakir answered as best he could...He determined long ago that dragons, their bones in particular, repelled the Mist.  It was for that reason that he had captured a dragon's egg and used magic to slow the growth of the dragon inside so that it didn't become too big for him to keep prisoner to stave off the Mist if it ever rose as high as his tower.  It was known back during the Dragon War that Adamantite was anathema to Dragons and so he had of course located his tower atop the only known Adamantite mines in this part of the world:  The Prison Mines of Pelor.Once the egg hatched he also cut the wings off the dragon, using an Adamantite knife so that they would not grow back.  It wasn't until much, much later when Mialain had unleashed the power of the Glass Book at the Tree of Life that so much healing energy washed over Blackbreather that her wings were restored (there was also the unseen healing that Melora did on Blackbreather's mind to let her be reborn as Steelslicer).From his tower safe atop the Prison Mines, Valakir dedicated his life to understanding all he could about the Mist with an eye toward undoing the cataclysm that had destroyed the world.  All signs pointed toward the Isle of Wyrms where the Mist was known to have first originated at the end of the Dragon War.  He learned the art of summoning Mist Demons and made many a pact with them to seek out the location of the Isle, hidden in the depths of the Mist.  Finally the location was discovered and he set off for the Isle, knowing that he might never return.He located it and found it abandoned.  The great Temple stood at the center of the "island" and he began to explore it, finding that there was a pillar inside that bore dozens of tablets holding an incredible ritual.  It was a ritual that would transform a being into a mist that was the purest essence of their being.  Valakir discovered, the hard way, that he was messing with powers that were beyond his comprehension.  As he attempted to study the Mist Ritual, he accidentally transformed himself into mist.  His nature was devoted to uncovering the secrets of the Isle of Wyrms and so he had been stuck here ever since.The larger implication of course had to do with the Mist.  When the evil forces of the Chromatic Dragons had been defeated and the men, elves and dwarves threatened to invade the Isle of Wyrms and seize back the Nexus, Ryukaar had acted to stop them the only way he could.  He transformed himself into the Mist, which embodied his essence of Retribution, Vengeance and Hate, and washed over the world.  Such was his power as one of the Old Gods that he eventually nearly covered the entire world.  But not quite.Valakir believed that, even as their worshipers died and their power waned, the other Old Gods somehow acted to halt Ryukaar from destroying everything.  They managed to slow his advance enough such that some could be saved.  And then they vanished.But now Kruxicor the Dracolich, High Priest of Ryukaar, was reversing the ritual.  He was working to turn the Mist back into Ryukaar, thus making him incarnate once again with the full power of an Elder God...</blockquote>

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