Hi everyone!
Since it’s been so long since my last update, and since my posts have been so infrequent these past few months, I thought I’d provide a very, very abbreviated plot summary of what’s been happening to Abernathy’s Company recently. Here it is:
After preventing Naradawk and his army from invading Charagan at Verdshane, the Company is shocked when a secret Sharshun plot comes to fruition. Somehow the Sharshun have caused history to be re-written, such that Naradawk’s father Naloric was never defeated by the Spire. The Greenhouse has protected the party from this world-remaking effect, but Tal Hae, like the rest of the Kingdom, is now in the evil grip of the Emperor Naloric Skewn.
The two Eyes of Moirel in the Company’s possession, long kept in the Greenhouse, tell the party that if they want to set things right, the time has come to “travel nowhere,” for which they will need a third Eye of Moirel that is located in Het Branoi (a hidden magical tower) in Kivia. Using a special teleportation item given them (pre-history-rewriting) by the Spire, the Company travels from Tal Hae (now called Pyke Vale, its original name under Skewn rule) to the Jungle of Dreams in south-eastern Kivia.
They arrive to find themselves trapped by Black Circle devotees, but are saved by a rampaging giant that helps scatter the Circle forces. The Company flees under cover of magical fog, while the Black Circle leader screams after them that the universe cannot abide their existence. That proves to be literally true, as space-time starts to unravel around them, but the Eyes of Moirel are able to use Ernie’s talisman of stability to negate the effect.
The Company, whose only lead to Het Branoi is an old map-scrap acquired months back in Djaw, makes the thousand mile journey northward under the effects of wind walk, while Aravis and Kibi take turns flying as polymorphed dragons. Before long they are flying over Branoi, in the frozen wastes of north-eastern Kivia.
Through clever use of find the path, the Company gets around Het Branoi’s inherent defenses and finds it located in an open courtyard, inside a giantish town. The tower is invisible and masked by the illusion of a statue of a huge beholder. After some run-ins with many giants (including their shaman Eigomic) and some real beholders (mostly miniature ones, but also one full-sized model), they steal the key to the tower and eventually learn the pass phrase to enter. The jump through the glowing magical doorway into the Tower of Het Branoi, a place where (according to legend) the inhabitants were doing something so hideously dangerous that the ruling faction of the Black Circle wanted it destroyed…
Where they find themselves is not the interior of a stone tower at all! Instead they have landed in a forest, where an alien orange sun shines down through the trees. The magic doorway through which they emerge quickly vanishes behind them. They are in a woods near the town of Green Valley, a peaceful but creepy place where the folk haven’t aged in 11 years. Tog, the town Elder, has forbidden his people to go far from the town, since he knows that while his people are desperate to escape the “Stillness,” a blue magic portal deep in the woods leads to a cave with a deadly beast. He has kept the existence of the cave a secret, to protect the lives of his villagers. The Company goes into that cave via the portal and finds not one beast but three, all of which they dispatch. One Certain Step is killed in the battle, but Morningstar brings him back to life.
The beast cave seems to be an entire separate world from the woods of Green Valley. Both Cave and Valley have sharply defined borders, where despite the appearance that they continue geographically, there is some magical barrier that causes living creatures to balk at passing through. It’s as if each world is a cage, or a partitioned experiment of some kind.
At the far end of the cave complex is another glowing blue portal, probably allowing access to yet a third world. After the resurrection of Step is complete, the Company heads through that portal to whatever lies beyond…
I’ll be posting the next installment sometime tonight… promise!
-Sagiro